German Girl Art
Thoughts, Essays, Poetry
Thursday, November 14, 2024
Does Your Own Soul Need Comforting?
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
Ellipsis of Thoughts
Just as I cannot imagine a world without trees and animals, I cannot imagine a world without art.
It’s a glorious impulse to fly, to stretch, to greet the mysterious mirage, greater than the sum of all our human efforts.
This oasis nourishes the thirst in my soul / a known and unknown source recognized in my deepest subconsciousness / plumbing those strata is the marketplace of my dreams and imagination.
And within this realm lies a delicious paradox, that is not about me, and yet, it’s all about me because nothing happens until I act, otherwise it’s just air, only felt yet unseen. My physicality is vital to engage in this dance of collaboration. As I am the doer.
Even as I write this, I struggle to find the language to communicate what I know to be true. It’s a magic act, not created from the sleight of hand, but an illusionary dimension just beyond the aura of our sight, a world behind our eyes.
I remember holding my grandson when he was just a few months old and he would suddenly stiffen with an explosion of joy, a Grand Canyon wide smile on his new little face speaking in a language I no longer understood, and I knew I was in the presence of something large and wonderful.
I
believe we search all our living lives to reconnect with that nebulous spirit. And when we let go of our Selves and become its human tools,
together, we create art. We all came here with a unique song to sing; we just
need to have the courage to open our throats.
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Beckoning
How long does it take to make a painting?
Sunday, January 14, 2024
What Is Your Story?
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver
It’s an early Sunday morning in January and the new year is in its 14th day. The temperature outside is -8 with a windchill of -35, perfect conditions to enjoy a warm cup of coffee and reflect on what kind of person do I want to be.
With the jolt of caffeine, my mind begins an internal dialogue.
List the qualities and make it your life’s purpose to be guided by them. For instance, when you find yourself responding in a way that is not in keeping with your image, stop, breathe, and adjust.
Rebel thoughts and behaviors should be encouraged, it’s important to let our thoughts and actions roam free on the Plains of Individuality.
Sit quietly and consider these intuitive thoughts as they become your guideposts, soft slips of clay molding your heart into the person you want to be, no longer pulled by the actions of others, no longer an emotional puppet reacting to circumstances.
Reflect on how you are acting now and dive into change. Here is the fertile soil of your growth. At times it will be painful as you expand and crack your existing shell and metamorphosize into the soloist of this symphony we call life.
When someone hurts you and your immediate response is to defend yourself by striking out in kind, mirror your path of being a loving person, then choose forgiveness and let go. I believe this is what Jesus meant when he said, “turn the other cheek”. Not becoming a weak victim but staying strong and true to your being.
We are the stories we tell ourselves. It is never too early or too late to ask, What kind of person do I want to be? Avoid the trap of becoming someone you really don’t want to be just to please. Share your ignorance with glee, so you can learn, then share your knowledge with gratitude, so you can teach.
We only have so many heartbeats. Our purpose is to make every beat count.
Friday, January 27, 2023
Girly Girly
When
we first brought Mollie home, she weighed a hefty four pounds and fit into my
purse. With all the cool non-chalance of being in the perfect bedchamber, she
would burrow into my open bag , find a comfortable spot and nap, as if the purse were made especially for her.
Our second cavalier, Max, a gorgeous chocolate- tri, didn’t have the same level of testosterone, none-the-less, you wouldn’t mistake him as anything but a boy.
2009, Max was two and a half years
old, and we decided to get him a companion, a 12-week-old black and tan,
petticoat girl. Mollie literally wiggled with curiosity and love – not for us,
but for Max. As soon as she saw him, she made a beeline for his side, as if
shouting, Yipeee,
one of mine. It took Max a few weeks to return the sentiment. However, once their bond was threaded, they
were braided together for life.
During her teething phase, she gnawed off the tip of a leather belt, chewed one new Birkenstock sandal to shreds and disfigured a diamond earring into an unrecognizable shape while digesting the diamond…no, I did not check her poop, instead I had a jeweler straighten the setting and put in a cubic zirconia. Now I can’t tell, nor do I care, l which earring is real, and which is “fake”. I marveled at her fashion sense.
Over the 13 years she was with us, she became anointed with many nicknames, including Shatze, Mollie moo moo, Princess, and the Dowager Princess when she reached the elegant age of 11. But my favorite was Girly Girl.
