I Try To Do Too Many Things

I was sitting in Borders the other night, (thankfully, this one is not closing) looking through a stack of books and magazines.I often hang out at Borders while I wait for Kate to be finished with this or that activity. Joe and I decided to re do the walkway through our backyard that leads to the garage area. It is made of concrete and it is a broken, sunken-down mess. I was going to buy a book about laying down a brick walk, but decided that the public library is a better bet. So instead of books about walks, I was looking at books about art journaling. I started getting a minor anxiety attack. First of all, I was looking at the books and thinking, what is the point of looking at this stuff? It does not bring me any closer to making my own art, and further more, it tempts me to buy ever more cool supplies for art I don't have time to make. Why don't I have time to make art???

So, I start to play that movie in my head again. I have to take Kate to... everywhere... at least 2 nights per week. My parents come on Wednesday, and I food-shop one day per week. My car is a disgusting mess and I need to clean it. I need to order another seat cover for the driver's seat, because the current one is shredded. (What would the actual seat look like if I had never covered it in the first place?) I've gained 16 pounds and I look fat again. I should exercise more. I need to live a long time and take care of Kate. I like to garden. When I got back from Italy, the lawn was knee high and the various beds were taken over with weeds. I have been trying to catch up ever since. I have some more to do before I am ready for summer. I am trying to re-create the gardens of Italy... mainly artfully arranged terracotta pots. I looked into buying the huge Italian pots I saw. I may as well just save a little extra money and just go back again. My suitcase is still in the living room from my trip to Italy, from which I returned on May 7. I want to sort through all of our trip photos and do something really cool with them. I signed up for another college course. I usually take the summer quarter off, but since I took the Spring quarter off for my trip, I am taking a course, History again. (1815 to 1900)  I drink too much wine. I need new glasses. Our garage needs to be painted. We have an ant problem in the kitchen. We have 2 trees in the front of our house that need to be taken down. My son isn't doing that well. Not awful, but not great. He seems kind of lost and unfocused. He and Joe have some friction. Joe gets mad because my son eats all of the corn chips, I'm worried that he will never get off the ground to real adulthood.

So, I have this movie playing in my head, and I start to quietly freak out. I realize that I can't focus on anything. I guess it is because I try to focus on too much. So, I look at art magazines as the next best thing to actually making art. (I wonder how many people do this?) I think, what thing can I cut out out of my life? I started this "shop from home" thing with my supermarket, but it has become so popular that often times I can't get the time slot I want! I want to pick up the food on the way home from work. Well surprise, so does everyone else! The last time I ended up just doing the shopping myself after all. I am definitely reducing the number of garden beds I have now. I can ask my parents not to come on Wednesdays any more. But I don't really want to do that, they seem to look forward to it all week. I can cut down on Kate's activities. Well, that is her whole life, all of her social interaction. Yikes, I forgot to mention, I am having some health issues! There is a "procedure" in my future. There is something that will clog your brain. Maybe I should stop taking college courses?

FYI these images were taken in Florence

I Was Just in Italy, Wasn't I?

Of course, I'm kidding. I surely was there. I just got dumped awfully fast back into my regular life. Joe says that, ultimately, it is a mistake to do things like this, because it sets up in you a yearning that cannot be satisfied. (At least, not for us. Not right now.) the man has a point, but I don't regret going, even if my life is... not in Italy. I have so much to say about this trip. Mainly I can say it was a visual feast. Rome was our first stop and we were blown away. Joe really summed it up, as we were laying in bed that second night, unable to sleep. He said, "I feel like I am vibrating." 

We would get up every morning, have our hotel breakfast, and start walking. We walked every day from the Trastavare neighborhood in Rome, over one of the bridges to the main area. Every street had some interesting thing. A cool doorway, a door knocker, a statue, a Madonna shrine on a wall, a cafe, a tiny Italian car, a fountain, a church, an alley, I mean, it was endless. And on several occasions, we rounded a corner and were confronted with ancient ruins! Joe and I each had our own cameras. Between us, we took around 2000 photographs. (digital images?) 

