Painting Pages

I just finished Sarah Ahearn Bellemare's Painted Pages, a how-to book that offers a number of tips to jump-start the creative process. I first saw Sarah's collage paintings at a friend's house and later at a local gallery. My daughter was privileged to take a summer art camp class with her as well. The artists's paintings have a distinctive style and palette, incorporating found images and photographs, maps and other ephemera, and text. (See Sarah's Flickr sets for lots of collage inspiration. Her work is also featured in the upcoming Enormous Tiny Art "eleven" show.)

Painted Pages takes the reader into Sarah's studio, where we get an inspiring glimpse into her process. In one chapter, Sarah shows how a visit to a roadside stand inspires a painting. The Polaroid photos she took of the flowers are incorporated into a sketchbook collage, which then becomes the preliminary sketch for a painting.

I love Sarah's idea of approaching each sketchbook page as a mixed-media collage/journal. In Sarah's sketchbook journals, she takes a particular photograph or piece of text and free-associates, adding related colors, words, quick sketches, a complementary palette, and patterns and textures from her impressive collection of ephemera. This form of journaling seems like an effective, free-form (and fun) way to keep track of events big and small and tuck them away for later use.

During a recent journaling session, I tried out a number of her practical suggestions to get some ideas flowing. I cleaned off my work space and used the scraps and clipped magazine pages I found. I put wet media on the right and dry on the left to help me keep my work area clean (a definite problem for me). I wore an apron and kept a wet cloth and dry cloth close at hand to keep the paint and glue off my clothes and my fingers. Less mess makes the creative process more fun for me.

I used many of the techniques from the book, and the collage that emerged is a random collection of images and ideas that have been on my mind lately. It's a sketch, of sorts, of a moment in time. I like the possibility of it as well, that the collage can be a springboard for some future work. Sarah suggested focusing on smaller areas of the collage that resonate in some way, and it's interesting how those little pieces suggest something different when seen in isolation.

I'm jazzed about using a mixed-media sketchbook/journal on a more regular basis. My collages may not become paintings, but I can imagine using this technique to break through writer's block or process some of life's daily stresses.

Have you tried a new-to-you technique that's helped ease you out of a creative rut?

Bookworm Month

*This post is dedicated to my daughter, who is curious and widely read and drops the appropriate literary quote when necessary, e.g. “Well, remember Mommy, 'Life is an X-rated soap opera,' T.S. Garp.” My daughter, who is so busy with school and rowing and friends that it seems like we never have enough time to talk about the important stuff, e.g. books. And who, most importantly, alerts me when the supplies of dark chocolate in the house are growing dangerously low.

I just finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I got it a few years ago, started reading it, and put it down. The tone was off-putting. Somehow, at the time, the very virtuosity of the language evoked so much distance between me and the main character that I just didn’t make a love connection with the book. Perhaps 9/11 was also too recent an event to wrap my head around its novelization.

Luckily for me, another January has rolled around, the month I read, when curling up on the couch with a blanket and a book is about all I care to do. (I usually ask for books for Christmas, and my generous family and Santa usually come through. Then I chomp through them like the frustrated bookworm that I am.)

I’m so glad I came back to the book and was open to receiving it. The events and themes the author tackles—9/11, World War II, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, loss, grief, family, childhood, love, aging—are sweeping and enormous. Yet they are brought down to the level of ordinary life in this novel. They are rendered incredibly closely through the eyes of a child, Oskar Schell, who is struggling to make sense of losing his father on 9/11. His attempts to think his way through his loss are moving in their fruitlessness. So is his discovery of a key, and his search for the lock that it will open. He hopes the key is a final clue left by his father. As he looks for the lock, Oskar makes the human connections that ultimately help him figure out a way to keep moving forward through life. He finds a way to emotionally connect with others to get through impossible grief.

It’s interesting that Foer shows us 9/11 through the eyes of a child who likely has Asperger’s. I think it might not be too far-fetched to say that Oskar’s viewpoint is much like how we ourselves have reacted and tried to deal with this enormous tragedy. We focus on the facts we can report and quantify. The time at which the first plane hit. The temperature at which the metal frame of the building melted. The number of people killed. Those are the facts that we cling to, in our emotional numbness, the things we can process.

