Pray Street

I don’t believe in living with one's own art. I’ve spent the past few days debulking my house of paintings, drawings, frames, and supplies. Canvases rolled up under the bed, paintings stacked in the hallways, closets filled with stretched work (I hate stretched paintings, so easy to damage, so awkward to transport…)
All that stuff now has a home in my studio, where it can be properly inventoried, stored, and looked-through. I can begin to think straight again.
The artwork I want to live with is that of others, my friends and colleagues, inspiration and memories.
Here’s an exception, though. I did this painting of my grandparent’s backyard almost 20 years ago. I remember the afternoons I spent on the patio making it. Now their house is empty, unsaleable in this economy. My relatives still hope it’s valuable, when like all property, it’s not, and moreover, the house if falling to ruins.
But my memories of it are like this painting, dotted with sunshine, softened with a martini, sharpened with practical advice and intelligent conversation. I don’t even feel it's my painting, it has so many other meanings in it now.

I promised I wouldn’t complain.

I did.
My legislators are locked up trying to cut thousands of state jobs, and it’s very real I might soon have time on my hands.
But today I was stressed. I taught four hours of linear perspective, hopped in my car for a half hour drive to my next school, eating en route, to teach another three hours on the same subject. Which, if you’ve ever tried it, is hard to learn, let alone teach. Vanishing points, cast shadows (did you know that sun and artificial light function differently when rendered in 2D?)…
So I’m taking roll in my afternoon class, and notice a student absent for a second day. Maybe he’s dropped. I call his name to make sure he’s not there. A moment later another student comes and whispers in my ear that the absent student died last week. Some kind of accident. He was 18.
And then I had to continue to teach the class in a shock at the loss. Sort of put things into perspective.

Blurry

I had a dream that my grandmother came back to us as a physical spirit. My mother, aunt and I waited for her in a house, and heard her walk up to the door. We opened it to find a woman, about the right height, with little glimmers of her about the eyes, but it was not her. She told us that she was “soft” and unformed, the product of our shifting memories. That she’d come into focus as we thought about her in more concrete terms, like the shape of her eyebrows, or how her wrists were boney with arthritis.
I think I’m missing the way she saw things so clearly.

Love, Bubbah

Today my brother would have been 41 years old.

Signed by the Living in Memory of the Dead

Here’s how one of the masks turned out for the Day of the Dead show. A friend and I each wore one and people wrote on our faces.
Mine is all covered with the names of dead grandmothers:
Lucille
Frieda
Francisca
Mattie
Isa
Zoe
Violet
Lilly
Mitsy
Rachel
Rose
Bella
Guadalupe
Mama Concha
Irma
Lola Maria
Florence
Clara
Beulah
Grandma B.

600th Post, or the Day After the Day of the Dead

Halloween was successful, my Devil and Grim Reaper got the candy, and respect, they craved.
Art opening was successful, although my 4” heels nearly did me in.
I spent part of today cemetery hopping--was very pleased to see the red, orange and yellow flowers flooding the graves, and many people still sitting around in their lawn chairs.
I also checked out a possible art studio in an arty little neighborhood. Now I just have to figure if I can afford it.
Or maybe I can’t not afford it at this point.

Skulls

Fall’s gruesome holidays are almost upon us. I’ve been invited to participate in a Day of the Dead art exhibition, and spent last night sewing “lucha libre” skulls. At the opening on Nov. 1st I’ll ask people to write remembrances of their grandmothers on a mask as I wear it.
I do like the Mexican celebration of death, rather than my own heritage’s grim respect. I would like to laugh at death too. Right now it’s the one-year anniversary of my gram’s “passing,” and I’m missing her. A lot.

