Woman Dancing By Herself

When I first posted this drawing today I gave it the title "Woman Dancing Alone," but in thinking about the drawing afterward, I remembered that it is called "Woman Dancing by Herself." She is not dancing alone.

People With Their Eyes Closed/Baby Girl (1984)

Looking at the first image, I remember those last dark years before I began to recover from an eating disorder. When I did that drawing, I was 34 years old, within months of the end of a marriage that was dead, and acutely aware that as long as I had an eating disorder I would never be able to be a mother. I didn't know where this drawing came from, as I had not had this image in mind when I sat down to draw. The image still disturbs me almost to nausea. 

During this time, a friend of mine commissioned me to do a drawing from a photograph of her firstborn daughter. I didn't think that my style lent itself to doing portraits of babies, and I said so. She insisted that whatever I did would be fine. She was pleased with the result. I almost didn't post this drawing because today I find the vulnerability of this happy baby girl, drawn in this manner, to be unsettling. 

As I wrote in my December 15th post, the human body is vulnerable and sacred. When I did the drawing, I was not at all in touch with my own vulnerability because I was eating massive amounts of food to keep from feeling vulnerable. 

 One of my earliest memories, at 2 years and 1 month old, is that I was standing next to a stone birdbath which had a statue in the middle of it. I looked down at the clear water and old leaves at the bottom of the birdbath and debated whether I should touch the water. It looked beautiful to me. At that age I was quite aware that there were many things I wasn't supposed to touch, and I knew I didn't want to be punished. But the water was so inviting, and I decided to take the risk. I remember reaching my hand into the cool water and then being startled to hear someone saying my name. When I looked up, my picture was being taken. I distinctly and clearly remember feeling fear that I had been caught doing something I shouldn't do. I felt vulnerable and not at all sacred. I am always amazed when I see people talking in front of 2 year olds as if they were not present.

Yom and Karuna (1984)

In spring of 1975, I was working in a large warehouse as an industrial sewing machine operator, assembling ski pants with eight to ten women of various ages. One day, a large group of Vietnamese women was introduced to us as our new co-workers. They were among the first group of refugees who came from Vietnam after the war ended. I became friends with Yom (the name she took when she came to the United States), who was close in age to me and who had spent some years as a young girl and young woman in what sounded like a Catholic orphanage and who had not been adopted. A family had sponsored Yom to come to the United States after the war ended. They helped her until she was able to live on her own. 

Sometime around when I began doing the pastel drawings I've been posting, Yom went to India as a volunteer working in an orphanage and there she made friends with Karuna. Yom had some hopes of adopting Karuna but wasn't able to adopt her. Yom brought me her favorite photo of Karuna, along with a photo of Yom and said that she would like to commission me to do a drawing with both of them together. I told her that it might take a long time for me to do the drawing, but that I would give it a try. I didn't have the confidence that I could get a good enough likeness. 

A year later, after much procrastinating, I sat down and did the above drawing, which is a good likeness. Yom loved the drawing. This is one of two drawings that I did on a commission basis during the early 1980's. On a third occasion, I was commissioned to paint a Muppet mural on the wall of a child's bedroom. All three commissions were successful, but I found that doing commissions was extremely stressful for me and have not done any since then.

Witness with Blue Hair (1984)

When I first tried to upload the images for today, I got this message: Safari can’t open the page “http://www2.blogger.com/upload-image.do”. The error was: “bad server response” (NSURLErrorDomain:-1011) 

 After trying a few things, I noticed that I was trying to upload a TIFF image instead of a JPEG image. Once I converted the image to JPEG, there was no problem. What a relief to be able to figure that out! 

Visual art forms bear witness, as do the written word and the spoken word and song. This witness is singing. The second image above no longer exists except as a reproduction. The first image is a cropped version (created using iPhoto) of the reproduction. 

After I had thought this pastel drawing was complete and after I had photographed it sometime in 1984, the red and black bars on the left side of the drawing began to bother me. They seemed to limit and inhibit this witness, so I got out my scissors and removed the left side of the drawing but failed to photograph the cropped version. 