In Oskar, I think Foer accurately captures a child trying desperately to make sense of the crazy, messed-up world. As I was reading I was reminded of the images that popped into my head in that half-waking/half-dreaming state right before sleep that I had when I was a kid. In those vivid images, I played with perspective, seeing the world as if I were spinning on a merry-go-round. In other images I was tiny, the size of a mouse, standing in the street staring up at the mountain of a curb in front of my babysitter’s house. The view telescoped even further, so that the world seemed to be receding away from me at a scary rate. In the face of events like 9/11, maybe we are still that child, small in relation to the world and overwhelmed and confused by its scale and speed.

I was also quite moved by the characters’ troubled grappling with words. For various characters, the spoken word (emotion?) contains much power and the written word (intellect?) ultimately fails to convey meaning.

• For Oskar’s grandmother and grandfather, their shared trauma during World War II leads to the failure of true communication and the consequent severing of the human connections that words are meant to create.

1. Oskar’s grandfather loses his ability to speak after he loses his family, his first love, and their unborn child during the bombing of Dresden. The written word—“Yes” tattooed on one hand, “No” on the other, and his notebooks of written responses—is inadequate and fails him. He ultimately cannot respond to the love his wife offers him or the hope (and potential tragedy) that their child represents.
2. Oskar’s grandmother lives her life, has her child and raises him alone. Yet as she types her life story, the pages remain blank. They both write letters that are never received by the intended recipient.

• On 9/11, as he is trapped in the World Trade Center, Oskar’s father leaves a message on the answering machine, a call that Oskar is too paralyzed by fear to receive.

• When Oskar turns on the hearing aid of his octogenarian neighbor, the man is able to hear for the first time in decades. He is able to leave his home and open himself to a new love.

This struggle with words is something I deal with every day. I love them, the sound of them in various languages and accents and dialects; the joyful energy of their utterances and the sweet relief when my words are fully heard. I love reading them, love their tangled roots and interconnections. Love to play one off another, in sound and rhythm and meaning.

But I have trouble remembering words and uttering them with confidence, most acutely when I am speaking in front of a large group. I guess that’s why I like this blog, and why I keep coming back to it despite being pulled in other directions. In a blog post, I feel like I can put words together to form a coherent whole, something I feel frustrated about when I’m speaking. It helps me give a shape to emotions that can often overwhelm me. It’s a record that I’ve lived my life and processed it. It’s an attempt to share my life with others.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close resonated with me in so many ways. For me, it is both the key and the box it opens. It is the world we live in, the people we struggle to love, the grief we grapple with. It’s that reaching out, however we can, to connect with each other.

Circles

Time is a circle. It loops back on itself endlessly.

As I travel on its curved line, at times it seems to speed up like a racecar whipping through a turn, other times apparently slowing on a straightaway but really going ever faster in an endless loop around the track.

January is a discrete point on the circle. January is the rawness of chapped lips and dry skin, tender cheeks reddened by the wind. January is the mourning veil of snow and ice and dead leaves over earth. It is the great grief, the loss of the light. January is the frozen sap in the maple, the slowed-down life in leaf and blood.

January surprises me every year with its grayness, its slowness, its lifelessness. It surprises me that my body slows down, that winter seeps into my bones.

It should not surprise me, I know. I've been around this circle enough times to know, to anticipate its specific gravity. Long enough to know not to fight it but to sync up with (down into?) its slowed rhythm. To allow myself to sink into the couch with a blanket and a good book. To make endless batches of warm cookies to heat the house and warm the tummy. To let the kids pour a dozen, two dozen, tiny marshmallows from the package until the tiny circles of hot cocoa are filled in with white. 

