One of the highlights of the Rites of Spring in our town is reconnecting at the park for the time-honored new puppy meet and greet.
Author: Picking My Battles
Make Me Smile
We decided to reconnect our granola, earth-sheltered house to the grid before the first snow fell last November, and, after years of watching every watt, we indulged.
We used an electric dryer over the winter and renewed a relationship with our crock pot. I even adopted a school of tetras and a guppy, setting them up in style with a few plants and a little stone thinker girl.
I added a Plecostomus, also known as a Suckermouth Catfish — technically a bottom feeder — to control algae. He was a little shy at first, so I named him Herman the Hermit, resisting the urge to name him after some politician.
Soon, I caught him whispering in thinker girl’s ear, and her smile seemed to grow (he must have been telling her how well he’d clean the tank because he did). Her beaded hat gleams, which made me realize most politician are not bottom feeders. Bottom feeders performs a useful service, after all.
And, anyway, how many politicians would think to make a woman smile by cleaning up without being asked?
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Perfectly Still
A few months ago, wanting to improve my paintings and realize a dream I’d had since high school, I began looking for an affordable art school. I wanted to improve my drawings, learn more about techniques and be in a community of other emerging artists.
If you’ve ever looked for art schools, however, you’ll know what I mean when I say that the word ‘affordable’ is REALLY subjective, and, realizing that getting a BFA or MFA would require mortgaging all my vital organs to pay for it, began designing my own MFA in illustration. I looked at the curricula for a number of schools and set about finding inexpensive workshops that paralleled them as closely as possible, settling on an online classical drawing course.
The first part of the course focused on breaking bad habits — holding the pencil wrong, starting with the wrong subjects — and starting new, good habits. Ironically, the affordable drawing course had a fairly pricey equipment list. Wanting to follow it as closely as possible, however, I went online an ordered everything except the $250 easel. And then I waited.
And I waited.
I waited for the stuff to arrive. I waited for the next lessons on using it properly.
And I didn’t draw a thing.
Not a cartoon.
Not a single still life or even an recklessly abandoned landscape. Even my book layout slowed to a crawl.
My art — and with it — my blog was perfectly still.
A friend pointed it out to me: “Your blog is static. You’re only posting every few weeks.” And I wanted to add that the posts were uninspired because I was uninspired. I began telling myself the posts were so infrequent because it took too long to illustrate them the way I wanted.
Then a friend invited me to test out a watercolor tutorial she had developed for an educational website. The video turned out to be a fun review of basic skills, but what stuck with me was a phrase she kept repeating: “Be gentle with yourself.”
I look at other tutorials on the site and noticed that, other tutors — most of them working illustrators that I want to be — all ambassadors of the “Be Gentle With Yourself” philosophy. They were also doing was something I wasn’t anymore.
They were drawing everyday.
My favorite video was a short segment called the “Three Minute Sketching Challenge.” Inspired the Hundred Days of Sketching project, it advocated timed drawings that guaranteed an imperfect result. It also guaranteed, however, that there would be a result.
I turned to my fish tank and set the timer. My guppy, Oscar seemed to know he was being drawn because he chose those exact three minutes to do his daily race around the fake bonzai plant, but three minutes later I had a fishy doodle.
Four minutes after that, it was colored in.
Five minutes later, I dropped the ‘serious’ drawing class and subscribed to the way cheaper site .
I did a few dozen timed doodles, cursing when the alarm clock announced it was time for my day job.
Nothing I’ve produced in the last few days is remotely serious. It’s miles away from perfect. I may chase perfect and sign up for a ‘serious’ art class again someday, but, for now, I’m too busy drawing.
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Keeping Score
Around our house, Little League starts a couple weeks before the first practice and, with it, the same exact conversation:
Thing2: “Do I have to play?
Interchangeable parent: “yes”
Thing2: “I hate baseball. (Insert ad nausea exclamations as to why we should not sign up for baseball)”.
And just as I’m looking for the return receipts for the new gear after assuring Thing2 for the umpteenth time that “you love baseball,” something great happens.
