By Light of a Pencil

This is very old news to the blog community, but sometimes you can't help inspiration from coming back years later and still leaving you excited.

In November, some friends and I went camping near Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Falling Water. I had visited before, but my return visit as a semi-adult was much more rewarding--the original artwork in the building was enough to make me giddy, let alone the building itself. However, we also visited the lesser known Kentuck Knob, a building Frank Lloyd Wright designed for some nearby friends of the Kauffmans.

Kentuck Knob was much more up my alley than Falling Water--I could actually see myself living in it, tucking myself into its wooden nooks and crannies.

But this post isn't about Frank or his buildings: it's about three white vases lining the edge of the dining room table in Kentuck Knob.

[Images via Tiffany&Co.]

Three vases similar to these, also by Frank Gehry. Lucky for me, our tour guide was a lovely little woman who took pride in pointing out the works of art displayed in the still very much used Kentuck Knob, and pointing out which artists executed them. I jotted Frank's name down quickly in my journal, though in the end, I didn't have to--these vases stuck in my brain.

The warm background of wood and stone made these vases jump toward me, and it was all I could do to keep myself from reaching out and sweeping all three of them into my bag (I think that might have been frowned upon).

This post at Design*Sponge reminded me of them today. A quick google search revealed that Gehry designed similar vases to be sold by Tiffany & Co. in 2007, and they're still up for grabs. Now I don't often blow $300 on an item for my table (read "often" as "never"), but I desperately feel like it would be money well spent to have these beautiful pieces of bone china in my possession.

Gehry calls them "rock" vases, but to me they are stunning pieces of paper, homages to the hours I spent in high school learning to delicately shade crumpled white wads that I looked at with the right half of my brain. They remind me of St. Peter hunched at the foot of La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain. They are a memory of a rainy day spent exploring Wright's artistry with a group of sodden, hopeful friends.

...it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, isn't it? Do you think Santa might have enough bubble wrap to send me a couple of these?

Here's to hoping.

A Break, A Breath

I got off on the wrong foot this week. As a result, I've been waiting all week for Friday to arrive, so I can get my wits about me again and feel like I'm not floundering around on a tight rope. I came home to an empty apartment, which was fine by me. I like having a few hours to myself every once in a while. Tonight, I...

...made the bed (with a little help)

...decorated the Christmas Ficus
(because it was stealing the real Christmas Tree's thunder and we took it upstairs,
but I didn't want it to feel left out).

...admired the real Christmas Tree
(It wasn't until I sat down for dinner that I realized I hadn't turned on the living room light yet--
I had been functioning for hours by only the light of the tree).

...and started setting up the fish tank (...again, with a little help).

Oh, and we got a new cat. Did you notice?

I think he likes you.

Ringring. Hello?

After a weekend full of conferencing, I needed a break. Desperately. On Wednesday morning, I stayed home from work to finally unpack my things and regain a bit of sanity. So where did I find myself at 7:00am? Cheerily making cards for my telephone/address index. Lots and lots of cards.


The block printing supplies came in handy, and gee did I forget how much fun it was. It was definitely a morning well spent.

Lizards and Moons: Introducing the Muses

[insert lizards here]

I have this joke about what I'm going to do when I finally, once and for all, get tired of this office job. When people ask me what I'm going to be when I grow up, I respond with something like this:

"I'm going to be a vagabond painter. I'm going to run away to the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona, where I will set up a canvas tent on the side of the road. I will paint rocks with brushes I make myself from wild desert grasses and sell them to bemused tourists on their way into town. I'll grow my hair long and wild, and befriend a gaggle of lizards who will skitter around my tent. My menstrual cycle will follow the full moon. I'll eat cactus and play with javelinas, and I'll collect road trip stories from burly motorcycle men and share them with travelers like bread."

This, of course, is exaggeration. But I often feel it's not far from the truth. Something in me wants to make my next office space open and airy and under a blue sky. Something wants the freedom to stretch and play and grow. As a student, I was always growing. As an office worker, I can already see the beginning of my life in circles. And if there is one thing I learned from high school gym class, it's that I was not meant to run in circles. This is the beginning of my second year in the world of manila file folders and weekly time clocks, and my yearly pattern is already beginning again. It is not something I want to continue for long.

Starting today, I have given myself one year. One year to take classes, get my bearings, and make some decisions. I'm going to take art classes and literature classes and make a decision. I have to keep growing. I have to keep stretching.

