They are often called primitive for want of a better name.

What could never have been written is there, all the dreams and anguishes of man. The hunger for food and sex and security, the terrors of night and death, the thirst for life and the hope for survival.”               
      

Dominique de Menil, 1962  

This week’s Studio Friday topic is a challenge (and I’m on vacation this weekend, so I’m not up for any added challenge besides the enormous challenge of travelling with kids). How do I illustrate my approach to fear, within the context of my studio, my work?

I posted one of these photos this Halloween, after Ford won first place in the neighborhood fair for the costume he is wearing, the one I made with him. After searching my workspace and my desktop for a clue to this week’s topic, I kept coming back to this series. This costume was the keystone of several months of Ford’s fear, and by including this triumph of his (over his fears of this imaginary creature) I am displaying my own attitude towards creative challenges: I like to face them head on, without fear of rejection.

I think design school (and I was talking to a friend about this today)(Hi MaryEllen!), despite the fact that I am still paying for it (and will be for a while) taught me to accept criticism. It taught me that jumping in headfirst, and giving all of myself to a project, would yield back every ounce I put forth. What I create may be a flop, but as long as I persist, it’s the process that matters (to me. Screw everyone else!). No effort is wasted.

That said, I am also a perfectionist, so for years now I have resented myself for certain flop projects in school (that really weren’t flops, but mediochre work). The other day, Damon walked into the kitchen, where I was having coffee, and plopped five of my school sketchbooks onto the dining room table. He was cleaning the garage. I sighed when I recognized them: each handmade, handsewn and bound, oversized and beginning to mold. It was funny that, while I knew most of the books contained great (naive, hopeful, expressive) stuff, I was drawn to one section of 1992 where I sabotoged myself brilliantly in a particular class on designing for the future. I remember slipping into a horrible funk after the required reading, Future Shock. I’d never been introduced to speculation. I didn’t grow up with science fiction; in fact, my family avoided it (I never even saw Star Wars until college). You can imagine the shock that I, this mega-naive college coed, felt after reading the book. In me, it planted little seeds of nihilism. I floundered in the class, got my first “C”, dropped off the dean’s list and got really bummed.

But I showed up at the page. I did the work. Sure, I was afraid of failing. I was also afraid of failing when I was in dental school, but I busted my ass and survived. Well, until I realized I didn’t want to become a dentist. When you try, when you do the work in earnest, and miss a little sleep or lose a few hairs, you grow stronger and get to know who you are. Some efforts are successes and some are failures, many may be in between. Over time, the successes eclipse everything else and begin to define you. The portfolio speaks for itself. I ramble when it’s late and I’m on a mini vacation. I’m going to the beauty parlor in the morning and I get to see my grandmother in the afternoon, so I feel giddy and chatty. Maybe a little preachy.

I feel like Chas, in the photos: bring it on, I say. I also identify with Ford, who is wearing the costume I made to resemble the creatures in The Village, whom he had been reckoning with for months, wondering whether they lived in our woods, too. He faced his fears in his own way. In fact, I don’t know who was more proud in this photo: Ford, for winning the costume contest, or me, for having a son so brave to confront his fears in a creative way.

See more Studio Friday.

I decided to document a moment of our own famiy drawing time after reading a post about just that the other day on WhipUp. I just luuurve whipup. Can I say that, again? Just love it.

Kid’s Kitchen

When I am cooking at of the stove, I’ll glance around the corner and watch Chas pull the bowls off the shelves of his small kitchen. One bowl is filled with chubby markers, another is filled with small Swedish tartlet molds, another is filled with cedar balls. He’ll sit atop the lambskin and rearrange contents, draw on the floor, throw the balls across the kitchen and into the living room. I’ll find them later behind the sofa, or between seat cushions.

The car feels strong and bottom-heavy, it keeps going when I feel the need to pedal faster. It’s disorienting driving a car after cycling for several hours.