From this January vantage point on the circle, that shape seems to be all around me. Embroidered circles on a wet-felted piece hanging in my sewing-room window. An empty embroidery hoop, waiting to be filled. Circles of coiled, felted wool sweater scraps crammed together into a coaster/pin holder. Circles of turquoise in a nest of type. Swirls of Betz White's felted wool cupcake pincushions I made for Christmas. A sweet circle of blogging friends and neighbor friends to visit. And a circle of women writers I am eager to rejoin.

Finished projects, future projects, circles of promise. They remind me that this torpor I am feeling is just a brief, albeit recurring, stop on this sometimes crazy loop of life. 

Wordless Wednesday: Signs

Housedreaming, in color

My mind is a box of crayons. An old cigar box, the paper peeling off one corner. The crayons are old, from different sets. Some have lost their paper wrapping, naked and nameless. Others are broken bits, but still useful. The crayons have jostled each other, bumped their snub noses against the sides of the box, leaving a rainbow smudge, like a tub ring, around the inside of the box.

Too often I shut that box. (And not just shut it, but place it in a high cabinet, doors closed, inaccessible.) But today it is open. My hand sifts through the color, fingers the gray crayon to capture the leaden winter sky, the depth of the cold lake I see from a distance, my own gray heart. I pause and let it fall back into the box. It's not the color I need today.

Push aside the paper-wrapped sticks of color, searching. Ah, pumpkin. The sheen of fall. Coral, a heart beating in time to ocean tides. Glossy electric blue, the living room walls my brother painted. Lilac and green, the embellishment on a delicate valentine of a starched linen handkerchief.

I think I will color the world today.

Cookie Time

Buckwheat Flying Apron Biscuits

I have to admit something. You know how I mentioned that we follow a primarily plant-based diet as a family? The stress is on the "primarily." There's that other part of our diet that's indulgent and allows in some animal products.

We've been on a cookie bender since the holidays, with no sign of a let up. Before Christmas, my daughter made a batch of Tex-Mex polvorones, pecan shortbread cookies crisped with butter and dredged in powdered sugar. These were staples of my mother's holiday baking, and what a proud mama I was when my daughter decided to keep that tradition going.

Polvorones (Pecan Sandies)

Gingerbread cookies made up the main activity on several December play dates. My boys and their friends decorated three batches of gingerbread cookies and made Not Martha's wee gingerbread houses.

(Just a reminder to myself for next Christmas baking season: Megan's advice to chill the dough both before rolling it out and after cutting the house shapes made the cooked shapes precise and build-ready. And I think the perfect crisp gingerbread recipe can be found on the back cover of Jim Aylesworth's Gingerbread Man. Extra bonus: we sat down in the warm kitchen while the cookies baked and enjoyed the hypnotic repetition of the text and the vintage-looking illustrations by Barbara McClintock.)

And for those of you keeping track, those polvorones are made with butter--from a cow--and the gingerbread also, along with one farm-fresh egg--from a chicken. Decidedly non-plant-based, though technically still vegetarian.

And to combat the chill outside in January, we have heated up the stove and made batches of vegan chocolate chip cookies (which were gobbled up after the middle school orchestra concert last night; my husband says that most kids will eat ANYTHING involving chocolate) and peanut butter cookies. And that's just this week.

So how do I justify these little indulgences? The house heats up nicely and fills with that lovely toasty-sweet aroma that wraps around us and buffers us from the winter chill. The kids take a break from the Wii and the TV and the computer and actually converse with me and each other. They spill juicy details about their day. Those add up to a pretty hefty spiritual payoff to me, all for the cost of a cookie.

The kids have even tried my gluten-free, vegan (GFV) cookie experiments. Last weekend I was well into whipping up the Flying Apron's GFV Buckwheat Biscuit recipe (yes, buckwheat is gluten-free!) before I realized that the biscuits weren't savory but sweet, as in English biscuits (what we Yanks would call cookies). My version turned out looking a little like hockey pucks, but they have the texture of a shortbread cookie (which is a texture I have found hard to achieve with gluten-free flours) and remind me of that distinctive sweet crunch of a graham cracker. They go nicely with a cup of hot tea.