She didn’t have a frou frou wardrobe, she was more Golda Meir than Princess Di. She liked to walk about in her naked fur, all shiny black and tan. She loved belly rubs, leash free romps in the park. She loved resting her front paws around our necks and nuzzling us with her throat. Most of all she loved Max.
Food was her Vogue, and she was a non-discerning gourmet. Her dining etiquette, however, could have used a bit of advice from Emily Post. Though gentle, she could snap a treat from your hand faster than a magician. When dinner came, she would sit primly waiting, gazing at me with goddess like reverence, razor focused, as I made her bowl of farm to table fare. When ready, she would race to her dining spot with the speed of a Formula 1 race car driver, sitting in nervous anticipation until I served her. And like Houdini, her food would disappear with sensational speed.
The only thing that ever slowed her down was when I put blueberries in her bowl. I watched with amusement as she delicately removed every berry from her food and spit, yes spit it out onto the floor with energetic contempt.
After 13 years, 2 months and 18 days, a heart that beat with wild exuberance, broke, and stopped. Mollie passed away on December 18, 2022.
She was by Max’s side when he died
three years earlier. Today I imagine how
happy he was when her spirit ascended and met his on the other side.
I miss her sweet energy, trotting
behind with unquestioned loyalty and trust. The cozy cave in my heart keeps expanding.
Nestled inside are the four-legged companions who gifted me with their loving
presence. How blessed to have been chosen to be stewards of these amazing
beings.
Thursday, December 8, 2022
Love In The Park
Tuesday, November 15, 2022
A Brief
Description of the First Ab Ex Artists
Outlaws of the art world / beatniks
of color / renegades of content / shape shifters of consciousness with oil and
turpentine.
An alchemy born in smoke filled studios, composing a brave, nascent language even they, at times, did not understand / questioning value and substance / ultimately liberating the future from the order of realism and dunking us into the lyrical chaos of the unknown.
We would not be able to paint like we do without these early warriors, slashing a path through a foreign territory known as our interiority / giving us permission to seek the arcane in the subconscious / shushing our selves and allowing our daemons to speak.
Monday, July 18, 2022
Piece of Mind
a closet
full of contradictions
a wardrobe of non-conformity
her piece of mind
Wednesday, January 19, 2022
Secrets
Secrets are powerful aphrodisiacs; mysterious, alluring and
potentially dangerous depending on the secret and with whom you share
it.
When someone shares a secret, they give you a potent power,
trusting you are the trustworthy friend they believe you are.
Sharing a secret is relinquishing a burden, a bidding of sorts, asking
someone to share the weight of whatever it is that is haunting you.
Growing up in a Catholic home, I witnessed another kind of secret.
A mass said in an arcane language and an advocation of confession.
As you enter the confessional you are transported to a dimly lit
closet size room where you kneel on a cantilevered piece of wood that has been
wrapped in velvet and once settled in piety, a small, screened window quietly
slides open to reveal your absolver, a stand-in god.
You whisper your sins into the profile of a man earnestly leaning
in towards the breath of your words with the sacred knowledge that what you
confess will be held like executive privilege, never to be pried from his
mind nor lips. He passes down his judgement through a series of penances and
you rise with your soul once again bleached clean - if your conscious stays
mute.
Our secrets are witnesses to the unwritten pages
between our lives.
Some are frivolous / some are hurtful / some are damning
/ some should be revealed / some will be bound in our ashes, forever silent.
Saturday, June 12, 2021
Hush Hush
As an artist I am always searching for my spiritually covert language, the closed conversation between my soul and the Divine.
A sacred braid, we weave around and within each other, a linguistic hide and seek, building a wordless language through color, shape and structure.
The seeker becomes the sought.
And like an arcane chameleon / me and my Maker / we evolve, we mutate, we grow.
It is impossible to be immutable. Until the final molecule of oxygen escapes from my lips back into the Universe, where I will slowly dissolve, fading to stardust.
A rainbow / a glimmer / a sudden burst of brilliance.
Hush Hush
Tuesday, April 13, 2021
Stardust
I marvel at the stamina and resilience of my body, my feet and my legs. They have been faithfully carrying my increasing height and weight until my mid-twenties where I balanced upon my set point on six and half shoe size feet.