We contour the gilded canyon bowls at sunset, travelling north. Long shadows like blue fingers hug the hills. A dip in the ridge reveals downtown on the right. Deer tracks jog up the limestone bluffs, Yaupon berries are still red, cast in a mini-explosion along the bottom of the bluff. In traffic at an intersection I notice a pair of cowgirl boots with silk flowers inside, roadside bouquet. I think this is very Austin and wonder whether this is a resting place.

At the restaurant, I struggle to wipe chocolate buttercream icing off my pink merino sweater; small brown crumbs sit high on the wooly pile. In the middle of an anecdote I forget what I am talking about as I watch Chas lick the remains of a large block of sweet cream butter off his fingers. While wiping his right hand, the left dumps a cupful of toothpicks onto the floor. Ford asks me where the chef has managed to catch a baby squid. He demonstrates how the squid consumes food, I notice how dirty his hands are as he puppeteers the cooked squid’s tentacles, directing invisible food in towards the squid’s mouth. “I don’t like shrimp anymore,” he declares, while Chas pours ice water on my lap.

It is dark. Focused hypnotically, I migrate home beside fellow lights. we are travelling synchronously, automatically, snaking our way through the black canyon. Rut is over, I am seeing no more deer at night, a relief.

At home, I park the car, and carry a package of diapers under one arm along the moonlit driveway. It is a half moon, and I could play badminton on the lawn. The birdbath sparkles as I pass. You can hear the night in it’s crackling quiet, with a band of coyotes wailing a mile away. Orion has bookmarked the sky, and it’s especially bright, even as I approach the yellow incandescent halo of our home.

We leave the playground, and I weave along the lake, trailering the boys. In this warm winter weather, Austin has molted and begun to grow again in little green patches along the water. The rest of the landscape is still dormant, less agressive than the shoots. Clusters of Elephant Ears brazenly crowd along the bank, submerged and waving in the breeze.

The wind awakens me, and my rhythm intensifies while growing efficient. My muscles remember well; I biked for many years before children. I love the way my quadriceps begin to feel warm. I don’t feel this way when I run. My neck burns. I am smiling.

I pass under Riverside drive, and pause to watch reflections dance uninhibited on the bridge’s belly, winding up the concrete posts like white fishnet. Sliders anchor the river, basking in the sun, and we count them. I notice a canoe, motionless, with a fisher aboard, waiting.

It’s a dry day, and chrushed granite crunches as joggers pass us under the bridge. One woman smiles at the trailer, and I follow her eyes to find Chas’ sleeping head on Ford’s shoulder. I return to meditate on the coke bottle water, crystalline turquise jade with a fuzzy rockbottom, brimming with rippling silvery fry.

Barton Springs feeds the creek, the creek feeds the river.The dedicated swimmers, all three of them, are lumbering the length of the pool, their slow, regular paddle lulls me.One is wearing a wetsuit . The elm trees lining the pool are tipped with new leaves, on the pecans, empty shell cases gape at the sky on bare branches, so that we don’t forget that Fall ever happened. But it did, and so did Winter.

Closing windows on my desktop, I was cleaning up two days worth of clutter. Beneath three Ecto layers I found a cryptic little poem. Did I write this? I sat frowning for a few seconds. Then my eyebrows lifted my face; I had written it last night, my mind replied, but I needed to string together what facts I could recall: I had put on heavy eyelids, a light shone down the hall, metered by snoring, the laptop was too warm on my lap. A car dealership ad jostled my thoughts, Forwards, backwards, backwards. I had written this in my sleep:

I’m stop an elderly gelding
White and mellow
He is standing on a tidal flat.

A poem? Or was I dreaming? Did a TV ad filter into mysubconscience?
Did something happen to Marshmellow, the grey gelding I sold in Point Reyes? I feel compelled to search for his owner and find out.

I just turned a year older while thinking this over in my mind.

Kathreen inspires me to seek out color
and to perfect my stovepot coffee technique
(she compiled an excellent how-to)
Brownies with kids
sweetened last Friday afternoon:

(…video would have been even better)

and the easy pants tutorial is on my calendar.
On top of infusing her blog with such goodness, she conceived Whip Up!

Thanks, Kath!