Deavers

Reagan’s chef of staff was a sly media manipulator named Michael Deavers. He once said people absorb impressions, not facts. This strikes at my core. If you repeat a lie enough times, it becomes true in your mind.

We process data based on associations. Otherwise, how can you make sense of your surroundings? In my experience with trash cans, I have a large visual reference system. Therefore, I can see an object on the street and, in context, I can sort through my known reference materials and determine it is a trash receptacle.

What do we do with portraits? You have to dip into your personal life experiences to make sense of an image of a person without words. Sure, it’s better with a backstory but is the impression valuable too? What if you are operating in a censored media space? What if the impression is all you can have? It’s better than an empty frame, right?

A search for Clair Harward’s name yields only this result. I wish I could say there were other images of this young man — pictures of him in the bloom of good health, holding a cat on the front porch of his childhood home, a smiling yearbook photo. I think he looks like Steve-O so maybe I’ll paint him as well.

Party favors

If you’ve known me for a while, the news that I was hit in the face by a piñata is not going to come as a surprise. It’s sort of comforting to be reminded that this sort of thing happens. Oddly, the prizes inside were the real danger. There were little watercolor sets that shattered on impact. Even stranger, the ones I saved (of course I saved them) contained decent quality paint. It doesn’t dry as expected but the colors are interesting.

Swimming upstream

I always tell students that the joy of learning new programs is that you’re allowed to be bad at them. But it’s hard to embrace being horrible at something when you know you could easily avoid the experience.

Facing failure is not for the faint of heart ❤️

Dreams

I try not to write my dreams on Facebook as much anymore. My brother finds it creepy and lords know he would never read this. I often dream I’m in other people’s houses. Wherever it is, I’ve quickly gotten accustomed to my surroundings and am able to navigate easily. I never have any guilt or feel it’s wrong to be there but always feel deeply ashamed when I’m caught.

Desi was listening to me explain the dream and commented on how strange it was. “Why would you be in someone else’s house?” I was fumbling through an explanation when my husband interrupted me. “Because it’d be awesome. You’d get to see people’s stuff.” Exactly. Funny how you don’t know you have something strange in common with your spouse. If it wasn’t illegal and socially unacceptable, I’d totally go into people’s houses.

I believe there was a character in a Douglas Coupland book who did that, for years. She felt herself to be very sly. When she was finally caught, it was explained that everyone knew she wandered into houses and everyone in the community hated it.

Like the North Pond Hermit - from a distance, on NPR, it can sound quaint. But in reality, people wanted to shoot him and put a lot of time / energy into catching him.

Eritrea

One of my very favorite student is a second generation immigrant. He’s loud, super smart and would always ALWAYS empty out his pockets when he saw me, giving me whatever he had with him. More often than not, it was a drawing of a heart and my name. When I see refugees struggling to come to the US, I think of his mother. If she wasn’t brave as hell, he wouldn’t be here to lead his classmates and drive teachers crazy.

Chris

I’ve been painting Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old Black man who was fatally shot by law enforcement in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. As most of my paintings, the source image doesn’t resemble the end result. What strikes me most is how much the portraits end up looking like people I’ve known in real life.

This painting looks like a student I had years ago named Chris Smith. Chris was not a great student; he couldn’t concentrate, talked constantly, often tore up his papers in front of my face. But he was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. His tone of voice was and delivery was legendary. When a classmate asked how Michael Jackson died, Chris said, “He just died, end of story.  Stop asking so many questions, fool. It’s none of your business.” When our school closed, Chris was one of the few students not given a place at the sister school because his discipline record was a mile long. I have a terrible feeling that his teachers could only see him as a pile of paperwork instead of the funny kid everyone adored.

He is one of the filters I view Michael Brown through — he was somebody’s favorite person.

Supporting Actor

I have been painting Ja’Marr Chase a couple times a week since Christmas. Not only is he a phenomenal player but he has a great face (hard to replicate).

More than anything, I find him super interesting because people are obsessed with his friendship with Joe Burrow. Grown up journalists, who should have real questions for this Triple Crown winning athlete, repeatedly ask him about Joe. You can see his reaction shift when Joe’s name comes up.

I can relate to being a person that people like better in relation to another person. It’s generally OK but it takes the wind out of your sails when you’re alone.

the art of planning

I’ve been painting images of child soldiers from around the world. It isn’t a new fascination, I’ve been reading about Johnny Htoo and Luther Htoo for years. They are twin brothers who jointly led the God's Army guerrilla group, a splinter group of the Karen National Union, in Myanmar back in the late 90’s. I could swear Rirkrit Tiravanija drew pictures of them but I can’t substantiate that claim.

