Anticipation is making me quake

I am so close to finishing this painting I can feel it.
My heart is beating fast and and my fingers are trembling.
I even have a title already, The Mermaid.

close up photo of the face (Jan 2013)

January's Essay

I AM STILL A PAINTER


About five years ago, I made a choice, a choice to be a teacher.

It was the spring of 2007. I had been painting and exhibiting in Philly for about a decade. Even though I had sold paintings, I worried about the future. During those ten years, I learned how difficult it would be for me to earn any kind of living from my artwork. I finally understood why my Dad never wanted me to study art. He wanted me to be financially stable. Despite his wise advice, which I totally dismissed as a young adult, I chose to be a painter. How did I make this choice? I declared “Painting” as my major in college. It seemed rather simple back then, but I was far from being any kind of artist. I was a student and I knew nothing. It would be years before I could comfortably introduce myself to new people as a painter.
 
Anyway, in the fall of 2007, I took a class, The History of Art Education, at Temple University with Dr. Jo-Anna Moore. I loved the class. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed being in a learning environment. My new professor came in the form of a soft-spoken grandmother, a persona that hid her startling intelligence. My new classmates were bright and inspiring as well, so I applied to Temple to pursue a Masters in Art Education.
 
For three years, I told myself that I was no longer an artist. I was making a new choice, a choice to earn a decent living from something else that I love, sharing my passion for art with students. I was on a new path. I wrapped up my studio and converted it into an office. I made artwork during the summer and in the studio classes I took at Tyler, but for the most part, my focus was elsewhere.
 
However, once the bulk of my class work was complete, I set up my studio again. I still had a master’s paper to write, but time was again on my side.
 
Before I graduated, I had an exit portfolio review. I showed pieces made during my time in graduate school. Even though I barely had time to make art, the room was full. Years prior, I thought I had to give up being an artist to be a teacher. As I looked around, I realized just how important artmaking is to me. Even when I had no time, I found time. One of my professors asked where I saw my work going. I held up my newest painting, one that I had just made in my recently converted studio/office space. I said, “This is a painting I made with only a palette knife, no brush. This is a new approach for me and I think I love it.” The painting I was referring to is Phillyscape. I added, “I want to make more like this one.”
 
And that is exactly what I have done. I made a dozen more in this new style and without realizing it, I was back to being a painter.
 
Yesterday, I revised my list of artworks. It is a list that includes 16 years of making art (1997-2013) after completing my BFA. The last entry is numbered 140. Looking over the list, I made a realization. My work did not get really good, according to my standards, until the year 2008. This means I spent about 11 years making mostly crap. It wasn’t crap to me when I made it, but now that I am older, I see much of my early work as practice. I was trying to be good, but I wasn’t good.
 
To truly understand what I am talking about, I will leave you with the best quote about being an artist, thanks to Ira Glass. Every working artist out there can sympathize.

January 27th, 2013
K. Cicalese

Feeling Monochromatic

Today's palette.

Two of my favorite things

Cats and drawing. Timeless loves.

The Schmich Suncreen Speech (made famous by Vonnegut)

Decided to see if I could find a link to that Vonnegut speech I was going on and on about yesterday. As it turns out, he didn't write it. It was a newspaper column by a woman named Mary Schmich. The original piece of writing appeared June 1, 1997 in the Chicago Tribune. Mary wrote:

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 1997:

Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

Don't worry about the future. Oh worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 P.M. on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Sing.

Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.

Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone.

Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself, either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.

Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders. Respect your elders.

Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.

Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen.

She said it was an imaginary speech, what she would say if ever invited to give a commencement address. Here's a link to an article about the hoax, which says that anyone who didn't know about this must have been living in a bomb shelter (The Kurt Vonnegut Sunscreen Speech - Urban Legends). Now I can tell you that I was not living in a bomb shelter and I was not the only one to be duped. The copy of the Vonnegut speech was included in a newsletter sent to my step-dad from his horseshoe group. The postage on the newsletter revealed it was sent out August 23, 1997. Ms. Schmich, the rightful author, revealed she was the actual author in her column on August 3, 1997. She wrote:

I am Kurt Vonnegut.

Oh, Kurt Vonnegut may appear to be a brilliant, revered male novelist. I may appear to be a mediocre and virtually unknown female newspaper columnist. We may appear to have nothing in common but unruly hair.

But out in the lawless swamp of cyberspace, Mr. Vonnegut and I are one. Out there, where any snake can masquerade as king, both of us are the author of a graduation speech that began with the immortal words, "Wear sunscreen."