Table/Turtle^haus

An old friend of mine in NYC has started a new blog called Turtle^haus. It’s about real living in spaces we create. She’s a fantastically gifted woman: architect, librarian, translator (mostly movies Italian/English), writer, mom, and life enthusiast.
Her first post made me write the story of my table. (And yes, that's my painting hanging above her table in Brooklyn.)
...
The oak clawfoot table pictured above was in my grandmother’s childhood home in Fort Wayne, Indiana. When my great-grandparents died, it was shipped out to California, and for years my grandmother served her extended family on it. Later, as she got older, the cooking fell to me, and I loaded it with dishes and then wiped it clean once a week.
It’s both elegant and strangely primitive. The grain is heavy and the color dark. It has several leaves, and can accommodate about 16 people.
When she was dying, my grandmother told me she wanted me to have the table. At first I thought, no, it’s not my style, I like modern furniture. But later I realized, Kloe don’t be stupid, this is such a gift. However, when she died there was no mention in the will that the table was to go to me, and my uncle proposed to sell it. I protested, but to no avail. Luckily, later he got down on his back under it, and found the post-it in my gram’s hand—said the table was mine.
So now I have it, and it serves as a metaphor for my creative projects and family life. We use it as a project table: play games on it, do homework on it, make artwork on it (protected of course). Someday I’ll again use it as my kitchen table and serve pot roast on it like my gram taught me.
It is one of my most prized possessions.

Missing my Elders

The other day I was in Costco sorting out my membership so I could again purchase way too much stuff and eat a free lunch of food samples. Not to mention buy gas at 30 to 40 cents per gallon below normal. OK, I admit I’m suburban at heart although I fight the good fight.
Anyway, my original membership was with my grandmother. So I’m explaining that she died, and the woman helping me keeps repeating on the phone and to supervisors, “the grandmother passed away.” And every time she said it, I could feel my composure slip a bit. Until I finally started weeping, right there at the Costco membership counter amid crying kids and hotdog eaters.
It makes me realize how much I miss her. Most of my life I spent a night a week with my grandparents, and I haven’t been able to replace that ritual.
I also miss when my parents are out of town, and am thankful when they return.

Response Quote

I had to go into my grandmother’s house again, for the first time in five months. Took cashmere skirts and hand-knitted cardigans, dead plants in pots, soccer balls, depressing detritus.
I was pressed into accepting a small bulletin board from the garage pinned mostly with xeroxed cartoons. But cut out carefully was this quote:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point to satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do it with the approval of their consciences.

C.S. Lewis

What Kloe is Missing

I accidentally opened my email account to a page that showed letters from a year ago. And there was my gram, vivid and alive, advising and loving me from SoCal to Turkey. Her birthday is soon, like mine, and I really miss her.
Here is what she wrote me:

Dear Kloe.
I'm imagining that you are having a completely wonderful
time at your show in Ankara. Trust you are living up to the
recognition and the satisfaction that comes with it. Hope your health survives.
Today I was going around my house and reading from your sketches and
paintings the dates they were done. How much angst when you had to pay for
framing them and spending time in the so-called gallery . Things from 1990, Mexico, Arizona desert, Africa, Spain. Thanks for not giving up.
I enjoy everything of yours, back to when you drew yourself practicing
the piano at age 10.
Best of success at each thing you are doing. Your blog has been
great--even though I don't always "get it".
Gram

How to Stay Home

My self-employed grandfather planned for his retirement and eventual demise carefully. His oft-repeated goal was to stay in his house until the end. As a young child I remember visiting my great-grandfather in a “home”—I never asked why or how he ended up there—but it was not a good place. My grandfather didn’t want that.
He ended up staying in his house, with my gram and nurses caring for him, until a few weeks before his death, when he had to be moved into a convalescent hospital; the end-stage of his disease was just too devastating for home care. I was eight months pregnant at the time, and thought my grief might throw me into labor.
My gram died at home. The last four months she was totally housebound because of 24-hour oxygen. I wonder if all that money and planning was worth it. It didn’t make dying any easier. She was depressed often, and furious at her helplessness. But she died in her own bed.
I’m studying Ancient Egyptian art, how the pharaohs prepared for death by building huge monuments where their spirit would reside forever. These tombs resembled their homes. They led short lives on earth: beautiful Nefertiti was probably in her late 30s when she died, Tut was only 19.
4000 years later we’re still obsessed with the same basic problem.

Another Death

Yesterday an artist colleague died suddenly, relatively young. Although I was surprised, I also understood. He led one of those hard lives we traditionally allow creative people. We want our artists to experience life sharply, extremely, and give this information back to us in their work. And so these men and women are fragile emotionally and physically, and they sometimes die, like Heath Leger, before they should have.
But we don’t consciously choose these highes and lows, this non-stable lifestyle so different from the norm. Most of us can’t really help that we crave deep, often painful experiences. It feeds our work, and our work makes us hungry for new ways of being. Not all artists are like this, but many, including me, are.
(Another Martin Puryear sculpture at MOMA.)