I've mentioned my muses before, and I think it's about time I've introduced them to you. Before you start getting ideas about schizophrenia, I have to say that their personification is purely innocent and affectionate. The idea of naming my muses came as I was reading Stephen King's autobiography, On Writing. My Grandmother, who is always reading autobiographies, suggested I read it. "I just think it's interesting," she said, "that someone can write things like that. You write things, don't you?" So I skipped through the autobiography part and jetted straight through his section on writing, and it was there he introduced the concept of his muse. He noted that, traditionally, muses are personified as female, but that his was most definitely male. His was a stingy creature that lived in a basement, surviving on potato chips. I thought this was funny, until I realized I harbored a similar male muse: Arnold.

In college, Arnold was my critical writing muse. He was the muse I turned to when I needed to crank out an eight page paper for my nine 'o-clock class. Physically, I imagine he is very much like my late grandfather, strangely enough; a portly man in a flannel shirt, content to recline in his chair with a cane by his side and a can of ginger ale. It was always hard for me to talk Arnold into getting down to business. He is crochety and stubborn at the best of times, refusing to work with me until the last possible moment when he finally lightens up. He's been quite happy since I've been out of school, and I think he's getting a little nervous now that I'm threatening to return for a masters in literature. But he knows he has no say in the matter, and I know that deep down, he loves digging into all that rhetoric. I'll guy him a case of soda and set him down, and all will be reconciled.

The second of my muses is, surprisingly, also male. Miles is my ambiguously ethnic poetic muse, and he's quiet as a woodland brook. Well, most of the time. I don't write poetry very often, but when I do he speaks through me in tones of voice that are cool and warm at the same time, always surprising me with their slight pivots and turns. He dons a sweater vest and glasses, sometimes when it's cold a stately pea coat and cap, and he is the constant undercurrent of calm that runs through my middle. Miles is flighty--he tends to leave me when I need him most, and I spend a lot of my time missing him. But he always returns, usually with flowers and birds, and quickly calms me down.

The muses need fostering, but especially Florence, my artistic muse. I sit in my office, trying to do paperwork, and Florence just won't be quiet. She giggles and squeals and kicks her legs, tugging at the corners of my brain with projects she wants to complete, blogs she wants to visit. She's trying to convince me to quit my job, lock myself in my new studio space and give it a good hearty welcome with a handful of canvases and a lot of paint. I feel like a bad mother, telling her to be quiet so I can get my work done (which, in the end, I don't really get done because I'm too busy thinking of the sad little girl who I've sent to her room). Unlike the boys, Florence is a fighter. She is vibrant and excited and hard to ignore.

Florence is the most fluid of my three muses. Sometimes, she is a wild child, seven years old and full of crawly ladybugs and deep breaths of air and doll houses made from kleenex boxes--this is the form she often takes while I'm cooped up in my office. Other times, she's wise as a sage, ageless and bodiless, a serene woman with a vision and a purpose. Somewhere between these two is where the Lizard Woman hovers, teasing me with silly notions of becoming the crazy lady everyone has somewhere on their street growing up. I know the Lizard Woman is all Florence's doing; the boys would have none of it, would insist that I keep one foot in the academic pool, or at least in the pool of the literary.

So I spend my days trying to juggle the three muses, trying to keep Florence under control while I enter dates into spreadsheets and fill out packing lists. Someday, I'll be able to set them free completely again, and I know that both I and they will be all the happier for it.

One year. I have one year to take classes, find something new, and get out of this office. I have one year to find a work space under the sky, and a pile of rocks to paint by the roadside.

Ready? Go.

Brush Strokes

Today is my first day back in the office after a five day academic conference in Boston. Unfortunately, the conference was not my kind of academics--I was there to sell books and hand out information. Still, having time to roam around Boston a bit by myself was rewarding...even if my camera did run out of battery, with no charger in sight.

I have a thing for museums. The first thing I do in a new city is find out where the nearest museums are. Often, I don't have time to visit anyway, but it's still the first thing I do. When I found out the Boston Museum of Fine Arts was a mile west of my hotel, I made time on Friday evening to walk over and take a gander (I heard the Gardner museum was also worth seeing, but I didn't have enough time to do both).

There seems to be one painting in every museum that just makes my whole trip. Picasso has unexpectedly stolen the show for me a few times, once with his impressive Guernica, the other with his early blue period painting, La Vie. When I walk into a museum, I never know who is going to make my heart stop instantly. On this trip, I had expected it to be Renoir with his Dance at Bougival. Instead, it was John Singer Sargent with The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.


I believe this was on the wall of the second room I walked into, and I almost hit the floor, it was so beautiful in person. There is nothing like running smack into a painting you have admired in print for so long, only to discover that the real thing is more fantastic than you could even think. I stood in front of that painting for fifteen minutes, looking at the ragged edges of the maroon skirt and apron on the little girl at the left, the exquisite face of the one in the middle, the unbelievable quality of light and the way he brings focus to detail by bringing soft edges and strokes to background fixtures.

