You always see these staged pictures of a pretty dressed-up and smiling artist in front of their work - but I wasn't really going for that.  I was going more for a real documentary image of well.. this is me, now, and this moment will be gone before I know it as time keeps passing by so quickly.  So, this is me, not dressed up, just after running 8 hours worth of mail and packages, putting the glaze on my painting so I can bring it to a show submittal tomorrow.  This is my natural hair color, sunburn, no makeup, hat-hair even as I just took off my ballcap from the route and chased a chicken around in the yard until we got it back in the fence.  Also, I've been running nearly two weeks without much of a break - because things need to get done.  But I took a picture anyway, and I posted it, because this is real, and I have this painting and I hope someone will enjoy looking at it.

 And the first drawing here - is one of my scribble and see something drawings.  But it looked like the tiger thing had killed another creature and was eating it -so I abandoned the drawing and left it on my board unfinished.  My daughter said I should try the character again, though, so I did.  It might be something to keep working on, it's kind of cute, and you can definitely see where I used to design stuffed animals and sew them coming through on the second one... but it's a start

 

 

March

 

 

thought board 3-27

Oh, it's been a month.  It's been a month that has felt like three.  There have been weeks I've been working the entire week, running postal routes (9 days straight this time, actually) - and I have just not had much time for anything, and there have been days I've worked towards goals, and very few days staring into space.  Had a few very good conversations this month.  E and I have cooked some interesting things and talked about things, as well.  

 

Had some lovely notable 'flow' times sorting and interleaving postal routes to get multiple package routes done at once.  That uses the best parts of my visual spatial brain to the best effect.. but it's also, few and far between that I get to 'play' at that high of RPM and have it actually be useful.

Did French mostly (you can tell it's been busy when I say that), and then threw in some Spanish, German, Italian and Hungarian as side dishes at times.  I completely forgot about Portuguese - even though I just got that big thick textbook - why do I do that to myself?  Finally put the repair parts together on the basketball hoop.  My truck's transmission continues to wheedle down - but last time the mechanic said 'it'll do' and I disliked that comment, when I know it is failing.. *sigh*

Simon and His Boat, collage

Tried several new types of pencils - Derwent Chromaflow and CastleArts - liked both of them, they add a lot to the drawings.  Also tried tan and blue toned papers, and am experimenting more with them.  Added four or five colors of paint to my mix, and a gold paint pen.  I know I have to work more on the big project for the gallery but it has fallen to the side -BUT - I did get the pieces entered and ready for the Artist Showcase that starts April 2nd at the Paris, TN public library.  I just have to drop those things off now.

I did a little more work on the Sam the Cat book, about intensity and synesthesia, using my new story board easel to tape up mini paintings and try to organize so I can tell the entire story the way I want to.  I got some great ideas when I played with DALL-E last fall for adding Rosa in as more of a character, with her own gifts as well - and I'm enjoying imagining that and the richness that adds.

 

this hoop had been thrown away, and the person said that their son didn't want to fix it - so I found the repair parts online, and ordered them, and put it up in our yard.  It was heavy - and Mark had to help a lot moving it - but I hope we can get a lot of use out of it.  I used to love to shoot hoops with my brother when I was a kid.  E has a remarkable long-arm shot I didn't know she had.  I was so impressed!

 

A discussion about how I see the mind working - this sketch took about an hour to make and is on 16x20 paper.  I then ran it through DALL-E myself and came out with these, that I liked:

 Another artist / author David Wakeham had done his own AI version of the concept and I really liked what he had come up with, as well:

did a few of the little mini paintings of places I zoom by on the postal route - this one is sort of a house out on Bells Store Road, but the more I look at it in real life I feel I've smashed two places together, and it requires a bit more work.  But then I keep looking at Paris Pike and saying that place is so beautiful as well.  I want to go to the downtowns and spend an afternoon sketching buildings - but there is never enough time, good weather, and vehicles I am always worrying about 'using it up' which ties strings around me... I know it shouldn't.  It still does.  So I end up drawing and writing things at 3 am, instead.

experimenting with different paints, pencils and so forth

 

thought board 3-16

This is inspired 'Für Elise' by Beethoven, in four or five colors of paint

February

  

Loki and Minion checking out the spiderwebs by the sewing machine

and enjoying the sunbeams.  On the wall is the acrylic painting 'The Yellow Light' from 2022

 I've been cleaning up the studio a little, it's been years since I did much more than a drawing or painting here or there.  contemplating checking out if the sewing machine can work again, or if it needs to be replaced entirely. 

 

a little shawl project to use up time in between things, one row here and there at a time

 

found some old supplies that worked fairly well for drawing still - I was impressed the pen refills still worked well - the paints did not fare as well but were still usable with some persuasion

 

went through lots of sewing materials and patterns and threw some things out, and planned what I need to start working on my large marshland painting setup that I dreamed up last fall

 Year of the water Rabbit, a year for growth, mixed media sketch

playing with the Niji watercolors, some acrylic gold paint and ink

 

 Moon Dreamer

gel pens and colored pencils, sketchbook

Languages : French and Portuguese

some : Japanese and Ukrainian

January

 

painting above : Les Preoccupees

 

Quand ils mettents leurs mots

en sommes graciosas

ecrire au futur

en les murmures

en des ailes d'encre

ils restee au pointe

 

 January:

still working on languages, but I have a few other goals in mind for this year - advance my writing efforts that I had shelved for a bit, work on the math concepts I was working on before, practice art more often because I so often get stalled by a blank page or stopping in the middle of something and then not doing anything else either for a good while 

languages lately:

did a lot of :