A joyous toast to you marvelous feet and marvelous legs, torso upright, arms swinging to music only I can hear, hands creating, well-shaped shoulders supporting neck and the regent, the head.
Time to travel inward where the unseen land of miracles performs night and day to a full house, without pause. The exquisitely extraordinary ballet of life; stomach, the uncontested conductor, sending signals through the dynamic vagus nerve to the brain which then orchestrates everyone into positions of optimum production, pumping red glory, all keeping the miracle of me alive!
I fill the corrugated-consciousness, complex maze of my mind with libraries of gratitude / happiness / health / kindness / patience / generosity. A symphony of electrical adjectives that shimmies my heart into gladness.
I feed you / food for thought / food for health / food for pleasure / formal exercise / sexual exercise / dancing / lifting / stretching / breathing / touching / feeling / on soaring wings of abundance / all critical for the river of blood to flow freely in an infinite loop of nourishment / a marvel beyond words / an ecstasy beyond landed experience.
I am the embodiment of stardust streaming / I am the embodiment of stardust dreaming.
Sunday, March 14, 2021
Breaking Rules
“There are no rules…go against the rules or ignore the rules.” Helen Frankenthaler
The above could have easily been expressed by Frankenthaler’s contemporary, Joan Mitchell. With a major difference in linguistic delivery. Mitchell would have simply said, “Fuck the rules.”
Like fabled Humpty Dumpty, once
cracked and shattered, the rules can never be put back together again.
Wednesday, February 17, 2021
What Is The Story?
Gallerists, other artists, and colleagues advise consistency as a way to brand you as the artist.
When I look at the body of work I have made over the past fourteen years, at the beginning, I was all over the place. A result of taking a lot of workshops and copying the style of the instructor. Quite normal, I am told.
Once I realized I had to go beyond the instructors and their techniques to develop my own style (and frankly, I don’t want my work to look like another artists), I still found that I took pleasure in the experimentation phase of painting. What if is a part of my internal dialogue. Over the past few years, I have been working in a more disciplined manner, and can see a consistency of my hand on the canvas.
Then in the late fall of 2018 I
re-discovered my love of collage and began developing a series that has no
resemblance to my paintings or mixed media work.
The
Black-Tie Affair
I am not here to tell you the
ending. I am here to show you the beginning. The rest is up to you.
My
Awareness is a Silhouette Floating in the Background
My painting are also a form of visual storytelling told with pigment and paint. Here I strive to create worlds of calm, beauty and elegance. An oasis for the mind where you can lose yourself for a while, tuck the troubles of the world away and just dream.
My purpose as a non-objective painter is to create a visual landscape from the inside-out. The painting is my story and your story simultaneously. My version, your version, the true version.
Friday, January 29, 2021
A Puppy and His Unique Taste Buds Leads the Author on a Thoughtful Journey
Our puppy, Nigel, discovered a weird and to a human, disgusting appetizer, wild goose poop. Before I could stop him, he had ingested several green droppings, which he discovered on our mid-day walk past the man-made pond in our neighborhood.
The next day, at exactly 2:48 am,
he barked me awake from a very warm and cozy sleep, with an urgent, I have
to go out..NOW.
I don’t fault the geese or the dogs, they both have a stake in the land. As do the coyotes and foxes that can prey on the smaller dogs, if they are not tethered to their two-legged companions.
Our eyes yearn for those pristine areas of majesty and our ears cry for their holy silence. When we see a photo, we are stunned by her beauty and wish to be transported, not to tame but to be held in her thrall, to honor, witness, and explore her wild wilderness.
So, when I see a coyote, or a fox, or a hawk flying high in the sky, I feel blessed to witness their wildness and I feel a measure of sadness as we continue to encroach on their stake in the land and force them into smaller and smaller spaces of survival. And I always make sure I know exactly where my four-legged companion is.
Tuesday, November 3, 2020
Did We Arrive Knowing?
As soon as we look at something, we change it, minute-micro
changes. We color the object or environment with our subconscious and conscious
perceptions. We bring our history, our bias, our opinion and create a new narrative,
adding another layer to the story.
We are all storytellers, richly manifesting our version of
reality into beingness. We walk into a space and we change it. Our unique
energy pulses and sparks the space with another level of truth.