Sunday’s something great happened when I drove Thing1 to the rec park for around the free golf course. Ten-year-old Thing2 insisted on going to join me for a walk around the trail, and I said yes, knowing I’d be abandoned for the playground before the end of the first lap on the trail.
We didn’t even finish the first half before Thing2 noticed a classmate and his dad engaged in an impromptu batting practice at the baseball diamond. The friend’s dad, who happens to be this year’s coach, invited him to stay and hit a few, and gave me a few minutes of quiet walking time.
Twenty minutes later, coach and classmate were ready to head home for Sunday dinner. Thing2 helped stow the equipment as he proclaimed his anticipation of the next night’s official practice.
I corralled him back to the trail so we could drag Thing1 from the golf course.
“I hit 30 pitches,” Thing2 told me as he skipped to the last putting green. “That would be a ton of runs!”
T2 was still calculating his imaginary score when Thing1 came into view. We arrived to see him sink his last putt and pound the air with his fist in the universal signal of victory.
The boys had scored big, but I was about to get an unexpected win.
We got to the car, Thing2 waved to his friend across the parking lot. Then he turned to me and said, “Man, I can’t wait for baseball practice tomorrow!”
Score!
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Brand New Day
The trees are still bare, but today’s the first day it feels like it could actually be spring. Even the field stones seem to be blooming today.
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Just a Moment
Without asking, he brushed a finger over her gossamer wings.
A bazillion years ago when I was a kid, a boy who was more than old enough to know better touched me in a way that changed me forever.
The change didn’t happen overnight. It took years for the confusion, guilt, shame, and secrecy to build walls and to paint my own mental picture of Dorian Gray. In my mind for many years, I was an ugly little troll, and I did not want to be.
I was thinking of this the other day as I was sketching a rough layout of a similar moment in my next book, The Truth About Trolls, when everything changes for the main character, Elly. That moment is a big reason why I wrote the story. It was to acknowledge that sometimes things happen, even to children, that they can’t control and that change them. Even though that moment in the story is told in a way that is comprehensible and accessible to young children, I knew the rough sketch was on the right track because I started to cry as I drew the hand of a brash boy reaching to touch the wing of a fairy.
When I met my husband, a.k.a. The Big Guy, my mental picture changed. He was the first man who knew me and my secrets and still told me I was beautiful. Twenty years later I still see a very round troll when I look in the mirror, and he still tells me I’m beautiful. The only difference is that years of loving the Big Guy, 16-year-old Thing1 and 10-year-old Thing2 has helped me see that trolls can indeed be beautiful.
That is the next part of the book. Sometimes things happen and they do change us, even against our wills. But too often those changes cause guilt or shame, and we can begin taking unflattering mental selfies. What Elly discovers, and what I’m hoping children will glean, is that even if you are not the same person you were, those changes don’t make you any less valuable or beautiful, and, in time, you can come out stronger.
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Trolling
“The worst tale is that trolls have no magic…”
In between working on getting art supplies to future artists and taking a drawing course to improve my skills a bit, I’ve been working on the layout for “The Truth about Trolls”. The story is about finding your inner beauty by recognizing the inner strength that comes from surviving loss or heartbreak.
DrawPaintCreate has raised over $1500 in its first week, and will be delivering art kits to refugee children in Albany New York in the next week or so. I’m also in contact with the Department of Children and Families in Bennington Vermont and I’m working to
assemble kits for an additional 88 children that they serve.
DCF was kind enough to provide the ages of the children so we can tailor the kits a bit for safety. I had a chance to peruse their site and found the site of an agency that helps place children with foster families and with forever families. The site has pictures of smiling faces that are impossible not to fall in love with and stories make you to want to wrap each and every kid in unconditional love and shelter until they’re ready to fly the coop.
You can’t, of course. You can give as much help as possible, but there will always be another story that tugs at the heart– as the stories should.
The smiling faces however, have kept me on task with the drawings for “The Truth about Trolls.”. They’re reminders that resilient inner beauty is more than just a fairy tale.
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No Blue Mondays
Monday is my new favorite day of the week. Between sales and outright donations, almost $400 was raised for DrawPaintCreate, and I was able to order supplies for 20 kits, thanks to a friend who helped find a few websites that sell art supplies wholesale.
