Inhabiting the Drawing

This Ventura drawing, the Earth Mother who is covered with things from the Earth, she’s inhabiting my brain…she’s sat down right in the middle of the cerebrum and is having her lunch, spilling crumbs into the connections that allow me to get work done, to clean the kitchen, to cut a new screen frame, to dig the tree holes. At the gym yesterday morning, she was right there, drawing animals onto her arms for me, trying out all the options…raccoon? Nope. Cat? Not on the arm…somewhere else. Whale? No, all the water animals are up in the hair. Or something. I’m not sure. I’ll think about it. By late afternoon, it was a fox. I’m not sure why, but the right arm was definitely a fox. So I sat on the floor with a bunch of fox(y) pictures pulled up on my iPad (eyepad) trying to decide how to fit it on her arm, how to make the arm be filled, what to do with the hand. It just spilled out.

And then making dinner, the heron was there, from a picture I pinned on Pinterest earlier from a human body painted as a heron…Shannon Holt…it’s your fault. So the left arm needed to be a heron…I didn’t have time or mental space to draw that until tonight…

And I’m debating trying to put a wing in there falling off the right side, under the hand, but I need to enlarge the drawing and add on to the right side and the bottom, and figure out what the hell I’m doing with the rest of it. Because it has to be done in 5 1/2 months, along with two other small quilts, one of which NOW has to be done by April 1…more on that later. So I don’t think I can do the whole body, but if it’s just a torso, it still needs to end somehow and it needs to make sense to me, so all the options are running through my brain, like a flipbook on speed, because really, this drawing has inhabited my brain and I am just sitting here waiting for the reveal. The hard drive is humming. It will make sense at some point. In fact, after I took that photo, I sat back and watched TV for a bit, maybe 10 minutes, and then this happened…

Because it was supposed to…that’s what’s so hard about people asking me what this or that in my art means…I don’t know. I was sitting there and the drawing happened. I can’t explain it half the time. I know where the heron came from, but the fox? No clue. The cat made it in, though, can you see? By the way, I think my small-quilt focus for the summer will be cats, like I did the birds. Keep them small and simple, draw from existing cats in my quilts. We’ll see if that works. So many were bought by friends and family…I can’t depend on them to pay my bills this summer.

So tomorrow, I will drag this to Not-Kinko’s and enlarge it 250-300% (haven’t decided yet) and then I will make a decision about a heron wing (I think that decision is already made) and the lower torso and what happens at the bottom. And then, much to Julie’s relief, I will number the pieces and see how bad it will be. Look mom! No nudity! No politics! No violence! I still like it though. That’s what’s hard about the birds…they’re easy enough to do, but I don’t get any art high off of them. They’re the equivalent of my mom making placemats and pillows when she was weaving…and that’s fine. Where I’m at in my life, finances are tight…I need to find ways to collect extra income for college costs. So this might be it.

So then I have two pieces that have to be done in recycled fabrics…with some weirdness about the definition of recycled. So I pulled the upholstery samples apart and divested them of most of their sticky labels…

I did not spend hours doing that. What a lame group of colors. Ugh.

Honestly, I’m stuck at the moment…

What the hell am I going to use for the background? I thought about using all the lighter colors and piecing them or just plopping them down on a base fabric. And I thought about painting over them a la Deidre Adams…she pieces all these discordant pieces and then paints a bunch of stuff over them until they become beautiful fiber pieces. But I don’t even need that. I just need a semi-unified background. And I don’t want to trash my machine…with the whole sewing-through-paint thang. Fuck. I really need to just let this one mellow in my head…fucking ferment really. I’m annoyed by it.

The second one, I’m using Mariah’s batik leftovers from all her quilts for that. I spent time yesterday and today sorting them into color piles, and though I don’t think I have any flesh-colored pieces large enough for the main female figure, it’s possible she should be blue or green anyway. So whatever. I’ll finish sorting and then decide.

It does mean I don’t really have something I can come home to from work and do without any brain power. Everything requires thought, reflection, processing time. Ugh.

So I really flailed this evening. Because of all that. I guess I could iron the cancer hands together, except I’m tired. So maybe I should start the week off right and go to bed. Everyone else did.

Double ugh. Really flailing. Hey, this is the reality of being an artist. Some days, my brain is so inundated with decisions about how and what and even why that I can’t even take a step out of this room without feeling like I’m doing the wrong thing. Or without being convinced that it’s going to really suck.

I know. Just keep working. Cutting things up and drawing what’s in there, watching her spitting cracker crumbs into the machinery. Ironing things together. Trying to make sense of it all. Trying to find a way to make what I want and fulfill a million obligations…and be happy in the midst of all that. Tie all the pieces together in my head. Spill them out on the paper once the knots are strong enough to hold together. I’m so very much in my head right now. Distracted. Not a bad thing…just a nasty knot in the embroidery floss. It will take time to pick it apart. And that’s who I am. I always pick it apart. I don’t ever just cut it off and start over. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad…it just is.