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I hate not doing things right. It's a real problem. It keeps me from doing things I don't do perfectly, which is a lot of things.

I've been venturing out into some new things lately, many that turned out to be things I didn't do so well. I guess naturally that brings you to a place of seeing a lot more of your own weaknesses than you do when you're gliding along in the places and activities you're familiar with. It can be kind of shocking if you haven't roamed from your comfortable habits in a while.

(Reminder to myself: make sure to regularly roam out of your comfortable habits.)

When the new rollergirls I coach get frustrated with falling down, I tell them how encouraged I am to see them on the floor. If you aren't falling, you aren't learning, I say. Why is it so much harder to say that to myself?

I am imperfect.

Somehow today I'm going to make myself love the sound of that phrase.

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It's been 6 years since my finger epic that was documented all over this blog, and I still haven't lost my fascination for finger traumas, nor the nausea that comes with thinking about it. And finger injury stories mostly seem to be about that poor dominant middle finger, digitus impudicus, the one that is most in peril of all the fingers. (There's even a club: the IFPWMF, or, International Foundation for People Without Middle Fingers.) Now comes along this guy. He made a new one for himself. Out of bike parts. It looks a little like the one Holly Hunter had at the end of The Piano. But it is articulated. He is a hero.

I'm very very grateful for every funky bit of my freaky frankenfinger.



 

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I got a lovely email from a 10 year old reader of Magic Hoofbeats, who is also a horse-drawer like me. I sent her an email with an attachment of this horse drawing.

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Like the world depended on it!

(More experimenting with watercolour on brown paper, this time filtered with Snapseed on the iPhone.)

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Khadija hosted a 3 day retreat at my home-away-from-home, the Dervish Retreat Center of Ithaca, NY.    The weekend was full of whirling classes, meditation, good eating, and woods walking, leading up to an informal sema ceremony on December 17, the annual worldwide celebration of the passing of the poet Rumi. I could only capture a few photos on my beat up phone. Thank goodness there is Instagram to pretty up terrible pictures!

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The facebook puppet show is still going with (almost) daily updates to my cover and profile pictures. Today the moon has finally become full, and there's a new addition with my old fiddle, and growing sprouts. Where this is going may be as much a mystery to me as you! But it's a heck of a lot of fun along the way.

An updated video, going up to day 34:

  Polly Sonic's facebook puppet show from ply snc on Vimeo.

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I'm wandering on with this watercolour on brown paper exploration. This one, photoshopped the black in part way, and left it in the speckly phase cause it felt pretty cool.

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The incredible Andrew Dawson now has video up of his performance of my hand injury, from his show The Articulate Hand. This was the performance that came to the NYC World Science Fair where I was invited by the moderator to give the audience the finger as an honored guest during the talk back. That was interesting!

It's still hard for me to watch this. Not just because of my ridiculous voice, but also the breaking of the pencil makes me ill. The feeling of my broken finger is still sharp in my memory all these years later.

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It's some tricky business matching the profile picture inset up with the bigger picture. There's a lot to figure out with lighting, the photography, posing, and photoshopping. The first 16 were done in about a 4 x 6 space, the camera on a tripod rigged to a ladder with duct tape. I just took a new bunch in a much easier space with some new lighting. Come friend me on facebook if you want to watch, just message me that you're an Antinomia reader!

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Playing with watercolor and white acrylic on brown paper for an articulated paper mockingbird.

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My zen center friends visited last week and brought all kinds of wonderful things from Ithaca, including a stop over from Boat #5 which has been moored on the banks of the pond for over a month. The weather has made it infinitely more beautiful then before, with a fine pond-goo coating making a grey patina over everything, uniting all its parts into one antique vessel. All my boats from now on will have to be aged this way.

I did some repairs on the matchstick outriggers and sail, and added a bird. Then I cut some tiny fall leaves out of real leaves, cargo to take back northwest.

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I have an aversion to lifestyle blogs with pretty pictures of magazine kitchens and perfect meals, so I feel a twinge of ugh posting this picture. However, potatoes and a dirty stove aren't so pretty, and after all there is a heart potato here, found in a bag of goldens this morning. And I do love hearts.

Plus it brings me around to the primary subject of my life in the last year: (surprisingly) food. Before now I've never cared about food. It didn't make sense to me to put time and money into something that would disappear in a short time. I'd rather build or paint something. I ate whatever was quickest. I hated cooking. Foodies and nutritionists seemed to me people who had too much time on their hands.