The pictures here are from a tiny town in the Chianti region of Tuscany named Montefioralle. We visited a number of these walled towns. Some are big tourist destinations, they usually have extensive shopping. (Radda and San Gimignano come to mind) These towns are fun, but Joe and I visited 2 that were really just small towns where people live. The other town like that we visited was Monte San Sovino. We were enchanted to say the least. These pictures are at hand, so I am posting these now. I am sorting through everything, I've narrowed it down to about 1400 good pictures. Someone at work said they would help me make a DVD out of it that could be "played" on our TV.

There was a long traffic light at both ends of Montefiralle. That was because the road was so narrow, 2 card could not fit. Everyone had to take a turn. The guy on the motorbike is waiting his turn, but he is holding a large branch of flowers.  I just liked him. 

Altri 3 giorni fino a quando le mie vacanze

This means, "3 more days until my vacation." In Italian. I'm at work right now and quite frankly I could not care less. I'm extremely distracted. Joe and I are out of here Friday afternoon, arriving in Rome Saturday morning. After all these months of dreaming and planning, it is going to happen. Car is rented, museum vouchers in hand, train tickets, Euros. I even figured out how to use that i-pad thing. I needed to download a special app to upload pictures to face book. I still don't know how to get them onto the blog, so I guess it will be about facebook on this trip. It's weird, I have no clothes to wear right now because I am saving everything for the trip, even my best underwear. My husband says you should really wear your worst underwear and just throw it away as you go. We also considered not bringing any clothes at all and just buying a wardrobe in Rome. (That was a joke.)

I am spending a lot of my time today looking at restaurant websites and putting the menu options through Google translator. Coniglio in umido is rabbit stew. Cinghiale is wild boer. I've also discovered that gas prices in Italy are the third highest in the world, at about $6 per gallon. (The most expensive is Norway, at about $6.50) The cheapest gas? Venezuela, at .12 per gallon. No kidding.

Anyway, we have rented a little tiny Italian standard shift car. This does not confront me in the least, I feel most comfortable in a small car, and I understand you can feel a lot safer because there are virtually all small cars there. No SUVs to run you over. Of course, all of this is cancelled out by crazy Italian driving. At least, this is what I hear. I'll let you know my impressions.

I-pad?

They lent me an I-pad at work to keep everyone posted about my trip (8 more days!)
I could upload pics from face book or to this blog... Except, I can't. apparently, since I-pad does not use flash, you can't upload photos in the usual way. Let me try it...

No, you can not do it! to be continued

100th Anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

 

Read the story of this tragedy here. It is awful, but has fascinated me for years. It could have been one of my relatives there, I know a number of them worked in sweatshops.

Italian Lessons

Clarification on Italian lessons: It is an online thing called "Mango" and we do it through the county library. You go at your own pace. There have been some cuts at our library, I hope they still offer it.

Kim Hambric has offered me some advice based on her recent trip to Barcelona. She feels that it becomes easier to communicate in a foreign country after drinking a glass of wine. This is the kind of practical information I am looking for, thank you very much!

I am reading a guide book about Venice and becoming overwhelmed with choices. Really, you could spend 2 weeks in any of the places I will be in; Rome, Tuscany/Florence, Venice. I want to go to the Arena Chapel to see the works by Giotto. Giotto is pretty much the first renaissance painter and I have always loved his work. Some rich guy commissioned this chapel to get his father into heaven a few hundred years ago.

I understand that it is in Padua, which is a half hour train ride from Venice. Seems crazy not to see it while I am there.

Countdown to Italy

I just handed in my final paper for American History to 1815. I had to write an essay about an aspect of David McCullough's book 1776. That was a really good book, a page turner, even. My husband read it and found it very interesting. Here is a quote from the book that I love:

 "It was an army of men accustomed to hard work, hard work being the common lot. They were familiar with adversity and making do in a harsh climate. Resourceful, handy with tools, they could drive a yoke of oxen or "hove up" a stump or tie a proper knot as readily as butcher a hog or mend a pair of shoes. They knew from experience, most of them, the hardships and setbacks of life. Preparing for the worst was second nature. Rare was the man who had never seen someone die."