Ukranian, Spanish, Welsh

did a little of : 

Greek, Japanese, German, French, Polish

The New Year

It is 2023

a bit of a self-portrait from a week or so ago, but really, the portrait lies in the poetry and the art, and the pressing on through the fog

poetry:

 

January Afternoon

sleep came down like little bubbles

and stayed for a little while

holding me in that in-between place

grabbing an icy grip upon my knees

hurting from many stairs

many heavy things, carried places

but now it felt good to fold them even

tucked in, soft against the blankets

the sunlight red against the inside of my eyelids

a Spanish poem filtering through my mind

of mariposa, and verdant, and a word that did not mean wings

Tessellations

it is the opening of the year

the music has quieted

soft and harmonious

– melodious patterns of geometry

– beautiful in the background

– like ephemera

--||-- watercolor tinged newspapers and stanzas

–||-- a feathered bird rising

--||-- pinks and blue tips and the paper yellowed with time

and the light it shines

through clerestory windows

thoughts that nest vibrating as sparrows

 

 

Lyffan, and Loki, and Minerva

 

'The Man and His Flying Machine'

drawing play with compass

 

The Language Project

polyglot

 

This was my project from last January 14th, to this one.  I started out with only French, Welsh, some German from high school, some Japanese in the can from a year or so back and had started working with Romanian.  I wasn't sure where I was going to go - but the main goal was to explore all languages as much as I wanted, and gain some connectivity and proficiency in listening to tv and radio, and reading books and news sites.

So four languages (five if you count the German) turned into nearly twenty.  I read that article about the carpet cleaner who was a polyglot.  I knew that with my type of memory, and the fact that I've 'dumped' a lot of it into the faded-out realm from my job where I kept tens of thousands of item locations in my head (hardware store) that I was very capable of doing something similar.  I've always been 'good' but not fluent with languages.  But then, I've always shied away from them when people said I wasn't capable of becoming fluent, because I'd never use it, because I'm dyslexic.. who knows.. and I decided who cares.  I took off after whatever language looked interesting.  

There was Spanish, which my daughter will take next year in school - but OH BOY was that incongruent!  More on that later.  There was Swedish, which seemed to fit my brain, but then someone said Norwegian was more useful.  And then I just segued into Czech and that fit my brain very well (but it is SO hard so many say, but I went with the fact that other people's logic doesn't always work for me, and kept going and enjoying it). 

 

I added Portuguese and Catalan in an attempt to reach Italian - which several friends were studying.  Italian is 'ok' but I found I liked Portuguese even better than almost any of the others.  Little point - when I was in middle school I spent weeks listening to a course in Portuguese on tape from the library.  I was convinced by a friend it would never be useful, and that I didn't really know what I was doing even after weeks of checking it out... but I think some of it was still in the brain files... it was like drinking a familiar tea or soda you can't quite remember the name of to ask for it, but you know it when you taste it.  I added Hungarian, Polish, Finnish, Irish and Greek because of different people who posted in languages and also because of a Comparative Linguistics course I took.

That was fun - I took a Comparative Linguistics course on audit from the Leiden University in the Netherlands.  And I really enjoyed it.  There was a lot I knew - but then a lot I had never heard of, like Lapontic.  I was amazed at how easy the Greek alphabet came to me - the Japanese is still 'in there' from years ago, as well, it's just like remembering how to divide fractions.

The Spanish is still hard but in the 'middle' lessons it was so much harder than ANY other language.  It's supposed to be an 'easier language' to learn?  Not for me.  It was like it was sorting into the holes the French was in and the French was pushing it out and there was no where for it to 'stick' except clinging to the French.  As I learned the Portuguese and Catalan, it seemed to come through those a lot better.  The Catalan course was IN Spanish, so I had to answer and type in Spanish to translate the Catalan.  That made my brain smoke!  And then the middle-level Spanish finally started to repeat sentences and concepts (like past tense) that the Portuguese had covered very early.. and it was like the glue was finally there.  I began to understand and pick up Spanish in many places where I saw it online, and understand it when I heard it without looking at the screen.

So now I'm headed into 2023 without such lofty goals (although, I'm proud to have achieved level 25 on DuoLingo in French) and the Spanish has opened up a little.  I'm working on reading more books, including Spanish poetry and my Czech novel, and a few German things as well.  I've added a few other languages - Latvian and trying the very beginning of Russian and Ukranian which seems to sort next to the Czech and Polish nicely.

 

the results:

 

((fairly fluent, second language, third and fourth))

French - level 25 radio, some tv and books/news

German - level 12 but not 'trying', just using it as filler space, reading books

Welsh - level 23 (second time around)  tv, radio and books/news

 ((some fluency)

Spanish - level 21 - reading books but with a dictionary

Czech - level 18  - reading books but with a dictionary

((Still learning))

Japanese - level 13  - recognizing words and grammar, remembering symbols

Portuguese - level 14 - reading recipe websites

Italian - level 14 - not sure, but it's not hard either

Greek - level 14 - very interested in continuing

Catalan - level 9 - very interested

 

((stagnant))

Romanian - level 16 

Finnish - level 13

Norwegian - level 10

Swedish - level 10

Irish - level 9

Polish - level 9

Hungarian - level 8 

Latvian - playing on children's game sites, reading news (badly), watching kids shows (lost but enjoying it)

 

knitting with dinosaur

Christmas 2022