The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 

Robert Frost

Finally Creating Art Again

I haven't created an "actual" fine Art piece since before I came to California. Sure, I've done lots of crafty stuff but I have been completely devoid of fine art inspiration.

Since my illness, though, I have had to begin thinking about what I will be doing with my life if I continue to get seriously ill on a regular basis. I don't feel like I can take on the responsibility of being a therapist if I cannot be sure of being reliable for my clients... and so Art might just be the secure career to fall back on :)

In concentrating on Art I have been developing an idea of where I want to go with my work right now. I guess you could say it is a mix of abstraction and realism. Figurative/portrait work (since I am most interested in people as subjects of all creative work) but it is imposed on a backdrop of geometric patterns. I was inspired by the beauty of quilts that women have been making for hundreds of years-- works of such craftmanship and beauty that they should have been acknowledged as the works of Art that they are, but have never been seen as Art-- they are always relegated to the halls of "craft" just as other womens' work has been so long ignored and dismissed.

I hope to speak to the beauty and importance of the work of so many talented women of history by referencing their creations in my own work. I believe that this will be one of the recurrent themes that I will work with as my own body of work evolves and grows. I really hope that I will be able to make work that can speak to the lack of respect so many talented women have endured in the centuries before we were free.

A Poem for my brother

We came from the same spool

for my brother Jon

We came from the same spool.
Fibers connected in fireside ghost stories,
cardboard castles, daisy chains, mud pies, trees climbed.
There is no before you; there should be no after.
Always we shared a special glimpse of
what we might have been if a different day
was conception.

Our threads in one canvas,
weaved filaments of moments and time;
kicking each other under the table, your first crush and mine, heights on a door-frame.
I am not me without you.
I always imagined a woody porch to
rock on while we laugh and correct our versions
of yesterday.

Together we built a tapestry
shaped and driven by separate paths:
Romances, rebellions, moves, marriage, sorrows, serenity.
We begin each other.
Our unique sameness and difference
mapping out the landscape of those who came before
and after.

Snipped from that spool,

our very ends carry the other.
They hum alive, no matter how vast the canvas becomes.
In this tapestry we are intertwined irrevocably.
Touching forever

at the junctions of our souls.