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Recently I had the pleasure, albeit a somewhat nervous pleasure, of being interviewed by my good friend Monica Lee of Smart Creative Women via Skype (nothing makes you more aware of age and weight than knowing you will be on camera). That interview will go live very soon, but I thought I would share some thoughts that Monica and I never really got to cover fully during the time we spoke, because time did, as time does in real life, fly by.

I have had the good fortune of being able to spend nearly one hundred percent of my time these last forty years, making art in one form or another. I did take a few years off when my two oldest sons were little, but when I think back on that time, I was always dong something creative (and most of it was donated for fundraising events of one kind or another), just not all of it professionally. Aside from that short break, it has pretty much been non-stop all the time.

But, nonstop at what?  Well, nonstop at art. Art in many forms and in many materials for many venues. In short: I've been a painter, puppeteer, doll maker, soft sculpture artist/craftsperson, editorial illustrator, children's book author and illustrator, fabric designer, licensed artist, and now I am also painting again. I’ve also spent a lot of time decorating houses, but, to be very honest, that makes me zero money. It only costs me money. But that's OK. It satisfies my soul. It's a medium I have to work in almost as much as my paints. “House--just another art material and artistic discipline."

But back to business. If I look back over all my years as an artist, I see one thing: my aesthetic sensibility has not changed much in forty years. I am still drawn to the same things I was drawn to in college--characters, details, expressive gestures, and emotions. I love color and texture and patterns. I especially like narratives. Everything I do tends to tell a story, and the story is in the details, textures and characters.

I have written about this before and in much more detail. You can read the first accout I wrote years ago for my very first web site. It really rambles and tells the story of the earliest years. Here is the place to read that. I created an abbreviated version for my current web site. You can ready that one here. 

I’m sharing some recent art here at Cats and Jammers Studio to coordinate with the interview. I am also sharing some of the house and other new art on my other blog, Design Rocket.

What message would I love to give other artists? This: don’t be afraid to re-invent yourself and try new things. Life as an artist is a wild journey on a winding road. A few years back, I posted a long post about moving in random directions in life, seemingly as if by pure serendipity. Well, life is that but it is also by luck and pluck, and maybe much less by design than we think. Please read that post, Serendipity + Pluck = Life.

Much of the art here is from my 2011 Sketchbook Project, “Coffee and Cigarettes.” I loved doing that book. I have done two others since. You can see the digital scans of my book here. And you can see the show opening containg paintngs based on the book here.

Participating in the Sketchbook Projects for the Art House Coop really feeds my artistic soul. My most recent book was titled “Strangers.” In doing that book I dedicated it to my painting and drawing professor of my sophomore year of college, John Patrick Murphy II. John was the head of the art department at Rockland Community College for more than 30 years. On the very first day I met him, I shared some paintings and he gave me advice that has stayed with me all these years: “Barbara, draw out of your head.” Meaning, draw from the well within you that has your memories and your impressions. And that is the way I have worked ever since.

John very recently passed away. This post is dedicated to him, because, really, meeting him and getting to know him was pure serendipity and it pointed me along the way on my own artistic journey.

All Photographs © Irina Werning

Here we go again. I discovered this on Jeannie Jeannie. Wonderful pictures that chronicle the passing of time. This time we have shots by photogrpaher Irina Werning as she gets her subjects to strike a pose and don clothing that match, as much as possible, a shot from when they were very young. 

You know I love this stuff. I love seeing the evidence of a life that has been lived or is in the process.This tempts me to try and do the same thing with pictures I have. I have one picture from 8th grade of Phil and I and Bobby Stewart, another classmate, that we need to recreate if we can manage to get together sometime in our life.

Go check out the rest of these pictures. They will make you smile but you might also find yourself waxing a little melancholy. Time stops for no man... nor baby.

This is so in tune with my pulp fiction covers and Fancy Nancy YA book jacket, that I HAVE to share a  link sent to me by my friend Liz for "Vinatge Valentines WTF." And if you these are strange, wait until you see the rest of the fantastic collection.

I live for this kind of photography: haunting shots of once lively and active places, now in ruins. There is something that hits a nerve somewhere within me that makes me look at the disintegration of old structures, and see it not just as it is, but as it must have been. 

There's a lot to read and a lot to see in this wonderful photo essay about  New York's North Brother Island and abandoned Riverside Hospital from The Kingston Lounge, which may soon become another favorite photo blog for me, right up there with Shorpy. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves and the history tell it's own story.

It seems that this blog is often turning into a forum for obituaries of people who have moved me. That may very well be, for I if I am going to write about things that are important to me, then that needs to include losing people or artists who have touched my life. I guess as one gets older and more of those key players in a person’s lifetime pass away, it becomes even more important to acknowledge, reflect upon, and celebrate lives well lived.