Before my blood sugar and waistband get me off this cookie-based diet, I plan to try a decadent-sounding gluten-free peanut butter cookie recipe sent by my friend Jillian. These GFV cookie recipes from the Gluten-Free Goddess may be worth the calories.

If you decide to indulge as well, let me know, and we can have a virtual January tea-and-cookie klatch to chase away the winter blahs. I'd love to discuss how you balance that tricky divide between healthy eating and indulgence. And maybe you can give me a little advice about the biggest question I faced over the holidays: how do you honor beloved food traditions and adhere to a healthy diet? (Frankly, sticking to the gluten-free, vegan diet over the holidays made me a little nuts, and others as well!)

Ithaca Waldorf School Elves' Faire, 12/11

A Tex-Mex Winter Feast

Tofu Guisada

November and December were mild in upstate New York, with little snow. January has decidedly ushered in winter. We've had single-digit temperatures for several days in a row over the last few weeks. It started snowing on Friday morning--the kids were so excited walking to school, stopping frequently to pack snowballs to throw--and it snowed pretty steadily for two days. We have a nice few inches on the ground, and the trees have a more solid presence now that they are outlined in white.

Oh, but I am feeling the cold, with the temperatures dipping into the single digits overnight and the chill persisting well into the mornings.

I'm seeking comfort in food: soups and stews and noodles and anything warm and rib-sticking. I'm finding special comfort in preparing the Mexican dishes that my mother and aunts and grandmothers made when I was a kid. I still associate the smells of toasted cumin seeds and garlic, ground in a molcajete, and carmelizing onions and peppers with family and welcome: with the warm kitchens that my grandmothers cooked in and emerged from to greet us when we visited during the holidays.

The problem is that these dishes are traditionally made with meat, cheese, and lard, and my family switched to a primarily plant-based diet last year.

Thankfully, I'm finding that, with a few substitutions, the Tex-Mex dishes from my childhood adapt pretty well to a plant-based (and gluten-free, for me) diet.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite dishes to have for a special dinner was carne guisada, which I have seen translated as braised beef tips. It's essentially a dish that uses an inexpensive cut of meat, which becomes magically tender as it bubbles away in a cumin-spiced gravy. My mother would sometimes make this dish with venison, cutting the meat into small cubes and browning them in sizzling Crisco. I would eat my portion and then sop up the gravy with a tortilla "spoon."

Here's a gluten-free, vegan version of my childhood favorite, made with organic tofu from our local Ithaca Soy. The spices are the same familiar ones that remind me of home. (Edited to add: Please note that I don't use precise measurements when I cook, so the quantities are approximate. You can use more or less spice according to your taste and liquid to the desired thickness of the gravy.)

Tofu Guisada

1/2 onion, diced very small
1 small bell pepper, diced very small
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 TBSP olive oil OR 1/2 cup vegetable stock
1 package firm tofu, drained and cubed
1 TBSP cumin powder
1 TBSP red chile powder
salt and pepper to taste
2 TBSP brown rice flour
2 TBSP Bragg Liquid Aminos*
1 TBSP toasted sesame oil
~1 cup vegetable broth
(Edited to add: *Bragg Liquid Aminos is a non-GMO, wheat-free, low-sodium alternative to soy sauce. It adds a nice "umami" flavor to a vegetarian dish.)

Saute the onions, bell pepper, and minced garlic in either the olive oil or the vegetable broth until carmelized, on medium-high heat. Add the cubed tofu to the vegetables and brown. Add the spices. And the brown rice flour and stir until browned. Add the Bragg liquid aminos and toasted sesame oil and mix well. Add the vegetable broth a little at a time. Cook on high heat until the gravy bubbles, and then turn to low, cooking about 5-10 minutes, until the tofu absorbs the flavors.

You can serve the tofu guisada on a bed of mixed greens, garnished with bean sprouts and grated carrot for extra crunch, and guacamole on the side. It's also good wrapped in homemade flour tortillas, which my kids call "Mommy-tillas," or corn tortillas.

It makes me happy that I can introduce my children to the flavors of my childhood. I hope that they'll be able to continue the tradition with their own families.

Mommy-tillas