Saturday was the first class of the spring session of the ladies drawing club. I was thinking what the heck to do that would keep us all alert and paddling upstream when I picked up my new book on Dada which I’d plucked from a bargain table. And there was the most wondrous revelation—Sophie Taeuber. First, Dada, as you probably know was an art movement that lasted only from 1916-1920 before it morphed into Surrealism which sort of morphed into Pop art and Fluxus—if art can be called linear at all. Dada, in the midst of the horrors of the first world war, insidted that the thinking that produced that war must be rejected. For the Dadaists that meant rejecting all prior culture and the restrictions of art movements while attempting spontaneity and free expression. Curiously, it too became an art movement. It was pretty interesting though and I think it got half-way there in beginning to reject thinking as the real basis for art. But—I digress!

There in this book is Sophie Taeuber of Zurich, the companion of Hans Arp whose name we actually know. Sophie had begun already in 1915 to think of art outside the established bounds of painting and did embroideries and sculptures and puppets. She wanted to make the art in the ordinary apparent. Her work is fantastic, beautifully executed, evocative and arresting. And, in the official history of art, so few women make an appearance. It’s great to discover a female artist who was not painting endless pictures, however beautiful, of mothers and babies. (Sorry, Mary Cassatt.)
For our intrepid group who meet every Saturday, some who’ve worked at art for a long while, others who are just embarking on their artistic journey, it was great to be able to look at this woman’s art. I’m flying the flag here! Yay, Sophie! Here was an independent woman who dared to follow her own path and she’d begun her explorations before the assertions of the Dadaists were made. It takes courage to abandon a conventional path and strike out on your own. We need to know this woman. The image here is part of a tryptich—I couldn’t get it all into the scanner but it’s rich and balanced and full of surprises too—absolutely stunning.

The night before class I’d overly salted our dinner by mistake and lay awake the whole night. I suppose too much salt can do you in and, well, there I was—not a wink of sleep the whole night and still a class to teach. Luckily a couple of the group also missed a few winks so we forged on in good cheer, especially after looking at Sophie’s art for a bit.

I decided we’d work on portraits this week and chose an image from the Dada book—Marcel Duchamp in drag photographed by Man Ray. I attribute the choice to lack of sleep! The picture’s pretty weird and funny but very arresting. It was also an image I thought would free us up, like the Dadaists. The tendency in doing this sort of thing is to try to get it right but I wanted our goal to take this crazy image and go wild with it—play around with the elements of art to make a picture that said something.

Everyone did amazing stuff and one of our members is now recording the efforts so, with luck, we’ll get some of them up here before long. We went from this to use mirrors to observe ourselves and do self-portraits. Next week we’ll work with gouache again using photographs of ourselves to paint self-portraits. With luck we’ll have time to do more than one and experiment, as the Dadaists did, with expression without feeling tied to getting it ‘right.’

Here’s my drawing. What we all discovered was that it took several tries to break free of the idea that we must draw something in a realistic way. I did three quite ordinary drawings before I suddenly woke up to this one in which I left all the details out and went for the drama using the deepest black and yards of wide open white space. I kind of like it though it feels, curiously, very early twentieth century the way the person hides behind hat, feathers, jewelry and hair. But I slept like a baby last night.

Yesterday I got hired to design a poster for a symposium here in Boston hosted by Harvard in mid-April called—Art in the Life of the City—London Stories, about ephemeral art projects. What a fun assignment! I’ve already started to play around.

Last summer we watched the film, The Sultan’s Elephant which documented one of the most amazing public art projects ever. One day in London an object appeared on a major street. It looked like a space ship had crashed to earth—it was half submerged in the street and the road was all broken up. Londoners were stunned and puzzled when they encountered it. No one seemed to know what was going on—there were no explanations. The next day an enormous mechanical elephant, gloriously and extravagantly decorated, emerged from a side street and began a slow march through London. Soon the whole city was watching, the police cleared traffic, people pored out from office buildings, kids skipped school. Nobody knew what was happening. Where did it come from? There was a smile and wonder on every face. In a day or two a huge human figure, a little girl, stepped out of the elephant and began walking. The way she moved was so life-like, the whole thing was magic.

The event lasted three days and the procession ended back at the spaceship that was now, miraculously, whole again. I will say no more. Rent the film if you can.

But it reminded me that art can really take us to the place of infinite imagination and possibility if we think BIG. Imagine what might be possible if we started to think that way all the time! I’m so happy to be doing this poster. Now to think BIG!! Stay tuned. Will post when done.

My friend Debra has a cool post today about how the words we put to things change our experience. “I can choose to see the promise of rain or see rain threatening.” So true. And Gandhi, as Debra points out, says we need to be the change we want to see in the world. So, if we want peace in the world, then it’s we who must find it within ourselves first. We need to know it’s always there for us. I love that.

