CMAppleton

This photo is from my May trip to California for Toni's birthday. We're in a Japanese steak house (Toni loves them). Forget the name, tried something other than Kobe this time, a sports bar version of Kobe (we were in the basketball finals after all). Food was good, the usual goofy chef who tosses bits of shrimp in the air for diners to catch in their mouths (not fond of that, plus I'm always thinking that it will go into a pocket, the shirt will end up in the dry cleaning pile at the bottom of the closet, two weeks later there will be this smell . . .). He sets a little volcano on fire to everyone's oohs and ahhhs (like we haven't seen it a hundred times before). The usual but there is something comforting in these predictable little rituals. We had green tea ice cream and took photos – (Ty took this one). Earlier the three of us had our hair done together, and then went in search of flip flops – on sale at Old Navy (the soft plain rubber ones that we like). Bought some stuff but no flip flops – too many, paralyzed by an overdose of choice.

Must Love Cats and Dogs

This is Gizmo. He is sweet and a bit of a clown. He hates to be restricted in any way (like Toni) so if you pick him up when he's not in the mood he will whine and complain (like Toni). I am here at the Bermuda Dunes house (aka animal house) for a week of hanging out with Toni and Nat. We have done a lot of eating, a little movie-going, visiting with Judy, shopping, and stuff like that. Yesterday Judy came and we barbecued carne asada and chicken and had the most wonderful tostadas. Toni made a strawberry pie which was yummy. Natalie missed out since she was working, but we'll see her later today. Missing Georgannae a lot. We all are but with a tiny bit of healing under our belts we have been able to tell a few stories with her in them with smiles of happy remembering. There is a giant hole in our family. She would have so loved this past week. She also would have been able to make an assessment of Max's condition. He is 15, 16 in November and has arthritis. It is impossible to know if he is in pain and if so how much. He is stoic and gentle and quiet, and of course has no way of letting us know. He amazingly still has the heart and enthusiasm of a puppy. I wish I could take him home with me but that would only be possible if I were driving (which of course would take a car and ten days). Toni has two other cats named Koi and Milo (Milo actually belongs to Natalie but she has a cat who doesn't like Milo so he is here for now). Natalie has three cats (what's with all the cats, we went our whole lives having dogs and suddenly everyone wants multiple cats!) Her cats are Jinx (who actually belongs to Toni, not sure why Nat has him except that he is a bit of a bully), Pancho, and Bob. Bob lives under the bed for the most part because he is timid and not very fond of cats in general. Toni also has Brandy, a sweet furry lovable little girl she brought home one day when she was in high school. I didn't want another dog (at that time I had three already) so Georganne took Brandy and had her for years. When Georganne moved to the Chicago area Toni took Brandy back and she's lived at the BD house ever since. Almost forgot about Jixxer who belongs to Ty who is Toni's boyfriend. Jixxer is an American Bulldog and must be separated at all times from all the animals since she doesn't get along with them, especially the cats, whom she would just as soon eat as look at. Though, ironically, Milo seems to be smitten with Jixxer and seductively struts along the length of the sliding glass door when Jixxer is on the other side of it in the patio. They both seem to be in on this, occasionally throwing themselves on the ground and rolling on their backs while looking at each other with goofy looks on their faces. Odd. Below is the painting I did of Max several years ago. It's acrylic and four feet by five feet, it lives at the end of the hall in Studio 4 at Lorton.

Spring Deer

The deer seem to love the arrival of spring as much as we do. They rush to eat the flowers as soon as they rear their tiny bud heads. My first year here I was naive enough about the possibility of having lilys in my wild kingdom backyard, that I actually planted one smack in the middle of the flower bed in back, very close to where the deer are in this photo. They were there about five minutes. I'm sure it could be compared to say . . . if Dan were to leave a Hersey's kiss on the kitchen counter. (as if). We have a sweet lonely Canadian Goose wandering around the meadow next to the woods. There were two, they walked around the grassy areas together. Often they were on the driveway when I was trying to drive out and I just had to wait for them to waddle their fat butts off the road before I could pass. Suddenly there was only one goose. It was sad. Dan suggested we go find a goose someplace and bring it here for this goose. I was disturbed that he could kidnap a goose from it's own home and family. Then, after two weeks of loneliness, suddenly there were two again! But today we were back to one. I was thinking that maybe friends from the gaggle drop in and check on him. Maybe he lost his mate? There are also several fox sneaking around that part of the meadow but I am sure that if a fox was actually a threat to a goose, no geese would be there. We've had so much rain and every time it rains a lot, like now, we find toads on our deck. Almost like it's just too wet even for them. Last spring I picked up a fat American Toad off (I know their names now having painted a bunch of them recently) our deck and took him down to the creek, thinking he must be lost. But then a few days later, his twin (or maybe him) reappeared so I just left him there. He was gone in a day or so. The frog-singing from the creek is so loud when you're outside you can't hear yourself think. And then there's the cicada. And the sex crazed fox who scream weirdly when mating (Toni and I were watching them from the window). In the five years we've been here I've seen one turtle, and that was in the first six months. Never again did I see one but Dan did stop his car once on Fox Mill so that he could move a turtle out of the middle of the road. I wonder if turtles and frogs get along? Turtles seem like loners. Introverted. I'm kind of a turtle.

