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Away Above the Chimney Tops

“On Her Way Up”

09/02/10 New For the Artist in Us

Are these not FABULOUS? Somewhere around the second hour of my first art show I realized I’d forgotten something. A man approached me and said he’d be interested in purchasing some of my work on commission. Did I have a business card, he wanted to know. Crud. Crud. Crud. I absolutely had nothing like a card.

When I got home and thawed out I began the search for the perfect card. I wanted these cards to be beautiful, expressive, and fun. Nothing stuffy. Something that advertised the sort of artist I am. Everywhere I looked I found cards that were almost what I was looking for, but not quite. Then, miraculously, while vegging over a cup of coffee and random internet trolling, I found Moo. I can’t describe how happy it makes me to work with a company that accommodates artistic vision. Moo gave me everything I wanted in a card. I am so pleased. The back of these cards contain my information, written in lovely print with a little embellishment.

08/02/10 Warm Up


Here you are seeing approximately half of the crew that will descend on New Orleans this weekend for Mardi Gras. This photo was taken during Rio, which rolled Saturday in Lafayette. It was mere practice. A warm up, let’s call it, for things to come. Some people already had their game face on. Take Jon for example, whose highly scientific strategies included singling out ladies on the float and yelling,”Hey. Hey, LADY. You’re beautiful. You’re beautiful.” In a New Jersey accent. Invariably, the women would point to themselves oh so coyly as if to say “who me?” and then pelt bags of beads at their pretend-suitor.

07/02/10 Marvelous Mary

Mary Cassatt has been on my mind a great deal lately. Some of her most famous work focused on the subject of mother and child, which is the same subject I’m currently tackling. Typically, family isn’t an area of life I would chose to paint. I prefer other things. Darker or more ambiguous subjects. But I’ve been tapped to do a commissioned work for a silent auction to benefit premature babies and for this very worthy cause, I must deliver.

Before I ever started this painting, I re-acquainted myself with Cassatt. She used impressionism to capture the vitality, the energy of mother and child. She wanted to convey to her audience the feelings these images evoked in her. To study these works is to understand the beauty of the bond. To study Cassatt is to understand true artistic vision.

Cassatt once said, “Acceptance, under someone else’s terms, is worse than rejection.”

05/02/10 Confirmation

Grandma Breaux got a hearing aid. This is big news because we won’t have to scream at each other across Sunday dinner any longer. It also got the rest of us curious about our own hearing abilities.

I was slotted to bring G.B. to her follow-up appointment at the audiologist this week and decided while I was there, I could stand to get tested. Let me confess now that I already knew I had some sort of hearing loss in my left ear. Most of the time, I don’t need to turn my head to hear – unless a man is speaking. I’ve had two consecutive boyfriends accuse me of belligerently acting deaf just to irritate them. Well boys. Vindication is er, mine. Because the audiologist declared me profoundly deaf in the left ear. Indeed, I have a rare kind of deafness. Most people lose the higher frequency range where most female voices fall. I’ve lost the lower frequencies. And some higher. Mostly, that ear just does not work. It’s conductive hearing loss, which basically means that when the doc banged a tuning fork on a table and pressed it to my teeth I could hear it in my left ear. I see a party trick in my future.

At that point I started eyeballing the flashy hearing aid display and trying to chant my new mantra: hearing aids are cool. I was almost past the visions of having to excuse myself in front of some guy to remove my aid before we took a roll in the hay when the audiologist sucked me back to reality. A hearing aid won’t help me; I need to consider surgery. I remember watching an interview with Marlee Matlin where she was asked what it’s like to be deaf. She responded, “I sleep great!” There is a part of me that wonders what I would be giving up. The sleep is excellent.

04/02/10 Cherokee Summer

I’m experimenting with my style a lot lately and the process reminds me of a plot point in His Dark Materials. In the trilogy people have daemons, which are roughly comparable to souls (that live outside the body in the form of an animal). Children’s daemons can change until they “settle” into one permanent form. A sign of approaching adulthood is the establishment of a final form in a daemon. Lyra’s daemon is still shifting at ten years old and it makes her a bit uncomfortable to be asked about it. I too feel like the shifting of painting styles is almost embarrassing – as though I am not quite an adult artist until I’ve has found a solid and permanent artistic voice.

04/02/10 What happens when Saints fever hits your school’s cosmetology department

02/02/10 Intarsia and Fair Isle

They say it’s good, healthy even, to learn new things. I swear I aged 10 years trying to teach myself the complex knitting skills of intarsia and fair isle. I read books. I watched youtube. I called other knitters. None of the instructions did me any good. This was a trick I had to learn through trial and error. I had a clue early on when a very old book referred to one technique as “twisting” – which is the basic concept. Eventually I got it and the result was my first two color pattern: a lovely baby’s cap.

Here’s the right side:

And the wrong:

01/02/10 Drifter

31/01/10 Poetry in the Berry

If you asked me who I was most interested in hearing before Friday night’s poetry reading, I would have unhesitatingly said Darrell Bourque. As it turns out, Mr. Bourque is breath-catchingly amazing poet. I was simply awed by him. One particular poem turned my insides over.

Which is why Bonny Bonfire McDonald was such a shocker. She absolutely stole the show. Bonny is a performer-poet-singer who is nothing if not mesmerizing. She screamed. She cooed. She chanted her way into our consciousness. She had the entire audience eating out of her hippie hands. If you ever get the chance it see her, don’t pass it up. Here’s a few photos of Bonny doing her thing : A-Woman! Check out her blog here.

29/01/10 Third Eye

This watercolor and ink is part of the processing I’ve done on that weird music therapy session. It’s been sitting around in more or less this state for several weeks while I tried to decide what to do with it. For now, I believe I’ll leave it as is. When I started working out this image, I thought it would turn into a very large, expressionist oil painting. Today I’m not so sure.

On the poetry front: I’ve been all dried up lately. Hopefully tonight’s event will stimulate my poetess gland. Claire, Mom and I are going to hear Darell Bourque read some of his poetry. Should be exciting.