As a collective we play a symphony, a quiet concerto, a
murmur of subtle differences. Our cones and rods filter the lens of our visual
and non-verbal information, reinterpreting it into our own making.
When did we first learn this skill? Did we arrive knowing?
Thursday, October 8, 2020
All The Time In The World
I feel as if I have all the time in the world and yet I have no time. The days slip by like warm taffy. Projects and goals have wavy boundaries. I move through the day in a hyper alert daze. This pandemic, poetically labeled, Covid 19, has restricted and liberated simultaneously.
I am more socially isolated allowing me the freedom to roam the inner corridors of my imagination. This multi-verse virus has created an unusual dichotomy; the surrealistic cave I find myself wrapped in has veiled my time in a shroud of lethargy and energy, coursing in tandem through me.
I
plan, I plot, I stand still - and wonder, what will the world be like when we
collectively awaken from this Kafkaesque dream?
These two poems were written one month apart, similar emotions, yet an increasing dread of *something wicked this way comes:
Pandemic Time l
The days run into each other
like children on a playground -
pressed together like p b & j.
What day is it? I wonder.
I test myself.
I think it’s Wednesday.
Are you sure?
I think so.
I doubt.
I look at my phone for confirmation.
The days run into each other
like children on a playground -
carefree
careless
careful.
Pandemic Time ll
These times move me
to moments of intense clarity.
I pull myself into this moment,
this now.
Staying in this present
keeps the wolves of fear at bay -
as they lurk
at the outer edges
of my invisible eyes.
They wake me at night
pounding on the door
of my heart.
I lurch into awareness –
and repeat this mantra,
I
here
as I slow the internal thunder.
Saturday, August 8, 2020
The Glorification of Idiocy
Our country has been infected by a malignant consciousness that glorifies idiocy. *
Anyone who
believes we are winning this pandemic war is living in a delusional, alternative
reality.
To date, more than one hundred sixty thousand*** women, children and men have died from Covid 19. The virus has been on our shores for what seems like an interminable seven months with no indication it will burn itself out in the near future.
How many more women, children and men will have to die before we call out this administration out for what it is…an inept, cruel, greedy, dishonest, and corrupt swamp.
I watched Larry Kudlow, Director of the United States National Economic Council, brag about how our economy is bouncing back. For whom is it bouncing back? Tell that to the mother or father who can’t feed their family, waiting in line for donated food. Tell that to the families that fear eviction because they can’t work and don’t have money to pay their rent or mortgage.
I dare Mr. Kudlow, in his expensive pinstriped suit with an equally expensive pocket square, to go into an underserved neighborhood and tell them how great the economy is doing, how their 401K’s are performing beyond expectations.
We pay taxes. Those taxes are supposed to be used to help us lift ourselves up into better lives for our children and our communities. We send, by voting, men and women to Washington to be our voice. To help create opportunity for everyone, not just their elitist friends and donors. Instead, many of them go to Washington to become rich, raping us financially, burdening generations with the debt of their excess.
Donald Trump
bragged he would “drain the swamp”, once elected. He IS the swamp. And he has
filled it with ferocious, voracious, rapacious, dangerous, ugly, racist reptiles.
If we think it can’t happen here, we are wrong.
Beirut, Lebanon was once called the Paris of the Middle East. Today, they are literally in shambles after a shattering explosion destroyed a lot of the city. And because of the corruption and greed of their government officials, they are incapable of helping their people. They don’t have the social and manpower infrastructure in place to mitigate the catastrophe. Instead of planning and putting emergency systems in place, they took the peoples’ money and used it to enrich themselves.
Sound familiar? Where are infrastructure programs, the factory jobs, the middle class jobs, our President promised to get elected?
We cannot stay silent any longer. Let’s not delude ourselves that the United States of America can’t become the next Lebanon or forbid, Syria.
Our mantra should be, vote, vote, vote this administration out.
I still have hope. There are a multitude of us who are awakened and see this evil for what it is. There are many wicked smart Americans in powerful positions throughout the country, including Washington, that see this administration as a dangerous, aberrant anomaly. So, let’s help them. Let’s stand up and speak up.
We have the power. We have the light. We can end this nightmare.
*Paraphrase Marianne Williamson and Russell Brand
**Newsweek
***New York
Times