Along those lines, several weeks ago I was so sorry to read in the NY Timesthat Jazz artist Billy Taylor had passed away. Here is another blog post about it on Mirror On America. I was  also so sad to read about the passing of George Shearing in today's NY Times. When I want the kind of harmonic jazz that is both contemplative and inspiring, I think of Billy Taylor and George Shearing. Their music  has a distinctly classy and urban New York feel to me.  I love it for the harmonic, sensitive and thoughtful sound, as well as for the fact that it reminds me of early years in New York, listening to live jazz in the city. That sound reminds me of being very young and feeling the world was there for the celebrating and taking.

I was very young.  A good friend of my then-fiancee, Phil's and mine, Norm Freeman, was a student at Julliard. Our summer evenings would often be like this: I would work until my shift was done at Capra's Restaurant in Stony Point, NY. That was usually until about eleven at night. Norman and Phil would pick me up and we would then zip into New York City to catch some live jazz. Getting down to the village about forty minutes later meant we could catch at least one set in a club.

And in the early seventies, you could   hear some great music in the clubs at night. We most often ended up going to the Village Gate (Top of the Gate)  or the Village Vanguard or the Half Note. At the Vanguard we  caught the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis orchestra in a place where we would

Tomorrow my husband and I are heading down to good old Rockland County, New York for my 40th high school reunion--North Rockland High School, Class of 1970. The school is now located in Theills, New York and has been since it opened for my senior year. This won't be so tortuous for my husband because he actually went to school with most of these people until his family moved to another nearby town in 10th grade. The best part is that the reunion will take place in Haverstraw (which is where the grand, old school was from 1933 until the new one was built) in a place just a half a block down the street from the house (on the Hudson River) in which my husband grew up, until the fateful move.

Needless to say, this is a prime experience for a time-passing-obsessive-nut like myself. What could be better than participating your own Ken Burns experience? I am not exaggerating when I say that with very little effort, I can put myself right back in my late 60s mindset, in the very halls where my high school heart still wanders in my dreams. In that place, everyone still looks exactly as they did 40 years ago. Close my eyes, and it is not much of a stretch to be back in my old clothes, in my old classrooms, cafeteria, and locker room, with a vivd sense of what was. I can recall the feeling of the halls, the big old windows, the way the old granite and marble steps felt, the vivid CCC/WPA  Depression painted murals on the walls of the Home Ec classroom, and the sense of a solid and substantial building meant to last (they still use it for the Middle School).

I won't go into much detail about how the new, one level, barely finished high school structure felt for the one laskluster year I was there. But suffice it to say that the yearbook staff managed to sneak one four letter word via morse code into the monotmous brick cover of the yearbook itself; that exposed where our collective hearts really lay with regard to the new school vs. the old stately building. It was a very silly and immature act of rebellion in retrospect, of course, but accurate at the time for a bunch of 17-18 year olds who loved the old building and town fiercely. 

In any event, I am very much looking forward to doing some time travel and some great catching up with my former classmates to see where our lives have led us during the past 40 years. We may not look now as we did then, but I am sure that many of us still feel like adolescents in our hearts.

After a weekend of High School revisited in Rockland, back in Boston the following week my husband and I have are having dinner with one of his law school classmates and his wife, after not seeing them for 30 years. Here is another case where it is effortless to imagine us once again back in Ithaca where we lived for 3 years, and get into that late seventies mindset. And it is equally vivid: clothes, food, house, soft sculptured dolls everywhere, while he happily toiled away in the evenings at his studies. Got local yogurt, Earth shoes,

Somewhere in the 80s, I was out with three friends of mine, all Asian. I can't remember exactly how or why, but the discussion turned to Charlie Chan. "Oh, I loved Charlie Chan," I said, sincerely and innocently. "Those were my favorite old movies!" And they were. My husband and I used to watch them religiously back in Buffalo in the 70s, where one of the local stations would broadcast one every week at around 11 o'clock. It was my first experience with appointment television since counting the minutes until five o'clock waiting for the Mickey Mouse Club twenty years earlier. 

"Ugh. You can't be serious," was the collective reply of my friends. "He is one of the worst stereotypes for Asians."

I felt like someone hit me in the chest. First, to think that I would willingly subscribe to that kind of thinking about people was an embarrassment. But, more important, I did not even see the reason for their disgust with the character (and hopefully, not me). My husband and I loved him and loved son number one (played by Warner Oland and Keye Luke respectively). In my mind, Charllie made everyone else around him look positively stupid, goofy, awkward, and incapable of seeing the details. He, on the other hand, was brilliant, had a fantastic gift for dry humor, and was all-knowing and all-seeing without being obnoxious. What's not to love? What better kind of stereotype can one ask for?

Reading the August 9th edition of the New Yorker yesterday I came upon a wonderful review by Jill Lepore of a brand new book by Yunte Huang: Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous With American History. Ms. Lepore offers some enjoyable information about Earl Derr Biggers, the author who first brought to character of Chan to book form and  the  movies themselves. But, even better, is reading about Huang's book which reveals that Charlie Chan was based on an actual Chinese detective with the Honolulu police force, by the name of Chang Apana, who was a legend in his own time for solving crimes. There are more wonderful facts to glean from the book, so get a hold of it and dig in. It is available now for pre-order (I made sure to order mine, you betcha).