American Beauty II

This painting is 48" x 60" and is done with acrylic, collage of printed material, my drawings, and misc. debris of all kinds. I am not sure it's done. I have wanted to put a figure near the top, drawn in as I did in American Beauty I. (AMI sold, and hangs in a boutique hotel's lobby in Maryland, despite the subtle pattern of tiny printed words which are all of the foul names women have been called throughout history that I could find on the internet -- I keep expecting a phone call with words like "Er, about that painting of yours, we didn't realize . . . our guests . . . offensive . . . er, misrepresented, . . . refund, . . .?") Like my first American Beauty painting, this painting deals with women's rights, body issues, etc. After doing a lot of research for this piece, it just felt sad to me that women, here and around the world, from present time to over a thousand years ago, have been trying so hard to make themselves thinner, prettier, more appealing, wanted; yet have often been restricted the right to education, freedom of movement, jobs, property ownership, votes, even freedom over their own bodies. Recently in the middle east a woman (another woman) was murdered by her own father for speaking to a man who was not her husband or father or brother. How do we, as western women, respond to that? It is beyond comprehension. Women have been controlled by not allowing them to learn to read, draping them in burkas, attaching chastity belts or slave bracelets, forcing circumcism, locking them up, physical violence, social alienation, the list goes on and on and is just so sad. Now I'm depressed and totally drifting off the subject. Well, the painting deals mostly with all the ways women try to make themselves younger and prettier, to be more of a contender in today's world ala the standards set by TV, movies, celebrity awe, etc. I was attempting to put all these things together, the advertising for the creams, the waist cinchers, the get pretty fast schemes, to show how ridiculous they all are.

Breaking Through to Blue

These six paintings were intended to be hung very close together, rather than as shown here. They are each ten inches by ten inches and I did them very quickly. I was trying to change my palette. I always use the same old colors over and over. My studio is filled with orange, red, yellow and smaller amounts of cool colors. I had to force myself to use mostly blues. These paintings all have deep sides and the paintings go around the edges to the sides. As I was painting them I would put two at at time together, and connect shapes and colors, select another two, and kept turning them and varying what I put side by side, in the hope that in the end all of the pieces would work together. Well, most work well together. I really loved doing them because it just felt right, came together, things were working plus I did a lot of drawing on them and that was fun. I am working on another blue palette painting now that's 48 x 48 and will also have a lot of drawing. It's staring at me right nowbut I have another painting in line in front of it so it will just have to wait it's turn.

Lorton Suffragette Series

These paintings were hung in the Lorton Arts Center Small Works Show over the holidays. The top painting was selected to be on the calendar they are going to print, hopefully before the end of the year. It's title is Metamorphosis, and intended to reflect the transition from prison to art center, to show that the physical structure, though the same, now houses a creative and positive spirit without completely forgetting the minds and bodies that once spent every waking moment behind those walls. My focus is mainly directed to those women imprisoned for standing up for equal rights. Seems so odd today that women were once not able to vote. Especially when a woman was so close to actually becoming the president, and is now the third female Secretary of State. So much can happen in so little time. The second photo is of eight paintings on the same subject, and again focusing on the suffragettes. Creating these pieces was an interesting process as I went online to find information on the women who were actually housed at the Lorton prison. These women were arrested for marching in Washington D.C. Many then refused to eat and were force fed with tubes and such. I also ran across political cartoons depicting the plight of the poor husbands of these activist women. One shows a man, the poor guy walks in the disheveled house where there is laundry everywhere and no dinner and he's tired after his day's work; and where, oh where, is his personal slave? Off galavanting around in front of the White House with her friends putting her nose where it doesn't belong. We've come a long way, at least in this country.