I’ve been watching the Ekhart Tolle class with Oprah online when I get a chance. You can call it up at any time—oprah.com. He teaches that our true spiritual essence is peace and joy. It’s great to encounter his energy—it really is deeply peaceful and kind of fun. Catchy too when you encounter it, as I discovered.

The other night I got impatient about some trivial birthday plans—it’s one of those ‘big’ birthdays.  I got my knickers in a twist, saw the whole thing as stressful, labeled it in a negative way, then sat down by “chance” to watch some of Eckhart. Almost immediately saw the error of my ways! Would have cottoned on sooner if I’d avoided the twisted knickers, but there you go.

Once my energy changed I saw that I didn’t want to do this big birthday bash at all—I’d rather take a cool trip somewhere. I want to go somewhere I haven’t been before. I’ve decided this birthday will launch a great chapter of this life. They’ve all been rather fabulous, truth be told, even those when rain threatened or even pored. But now the promise of both rain and sunshine seems to open real possibilities. The good thing about getting older for me is I see the world more as I did when I was a child—as a wondrous place to be explored and shared. I think artists need to travel—it sharpens the vision!  So now I’m thinking where and how.

Let me reframe this—I’m not ‘getting up there’—I’m on the cusp of a grand new adventure! Yes.

Dear A and I were reading The Boston Globe at breakfast this morning as we do every morning. Usually A spouts indignation at the way a major world news story has been shunted to some small corner of an inner page while a sports hero decorates the front. It wasn’t much different today but on the inner page was the story of China’s crackdown on the Tibetan monks agitating for Tibet’s independence. It was a tiny article, about seven inches long, two columns wide—you get the picture. But what it said seemed huge to me. The Dalai Lama is threatening to resign if China cracks down further.

Here is a man who has been our teacher for many years. He has brought the deep practices of Buddhist meditation and observation, of compassion and respect for life to our consciousness. He has taught all around the world techniques to achieve peace and happiness and as a result he has become a beloved teacher, a person who is deeply respected. And faced with this sad and desperate situation, his own country occupied by an unwelcome force, he is saying he will step down rather than fuel violence of any sort. Think about it.

He does not allow fear in. Here, the worst has happened—his country has been overtaken and still he does not rally the troops or other world powers to lash out with force. He does not declare war. He says, if it will help to diffuse the situation, he will resign. He says that beyond everything human life must be honored and cherished. Human life rather than country.

Like I said, it was buried on page seven. To the editors of The Boston Globe and other mainstream publications the news is only that the Dalai Lama might resign. So far no thoughts on how his radical stance for peace might be the one true path that can lead to the real liberation where we can live without fear of war. But that liberation, as the Dalai Lama has tried to teach, is truly how we change our minds. He tells us if we can find the peace within, we will get beyond our own fears. We can only create peace on the planet when we find it in ourselves.

Curiously, after reading that, I sat down at my computer with my morning cup of tea and found the counterpart to that news on The Guardian Online, my home page, an independent liberal British paper. It was a four minute video of children in Sadr City, Iraq—one eight year old boy who sells drinks to commuters in cars from five in the morning until four in the afternoon to support his mother. And another boy in an orphanage, also aged eight, who, in trying to say how his father was killed by a car bomb when he was six, broke down and wept, a witness to the truth of the savage toll of war. It was almost unbearable to watch. This small boy knows too well what Dalai Lama is working to prevent. May his grief and the Dalai Lama’s patience teach us that radical change is not just possible but necessary.

It was the last class of the winter session of our drawing club on Saturday and another cold, rainy day. Sally brought in a roll of brown paper so that we could draw bigger than we have in a long while. We’d been working quite small the previous two or three weeks, sitting around a table, chatting, painting with gouache. It was a companionable, wintry and very pleasurable way to explore making art. I wondered sometimes if I wasn’t allowing the class to be a bit too relaxed. Aren’t teachers supposed to crack the whip? Must be the renegade in me that says when things feel good let them be.

I know a drawing class is supposed to be about learning to draw but there’s a part of me that believes we already know how to do that. Children draw without any self-consciousness, freely and with imagination. It seems so hard for a lot of us to do that—when we first begin again anyway. I often think our class, in which so many wondrous things happen, is really just a place where we get comfortable so that what we already know and who we already are can come to the surface. On this Saturday we spent longer than usual in the downstairs room sitting around a table, showing pieces of art we’d completed, chatting, the raining pelting the windows.