I was alerted to my bond with Mr. Vonnegut Friday morning by several callers and e-mail correspondents who reported that the sunscreen speech was rocketing through the cyberswamp, from L.A. to New York to Scotland, in a vast e-mail chain letter.

Friends had e-mailed it to friends, who e-mailed it to more friends, all of whom were told it was the commencement address given to the graduating class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The speaker was allegedly Kurt Vonnegut.

Imagine Mr. Vonnegut's surprise. He was not, and never has been, MIT's commencement speaker. Imagine my surprise. I recall composing that little speech one Friday afternoon while high on coffee and M&M's. It appeared in this space on June 1. It included such deep thoughts as "Sing," "Floss," and "Don't mess too much with your hair." It was not art.

But out in the cyberswamp, truth is whatever you say it is, and my simple thoughts on floss and sunscreen were being passed around as Kurt Vonnegut's eternal wisdom.

Poor man. He didn't deserve to have his reputation sullied in this way. So I called a Los Angles book reviewer, with whom I'd never spoken, hoping he could help me find Mr. Vonnegut.

"You mean that thing about sunscreen?" he said when I explained the situation. "I got that. It was brilliant. He didn't write that?"

He didn't know how to find Mr. Vonnegut. I tried MIT.

"You wrote that?" said Lisa Damtoft in the news office. She said MIT had received many calls and e-mails on this year's "sunscreen" commencement speech. But not everyone was sure: Who had been the speaker?

The speaker on June 6 was Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, who did not, as Mr. Vonnegut and I did in our speech, urge his graduates to "dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room." He didn't mention sunscreen.

As I continued my quest for Mr. Vonnegut -- his publisher had taken the afternoon off, his agent didn't answer -- reports of his "sunscreen" speech kept pouring in.

Fortunately, not everyone who read the speech believed it was Mr. Vonnegut's. "The voice wasn't quite his," sniffed one doubting contributor to a Vonnegut chat group on the Internet. "It was slightly off -- a little too jokey, a little too cute a little too 'Seinfeld.' "

I did, however, finally track down Mr. Vonnegut. He picked up his own phone. He'd heard about the sunscreen speech from his lawyer, from friends, from a women's magazine that wanted to reprint it until he denied he wrote it.

"It was very witty, but it wasn't my wittiness," he generously said.

Reams could be written on the lessons in this episode. Space confines me to two.

One: I should put Kurt Vonnegut's name on my column. It would be like sticking a Calvin Klein label on a pair of K-Mart jeans. Two: Cyberspace, in Mr. Vonnegut's word, is "spooky."

On August 6, 1997, the NYTimes squashed the internet mix-up (A Column That Was Only Written, Never Delivered - New York Times). And this morning, when I realized I made a mistake, I laughed, and thought this mix-up is what made this woman famous. Like she said, she put an expensive label on a cheap product and look what happened. Cyberspace, the world's best rumor monger.

Hoarding Gold

Grandpa's specs, letter, Grandma's diploma, and sculpture of Grandma

Remember in the old days, when people wrote handwritten letters?

Over winter break, I started sorting though boxes again in an attempt to further dehoard my space and I found gold, a 4-page handwritten letter from my grandmother. There were postcards from people who were on another continent, a slew of letters from friends (again, before e-mail), photos I took as a child (mostly of animals), a mix of childhood items with my name on them, but the letter was the treasure, the gold.  There is no date on the letter, but from its content, I suspect I am in my sophomore year of college. It is 1993 or 1994 and I am confused about what to do with my life. My grandmother passed in 2004. Finding this letter was like hearing her talk to me again and hearing her say, "I love you," as the written word pulled me back twenty years in time.

In the same little box of memories I found a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's commencement address to MIT from 1997. He offers lots of excellent advice to new graduates, but one quote resonates:

"Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't."

After reading both documents, I thought, I should have listened more to my elders. They knew best. However, I was young and ignorant, as if often the case with youth. I had to be bull-headed and make mistakes on my own. But the truth is, that is how we learn, by making these mistakes. And what I learned is ... wait, Kurt Vonnegut has advice for that too:

"Enjoy the power and beauty of youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine."

Self-Portrait (2012)

Self-Portrait (2012) graphite, colored pencil on vellum, 9 x 6 inches

 

Plank Girl (2012)

Plank Girl (2012), graphite and colored pencil on paper, 8 x 10 in

Open Heart (2012)

Open Heart (2012) oil on canvas, 10 x 8 inches

City of Color (2012)

City of Color (2012) oil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches