That's Princess Di. I didn't paint her, but Deb did and she has a show in New York right now. Here's some stuff I know about Deb Steckler: she's a highly talented and smart painter, she culls images from all over and especially from those weird little pictures that stick around in your head years after you see them in the New York Times or on tv or in Time magazine, she draws like a dream, and she's just swell. Like a lot of stuff Deb makes, this show is just small enough, just subtle enough, just smart enough to be worth seeing and coveting and keeping and treating special.

FRIDAY, APRIL 21, Reception: 7:00-9:00 P.M. The solo exhibition "Ordinary People" by Debra Stecker opens at Realform Project Space. Gallery is located at 218 Bedford Avenue and North 5th Street, walk two blocks south from Bedford Ave station (Bedford exit) on L train, in vestibule of Realform Girdle Building ("Mall") on SW corner. Thru May 21. Exhibition opens on April 16.

If you are in Atlanta, I heartily suggest you catch Club Rio at Saltworks. These kids are smart and I miss the stuff they make.

And if you are going to be in Rochester before April 30, I humbly hope you'll see my Starbucks show before it is no more.

I'm biased but then, I never said I wasn't. If we do not promote our own work, the fabulous things our friends make, and the things we believe in...well people might learn about them someday but someday is a long cold lonely future. I prefer now so that's why I tell you to see Deb, see the Club, see my pictures. See truth.

See my dreams of a garden unfurl. I had a gardening consultation with my friend Vickie on Saturday and my dad is coming to visit Sunday and the seeds continue to get ready to germinate ( I hope). Some of the little guys are popping up. Somewhere between permaculture, the square foot garden, and my dream of acres of wildflowers is the garden I'll be able to reasonably grow this year and next. I've been dreaming of a garden for a boatload of years and this time I can actually get down on my knees, put my hands in the dirt and make something happen. Even as a rank beginner, I think the tending, the cultivating, the growing and the learning is what I hunger for...though the veggies and the color have a true appeal too.

I'll keep you posted.
Rachael

My brother told me I was more of a slacker than a blogger lately and —as far as written observations of what I’ve been thinking, seeing, and making—he’s right. I don’t like him to be right about many things, though, so I’m sitting here typing and thinking.

I’ve not exactly gone into hibernation but I have been more insular. Thinking of friends but not really calling. And then I went and caught the bug again for American art. It's this little fever for everything visual made in America between about 1918 and 1942, but it ebbs and flows back and forth.



" I am blamed for not working when I am not inspired...I see first and then I do...When I draw, I draw. When I don't draw, I am studying character or other things and I am sure the time is not wasted..." p. 4 of Audur Winnan's Wanda Gag (as excerted from her diaries)...

I’ve been reading excerpts of Wanda G’ag’s life as printed in the recent catalogue raisonne of her prints. To be honest, it took me a while to get excited about Wanda because I’d only really seen Millions of Cats and that frankly isn’t my Harold and the Purple Crayon (Crocket Johnson, too, was a jr. radical). But Wanda’s prints, her drawings, her diary entries, her everything I can find out about her is a kick. Her story oughtta be a movie (Winona Ryder with a bob as Wanda?) and oughtta be required reading for every troublemaker girl in highschool, art school, or today’s variation on typing school. Her auto-bio essay (published anonymously)"A Hotbed of Feminists" was printed in 1927 in the Nation. And Wanda seemed to stay true to the art, sex and gardening she loved to love.
These starkly beautiful prints by Wanda are good to get the idea of her work:
one
two
three lovely things in the National gallery


The total eclipse

I’ve also been reading essays and stories by Annie Dillard and last night in the bath I read A Total Eclipse and it totally engulfed me. How can a writer turn a trip up a hill to see a natural phenomenon into a personal and social inquiry into death and the unknown? All the imagery, all of the words (none of ‘em really seemed wasted), all of the experience in that little essay was bigger than my bathtub, bigger than my brain, bigger and better than I ever expected when I checked the little book out because somebody once told me to read Annie Dillard.