The best part? At either corner of the gallery stood the two vases pictured in the painting. I couldn't help but imagine Edward Boit's daughters leaning against them in the parlor, posing for Sargent as he captured their portraits.

Even after strolling through the rest of the museum, a collection which included Renoir, Picasso, Michaelangelo, Zurbaran, Velazquez, Van Gogh and others I was delighted to see, Sargent's little girls called me back for an encore round before I left for the evening. I was enchanted.

Then I went back to town and wandered around the Boston Anthropologie, where I bought a fabulous shirt on sale. It was a good, good night for art.

Numberophobia? Dyscalculia?

Well. Haven't been here for a week or so.

I'm finally packed and (almost) ready for my conference; I leave for Boston next week. Packing was relatively painless, but getting together shipping labels and calling for pickup always makes me nervous. There are certain things about my job that leave me dizzy with unexplained anxiety, and until today I chalked it up to a general mass of irrational fears, called myself a loony, and promised to learn some yoga and meditation to calm my tizzied mind (which I still have yet to do). But today, I've started to realize that my anxiety is a little more focused than I thought; and it's focused on numbers.

I have always been better with words than with numbers. In first grade, they moved me to the second grade reading class; but damned if I couldn't remember my multiplication tables. As an adult, I still count on my fingers, have strange methods of arithmetic, and can't remember number sequences for more than a second. Often, my mind blanks as soon as I look at a number that has more than two "tens" columns.

Here's how I decide the answer to 8 x 4 in my head:

"8 times 2 is 16
16 plus 16 is 32."

And 7 x 6?

"7 times 3 is 21
21 plus 21 is 42."

Somewhere along the line of my second grade education, my teacher thought it would be a good idea to point out that the 6 tables are the same as the 3 tables times 2. I suppose it was in an effort to make the concept less abstract, which is probably why I clung to it with a ferocity that propelled the method into my later years--numbers were scary, but that didn't seem so bad. Now I look back and wish I would have memorized them instead of trying to understand them.

I was always jealous of the kids who knew their times tables off the top of their heads. There was a kid we called Bomber in third grade who used to OWN everyone in games involving multiplication. He could look at a set and know the answer instantly, while I was left standing next to him going "7 times 3 is 21, 21 plus 21..." in my head.

Don't get me wrong. I made it through honors calculus in high school, and with good marks. When it comes to complex math, I'm ready for the challenge. Geometry, trigonometry...bring it on. But hand me a $20 bill and ask me to give you change and I hyperventilate. How many nickels do you get back? Dimes? Oh god.

My job is riddled with dates and deadlines, which also give me trouble. I have NO sense of time. Which I'm thinking might be some of the problem with the anxiety I feel at this job. My time management is zero, and much of my job consists of reminding people when their due dates are. I'm always afraid that I'm going to send them the wrong date and have to apologize for it (which I did today).

So whether it's numberophobia or dyscalculia, both of which I feel I could have, or if I'm just unnecessarily bad at math, having pinpointed one of the sources of my anxiety already makes me feel a little better for it.

You know what else makes me feel better about it? Classic Sesame Street clips.



Since it's Sesame Street's 40th anniversary, I figure it's appropriate. Even though once I start watching classic Sesame Street on Youtube, it's very difficult for me to stop.

To add to my list of phobias, I'm also nervous around balloons and earrings. Anyone else have some strange fears they're willing to fess up to? I find them terribly interesting.

The "st end" to my "be fri"

Today is payday (the real live one, not the candy bar, you Halloween Chocolate fiends), which means that instead of grabbing a sandwich on my lunch break, I buzzed over to the art store on Craig Street and bought myself some new toys. This month's presents to myself: A brayer, an inking plate, and a nice big slice of linoleum. I haven't block printed since high school, and I'm quite looking forward to it.

Look at it all, just sitting hidden all lovely under my desk as I try to do something in my last two hours of work. I have manuscripts I should be sending out. I have a conference to get to in two weekends. My desk is a disaster. But it is Friday, and this weekend is going to be filled with lots of art and play.

Everyone is all twittery and excited over Halloween this weekend, but I'm more excited to curl up with some apple cider and pass out candy to the kiddies. This is my first year giving candy instead of receiving, and it couldn't be more welcomed.

Also, a quick view of the skirt I'm wearing today:

And this best friend bracelet is still my favorite accessory this week: if only because I know my ten year old sister is wearing the other half.


Who's the "st end" to your "be fri"?