Dogs Rule

Here I sit, in my hard plastic lime green chair in the AIM Gallery, where it is my turn to gallery sit, which means I am here for 8 hours. And since it takes a good half hour to get here, that's 9 hours away from the house, and sweet Molly. Dan is gone and that's ok if I'm going to my studio, since I don't have to be there for so long. When I am gallery sitting at AIM Dan's usually around but today he is in Norfolk meeting with General somebody and so Miss Molly came to the gallery with me today. There is a strict “NO PETS” rule, but Wednesday is such a completely dead day here I figured it would be ok. When I first came in there was only one artist here, way down the other end of the hall of studio/galleries; the wood turner Patrick who works furiously hours on end with loud rock music blasting (so he can hear it over his lathe) so I figured he wouldn’t even notice Molly was here (though not sure he’d mind). So I put her down on the floor and set about barricading a little pen area for her. It was easy to do, then I put down my fairly new Pottery Barn knitted rusty orange throw for her to lay on so she would be comfortable with the familiar feel and smells (the one I told Dan to NOT EVER let Molly lay on since she walks in circle digging it into a lump thus ruining it by pulling up little yarn threads). Sacrifices for canine comfort. Then I turned around to pick up Molly and place her in her new temporary home, and she was, of course, GONE. She did however, conveniently leave a trail of steamy little dollops of poop which REEKED. I looked down toward the gallery’s doorways just as her white fluffy tail disappeared around the corner. I grabbed her and brought her back to her pen. She was not totally delighted with the throw, or the bacon treat, or the fresh bowl of water. She immediately began searching for an escape route. In the meantime I was picking up dog poop, spraying the floor with cleaner, and looking for a zip-type plastic bag to put the poop in as fast as possible to get rid of the horrible smell. I could only find a huge trash bag but that worked fine as I was able to keep folding and wrapping until it was covered in at least 15 layers of plastic which should take care of the smell. Plopped it into the waste basket and looked in the pen, no Molly. I headed for the hall, there she was, waddling down the hall with her nose to the ground looking for something to eat or pee on I guess. I picked her up and put her back in her pen with a fresh bacon snack, which she ate and then resumed her attempts at escape. I just wanted her to settle down so I could go use the bathroom and get a cup of coffee and maybe relax for five seconds. I pulled one of the green chairs next to mine and put the orange throw in it and put her on top of it. After a while she actually settled down for as long as ten seconds at a time. It was so distracting worrying about her being annoying at any second that I couldn’t really work on any of the things I’d brought with me to do so I made a few phone calls and then just played solitaire on my computer and hoped she would exhaust herself soon. I grew bored with that (is there anything more boring?) and started picking out the m&ms from the giant bag of Kirkland Trail Mix. Then I started getting a headache from the m&ms so started writing this. She is still sitting in the green chair, panting, looking around nervously. More artists are coming in. A few minutes ago I went down the hall to talk to Amanda who had poked her head in the door looking for me when I was on the phone. We chatted for a while and then I headed back down the hall just as a loud YELP came out of the AIM Gallery. Gulp. I wasn’t sure it didn’t sound like a chair squeaking, maybe no one noticed. She of course had heard my voice down the hall and caught on to the fact I had snuck out and was letting me know that was just unacceptable. So now I am back sitting right next to her wondering how I am going to get through this day having every move I make monitored by a little 9lb ball of white fluff. Four and a half hours left. Update: it is now a half hour later. She was getting restless and driving me crazy so I put her and the orange throw back in her pen and gave her a little dish with some gravy in it left over from my lunch. She loved it, licked it and scooted it all across the floor trying to lick every last trace, making very loud slurping sounds and causing me to wonder what Bill must think of my manners. (He is in the studio next door and our thin walls do not go up to the ceiling so you can hear everything). He really must be wondering what all the panting, slurping, scraping and sniffing sounds are that are coming out of this gallery. Looks like she is going to settle down on the throw now, so maybe it is a good thing after all that I brought it. Nope, she just peed on it. How is it that a fuzz ball the size of a loaf of bread runs the lives of two otherwise fairly sane adults. Now we are home and she is sitting next to me in my big chair and every time I move it apparently disturbs her since she grumbles and sighs with annoyance. I guess she’s pretty worn out after her busy day.

Sitting here . . .

