At Settlers' Expo

 Tonight was Maya's fourth grade class Settlers' Expo.  The class was divided into around a dozen small groups, and each group had constructed a workshop out of cardboard, paper, odds and ends of furniture, and props (many made of paper, aluminum foil, duct tape, and cardboard).  Each shop was the workplace of a small group of colonial craftspeople-- candle makers, cobblers, tailors, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, weavers, joiners, etc.  The students assumed stage names and spoke in British accents (this was supposed to be the Jamestown Colony in 1680).  The audience walked around to the various shops and engaged the students in conversations to which the students responded in their appropriate roles.  If they didn't know an answer, they generally referred the questioner to a different workshop where the answer might be known.

One workshop, the cobblers, would measure your foot and make a shoe for you for one aluminum foil penny.  I commissioned a shoe, which is in drawing 1385.  Drawing 1387 shows the cobbler hard at work making my shoe.  He even put a few nails in it, and it took him just a few minutes to make it.  He told me it was made of leather and leather with sticky stuff on the back of it.  I asked him what the sticky stuff was and he said pine sap that he got from the weavers.  I paid him a penny and I got to keep my shoe.

Near the shoe is a sketch of a soldier (there was a soldiers' camp down at the far end of the auditorium, with a cot and a game of chess set up.  The soldier outfits were made of aluminum foil and paper, very effective.  One of my favorite costumes was the teacher's crocheted beard!  It reminded me of a balaklava, which I had been wishing for a few minutes earlier when P and I were walking in the woods in today's 20 degree high temperature.  I asked him about his beard and he responded, in role of course, that his wife complained that he didn't trim it often enough, but it was very warm the way it was.

On this page are two sketches of Maya in her tailor's costume, complete with measuring tape around her neck.  On the left, she's ironing some fabric with one of my old irons.  On the right she's answering a question as Constance, a tailor.

Child Form Dressed for the Colonial Program

 Maya came over after school today and asked me if she could borrow the child form to use in her part of her fourth grade class's program on colonial America.  She will be dressed as a tailor and will be demonstrating and explaining what tailors did in those days.  She thought the child form would make a good prop.  We thought it would be good to put some clothes on the child form to demonstrate what it was used for, and so we went rummaging in our collection of old clothes that we've gotten from Tobacco Barn to use in making things, and we found a beautiful handmade child's white cotton coat that we had already cut a chunk out of.  Maya hemmed it to make it a short frock coat, using her treadle machine by herself to do the long hem stitch.

We had other projects to work on this afternoon, including making a faux tiger skin tuxedo jacket for the stuffed bear we made a few weeks ago.  This drawing shows one of the front pieces draped over the bear.  We kept getting waylaid into working more on the colonial project, as the program is supposed to be tomorrow evening.

We found a couple of antique flat irons that I dragged home from Italy one summer.  Definitely they will add to the tailor's workshop.  We also found my grandmother's old darning egg, an ancient home- made pin cushion that came in one of the drawers of my treadle machine, an old spool of thread, an old awl.  We did manage to get the whole jacket pinned and cut out, and Maya sewed two buttons on the white coat plus made a collar stiffener out of stiff mull to go on the coat.  Then Jesse moved in and decided he loved the pattern pieces as well as my pen.  This drawing shows him lying heavily on all of the pattern pieces after having batted them around enough to loosen several pins.

Open Focus and a Scary Church

Tonight I went downtown to the French Broad Chocolate Lounge to meet with my journal group.  This is a group of people who all keep sketchbook/journal/notebooks of some kind, and we help keep each other going by meeting to exchange ideas and show some of our work to each other once a month.  I had decided to draw during the meeting for today's drawing session, thinking I would draw all of the pretty little chocolate confections that people were eating.  But all of the pretty things were eaten in the first few  minutes, and the table ended up littered with cups and French press coffee pots and napkins and glasses.   So I began to draw what was in front of me, without judging anything more or less interesting than anything else, just lights and darks and angles and curves.  Meanwhile Donna was talking about  something Keith Smith said about the imperfect way we normally see with our narrow focus and preconceptions getting in the way of what's in front of us, and how drawing can help us see more and better.  Serendipitous.

My drawing grew by accretion.  Sometimes I wasn't even sure what I was drawing-- some dark shape-- and then a few minutes later I would watch the shape become the distorted reflection of a cup in the curved surface of a coffee pot.  So the drawing on the left is a sprawling record of the table in front of me, and I like it very much.

