Um,

Well that was awkward. The gallery thought I was going to show the small abstracts. [sound of  tires screeching to a halt, followed by sound of glass shattering and hubcaps rolling.]

Oh, like I have time to update FB and my blog, but I can't write a frigging statement or unpack the house.

This is not the studio. It is the office/viewing room. It is also a satellite library.

The blog has more or less been a statement for the past 2 years of work, so I’m having some difficulty compressing two years into a pithy statement. I suppose I could grab sentences from posts here and there and be done with it. I'm serious, you know. I'm not going to show the abstracts from 2009. We'll refer to those as The Lost Months of Separation Anxiety. TLMOSA consist of 22 abstract paintings, and since those are already neatly titled, it's great to know I have a second solo show in my pocket. I could, in fact, construct a pocket for those works and be speaking literally. But that does not help me now. In the future, it will, but not now.

With regard to the works in the upcoming show, obviously I spent some time in the studio making physical contact with a canvas, but many hours were spent dealing with grown-up issues I didn't want to deal with, air travel back and forth across the United States, and my best attempt at plugging an emotional drain. I'm not going to let a few sentences hold me back. I'm good with painting deadlines. I knew I needed to have the work completed before I left Los Angeles. I have 17 paintings. I thought it was 13, but I found 4 more when my boxes arrived from L.A. The last pool painting was finished before my mom died. The last flower painting was completed while I was having open houses and packing up my belongings on the West Coast. Some of the titles came easily, but the titling department took a leave of absence and most of paintings have been waiting for nomenclature. For the longest time I had Southern Gothic on my mind, not as a literary genre, but as a sentenced lifestyle. I blow things out of proportion sometimes. It's a coping strategy. 

I came across a book of John Ruskin’s when I arrived here. I'm estimating this house contains over a thousand books, most of which were published before I was born. Ruskin's Works was in a bookcase in the office. The book was at eye level. In a moment of insight, I chose 13 quite lovely titles. It was a good start, but by one o'clock in the morning, I was trolling through Southern Gothic literature while listening to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and grabbing titles from sad country music ballads, the soundtrack to Donnie Darko, and a postcard from my dad. I also drew from my powerhouse of vocabulary I've built up over the years, as exemplified in the title, "Plank." As of this morning, I believe I am done. I haven't talked much about the process of painting, but I made a video about my palette. That should count for something.

Now here's the truncated version:

Pools and Flowers: Elusive Passages from the Chapters of Time

Like most of my paintings, these began as pleasant-enough stain paintings. The paintings were motivated by personal circumstances occurring over the last two years. They are small, and smallish paintings. The scale of the small paintings reminded me of chapters from a paperback book. It’s a disjointed narrative dealing with the fluidity of time, memories, reminders, and loss. In a longer version I would tell you these painting also deal with concepts of space and time and scale. The paintings are more or less representational, depicting an abandoned swimming pool, and flowers. I thought I had painted more flowers, but it turns out, I painted mostly pools. I tried to get away from John Ruskin and Modern Painters, but while clearing out some belongings at the house I grew up in, I spotted a book of Ruskin’s works, titled, Ruskin’s Works. The pool is outside my bedroom window and is partially covered in a blanket of moss and lichen. A bullfrog lives there. I buy fresh flowers once a week. 

17 Paintings General Index (Checklist)

Foreword (Bamboo)

Long Black Veil

Sad Waters

Tutu God Fairy Bouquet (Comic Relief)

Séance

Sleight Of Hand

January (White Flowers)

Sometimes I’m Optimistic And Think Of Mondrian

Black Flag Night Swim

Art Deco Chinese Rug

Carnation 

Deluge

Two Oceans Full Of Love and Sunshine

Plank

Double Negative (The Cedar Tree Painting)

In the Evening of the sweet by and by

Losing Time

As you can see, I have already changed my mind on a couple of titles and as of this morning when I revisited this post, I would like to change them all. I'm chomping at the bit to make the next body of work, based on the deluge of titles that are pouring through my mind. See next post for details.

Yes, well, I needed to think this through a bit more, plus I found a statement I wrote during a more sane moment. 

I'm starting to get kind of excited.

The Hamburger Hambuger Finale

I've almost wrangled a second room into shape. The Office. The Office has always been the office, so I only had to sort through one-hundred years of correspondence along with a complete archive of ALL the artwork I produced in first grade to make it comfy. Every, EVERY single piece of art, random drawing, note I ever wrote, has been saved. They are preserved in archival dry cleaning bags, bundled with notes in either my grandmother's handwriting, "Pretty Baby II, age 2-3," or my mother's handwriting, "M.A. artwork, First Grade." I have been somewhat ruthless and after giving them the once over have thrown a large portion away. I'm tired of sorting stuff, and have almost called it quits myself, but when I hit the document box full of first grade, I caved. I'm going to offer it up on Craigslist or eBay. Someone else should be able to enjoy what a dork I was in first grade. I kept a comic strip though. I was way ahead of my time. The most disconcerting aspect is that I remember the moment I made some of these things.

Welcome to Xanadu. The Charles Foster Kane version.

