The Day the Music Lived

Blissful sigh..... alone with my thoughts again at last...
A few days ago I picked up an old school-looking am/fm radio with a record player on top, CD slot barely visible between the old dials on the face, and cassette tape slot on the side. Oddly enough, the first song we heard when we turned the radio dial was "American Pie." Here's a video of the day the music lived again in the Flint-Last household.




I'm now happily listening to a CD of Cat Power being played skip-free through the woody speakers, feet kicked up on the couch, not a baby in sight, basking in the glow of our tiny tree in an otherwise empty house.....aaaaaahhhhhhhh.

I really don't know where to start in describing my life of late (as in the last month). Trying to paint for a show opening in now less than a month, eloping with Mike and honeymooning with a baby, shopping for Christmas presents and shipping everything by Dec. 14th so I could put my mind to other things, taking on two free-lance design jobs (something I never would have attempted if it hadn't been for good friends willing to pay well and if our car hadn't ended up in the shop), maintaining a household, learning how not to be a big sister to my 20 year old sister and her worm-infested cat, all this whilst still making myself available as Penelope's doting mother. I guess to summarize, life for me lately has been an exercise in patience and surrender. I feel like one of those tiny sand box toys, you know, the ones with the little sand-mill that dumps the fine filtered pile of sand in a little dome by it's feet - I feel like I'm the sand mill in the middle of a huge sand-storm and the tiny grains of sand are what's left of my patience and my being, everything that ends up in my paintings. The art has helped me through so much, and it's been so inspite-of-myself-honest that I feel the work is better for it. As I'm running out of time now to achieve my full vision of all the pieces I had hoped to or made sketchers for being in the show, I'm reaching a place of closure with it. Whatever doesn't seemed resolved seems appropriately so. The remaining panels seem unresolved or too personal, like the graphic "nativity" scene (come on, who really wants a painting of Penelope's birth on their wall?!), and what I think will end up being my piece about weaning (as I haven't weaned yet, I just trust that one will work itself out when I get there). The m.o. "paint what you know" just seems to keep holding true and I trust it implicitly here. I'm rather pleased I was able to get all the Christmas hoo-haw out of my system last week so that I can now just focus on the final touches on one of the larger pieces which I so wanted to bring a step further. I've added the new concept to the piece I think I might entitle "Me and my Shadow" the other night. I think once I can really achieve a sense of space and make the false backdrop look like a painting within a painting I will have achieved more than I had dared hope for with these few new works. I picked up the "Birth" piece (the splitting pomegranate piece pictured in an earlier blog) from Raven Frameworks this week along with the "Milk Giver" piece and the sperm-meets-pomegranate seed shapes on the molding of the frames are just stunning. I'm just squirming with anticipation at this point to see them all held in the gallery space together whispering their secrets to each other - like the thick silent roar of the museums in Paris or in a library - I like to pretend that's what that sound is, books and paintings talking to each other. But to see all of them, framed and dusted, under the hallogens, on a creamy white wall that falls away like a thick fog behind the piece. To see how the paintings stand on their own away from the chaos of my studio and my life, that will be my moment when my knotts will untie and I will hope to feel "You've arrived my dear. Congratulations. Now rest for a while."