time

I have a theory about time. We are infinite . The life we experience is very unrelated to the ticking clock. Time passes but we do not feel it. You can be married 40 years and it seems like 5 minutes. Or you can spend two weeks in France and it seems like a lifetime.

You have to get things done to survive but another thing is happening on a real experience level. A clock ticking away is going round and round again and again but it is not actually doing anything real. We are infinite so it is really meaningless.

When I was younger I tried to think of infinity in terms of clock time. Well you go a billion years and then add a billion more and so on forever. It would make my head hurt just thinking about it. It makes me tired to think like that.

But it does not make me tired to think of real infinity. We are. that is all

It is much more relaxing to just be than try and fit it in an artificial box.

We get older and older and we learn more and more.

I love how Matisse was just so simple when he was at the end of his life. His spark was simple.

Infinity is simple. God is simple . ultimately.

A different kind of Paradise

Soap Lake is a remote small village really in central washington. It is similar to the small villages in France we stayed in.

Not much activity in the way of stores and people running around.

That is why we love it. The extreme quiet.No cars hardly/ You know most of the town in about a month of staying there, An amazing lake that is never the same two minutes in a row. Birds and wildlife that you don't usually see. Sun glorious sun sun sun.

Dry and Hot and healing. The air smells like sage when it does rain and is totally intoxicating.

wind that blows and beats the restless out of you.

There is no tv in the house there. We have books. You will want to read and look out the window for hours.

We hike and play golf on the most fun golf course in the world. it is rustic. We hit the balls into sagebrush off rocks instead of a manicured chemical laden lawn.

We find snakes and giant beetles and sometimes scorpions. We love to look at them basking in the sun.

The sky at night is full of stars animal cries in the dark.

The lake shimmers and glimmers and tosses and is glassy all in the same day.

We canoe across the lake and drip out arms in the warm water and drift off into dream land. No jet ski or speed boats. Sail boats and canoes. Quiet still . Having friends over is wonderful as you can really talk to them and be with them.

We hate to leave every time. We hate to leave and come home.

one thing

One of the exercises in our creative club is to write down one thing, that if you started doing it now, would change your life. I hate that question because I know what it is. work out every day.

I used to teach aerobics. I was the best I ever was when I did that. Not only was I a single parent and ran a gallery and was an art broker, and painted a lot and had another part time job but I managed to teach a class one hour a day 5 days a week. It was not a beginners class either. I pushed my class to their limits every day. They picked my class because they would get major results. of Course my body was in incredible shape but it was not only that. I Knew no fear. As far as I pushed my body, my mind followed. I called it the Kill factor. I killed laziness in my life. I was aggressive in selling art and painting and my work showed it. then I got married and became a sloth. Well sloth compared to when I was not married. Things were easier and my kill factor went away. I became mushy.

I remember that during my class I would find the strongest person in the class and focus on pushing them. I was yelled at a lot because usually you are supposed to take care not to hurt anyone.

Once the strongest person was this 65 year old woman. I could not do anything she could not do. She looked at my eyes when we were going through the drill and focused . She knew what I was doing and she pushed back. It was the most fun I ever had. When we were done she said it was the best class she ever took. I never saw her again. It was this amazing experience because nobody knew her. She only came once. I think she was an angel.

the soap lake nudes

I am working on a series of nudes for a show in soap lake. A tiny town with an art museum that has ambition to turn the town into an artist haven. The owner is an architect who moved from Seattle to live and work in a very small town. I love the fact that he bought a building and started the Soap Lake Art Museum. I think if you are going to open a gallery give it a big name.

Brent Blake(owner) has had amazing shows in this very small town with some very interesting people who live there.

They had a film festival too and have a paid for beautiful theatre where they hold regular plays.

Very small town with big ideas. The city bought a 30 foot lava lamp to install in a prominent area of town. They bought it from a store in New York.

I love the guts of soap lake so I am honored to have a show there.

The nudes reflect the freedom to be yourself and be totally loved in Soap Lake.

The importance of Failure

Failure is just the step before success, even though it feels like light years away from where you want to go. How many times have I rolled in the dross of my painting failures that are just gobs of goo sliding off the canvas only to find a spark a few days later and have it almost break my heart with beauty.

I should learn to embrace the step not as a monument to how inept I am but a door to the next level of seeing. You cannot always recognize new things right off the bat. Your eyes have to grow accustomed to the new light.

You have to get away from it and ponder something else for awhile then come back and look again.