Almost an hour had passed when we decamped to the third floor where we took over a rehearsal room for the theater because we needed wall space to tack up the big sheets of brown paper. We didn’t hurry. Everyone chose an image of something botannical from a file of photographs. We set the boxes of pastels out. I put the music on—The Be Good Tanyas, a Vancouver girl band who we’ve come to love, and we began.

It was a sneaky thing. I, at least, didn’t expect it. Maybe because we’d worked small for a while and experimented with scribbling, then painting. Maybe because we’ve become so companionable and supportive of each other on Saturday mornings or maybe because it was raining and we were warm and dry. Maybe because we were working large and right out of our comfort zones, somehow, by some grace, none of us cared and something magical happened. Every single person did something fantastic. Every single person took a big leap up. The thing is with art, once you take a big step forward, you don’t go back.

I can’t explain it really, but there it is. I was knocked out by what people did, by how willing everyone was to step up and give it a whirl and to not care and care at the same time. Afterwards we sat and looked at what we’d done. We tried to see what could still be done, where we still might go. It was the last class for the winter session. In two weeks, when we begin again, it will be spring. And that is truly the time of rebirth and growth. Practice, of course, makes more possible and we’ll soon practice again. Stay tuned!

This morning on the front page of The Boston Globe there was an article about Leonard Cohen’s song, Hallelujah. There’s a buzz about the song at the moment started by a kid who sang it on American Idol. After that people started looking it up on YouTube and seeing incredible versions by Jeff Buckley and John Cale. And Leonard has just been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This song, true poetry that evokes worlds of sublime feeling, has become a living and growing thing. It didn’t make a splash when it was first released and I don’t think it’s an accident that, in this time of sorrow and challenge for the planet, it opens up those feelings which we need to take radical good action. It’s also a fine thing that Leonard, who I read had lost a great deal of money to an unscrupulous manager, will reap bountiful and deserved rewards.

So, I wanted to write that this morning here. Then I went to google to fetch a photo of Leonard to adorn this post only to discover that he is doing a world tour starting in May! I saw Montreal on the list and without a moment’s hesitation snatched two tickets for his last show at Place des Arts. Five minutes later it was sold out! It’s beyond a dream. I’ve never seen him sing and to see him in his city and mine will be so, so poignant.

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old and I can say I’ve been writing seriously now for twenty years. I’ve not tried very hard to publish, that is coming—it’s important too, but most important is the journey words take us on and what discipline and the practice yields. And Leonard has been an inspiration since I was seventeen years old.

In my last year of high school I had a brilliant, literate English teacher, Doc Smith, who took us through a four inch thick text from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot. We memorized and wrote poetry, we wrote satires, short stories, essays. We had debates. And we walked around saying —

“I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing each to each.”

One day my friend Lindley Shantz and I went to a café on Rue de la Montagne in Montreal. We both wanted to write ‘the great Canadian novel,’ which was a joke because at that time Canadian novels were not considered great. (Times change and thanks to the Canadian government for its support of the arts!) Canadians back then had a bit of an inferiority complex—our neighbors to the south were so glitzy, so it. We two girls were trying to hold our heads high and Rue de la Montagne, then called Mountain Street, was the place to be. When we exited the café that day Leonard Cohen was coming out of the bar next door, a place we were too young to get into. He was in a black leather coat and we trailed him for a block or so, clinging onto each other, our hearts flipping like fish.

Later, at McGill, I got to study English with the incomparable Louis Dudek who got us to read the world into a text. He was Leonard’s teacher too. All these years I’ve loved Leonard’s words and his music and loved his devotion to art.  That man has been an inspiration.  I feel so lucky that I now get to see him in the city where it all started.

That’s Leonard’s own design of the interlinked hearts, by the way, and his drawing too.

Last night the wind howled and kept us awake off and on as it shook our old house. It bucketed rain all weekend but almost everyone showed up for art class on Saturday and we painted in gouache again. There were ten of us and we arrived with wet feet and damp jackets. I arrived with stringy hair. Some had to battle traffic and slippery roads. I had to battle fatigue. I’d been up too late the night before and was a little out of sorts. We sat down around four long tables pushed together and painted again with gouache while the rain pelted the big windows.

A lot of the class had not painted in gouache before and like me they love it. It has a dense velvety quality, good for very flat work and more nuanced work too depending on how much water you add to it. I shared techniques. They looked at their pictures and wondered where they ought to go with them.  That really is a question of trying things out, of not being attached to what you have, of being willing to muck it up. I mucked mine up. This is just a small portion of it here. But it doesn’t matter. I can always do another one and build on what I’ve learned if I feel inspired to. They can too. That’s a big lesson right there. If we take a cautious route we’ll never get very far. Big mistakes make you jump higher.
It took all morning but towards the end it looked like we forgot both the rain and ourselves. We forgot whatever it was we came in with or I did anyway. By the end of class the focus on the art meant there was just the art and being there with it. Some of the work done at the very end, loosely like scribbles, was the most interesting and assured.

