Everything’s All set up. Shelves stocked with cerulean Blue, Anthro blue, green gold, burnt sienna, and more wonderful colors and colors and colors. New colors. Past year been keeping colors basic. Neutrals. Now deep. Deep in it. Officially getting ready for Solo show in the fall. Am excited. Got the supplies. Got the preparatory work started. Almost seven months to dial it in. As well as publish my book of Nap Time writings and paintings. The problem with my book is I want to just keep writing instead of editing and curating. I have to match the photos of my naptime paintings with the corresponding naptime writing that spans two years. Maybe it should be split up year two and year three. That’s a start at least. It feels like a daunting project! I had a wonderful day painting today. I made a supply run this morning, that is a help. I’ve been having vivid, intense dreams and feeling a sense of needing to put self-preservation first. Don’t take any chances, I think. I grab a long stick on the ground as I’m hiking this morning; A trail up high overlooking San Rafael. Its my first time this far up. It’s a spot the homeless camp out on. I walk across someone’s spot. A round circle of grass is flat. The sun is just peering over the eucalyptus trees. There’s a small, tidy bag of garbage. I see a cigarette box. There was a bad fire on the hillside a few years back, during the drought. “It’s the homeless camps” everyone shouted. I would set up camp here. If I were homeless. With some mean dogs to protect me. Billy’s getting old. Her leg isn’t quite healed. She’s feeling her recent injury. Her days. That’s why I Grab this stick. In my dream, I was scared. I ran through tall grass. I ran from a thief. I was scared. This would be a convenient spot for rape, I think. I remember how vulnerable I used to be when I was on the street as a young runaway. I had to line up with guys who would protect me. Even if I had to have sex with them to keep that protection. It was the lesser of two terribles. In my dream I was a teenager again. Sitting in the back of a pickup truck. Trying to figure how to stay alive. I brushed it out of my memory. Buried it down deep like they’re someone else’s stories. I picked up the stick this morning because the alternative, in the event that strange, somewhat in trusty worthy looking man was to come at me. I would have to run through the brambles in the wrong kind of pants, or strike him, hard. The other night I dreamt I was trying to protect myself with a garden tool but I couldn’t swing hard enough. The noise of the fan brings me back into my studio. I only have fifteen minutes left of my break. Tomorrow I am staying the night in the city. I’m going to the MOMA to see the Diebenkorn and Matisse show. It’s going to be the best night ever. I’m going to a Brazilian Steak house. I’m going to eat steak and drink wine.
Category: being an artist
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Purple and pink. Burnt umber and grey. Who can tell what is real or dream? Last night in a dream I walked in tall grass. It scratched my legs. Today I walked through the same grass. Little white bugs flew up but never touched me. Fiona called them flies. “Mommy” she whined. “Flies are getting on my horsy”. I walk back through the flies and tall grass. A bit of asphalt on the ground catches my eye, I hadn’t noticed it the first time I passed this spot. The area intrigues me. Old remnants of structure, of road that used to be here. A strange brown bridge Jack, Fiona, and Valentina sit on. It’s old pieces of round, dark brown, wood, it almost looks like tree branches. It’s scratchy and splintery. It goes to nowhere over nothing, as if it were transplanted from a place it belonged. “Fiona, your horsey loves grass.” I say. She got a new play horse yesterday, she loves it. Memories flood me, being a kid, playing with my horses in the grass, pretending they were eating and I was going on a ride. I imagined what I did and did what I imagined. In nature. Under the sun, the dirt, red ants biting my butt, stepping on nails, getting tetanus shots. Bugs and beetles and pollywogs. Frogs and snakes and old barns, old trailer campers. Vacant rose greenhouses where the sun shines through the broken fiberglass roof and roses still bloom. We rode our ponies through, feeling what was, feeling what the space is for us. A vacation. A dream world with real spiders and scary stories. Purple and burnt umber. Pink and white. These are the colors I chose to paint with today. It was a good, productive day in my studio. Painted in my notebooks. Pulled apart tons of pages that have stuck together leaving scars. Leaving repairs to be done. Structure. But it went well. Realized I have a lot of pages to finish in my gargantuan notebook before my show this fall. I can do it. I take deep breaths throughout the day. I stay connected. I cocoon when I need to. I got what I needed today.
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Daisy Flowers. I love when Jack says those words. We went to hunt for wildflowers yesterday. Up a hill off Lucas Valley. Yellows covered the hillside like I’ve never seen before. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Wind blowing. “I’m cold” says Fiona. I dressed her in pants in the morning before school; she wanted to wear a little pair of white shorts with a pink bow we pulled out of the summer drawer last night for pajamas. “We’re going hiking, I don’t think you should, keep your pants on. “I say. But it’s too late, she already has her pants half off, trying to get them over her thick Keen sandals. “Let me help you” I say. On the hill, I hand her Jacks green and yellow thick plaid shirt from out of my backpack. She has me button it to the top; it’s so hip pared with her flower skorts, navy blue keens, beaded necklace, (she made herself) and short haircut. Which I often have to explain to the little boys at the park that she is a girl and girls have short haircuts too, in fact all the best super hero girls have short hair! Then I explain “What’s in her ears?” when they ask that next. “Her hearing aids” I say. I should add a fantastic story about them being part of her super hero status. I sit on the hillside watching the children, Jack, Fiona, and Valentina have the best time of their life. There is a small, trickling stream that turned into the softest, throwable, mud as the kids play in it. Jack and Fiona both say they want to go home and take a shower more than once, but immediately run back in the mud and stomp and laugh. “I love mud” Jack says. I take it all in. A dream come true. Heaven. Today I am able to work in my studio and go to yoga, where I find my pelvic floor. It is the strangest thing: I studied all about the pelvic floor, hip, internal organs, spine connection last night, then today I go to Yoga and the whole class is about what I had studied the night before. This made my yoga workout today extremely intense focusing on breath and proper alignment and which muscles to engage (instead of being on auto pilot). It was pure serendipity! Spring is bringing me a bounty of inspiration and intuition. My alone time is coming to an end now though. I certainly haven’t gotten enough of it lately. But I appreciate all the time I do get to be alone creating! Namaste.
Dirty Laundry Blog by Jennifer Hynes 