Anyway, child soldiers have been on my mind lately as I am reading about the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Drawing from photos — whatever, that’s another argument. Let me start over. When I paint with watercolors, I usually don’t sketch things out ahead of time. It leads to lots of distortions so the source material becomes mushy. Below are example of a sketched image and a painted one. Something about sketching creates a shorthand for me and I work in a different style. I guess it's like penmanship. Writing in cursive changes the content of what you write just like typing this out yields different results than writing it out by hand.

combined forces

People knew what they were doing when they created monsters.
A head of a bull and the body of a man, a two headed dog, reanimated corpses, shapeshifters and spellcasters. Fears stack together to become something that makes us turn on our heals and run. Certain recipes work better than others.

Seeing a picture of the flag flying upside at the State Department (real or not) does it for me.

rules of the game

I woke up from a grisly dream with an idea for a video. I want to make a video game (or more likely for me, a simulation of a game) that only makes sense to me. Like I have to find things at work or synchronize a team of witches.

Portrait

I often joke about the pool we belong to being a cult. We hang out together, we volunteer for stuff we don’t want to do because it’s necessary, we share food and parenting duties. But it’s a cult I’m thrilled to belong to, so it’s OK.

Years ago, I team taught a senior seminar with a sculpture teacher. We were far too like minded and both tended to shrug a lot when we couldn’t find anything to say. The students were awesome so our input wasn’t truly necessary. I very clearly remember a student showing us a large oil painting and we both struggled to make meaningful comments. The student was frustrated and asked if we even liked painting.

“Sure, but it’s not my thing.” I replied.

This resulted in a long discussion of classical approaches to art. I don’t remember that part of the conversation but I remember thinking that I actually did like painting but I didn’t feel like doing it.

Flash forward 20 years and I’m painting with watercolors a lot. I’ve decided that I like painting now. Elizabeth Peyton’s portraits occupy a special place in my heart and so this might be my new cult.

building monsters

There’s a great article by Stephan Jones titled Like Father, Like Son. He is the son of People’s Temple founder Jim Jones. He talks about a terrible memory of his father throwing a giant rock into their yard. I can’t recall if this was aimed at his mother, it probably was. In his memory, the rock and his father’s figure merged to create a monsterous silhouette. It reminds me of the story in Blind Assassin by Margret Atwood when the narrator’s sister see their father dressed as Santa. It wasn’t that she thought he looked different with the hat and beard (there may have been a candle or two on his head) but rather that he finally looked the way she had always imagined him.

Visiting

I think a lot about dreams. I feel like the filler, the comfortable narrative structure is gone. Our brains create hierarchies separating sensory inputs, memories are grouped and regrouped.

A lone figure can become a monster, a house becomes a sanctuary and it’s components can become talismans. A pet serves as a symbol. We classify and reclassify to make little mountains.

Sometimes pain becomes sticky for me like the game Beautiful Katamari. Small hurts and worries become unbearably large, looming over the landscape like a giant.

Maybe the dream-time version of our brains is the opposite of Beautiful Katamari, our own coded sorting system choosing a representative from mental piles to construct a showcase we can’t decipher.

Destination

I think it’s interesting to think that what you start out making is not going to be what you finish with. The intent is the starting point but the process changes the content as you go. That needs to be OK. Sometimes the longer I work on something, the closer it gets to the intent. Sometimes the distance grows.

Can I burn this now?

One of my greatest teachers was Sarah Bagley, my childhood weekend art teacher and family friend. She used to say that only 10% of what you make is going to be good. No one piece of advice has helped me more. It’s so important to remember that you need to make a lot of work to get to that 10%.

Chase

I’ve always liked watercolors. My best friend and I took a weekend class in high school and I must have committed our teacher’s every word to heart.

It’s kind of cool to have an art making process that hasn’t changed over time. So much about video and animation is about the changing tech and learning new programs.

I’ve been painting pictures of the crowds of 9/11 and also Ja’Marr Chase of the Bengals.

Witches

I’ve been trying to think about word loss. People with memory issues often flip words or names but there is usually a rhyme to the reason. Pants become towel depending on the person. I think that the threads of association are how our or brain compress memories.

Concrete and bricks and pie crusts have cracks. On rainy days, our neighbor would let us stand on her porch while we waited for the bus. So I associate widows and perfectly styled Mary Lou Retton hair with foggy bus lights and the silent neighbor who lived across the road. If my mind stopped sorting correctly, what would I associate with witchcraft?

Echolocation

I wonder if some people are tuned into the presence of others better than others? Can you tell when you’re alone in the house?

Smile, you’re on candid camera

It’s interesting to think about how accustomed people are to being filmed compared to 30 years ago. Analogue video and film were a finite resource so there was almost always a moment of tension preceding it. You can almost see the guarded expression, the squaring off of shoulders, the leveling of gaze.

Stand in the Place Where You Live

Cincinnati is so strange