Just took Molly out to go potty. She has to be taken out because she can't see, and even if she could see, she would never consent to go out in this weather. She stands there all stiff and annoyed with the damp cold on her poor little paw pads. First real snow, a light snow but collecting on the ground and the trees nevertheless. It is silent and beautiful outside and not that cold. It's been a long time since I've posted here, a busy time. I have stopped taking my computer to my studio because it is a distraction, unless using it for art creation. As requested, I've put some photos here of my studio. The first is of the outside showing what the buildings look like. There are ten that look like this, surrounding a grassy courtyard. There are two buildings at the front of the courtyard, one that houses a main gallery which is large and on two stories and used for visiting artists and traveling shows of various kinds. The other large building is being remodeled for use as a performance area. There are many outbuildings on the property, one a huge barn which they are planning to open this year as a 'music barn' seating over a thousand. Other buildings were used by the former prison for manufacturing, brick making, baking, and other things I don't remember. There are guard towers sprinkled about as well. The other two photos are of the inside of my studio, which is about 450 square feet. I have space for working at a couple of large easels, a large table top for working flat, and a desk for my computer, monitor, Cintiq, etc. I also have some printers,flat files, cabinets,a storage area for canvasses,and a tiny kitchen where I have a frig and microwave. It's a great space and I feel very lucky that it's mine. I love being there and working there is just so much easier than working at home. My weekends are Mondays and Tuesdays since Saturday and Sunday are the busiest days for visitors. Many people come through, chat, some are artists and they linger the longest. One day a man came in whose father was the head prison guard back in the day. He was a boy of 7 and used to come to work with his dad, who would plop him down at a table in the prison cafeteria to lunch with the inmates. They were nice to him and it wasn't until years later that he wondered who he was actually dining with. Thieves? Murderers? His father was respected by the inmates because he treated them well and taught them to box. Sometimes when I'm standing at my easel I wonder who might have stood here on these cement (very hard) floors before me. Maybe one of the suffragettes?

Bugged

Did this painting earlier this year. It's been in a few shows, won an award and is about to retire to my wall. I had so much fun doing this painting because it combines so much of what I love – drawing, painting, glueing, and talking about things I don't know anything about. There are a lot of comment shapes – areas that required a tone or a pattern so I filled them with words that ramble on about whiny things. The drawings of the figure are of my artist friend Ginny who modeled for my drawing group for a while. She has a wonderful face and I could draw her hair all day long. She loves to get in these dramatic poses with hats and coats and things she brought from home that she'd saved for years. She created characters that added another dimension to the drawing experience. I liked most of the drawings I did of Ginny – seemed to have a higher success rate when she modeled. Though a wonderfully talented model, being an artist she prefers to paint, and has taken a break from modeling.

ARTOMATIC 08

I participated in Artomatic in D.C. this year because I thought it would be fun. And it was. They had about a dozen floors; each floor was about ten thousand square feet. All filled with art! I was on the 12th floor adjacent to my friend Susie Sikorski. (A view of the National Cathedral and the Washington Monument from our huge windows.) We painted our walls and dragged in our paintings. (I do get so tired of lugging my paintings around, [thank you Dan for helping] aside from having buckets of money, that would be my favorite reason to be incredibly famous, to have someone to lug the paintings.) Had several friends with work there. This year was the usual sublime to the ridiculous. LOTS and lots and lots of crap. Some guy on our floor had two walls, one with six foot letters spelling "FUCK" and the other with six foot letters spelling "KILL." Lots of political art (images of Bush and Cheney) and anti-war art. There were a few things that were really good, definitely worth walking every floor to find the jewels among the, well, non-jewels. Went there for "Meet the Artists Night" many put out snacks and chatted up their work. We put out wonderful snacks and met a lot of artists, a lot of people met us and ate our food (the kids zoomed in and took pockets full of our delicious swedish IKEA cookies and Wegman olives). Who cares. The better the food the more the visitors to your art. Is it possible they're faking interest in the art to get closer to the food? No sales or inquiries but did get invitations to participate in two juried art fairs in D.C. They had a total of 52,000 visitors through this year, a record! (And 47 pieces stolen, and some sales.)
The dog painting is called "Max" and I put it in because it took up a lot of space and I liked the color against the fuschia wall. The figure is called "Redhead" and was in a juried show in California, a watercolor. The three-dimensional piece is called "Slip Sliding Away" (from the Paul Simon song) and I guess you could say it's autobiographical since the images are me, and I definitely feel like I'm slip sliding away much of the time.
One day Susie called me from Artomatic and told me there was a poem taped on the wall near the painting of Max; a wandering poet named Brash wrote a sweet poem about the painting, and a few weeks earlier he had written a piece about one of Susie's paintings. If I could remember where I put it I would put it here, but, alas, things are just slip sliding away.