I had this attitude till age 38 when I became severely gluten intolerant. I'd like to apologize at the start to those who find this gluten free thing absurd. I felt the same way. No need to get into details, I just know because of wheat contamination I can't eat most processed foods without getting violent pain.

I dealt with this at first by eating a diet of 90% gluten free brown rice pasta. Obviously I was pretty unhealthy. Then I went to Kripalu for a week and was introduced to some of the finest whole food cooking probably anywhere. I couldn't believe what could be done with such simple ingredients to make them taste so good. I was for the first time in my life truly seduced by food. The year of deprivation had turned me food-obsessed.

Since then I've been learning how to feed myself with mostly whole and raw foods. It's been a formidable challenge, made more complex by nutritional needs for 8-10 hours a week of strength and cardio training. Learning basic cooking, how to schedule shopping for perishables, calorie counting, protein and portion awareness, it's been a full time education. I've spent the majority of my free time this winter in my kitchen, reading cooking tutorials, and scouring the pretty lifestyle blogs for recipes. And after months of laborious practice, utter confusion, and vaudevillian comedy, I can finally quickly pull together a meal like a normal person. It only took me 40 years. But oh how I love, truly love, this beautiful food, as if I've never seen it before in my life. And I never felt so good.

Here are some not so pretty pictures of imperfect meals.











(I take a picture with my phone of everything I eat to monitor myself and remind myself what to buy at the grocery store. It works pretty good.)

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I have a new blog. I can't even count what number this is, as I've left blogs littered all over the internet. This one is not of my own work, but collected videos I've been posting regularly on facebook in the evenings. They're all mellow, dreamy, hopeful, and beautiful. The kinds of things you'd want to fall asleep to. It's titled Good Night, Dreamers. You can find it here.

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I've had so many non-illustration commissions over the last two years --parade floats, puppet shows, mermaids, etc-- that the Winsor & Newton acrylic pallet I've maintained steadily since 1996 went unused and dried up. With some new illustration work coming in, I had to start from scratch and purchase my entire pallet all at once for the first time in 16 years. Ouch paint is expensive! Here's a comparison of my two purchases that day:

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With my new food-centric life, I'm now in the grocery store and farmers' market 2-3 times a week. That's about 2-3 times more often then I was previously. This seems a reasonable amount when eating fresh. When I lived in Rome people would stop at the Campo de Fiori every day after work. Italians have tiny dorm size refrigerators they barely keep anything in because they mostly eat what they bought that day. This is common sense to them, so foreign to us.

Luckily I learned to enjoy the shopping. Partly it's that I like making a pleasing still life by filling my cart with produce. It's less fun shopping for unattractive, color-clashing packaging. The more beautiful my cart looks, the more healthy it is, really. And adding farmers' markets this summer has brought a whole new level of adventure to food gathering.

While I was getting the food part down, I was accumulating a mountain of plastic shopping bags I felt pretty bad about, as I couldn't remember my fabric bags for anything. I read a blog somewhere about this problem that suggested buying beautiful shopping bags, as then you wouldn't forget them. I found these big sturdy ones, made of that flat plastic stuff used in bundle packaging. And indeed, I love them so much, I've never forgotten them. Aesthetics do have practical applications.

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There's been a remarkable abundance of them this year. Is it just that I'm getting at catching them? This one was a rare early morning rainbow that knocked me over when I got out of the car at the beach.

Last week I was working in my studio during tornado warnings. Then I felt it: not tornados, but rainbow weather! I hung out my east facing window and stared hard at the grey sky, until out of the mist a bit of color began to appear. It was the first time I've ever watched a rainbow manifest out of nothing. And it turned into a great big double rainbow all across the sky!


Dozens of my friends in New Haven posted the same picture, and then it was posted by the Big E in Massachusetts. Double rainbow all across New England!

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A fifth boat manifested suddenly, just in time for the City Wide Open Studios main exhibition last week at Artspace, where it'll be on display until the end of the month. This will be my eighth CWOS show since my first in 2002! It's in another great space, the recently abandoned New Haven Register building on the Long Wharf.

Boat #9 is larger then the Ithaca fleet, and has the addition of bunting and a small person on board.

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