I confess my friends that I have not been painting much but I have had my hands in the dirt as I prepare my gardens. My dad and my good friend Molly have been so much help as I prepare what I am lovingly reffering to as my vegetable plot and learn such things as weed identification, thining basics, how to edge, what the hell a mulch is, and all sorts of things I've wanted to know for a long time. Sometimes when my days off go by and I haven't been up to the studio, I fuss at myself for not creating, not playing with color, not doing what I think it is I am supposed to be doing but this time around I put the starbucks show to bed and spent the rest of my time in the dirt. I don't regret a moment and think this is all one continuiumm of dirt and color and growth and weeding and wondering what's going to come up when I do the dirty work. I am tempted to go down to the garden tomorrow morning early with the worms and see what I can draw but more likely I'll go down there and cultivate soil or plant lettuce or put the pansies in. There's a little too much to do frankly but it's all good work, the kind that makes my shoulders hurt a little and has alreday stained the kneecaps of a couple of pairs of jeans.
Everytime I sell work I feel great about myself and the things I make and this time was no different, but I just turned that cash around into groceries and garden and now I'm back to the dirt.
take care,
Rachae;

big thanks again to my dad without whom I wouldn't be here and certainly wouldn't be so excited about growing and learning from growing...

I had the pleasure of hearing Wendell Berry speak last night as he accepted the Art of Fact award here in Rochester. He looked a lot like this and I did get a couple of pages of notes and drawings. The honest, smart, kind and courageous thoughts were well worth hearing and I'm hungry now to read more Berry.

He talked a bunch about facts ("one has to believe in facts...that they exist" but that "facts never make a whole...just lead on to more facts") and how "honest facts" come with lots of qualifiers. The qualifiers of memory, and condition and how all of that comes from courtesy and concern. We're all trying to be true with all these facts but Mr. Berry stood up there and reminded us that imagination plus facts makes a more true truth, or as he said it, a greater whole.

He talked about limits and limit-less-ness, about how what happened after World War 2 was that our American pace was sped up. What happened when we went from mule to tractor? What's with our limitless hurry. He quoted T.S. Elliot's prayer "teach us to sit still".
And he made me (and the other couple of hundred people present) think. The talk, with it's not so subtle critique of big banking and big agri and other-wise business, was paid for by a bank. The bankers sat in the front row. There was high drama everyday politics of empty seats saved for latecomers while the plush auditorium filled with people.

And in the end, after the introductions of introducers, and after the applause, and after he read the essay an dafter he read from the novel in process, and after he answered a couple of questions, he pulled his small book of Shakespeare from his jacket pocket. It was a gesture quickly passed but the one I would want to paint.

All of this and more has me thinking about pace and place and change. The hectic-ness of work-a-day working, the silly effort has me exhausted and wanting to break, stop, rest and renew. I will soon enought but in the meantime, I just think of green. I'm in the dirt as often as I can be...little bits each day this week and lots I hope on Sunday.

And though, Mr. Berry doesn't own a computer I found this website of info on him and his work, very helpful. I can understand why he doesn't have a computer, he's got acres and mules...

goodnight,
Rachael

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