So that's it for another quarter. I now have nothing major to think about except our trip to Italy. We leave in 38 more days!!!!!!!! On Sunday we came across a doomed Borders Bookstore and purchased two guidebooks and a map of Florence @ 30% off . We are going to pick up our online Italian lessons again. I figure if we can ask for a glass of red wine we are OK.

As for art, I haven't touched any in quite a couple of weeks. I have some sheets of paper prepared for the next art journal. I used water color paper and did various water color washes on each page as a base. I can already see it isn't for me. It looks nice but you can't go over it with any kind of liquid as it smears the color. As they say, there are no mistakes, so I will just push on. I have been messing around with some photographs I took myself to avoid that copy right thing. I have pondered the question of what I have learned from making an art journal, and I still don't have much to articulate. I loosely put pages together based on theme, not date, but then I was pleased to find that they somehow went together aesthetically as well. That might just be serendipity. I learned that when stamping out words with rubber stamps, no matter how hard I try to concentrate, eventually I will space out to the point that I will stamp a letter sideways or upside down. Working in little chunks like that suits me. This is all I got right now.

 

Here is a picture of a stump that I see on my walk along the old rail bed in town. I took the heart shape in the middle and grayed it out in Photoshop. Someday I am going to paint that part of the stump pink.

Have I lLearned Anything?

I've been away for the weekend, just visiting with friends, and work has been so busy. I just dumped all of the photos of the art journal on Friday after work and ran. Idaho Beauty has asked me if I have learned anything from this project. The short answer is yes, but I'm going to have to ponder that for a while. It will give me something fun to think about while I toil away today.  I'll report back later. One thing I will say is that I already have the next one started.

Art Journal Completed

I'm Hot...

...still.
As you can see from the collage in my last post, I am having hot flashes and night sweats that prevent me from sleeping enough. I also feel cranky. I haven't busted out crying yet, I feel more on the angry side. I work with someone who is lame at best, and I am not able to deal with her well these days. I feel like screaming, "What the fuck, you've been working here 10 years!" She tends to act stupid about things in an effort to get you to say, oh, never mind, I'll do it. Often, it works.
But anyway, Art. It's about art. I've been working as much as I can on my art journal. I'm enjoying it very much. I'm usually too busy to do much during the week, but I try to slip into the cellar-studio and stamp a word on a collage, or iron a piece of fabric I know I will use soon, or file some color copies I made at work. I came across the absolutely cutest picture of a dog in the newspaper. I'm going to use him in at least one collage and maybe on the cover of my journal book, but I don't like using news print. Not sturdy, not terribly archival. I generally don't worry about that, but newspaper is over the line. So, I took the clipping to work to copy it to better paper. I'm also not usually a fan of cute, but this dog is too much. The headline of this article was, "Who are you calling ugly?" but that dog is so not ugly. Here, let me show you a link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/fashion/13DOGS.html?scp=2&sq=mexican%20dog&st=cse

 

Look how worried he is! Don't you just want to hug him and tell him everything is OK???? I think his main problem is he has no hair, otherwise, he is fine. Anyway, he is my new buddy/ icon and I will use him in collages. I was thinking about submitting my art journal to one of those magazines for consideration when it is finished, but they warn you not to use copyrighted images or words. What constitutes that? I mean, someone took this picture, and it wasn't me. I don't think that there is a problem if I cut this out of the newspaper and use it, but what if I make a color copy? What happens if it appears in a magazine? Is it OK if I haven't made any money?  These are my questions. I will go ahead, but I don't know what it all means. There is a long tradition of artists using clippings in collage.

Meanwhile, keeping the idea of copyright images in the back of your mind, it does compel us to make and use our own images. We can take our own pictures, alter them by hand and by hand, and we can draw. Or, I can try to draw. I think that even if my drawing is kinda sucky, it is authentic.

I have a lot of finished collage, but I keep forgetting to bring them to work for scanning every day. Pictures soon.