More Thoughts on Dying

I just watched the film La Vie en Rose, and it made me think of my gram. Edith Piaf and she were born in the same year, 1913. To think what my gram went through living the 20th century… My grandparents loved the songs of Piaf, and I grew up listening to her records at their house.
When people become elderly and sickly, it’s my experience that, even if they keep their marbles, rational thinking gets lost somewhere in their suffering. When you are dying it’s fair to become self-centered and self-absorbed (the movie portrays this well). The closest I’ve been to this state was going into labor, when you know something momentous is happening, but you have no idea how you will handle it emotionally or physically. I know labor isn’t death, but both are unavoidable and overwhelming and scary.
I went through an emotional rollercoaster living with a dying woman. She both wanted me to be with her and resented me for the things I wasn’t there for. She couldn’t handle my kids, but she loved them. She wasn’t always honest with me, but that wasn’t new; my family works in labyrinthine ways.
Last night my little guy, who is named after her father, said he missed his great grandmother. He’s such a sensitive boy, he was trying to comfort me.
Sorry to be so maudlin, but this is my blog and I’ll gnash my teeth if I want to.

The Longest Night

Who is to judge?
Maybe our last days in this life can be the best. Maybe the guacamole tastes perfectly balanced, the sky has never been bluer, the sheets on our bed so soft after being washed 1000 times.
Maybe we should linger in our dying, because we value these final sunsets and cups of coffee. Why are people waiting for us to die? Because they are so uncomfortable with the fact of dying, that’s why.
And it was easier, in the beginning, because life just faded away, instead of being cut off suddenly.
But grief also builds in reverse.
Bits of thread, wound on a spool, are a perfect symbol of my grandmother’s generation, who lived through the great depression and war after war. Her parents spoke German, poor like everyone else. She made herself.
Why can I not do it, with so much more?
This is my 399th post.

Domestic Inheritance

My grandmother taught me to sew. I always went to her house to use her machine, an early Singer. And so she promised it to me.
I don’t sew clothes. I mend, I make costumes, I renew sheets and towels and pillows. Now the Singer is in my house, near me, along with the notions chest, full of tiny treasures. I used the machine for the first time, to hem some new pants for Kid.01. Bittersweet.

Who is Left in the End?

When you get very old, and all your contemporaries are shut-in or dead, with whom do you interact? Well, if you’re lucky, your family. Otherwise, your caregivers. At the final years of my gram’s life, these were the people who came through, who were there at the end, who cried the tears. Current caregivers, former caregivers, mothers and daughters of caregivers. The family was in and out, but the caregivers stayed.
Image of Ground Zero, NYC

Other Ways to Go

This video artist, Jeremy Blake, recently walked into the ocean after his longtime girlfriend, Theresa Duncan, also killed herself. They were a young NYC/LA couple, hip and cultured, successful by most standards artists hold themselves to.
This double suicide has fascinated the Artworld. They were beautiful, they were popular, they were on the way up. She wrote a cryptic and intelligent blog. They were also apparently paranoid and frustrated. I wonder if the constant stress of keeping up the image of “artist” was involved. I wonder about myself, if I could keep up the image, if I should do it. It’s a very selfish lifestyle.

Best Way to Go

My Grandma S. died in her late 60s and we thought my Grandpa S. would soon follow. But he blossomed after the death of his wife of 50 years: lost weight, sold most of his stuff, pared his life down to only essentials. He was like Yoda.
Grandpa was a snowbird for years, coming down from NoCal to the SoCal desert for the winter months. I’d paint out there with him, staying in his tiny camper (once I brought a boyfriend and it wasn’t much appreciated…) He fed me oatmeal and didn’t give me advice.
This widower legend finally got too old to drive, and lived in a mobile home park, gently chuckling at life, until he got sick, went to hospital and died after two weeks. Saw him before he left, and he was still smiling. He greeted my kids as the “Future Presidents of America.”
Tree photo with white gouache by Tacita Dean at MOMA

Funeral

Got through it. Party was good. Everyone exhausted.
That evening we saw a Black Crowned Night Heron. It stood in the light a few minutes, and then unfolded it’s squatty body into a huge and graceful W as it took off.
Am going to NYC tomorrow to be with friends and see art.
Take care of yourselves,
Kloe