 Just as intriguing to me, is the story about the author, Yunte Huang. Mr. Huang was born and brought up in China, and may well have no

 photo from mcgarrigles.com

Besides reading the obituaries of two well know writers in this morning's New York Times, Robert Parker and Erich Segal, I was terribly upset to read of the death of Kate McGarrigle, at 63.

If I had to pin point specific music to be the soundtrack of my life as an artist working in my studio, it would be the music of the McGarrigle Sisters, whom I first heard on Saturday Night Live in the mid seventies, performing "Heart Like a Wheel." Naturally, even with the most limited of funds, we went out and bought that first album, "Kate and Anna McGarrigle," which became the very music that followed me from home to home, and studio to studio. 

The beautiful harmonies and melodies of Kate and Anna filled my small back room studio in Buffalo, New York while I sat and sewed the figures and dolls that first began my true life as a full time artist. When we came back from three months as vagabonds in Europe and settled in Elmira, New York, the album was the first to resume its proper place as number one on my play list. Happliy sewing away in the dining room of an old flat in the even more old fashion town of Elmira (which I loved, by the way), I listened to the sounds of that first album almost non-stop. I loved when they sang of what I thought was upstate New York in "Talk to Me of Mendocino," and I thought for sure I heard a slight smile in the voice of Kate when she sang the lead in "Go Leave," which I always imagined was her send off to her former husband Loudan Wainwright.

Make no mistake: as wonderful as the tunes themselves are the lyrics to the music of Kate and Anna. Theirs is truly poetry set to music in a way that makes it impossible to separate the two. Their sweet voices embraced the words and told the stories and your heart was never left untouched. The only time things went over my head was when they sang in French. I had not a clue about what they were singing. I liked it anyway.

In 1978 we moved to Ithaca so my husband could attend law school at Cornell, and I set up shop in a ramshackle house on Route 79, Slaterville Road. There, amidst the dolls and the cloths and the threads, and the painted eyeballs, played the wonderful, harmonious McGarrigles. 

And there, we happily added two more albums to the play list, "Dancer With Bruised Knees,"

If you read this blog, you already know that I obsess about the passing of time. You know that I wish I could time travel. You know that I love antiques and Ken Burns and the Oxford Project and anything that allows me a glimpse into the past. 

Now that I have discovered Google Street View, I even take trips to old neighborhoods of my past so I can "walk around" a see what those places now look like compared to  years ago. Let me tell you that can be fun, but also depressing. Sometimes places look very much like they did when I was living there, like my old street and house in Stony Point, New York (but the town itself is totally different) or the house my husband and I lived in in Buffalo, NY,  as newlyweds. Most of the time, however, things have changed so much, I don't recognize the neighborhood at all, or, in the worst case scenario, they  don't even exist, which is the case with both of the apartment buildings I lived in as a child with my grandparents in Newark, New Jersey. Gone. Empty lots. Rubble.

The discovery of Google Street View is just one of the wonderful things I came upon when I discovered my absolute favorite, MUST VISIT EVERYDAY blog: SHORPY.

To quote from the site:

THE 100-YEAR-OLD PHOTO BLOG

The blog is run by Dave, who posts the most magnificent high resolution pictures of years gone by. I do not know any personal information about Dave, except that he has some facinating looking family members whose mid century pictures he occasionally puts up on the site.  

When I look around my house and see the enormous amount of stuff I have managed to collect and inflict on my family, I sometimes feel...well..a little guilty. I wonder if they would all somehow live a life of minimal objects with a different mother and wife. I think my husband would clearly live is less clutter. He is very neat and organized by nature. Not anymore. I corrupted him. He sort of "caught" whatever it is that has always ailed me, and he now subscribes to the same sort of busy look in decor that he has come to know and love. In a way, my kids have, as well, though I doubt that they will ever be as far advanced with this malady as I am.

With those thoughts in mind, you can imagine how utterly relieved I was to read an article in today's NY Times about renowned urologist and Columbia professor Dr. John Lattimer, who passed away at the age of 92, and left behind a life's collection of oddities that certainly puts my mundane assortments of objects to shame.

I think I would have found Dr. Lattimer to be a kindred spirit. The article points to the fact that he was an only child of two only children. So was I. It mentions that somehow his collecting was an effort to hold on the the past. I agree. And it is more. Somehow owning a piece or two of the past, helps to grasp the present. I would even go so far as to say that it increases understanding of the future.

My husband and I have often joked about what our poor kids will have to deal with when they need to figure out what to do with over 100 cookie jars, even more pieces of carnival chalkware, tons of cowboy stuff, and a gazillion vintage tablecloths, not to mention everything else in this house.

But this we can guarantee them: they will not have to deal with anything even remotely similar to the type of relics being sort by Lattimer's daughter Evan, as she catalogs his vast collection for sorting for auction, discarding, and keeping.

How do I know this? Read the article. What gives me the right to sound so damned cocky, pun intended? This fact: I do not have in my posession, for example, anything even close to being Napolean's penis.....