Seems like, feels like, smells to me like I've been off my game lately. Creatively, my friends, I've been feeling out of sorts and off kilter and uncertain more than I have felt confident about the art I make. So I wonder, how often do you feel off-kilter with the work you are making? Why do we wake up wondering and go to sleep wondering what we are making, why we are making, and what it matters in the big bad world? I'm trying to pay attention to my gut and to break through the un-sure but sometimes it's not so easy...
I've been sparse in part because of a big project at work and a lot of teaching and preparing to teach. Each time I approach a teaching situation (whether it is giving a talk about process and painting or teaching teachers to integrate art into their lessons or teaching art appreciation) I follow the same pattern: excitement, research, planning, over-the-top unneccessary research, anxiety, over-planning, more research, and then when I walk into the class, I wing it. Improvisation, my friends, is a lie. There's a lot of plotting and planning that goes into being able to be loose, talk on the spot, and meet the needs of the students in front of me.

More learning from plants then...

As I tromp through my garden (some of the seedlings got their little heads lopped off with the pouring down rain this weekend but others are coming along nicely. Resilence, even in the plant world, is an important trait.)

I'll leave you, then, with one of my paper clay products, a moody little guy who now sits by the window wondering. Wouldn't we all if we could...

I'll be resilient, searching for my true marks, and paying attention to the plants and the paper and the clay.
take care,
Rachael

So with all that said I am scribbling away in my sketchbook, thinking about all the art I haven't seen in all the cities I want to get to (like Chicago, or New York to see LaFarge's Buddha, or the visionaries in Baltimore.)
I will travel soon enough and I'll harvest my vegetables soon enough and I'm painting again with the promise of a real bloom when I have time and space and inspiration all at once over two well wished for weeks in the North Carolina mountains.
Until then, sure, my bliggity blogging might be short but my days and dreams are long. Yours?
take care,
Rachael

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