I want to say a huge thank you to everyone for your generosity. I have even had local people ask if they could help assemble the kits, and I’m thinking a ‘Santa in Spring’ party may be in order.
Yup, Monday is a good day.
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Planting Seeds – Art for Sale
This morning, I’m planting a few seeds to raise funds for a project that gets creative tools into the hands of at-risk kids, kids who are in-transition or recovering from trauma. The seeds are the paintings, and 50% of all sales will go to the project, DrawPaintCreate which you can read more about here.
All Paintings are sold matted, ready to frame. 8×10 prints are available for $30 and 5×7 prints are available for $20.
If you are interested in any item or print, email me at rachel @ rachelbarlow.com and I can send you a PayPal invoice. I also take checks via snail mail.
Thingvellir Lake
12 x 16
$100
Geyser
12 x 16
$100
Ice Pond Farm
12 x 16
$100
313 West
9×12
$75
Magic Mountain
12×16
$100
Ice Pond Barn
14×18
$150
Dust Up 9×12 $75
Winter Roads, 12×16 Watercolor
$100
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Winter Wonderings
Winter Wondering, 9×12, Watercolor – SOLD
Prints can be purchased on Etsy here.
Tomorrow, Sunday March 5 between 4pm and 6pm I will be having an opening reception a new show – Seasonally Affected – at the Roundhouse Bakery & Cafe in Cambridge, NY.
There is never a wrong time to go to the cafe, but tomorrow will be something more than a reception for me. Tomorrow I will officially kick off fundraising for a project to get art supplies into the hands of children going through difficult transitions that’s been germinating beneath the snow this winter.
The project, DrawPaintCreate, came about after reading Jon Katz’s blog, BedlamFarm, and his efforts to help newly-arrived refugees.
The agency he works with does an excellent job of meeting the physical needs of the new arrivals, but as I looked at the photos of the new apartments’ bare walls, I felt a nagging, silent question about the children in these families who have just emerged from incredible trauma. It’s the same question I have had for years when reading about children living in foster care or who recovering from harrowing events .
How do they get back to being kids? How do they get past these events and get back to the incredibly important business of growing up?
Years ago while trying to move past a childhood trauma and manage a lifelong relationship with bipolar disorder, I discovered art as a powerful tool for processing difficult memories and re-engaging with the world in a positive way.
If art saved my life, my kids have given it direction by centering every decision around their physical and emotional needs as well as their futures. That includes caring about the physical and emotional needs of the other people in their generation, and giving children the tools to express themselves and create their futures.
Unsure if there was a want or need for this sort of thing, I put together 5 kits consisting of watercolor paints, colored pencils, sketch and coloring books, and a drawing guide packed in a small drawstring.
I then reached out to the US Committee for Refugees in Albany to see if they thought their younger arrivals would benefit from access to art supplies. They came back with a request for 50 kits. I have since reached out to other groups who serve at-risk children and have been met with enthusiastic responses and offers of help.
To that end, I will be kicking in 50% of my share of sales from the show at Roundhouse. Tomorrow morning, I will also be having a fire starter sale on this website, putting up a number of paintings to raise money for kits for newly arrived refugees in Albany, NY. Fifty percent of all sales from the website will also go to DrawPaintCreate.
If you would like to help, you can purchase a painting or visit http://www.DrawPaintCreate.org to donate directly and/or purchase an item to go into an art kit. Every donation is greatly appreciated as it helps to fuel a new creative spark.
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Rushing Out
I’ve been chasing waves all weekend.
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Under the Influence
Day is Done, 9×12 – SOLD
I paint at night because it’s the best way to get a block of uninterrupted time, but it’s a double edge sword.
If you’re under the influence of the art bug, walking into your studio was a bit like an alcoholic walking into a bar. You think, ” i’ll just take a look at last nights stuff quickly.” Then you pick up a brush to fiddle with a spot just didn’t look right and before you know it, the paint is still flowing at 2am on a work night.
And even though I’ve learned to hate 7 AM and I don’t have any illusion that I could quit anytime I want, it’s not a problem.
Prints can be purchased on Etsy here.
Picking My Battles 