A painting I was going to destroy(read paint over) became a beautiful thing when I started painting over it. I did not have white handy so I used some flesh color and started smearing away. You could still see the painting under it as the flesh was semi transparent. I put it aside to let it dry. People came into the studio and started exclaiming how they loved the painting that way. So dreamy. So it sat a bit more then someone offered to buy it like that. Then I saw it. As soon as they said those words I saw what it could become and I finished the work. Now it is going to live in a house in Seattle where it will be loved for years.

restless agony

I have redone my nudes four times now and am going to do another change. They are eluding me and I am looking all over for them. I need something because I am at a loss. I often think "did Matisse look at a blank canvas and shudder.

I remember what Edward Hopper said about painting. How he loathed it.

How can you hate something that feeds you.

Well I need to be stung to life and have to find something new and fresh and inspiring today. I do not know where to start looking. I have found inspiration in the past from weird places. someone passes me and I see it. I am walking up a hill or driving to nowhere and I see it.

It must be in the air and I just have to get my body to the place where it is so it will rain down on me. Its not in me. It is outside of my mind but I will recognize it when I see it.

the beautiful line

What is it about a line that makes it beautiful?? I was pondering what it is that makes you stop and say "This is a beautiful line on which to build a whole painting."

Is it that it reminds you of something you love? Or is it something deeper and a part of our essence that is longing to be released. Is that line reflecting infinity.

It is hard to put into words a diaphanous dream. You can see it and feel it but it is hard to define in hard edge words.

A beautiful line is what I am painting all day to find. Without one beautiful line the entire painting feels dead.

So the beautiful line is life, it is breath, it is depth. It is the reason all painters paint and all writers write and all musicians compose. Everyone is looking for that certain something that transcends time.

Our entire career hangs in the balance of finding a beautiful line, the beautiful line, the true beautiful line.

Year in Provence

I just saw the movie "Year in Provence". Ohh it is awful. I wanted to see a recreation of my trip but instead it is this story about these English people who are basically making fun the of the French. They are concerned because they dont understand everything that the French are saying. Maybe you should learn French before you to live there. Maybe you should buy a house that is already fixed up if you cant fix anything yourself.

They portrait the people as fools that can cook/

I can say from experience that the people there are wonderful and highly creative. We should be so lucky to be like them. If you have even one drop of french blood in you I envy you.

speed painting

A friend of mine said I was a speed painter. It seems to her that I just whip those paintings out easy as that.

It might appear effortless, but in reality it is an intense struggle. I draw lines over hundreds of times to fine on that feels right. The look on a face can go from angry to beautiful in a fraction of a line change. When I find the perfect line it is also hard to keep it because of my technique, which involves washing away underpaintings. Many times I have found a gorgeous line , only to lose it a moment later with the wash out. I never can get the exact same line back either. Even if I trace it. It is emotionally exhausting to look for hours for a perfect shape of a lip or eye lid. So glorious the is the human face and body that it is tremendously interesting and at the very same time tremendously elusive.

I paint 6 to eight hours a day and when I am not painting I am looking at material to use to paint later. I never stop working.

No artist does if they are professional. You can not stop, nor do you want to and it is the very best life any human being can ever ever have.

a week after getting home

Travel for me is earth shattering.

It is hard to come back from the brink of euphoria. It is hard to drive down the streets of Tacoma and look at what we live with. I know this will sound awful but I an ashamed of what America looks like. In Paris and the south of France everything is clean and well cared for. Art is everywhere you turn. Little sweet nothings to walk by. How can they keep everything so clean???? 12 million people live in France. 12 million. New York has only eight million.

The astounding attention to detail in everything. Food, clothes, window boxes. Lettering. So life honoring.

that is the overwhelming presence there. Life honoring. It is unbelievable how few believer are there when if you think about it, I would expect such reverence for life to be coming from another source.

We who are given so much to work with, live in a disrespectful way from all appearances.

Why is there so much garbage on the roads here that they need people to clean it up all the time and fill garbage bags full, then a day later it is all back. Are people just throwing stuff out the window of their cars non stop.

How can the roads be pristine all over France. You would be hard pressed to even find anything along side the road.

I saw something else that was amazing to me. At night there was a van that was dropping off mattresses for the street people. It had some sort of Christian symbol on the van. They droop them off and pick them up in the morning. Can you imagine.

Paris

We just got back from Paris and the south of France. I was going to blog while there but no internet available and also and more important no time. Every second was filled with looking the most beautiful city in the world. I dont know if they make it mandatory to be beautiful in Paris or not but I have never seen more gorgeous people just walking around in cafes and on the beautiful streets than Paris. You also must not be the slightest bit overweight to get to live there. You must also be beautifully dressed.

That is the full on effect on your life if you are so surrounded with magnificent loveliness that you become like what you see.

This must be it. You feel like standing straighter and and speaking softer. You are in Paris and that deserves a new dress and a hat and lipstick.