Afterwards three of us walked to our cars together, as we had all parked several blocks away.  We were walking near the very dark alley that runs alongside the reputedly most haunted spot in Asheville, so I suggested we go check out the site.  I had visited this spot during the daytime several times earlier this year, when an old church imprint was revealed during the demolition of a building.  The church had been built in the early 1800s then enclosed in a newer building for many years.  The early church had been built on top of a cemetery, and from early on there were stories about strange goings on in that place late at night.  When the newer building was razed a few months ago, the roof and windows of the old church were revealed on the adjacent building,  a truly wonderful sight.  And tonight we got to see it in the gloomy dark!  Fabulous!  My drawing on the right is from memory, the imprint of the old church on the brick wall of the adjacent building.  I called my grandson Jacob when I got home, as he is a fan of haunted places, and he and I having visited many over the years. We have now formulated a plan to go on the Haunted Asheville tour very soon. 

Day of Lying Down Cows

Why are ALL of the cows lying down today?  This week the herd is grazing in the field at the end of our road where an old brick silo stands.  The grass has been bitten by all the frosts we've had recently, and it too is lying down, looking like scattered straw on the frozen ground.  Today was sunny and windy, around 44 degrees at 1:00 when I set out, and all of the cows were lying down facing southwest.  When I got home at 3:30 the cows looked like they hadn't moved, except for one who was doing a bovine down dog as it clambered to its feet to move a few inches and then plop down again.

The Neighbors

A couple of years ago Maya and I figured out a way to make simple little stuffed dolls out of our drawings.  She drew a dog and then a mermaid, and we scanned the drawings then sized them and printed them out on tee shirt transfer material.  Then we ironed them onto old pillowcase material and stitched and sewed them.

I was so pleased with Maya's dolls that I decided to make some of my own.  I was working on a piece about my childhood neighborhood and had painted some of the grownups that had orbited our little group of kids, vague otherworldly characters that we saw one-dimensionally and through only the sparse interactions that we had with them.  I'm surprised at how much I like the dolls, although I've never done anything with them other than sit them on a shelf in my studio.

I have a feeling you have a collection of Neighbors yourself, maybe the same ones I have.  See how many of your own you can recognize here:  on the left is Mrs. Warner who lived next door behind a tall wooden fence.  I never saw her other than through the cracks in the fence.  She interested me because she had chickens in that secret yard, and she also had a collection of rubber balls; we hit a ball into her yard on an almost weekly basis, and she never returned a single one.   My mother told us she wore dresses made of feed sacks.

The Bishop was a frightening but ephemeral character who wafted in and out of our lives, mostly scowling, very tall, wearing his pointy hat (although he wore a little red beanie for daily wear) and seeming to be one long dark robe.  He was the pastor of our neighborhood and school church and growled at us from time to time.  He once chased me out of the back of church when I was exchanging a pamphlet I had bought for a fresh one (after reading the original purchase to amuse myself during the long afternoon in class).

Arthur Smeedge lived in the house behind ours, also behind a tall wooden fence that enclosed a wildly overgrown yard filled with cashmere bouquet bushes and Japanese plum trees.  He lived with his mother and two sisters, all ancient and unmarried.  On summer evenings Arthur would stand in his back window in his undershirt and old pants and look across our yard.  In eight years of living in that house I never exchanged a word with him or had any dealings at all with him other than scuttling through a hole in the fence and climbing the Japanese plum trees on my way to my friend Joanna's on the other side of the fence that separated his yard from hers. 

The fourth neighbor on this page was actually a ghost, the legendary aunt of a long-ago family who had lived in the haunted house down the block.  The neighborhood story among the kids was that she had died while the family was on vacation one summer, and had haunted the house since that time.  The house stood empty for as long as I lived there, and frequently we would hide in the yard and watch the upstairs window, hoping to see the ghost and looking for clues, to what we weren't sure.

These last two were friendly neighbors.  On the left was Prif, who was a youngish man (although we thought him old), who today would be classified something- or- other and would be living in a halfway house.  He was gentle and simple and always wore a plaid shirt neatly tucked in.  He lived with his parents at the end of the block.  He came around every day and watched us play ball or fling sand at each other or build tree houses.  Sometimes he would try to referee our arguments, but he never actually got involved in our games.  He was a kind of neighborhood watchman. 