One of the class members said this is art yoga and it is. We dropped into the present moment and had fun. We let everything else go. Very cool in my book—especially on a miserable day.

Next week will be sunny and we’ll shake things up a bit!

An opening tonight at The Arsenal Center for the Arts, home of The Ladies Drawing Club. Fun to see the work of the other teachers. That’s me with Deb Putnoi in front of her amazing drawings and seated together on her painted chairs. Her grandmother gave her the chairs and they needed a little freshening up. She found upholstering too expensive so painted them with portraits of her family. I think we’re actually sitting on her children.

It’s such a privilege to be in a show with Deb and Kaetlyn Wilcox, both very interesting, evolved artists. (Photos of Kartlyn’s amazing work to come.) I couldn’t help but notice they were selling their work for real money and rightly so. I priced mine more in the flea-market range but then they are small. That’s me in front of my work with a frozen smile waiting for Dear A to frame things up. He takes an excellent shot but it can take time. The light was not good for photography but when I put my new site up (coming soon) a lot of these pieces will be there.

I feel awfully lucky to be given exhibition opportunities as I don’t consider myself to be a ‘fine artist’ and haven’t sought them out. So much for goal setting etc. I’ve sold a few things at the center but I think that on the whole people are unaccustomed to spending money on art, even when it’s relatively cheap. BUY!! Now’s your chance! I really think we should all be changing our homes around on a regular basis—changing the art around, buying new pieces, selling stuff that no longer lights us up, trading, keeping the energy bright, stirring it up. When I change things up it reminds me that we’re creating our lives here on the planet! Truly revitalizing. Plus, art is there to take us to higher places, one way or another.
One of the great things about an art center like this, which is large and intended as a regional site for artists of all disciplines, is that you get to meet other artists and share the journey. Artists (I use the term in a general way here) usually just cut to the chase when it comes to chat—we talk about art first and we talk about making a living as artists. When the humor count is there it’s brilliant. We’re stepping into the unknown every single time we create so it’s great to have company at the end of the day. So, many thanks to the art center for providing a convivial place to meet and for hosting this show.

And good news—turns out Deb and Kaetlyn have just launched blogs. I’ll be getting their web addresses and we’ll be starting conversations here sometime in April as Deb has a big show coming up. That’ll be fun.
Meanwhile, if you’re in the Boston area, check out the show. And don’t forget your purse!

We were walking back from the library this morning when Dear A shouted, ‘Look!’ He’s not a shouting man and I confess I jumped out of my shoes. Thought I was about to step into dog do or something. But there they were in full sunshine up against the foundation of a house not far from the road—a brave little cluster of crocuses! What a thrill! It truly makes living in this climate worthwhile when spring arrives with all its great upward energy. This long winter hibernation left us under-exercised and faintly edgy, for sure. The snow melted two days ago, the sun shines and now we’re going on long walks again. So great.

Have to say, despite the hibernation and the snow, this winter has just breezed by for me. It’s serves a purpose—keeps us indoors with hands on keyboard.  I’ve been so busy with work, so engrossed in it that I hardly noticed what was going on outside.  I’m typing, typing, typing, like mad.  It’s good.  Much progress despite moments of doubt which must be put in their proper place.  Winter is good for steady work and our little house is cosy and warm. When spring comes I’ll doubtless want to be outside and there will be other things to do. I see there are still a lot of dank old leaves to be raked away but for now they can wait.

Meanwhile I’m waiting and waiting for the Democratic nominee to be chosen. Please let it be Obama. I didn’t always wish this. I waffled back and forth. But I believe now we need an outsider, someone who won’t play the same old game. It’s good he doesn’t have experience. He’s coming in with the possibility of new thinking. The old thinking got us into this mess—all that fear-based horrific blustery aggression, all the greed and looking out for only one. I’m feeling that again as this campaign gets tough. Enough. Something new is being born! Spring is here.

We just caught just a glimpse of Oprah and Eckhart Tolle online last night because after ten minutes the screen froze and that was that. This morning an email from the Oprah people saying that 500,000 people logged on worldwide and many had the same experience we did. It’s still early days for this sort of thing and they’re going to try to work out the bugs before next week. Who knows if they can be worked out but you can download the podcast today. Still, it’s a brilliant idea. Just think—500,000 people around the world hearing a very positive message all at the same time! And it’s an empowering message especially for those who are unhappy or downtrodden—it points the way forward. So, again—this is art on the planet! Meanwhile, here’s to making  art that resonates with good healing energy so that we can create a good earth.