I know, I know, I’m on summer sabbatical and I was only going to post at the beginning of the month. But things keep happening and I wanted to make note of this. One afternoon last week we went to see JK Rowling give a speech at the Harvard Alumni Association meeting that always follows the graduation ceremonies. It was an unseasonably cold and rainy day and we discovered to our dismay that we’d be sitting outside in a light drizzle. We arrived early without umbrellas or rain coats but it didn’t matter. Somehow, perhaps by magic!, we were ushered up into the front section of Harvard Yard not far from the podium when it seemed the audience was scant. Minutes later we turned around to discover the whole yard filled with thousands of people. Some were even standing on the steps of Widener Library.

JK did not talk about Harry Potter, except obliquely. What she did speak about was failure and imagination. When she wrote Harry Potter she was in the midst of what felt like a massive failure. Her brief marriage had failed, she had no job, no home of her own, only an infant daughter whom she adored. She had nothing but a big idea and decided to go for it. Failure, she said, was the firm foundation underneath her feet. Though she had nothing, she was still alive, still carrying on. And, I think it’s true, if you’ve not gone out into the wilderness on your own, you don’t get to find that amazing strength that we all have within. What I found inspirational though was the way she didn’t second guess herself, she didn’t come up with Plan B—she hunkered down and wrote the first volume of what became the largest selling series in history.

And it’s not the sales numbers that matter but the fact that she got kids reading and thinking about the presence of evil in the world and how to deal with it. In her speech she said imagination was something only humans have and it’s the ability to see ourselves in the situation of others. She urged the newly minted Harvard graduates to take this to heart as they stepped into the world.

“That is your privilege, and your burden,” she said. “If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better.”

“We do not need magic to change the world,” she continued. “We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: We have the power to imagine better.”

We came home chilled to the bones, made cups of tea and put on our wool socks. It wasn’t until I’d thawed out that I thought how fantastic it is that when real magic happens on this planet it’s because we hold fast to our dreams and act on them! Dream on! And now back to work!

The sun is shining, the temperature is now in the stratosphere, five huge pots of tomatoes, beans, peppers, lettuce, arugula and herbs are planted and sitting quite happily on the patio. Peonies and roses are blooming. Summer is here.

I’m on blog sabbatical but promised to check in the beginning of each month this summer. As chance would have it, I discovered today that Yoko Ono is starting a blog called 100 Acorns, ideas for bringing awareness to creating peace on the planet. Forty-four years ago she published a book of conceptual instructions called Grapefruit. I was sixteen when I bought my copy and loved it. I might even say that it planted a seed in me about how we might think about life as a creative journey—things happen but we also get to invent our response. It opened my mind.

Forty years ago, Yoko and John Lennon created a series of events to bring awareness to peace. John Lennon wrote the gorgeous anthem, Imagine, and invited us to imagine what a world in peace might be like. As necessary to do now as then.

I lived in Montreal at the time that John and Yoko spent a week in bed in a hotel there for peace. It was incredibly exciting—imagine that! It was exciting that two artists would spend a week in bed in the name of peace and the media hovered around like lightening had struck. Funny and great. It felt that peace was within our grasp back then but the people in power are still living in fear. Last fall Yoko created the Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavik, Iceland, in conjunction with the Museum of Art—a beautiful beam of light that arises out of a wishing well and shoots towards the heavens. We’re all invited to send in a wish for peace that will be planted in the ground around the well. This is art.

For the last six or seven years a whole segment of humanity who dreams of and desires peace has remained more silent than we might have imagined possible. The Buddha says that everything is perfect and even in this most discouraging moment something new is being born—a new consciousness, courage, art. We’ve been reflecting and gathering steam. There’s so much that’s changing on the planet right now, so much that needs our care and our courage. Sometimes one radical emblem—a song, a book, a peace tower—shifts attention to the truth of our infinite capability and generates both energy and change.

The lights are on in the Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavik to announce that so many on this planet love and respect each other. Maybe we can each beam a little light up.

Check it out—Imagine Peace.

I’ve just discovered that Cy Twombley will be at Tate Modern in London from mid-June to mid-September. I love his work. Monumental scribbles and splashes of pure color. Words that can barely be read and some that can be read quite clearly. Dribbles of paint. Thoughts and explorations. Repetition. The human hand writ large. All that freedom and carelessness. All that open space and yet within it a rather loopy daring. We saw a few of his pieces at MOMA in New York this spring and they filled me with a great sense of expansiveness and what the heck. There was nothing careful about them and I know I can get caught in that game of excessive care as an artist and a writer. I can get caught in thinking something has to conform to form—to be a careful version of what already exists. I’m really trying to break free of that in everything I do and get to that experimental place where I’m just following what comes to me.