The woman with the skull was my favorite.  She lived next door on the other side from Mrs. Warner,  and I knew a few things about her:  her name was Mrs. Turley;  she drove a big cadillac car;  she was a Widow-- the first time I ever heard that word-- and her husband had been a doctor;  she dyed her hair red;  she rented out one of her downstairs rooms to a medical student, who once  put a skull out in the backyard to dry after he washed it, causing a major terror among all of the kids in the neighborhood as we tried to figure out how it had gotten there and if it was real.  Mrs. Turley hired me to climb her fig trees and pick her figs one summer.  She paid me 25 cents a bag for the figs, and she invited me to spend the night at her house the last night I picked for her.  I was excited to get to spend the night but also a little uneasy because I knew that skull was in the house somewhere.  I slept in one of the twin beds in her bedroom.  Just as I was falling asleep she said from her bed:  "You never have to be afraid when you sleep at my house because I have a gun under my pillow."  She then said "Nighty night" and left me staring into the dark, snapped wide awake and terrified that she would forget I was there and shoot me if I got up to go to the bathroom.

Traveling to Various Edges and Reporting Back

I believe it was YoYo Mah who said something like "The job of the artist is to travel to the edges and report back."  I love that job description, so tonight I'm reporting back from a couple of edges to which I traveled today.

Early this morning my critique group had its monthly meeting.  This meeting is as essential as bread for me.  It takes place at the edges where ideas are slowly coalescing and shy little buds are trying to unfurl.  We listen carefully to each other and gently push to help the speaker expand on articulations and clarify for her or himself what's going on.  Some of us take notes in words and/or pictures, and when I look back at the code on the page, I remember the conversation as well as the emotional tone and the undercurrents of ideas.

 I was starting a new notebook this morning, and I generally take meeting notes starting in the back.  So these pages should be read from right to left.  Of special note is drawing #1353, made when we spied a man from the nearby fitness center parading through the parking lot carrying an enormous barbell over his head, another edgy kind of event.

After crit group I went downtown and met two friends for lunch.  As we were walking through the blustery wind, we noticed down low on the sidewalk, rising to about a foot high up against a building, a row of tiny building facades, carefully made and placed just so on slanted supports that leveled the bases of the little buildings along the hilly sidewalk.  What a fine surprise!  Nothing better than unexpected interventions where you least expect to find them.  If you're lucky enough to be walking in Asheville, check out the block between Lexington and Broadway-- more specifically between Chicken Alley and Tingle Alley-- on the side of whatever street that is that runs past the downtown Y and the Masonic Temple.  As you go uphill they will be on your right, way down low, on the edge of the buildings that cling to a narrow strip of sidewalk, right before the red light at Broadway.

I included the bricks of a building behind one group for scale. The other two were a few feet downhill, up against a stucco building.   These are really tiny, brightly painted, a sort of post-modern row of facades.  Absolute treasures.  Couldn't find an artist's name, but thanks, whoever did this!

Motherly Advice for Colds and Other Damp Conditions

Today I visited my acupuncturist at the Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinic and learned some things we can do for ourselves to help slow the flood of runny nose, teary eyes, barking coughs, and slurpy sniffs that seems to be afflicting many of us at this cold, dark, damp time of year.   While I was waiting for my appointment I drew a tropical fish that swims in the salt water aquarium in the waiting room, a soothing reminder to let go of stress and move slowly and gracefully while exercising to keep chi moving and thus reduce the stagnation that gives rise to the dampness that results in the extreme consumption of Kleenex.

I stopped at the grocery on the way home and bought the bitter tasting foods that help move dampness out of our systems, and when I got home I drew them.  A cup of warm lemon juice in water or tea is good in the cold mornings, and lemon is a great seasoning for salads and steamed vegetables.  The sour lemon helps dispel dampness and also alkalinizes your system.  Lemons also have vitamin C.  Asparagus is a bitter-tasting vegetable, a mild diuretic, and good at moving sluggish chi or energy.  Likewise celery, kale, and Swiss chard are excellent damp- removing foods.  And a nice surprise was to learn that bitter dark chocolate, in spite of its sugar, and eaten in small amounts, is good for all of the above.  (Happily, Greenlife carries Taza Mexican chocolate, 70% dark, organic, stone ground and nicely gritty.) 

Along with the list of things that are good for dispelling the evil dampness was a list of the main foods that create even more dampness and weaken your immune system and that will work against whatever you do to get rid of a tendency to pick up a cold or to get rid of one:  iced drinks; sugar; processed foods; dairy products.

This dietary advice won't work instantly to mask symptoms like cold medicines will, but by working them into/out of your diet over the long run,  you will improve your own health and immunity to the point where you'll rarely if ever need to take symptom-stopping medicine for a cold or invest in cartons of Kleenex.