From seed
I am so hopeful for the little peat pots full of dirt and little seeds (cantaloupe, tomatoes, basil, peppers, and yellow squash so far but more is coming). I feel like I'm in the 3rd grade again germinating seeds. The whole backyard beckons for plants and herbs and flowers and time to sit out there and watch it all grow.
Until my garden grows, though, I'm growing plenty of drawings...



So anyway, enough to keep me busy and be not afraid if you don't hear for a few days, if this blog goes dim, it simply means I'm reading, seeding, weeding and thinking...
take care,
Rachael

This morning I started a short course in working with paper clay and I'm amazed at what the stuff can do. Spending an hour or so ripping toilet tissue to shreds so it can make a slurry and then be added to clay was actually quite enjoyable since I've been spending my nights on the computer writing up a presentation I'm giving in a few days. It's this art of the 20s and 30s and I am amazed at how much of this stuff I still love...

I'm processing it too much to talk about it here but I simply wanted to say hello and fear not if I blog not. It's a busy and now there's paper clay to be obsessed with...

Jerry Bennet's handouts

Brian Gartside's stuff about paper clay
be good,
Rachael

So, I just gave an informal talk at the informal meeting of an informal group of women who are also artists and who are hoping an artists group will inspire them, help them make more and better work, and give them an excuse to see themselves again as artists. Jen nicely asked me if I'd start them out with a talk, with a little drawing, with some stuff about myself. And I prepared myself to inspire. I gathered some sketchbooks, I brought in some show and tell, I practiced my talk and even made a handout. I made sure I thought of everything and packed the room with pens and paper and slides.

Only, I didn't prepare to be inspired. But see these women are smart. And these women talked about the things they have made, the babies they have, the ways they already manage to juggle family and work and various degrees of art making and as we all sat around a room in a safe space with cookies and comraderie, I remembered that I don't have all the answers (I don't have any answers really), I don't have a failsafe plan, I definitely don't have a baby.

But I do have a driving passion that tells me that everyone who feels like they have to make art and feels like they have to find ways to create and feels like they need to be in a room with other artists...oughtta make some art, oughtta find ways to create, and oughtta find ways to get into rooms with other artists.

I feel more inspired than inspiring and definitely excited about my new sketchbook and some new friends.

take care,
Rachael

Since I typically work Saturdays, I have Mondays off and so Tuesdays are my first days back at my desk, my work-day reality, and the normal-ness of routine. I like my work and I tend to miss the place a little when I'm not there but the back-to-it-ness of a busy week is so busy, so full of details, so disorganized, and so phone-ringing and problems-to-solve that I needed cookies when I came home. So a couple of chocolate chip cookies later, I'll sort it out in a somewhat helpful way (I hope).

The more I read about other artists making at times they shouldn't be able to make (when in exile, after learning their father had killed himself, when they couldn't eat), I realize that I have no good reason not to let myself make the artwork I need or want to make.

I'm supposed to give a talk on Thursday about balancing work and painting and so I'm thinking I should work on balancing. The women I'll talk to have kids. I don't. I went upstairs and visited my attic studio tonight. I was surprised by the stuff on the floor (paintings in a first stage of mess and muck), by the big brushes I could have used yesterday, by the magnetic pull of potential energy.

Ten hours of work and 30 minutes of painting isn't much of a direct balance but I will sleep better an dtheoretically when I wake up tomorrow I will head upstairs and pour more drawings, marks, and meanings out of my head.I'm still chewing on Kozol's ideas, scary that there is a rubric for walking in lines. Especially since all the kids I know and live zig instead of zag when they're in lines. It's the teachers I work with who tell me that they love their noisy kids on a saturday morning because they know those kids are learning as they draw, thinking as they talk/tell a story, getting excited as they get creative...
So, maybe there is some balance here...
sleepy me, headed upstairs to fight the good fight in paint and pencil...
Rachael