I had that freedom once, as a kid, we all did. I had it as a very young artist, for a very short time. For all sorts of reasons I side-stepped away from the open declaration of whatever it was I cared about then. I became an observer, a studier of life, and that’s okay too. I like to think it’s all perfect and I’m thinking about it a fair amount because I will soon be sixty and that seems like so many years. Yes, it is a little odd to say it. It will take practice and I am starting here. I want to be open about who I am even if women were not appreciated for so long as they aged. I feel more creative and alive and centered now than ever. I do not think I’m too old to do the things I am doing. I still want to do things! It feels vital to me to contribute somehow to this world, especially now. And I still think, as I did in my twenties, that when I get up in the morning I get to make art and write about things that matter! I still think how I might send these things into the world as little tokens of lightness and I still send them. I think it’s all just right even though it is not quite as I thought it might be back then. Like every other artist I envisioned a rather grander kind of success than the one I achieved which has been fine and well-rounded and a little cagey. And I know, now that I’m almost sixty, just how lucky I was not to get the kind of success I envisioned back then! And when I really think about it I know I envisioned the big bucks rolling in rather later in life. Ahem. Well, never mind—now I feel rich anyway. I have so much that’s good in my life!

But I’m aware too that what I do now can never have the innocent freedom of my younger days. I feel a little nostalgia but can’t stop there. It doesn’t take us very far to dwell on or in the past. I’m just giving it a small nod as it sails by—like, it was nice knowing you, you wild, sweet, crazy girl!

Which brings me back to Cy Twombley. He’s even older than I am, for one thing, twenty years older, and he’s doing this amazing art still. Imagine. Art is fabulous like that—the gift that keeps on giving. If you give to it it gives back, over and over. We are very, very lucky those of us who have these things we love to do.

There were times when people thought Cy’s work was just scribbles, that it made no sense. He just kept doing it and, in fact, he used bigger and bigger canvases. Let’s take note of that. He was bold and brave. What an inspiration! If we’re going to try something new do it big! Make big mistakes if that’s what they’re going to be or maybe there’s no such thing as a mistake. Maybe there are just experiments. Maybe every honest gesture of our hand is worth something. I think Cy may be saying that too.

Because of this I’d really like to see this show. My mother-in-law lives in London so I go most years to visit. But now the exchange rate has become so unfavorable it seems almost prohibitive even when we have a place to stay. I will ponder a little more. There is work to be done here. Even if I don’t actually make it over I’m very excited because there will be a catalogue. I gave a Cy Twombley book I once owned to a dear artist friend some years ago and now it sells for $300. on Amazon. There’s nothing else affordable in print but soon there will be!

Last night we wet to a screening of a documentary film, ‘The Blood of Yangzhou District,’ about Aids orphans in China. The film won an Oscar for best short documentary on 2006 and tells the story of an impoverished rural village in China where residents sold their blood for money. The needles with which the blood was extracted were not sterilized and soon most of the adults in the village were infected with HIV/Aids. Some of their children were infected at birth and are, sadly, now orphans. When American aid workers arrived in this village they encountered squalid living conditions and people dying without any medical help at all. It was mostly children who were left and no one wanted to care for them because they have Aids.

It was heartbreaking to see these stories and to see the truly distressing conditions in which these people live. Although the Chinese government now provides medicine so that these children may become healthy and live normal lives there was still no one to care for them properly and to oversee their medical regimen until the arrival of the American organization, The Alliance For Children Salvation Association, founded by Dr. Kay Johnson in Boston. They designed a program in which the children were placed in foster families in cities so they might be situated near a hospital should they need help. They are each assigned a health worker to oversee compliance when it comes to taking the regular doses of medication they need to stay healthy. Their lives are vastly improved now from when they were first discovered in their villages, neglected and ill.

The film was presented as part of a fund-raiser for the kids by my daughter’s childhood friend, Eliza Petrow, who was instrumental in designing the program for their care. I felt so proud to know Eliza and to see the way she has grown into such a compassionate, wise and effective advocate for these kids and others. It’s the kind of thing that gives me a great deal of hope for this world. When I was a young woman few people thought of service careers. I’m truly in awe of what so many young people like Eliza and my own daughter, who is a teacher, are accomplishing.

There are so many worthy causes, it’s hard to know sometimes which to give to. I’ve decided to give to the ones that come my way as this has done. 100% of the donations go to helping these children. If you’d like to contribute please go to The Alliance For Children Foundation website. Pretty amazing to look at those smiling little faces.

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.

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.

The brilliance of the internet is that we get to see what we wouldn’t see. Now see this—The Little People Street Art Project. Slinkachu, aged twenty-seven, British, has carved and painted tiny little people and installed them on the roads in London. They are, ooh, so fantastic and touching. Come February we can buy photographic prints of one of these installations. Love the imagination. Brilliant fun. Art on the planet.

Artwala Road has been up and running for six weeks now and already readers have come from England, Japan, Spain, Israel, Canada, India, Ireland, Korea, Australia, Sweden, France, Morocco and all across the United States. And not through any great effort on my part. Not yet anyway. I’ve been focussing on overcoming technical ineptitude and on creating content. Friends with sites of their own have kindly pointed this way. Google has referred those who searched for subjects that exist in some form on the site. And in the magical, interconnectedness of the internet, connections are being made. I’m glad you’re here.

Mostly I’m talking about art here, about the process of making it, about what it might do in this moment in time, about things I see and like and that inspire me. I think a lot about art because to me art reflects our consciousness in this moment in time, or it can. Art can lead consciousness.

As dire as things are on the planet right now there are lots of signs of positive change. In art, in people. I’m looking for signs of art on the planet and reporting the good news here. Whatever comes across my path.

One big sign of positive change is this cyber space where connections are made and news travels fast. The underground is now overground. And we’re all part of it. All of you who visit here and everywhere from all over the world. Talk about radical and talk about good. Art on the planet.