Sometime later, I was showing photographs to a man who was interested in buying one of my drawings. He asked about the uncropped photograph of "Witness with Blue Hair." When I told him that I had cropped it, he said that if I would reattach the cropped part, he would buy the drawing. I refused, but he bought another drawing instead. A short time later, another man bought the cropped version.

Witness with Courage (1984)

There is fierce wind and rain outside my window this morning. The lights have been flickering. Georgia O'Keeffe said: “I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life -- and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

Photo by Todd Webb, Georgia O'Keeffe sketching at age 74 in 1961

Young Woman (1983)

Today is the first day of 2007. January 1 is one of a number of days that celebrate a new year. 

This young woman might be witnessing the first light of a new year. December 8 will be the New Year's Day for this blog. It is nearly a month since I began blogging. In the first week of February, I will be showing a series of watercolor and gouache paintings that I did beginning in 1987, which was the year my eating disorder recovery began. Those paintings are called "The Calendar Series" and were pivotal in my healing. 

The drawings and paintings we have looked at so far came from a part of me that thrived despite an eating disorder that had plagued me throughout most of my life prior to 1987.

Untitled Witness (1983)

Until now, I hadn't made the connection that "Untitled Witness" from 1983 is related to the drawing from 1966 that I posted on this blog on December 8, 2006, "Imaginary Brother as Witness": In both images, I see a young person who is a witness to something unnamed, a person who is marked and changed by what was witnessed. He is not guilty, but he is no longer innocent. 

As I look at these drawings I remember Bob Dylan singing: “. . . Ring them bells, for the time that flies, for the child that cries when innocence dies . . .” (from “Ring Them Bells,” Bob Dylan, 1989) “ . . . In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face . . .” (from “Every Grain of Sand," Bob Dylan, 1981) “ . . . I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn . . ." (from "Shelter From the Storm,” Bob Dylan, 1974) “ . . . The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone . . .” (from “Tombstone Blues,” Bob Dylan, 1965) 

 "I was thinking of a series of dreams Where nothing comes up to the top Everything stays down where it's wounded And comes to a permanent stop Wasn't thinking of anything specific Like in a dream, when someone wakes up and screams Nothing too very scientific Just thinking of a series of dreams Thinking of a series of dreams Where the time and the tempo fly And there's no exit in any direction 'Cept the one that you can't see with your eyes Wasn't making any great connection Wasn't falling for any intricate scheme Nothing that would pass inspection Just thinking of a series of dreams Dreams where the umbrella is folded Into the path you are hurled And the cards are no good that you're holding Unless they're from another world In one, numbers were burning In another, I witnessed a crime 

In one, I was running, and in another All I seemed to be doing was climb Wasn't looking for any special assistance Not going to any great extremes I'd already gone the distance Just thinking of a series of dreams" (from "Series of Dreams," Bob Dylan, 1991) 

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Today is the last day of 2006. 

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Child stepped

leapt 

grew steady 

everything under the sun is new. 

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Kind wishes to all for the New Year.

Sleepless Woman with Moon and Birds (1983)

It required some thinking before I could remember the name of this drawing. It wasn't until around 1987 that I began to write down the names that I gave to my drawings and paintings. Once again, I am finding that looking back at my work is a good exercise of my memory. 

This drawing has a connection to a poem I wrote in the early 1980's called "A Nation of Sleepless Women," which I posted yesterday. I was disappointed in the way the color of the image came through the first time I uploaded it because it had a cold blue look. The true image has much warmer blues. All of the colors are warmer, and even the black area is a warmer black. So, I went into iPhoto to see if I could remedy that. I clicked on "adjustments" and began playing with the brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, tint, sharpness and exposure. I even discovered how to straighten the photo! What a revelation! The only thing I couldn't adjust to my satisfaction was the color up against the woman's face. The red near the woman's face in the first uploaded image is more like the original red. In the original image on paper, it is a red with more blue in it than orange. Of course, seeing a reproduction is not the same as seeing a drawing, but I got as close as I could to the spirit of the original drawing in the second uploaded image.

Just to see what it would look like, I made it into a black and white image.