Finally have hi-speed Internet. Thank you, Comcast. 
The moving van arrived. I'm speechless. I had finally gotten the house to a manageable place, PRIOR to the van arriving. It took them 5 hours to fully unload, counting at least an hour of locating missing items. My motorcycle is damaged. (Rearview mirror, tail light. Dude tried to fix it with a gob of Gorilla glue as though it were some punk ass dirt bike.) Everything else is still in boxes. The garage is filled with studio stuff in boxes. I saw my palette. It is still wrapped, and feels to be in one piece. All my paintings arrived safely, as did my Culver City baseball cap, plastic lids, a valentine's card and Johnny Cash fake tattoo. For whatever reason, those things were in the same box as My Chemex Coffee decanter. I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I have gotten used to my Mr. Coffee brew.

I continue to be delighted, shocked, and simultaneously filled with apprehension. 
It seemed totally apropos that I would find Ruskin's Ethics of the Dust sitting in a bookshelf staring me squarely in the eye.
I did not realize having a diving board would prevent me from having homeowner's insurance, but apparently in the past 30 years, enough clumsy people have sued and spoiled it for the rest of us. I, for one, am thankful I have gators, double flips, and backflips on my childhood resume. I finally dosed myself in Cutters and persevered with a hacksaw. Victory.

I met an artist for coffee the other day and coincidentally another artist I have met here in town stopped in for coffee. It felt good to make some sort of contact with other artists here. So far, most of my conversations have been with repairmen. I’m tiring of my trips to Home Depo.

I thought I would try to go to Italy in 3 weeks for an art conversation as part of a project I'm involved in with some LA artists but the site sight (works either way) of the boxes is too much. I need to be out of boxes. I need to have order in my life so I can have a regular schedule again. I'm giving myself 2 weeks and then I will allow myself to feel like it's never going to end. 



My reality is rather harsh in the problems of abundance kind of way. I try and remember a few things:

I am grateful for what I have.

It's only stuff.

It's okay, everything is okay.

I am still a painter. Just because I have not painted anything of merit lately, I am still a painter.

Where's my documentary film crew?
eBay.

Post Montage. Finally uploaded. Live at the Frothy Monkey, Nashville.

Last  night I was awakened briefly every half or quarter hour to the sound of a mantel clock chiming. After say, 15 years of not working, it suddenly started ticking and chiming again. In full disclosure, I had tried to wind it sometime last week to no avail. 7 hours and 23 minutes later, it stopped. I am not going to wind it again. 

I am sitting at my kitchen table starring out the window. Directly in front of me are dead $7.99 hydrangeas from Kroger. They died  a few hours after I so elegantly displayed them in a crystal vase I found.  I was too tired to take them back for a refund. It's hard to find decent looking fresh cut flowers around here. I thought amidst all the dust, fresh cut flowers might be a pick-me up and an air cleanser of some sort. To the left of me is an application for a booth at an antique mall. To the right of me is the memorial book and a stack of acknowledgement cards I finally almost finished. My GPS coordinates show me to be somewhere between the upper rings of Dante's Inferno and Shangri-La. I am almost certain I have fallen in a wormhole. I thought yesterday that I would focus on making art, or at least writing an updated statement and honing my show title. I need to email jpegs. I waited for Comcast Guy #2 to show up with the right equipment. When he did show up, it was almost  7:30 pm, also known as 3.5 hours past the estimated install time, also known as 48 hours past their original estimated install time. The house is a virgin. No cable lines have ever been "dropped," to use cable speak. After crawling around the basement he reported that I had a decomposing possum, but that it was almost gone thanks to the crickets. He said the stench was horrible. Thankfully, it has not wafted up to the house. He did not install my Internet lifeline. It was too late in the evening. While in my kitchen he noticed a gun shell on the kitchen table. I had been at the firing range last week and a shell had popped back into my purse. I had absent-mindedly placed it on the table. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but it felt reassuring having a 9mm shell casually laying about my kitchen table. He was supposed to pull some strings and come back the next day to install my cable. He did not. Meanwhile, I finally harangued AT&T enough to change out all the outside phone wires so that I could use the phone  as a communication device instead of a static receiver. 

Sometimes, oh who am I kidding, almost everyday, I cry for a second or two. I am too sensitive of a person to be trolling through two or more generations of letters, documents, and outdated service manuals on my own. Sometimes I laugh out loud. Occasionally I am mystified. The house is still not a place to relax after a hard days' work. It is a hard day's work. It's been one month, almost. Time is going to start creeping me out again, and sucking me down if I'm not careful. I am making progress, and yet I feel like I have some responsibility to the furniture. My whole life. Always the furniture. 

The garage is somewhat clean and if I can make the final push to clear it from garage type stuff, I am back to thinking it will make a functional studio. I feel some sort of clarity and focus in there. I suppose if I were rich and ruthless, I'd gut the entire house and have one large open space. Slightly extreme. 

Otto chomped down on my hand yesterday. We returned from the vet (conjunctivitis) and instead of politely getting out of the car as I opened the passenger door, he jumped over to the driver's side. I walked back over to the driver's side and he jumped over to the passenger side. I walked around to the passenger side, and as he jumped over to the driver's side, I grabbed his coat. It felt like a steel door had slammed on my hand. No puncture wound as his canines are rounded down due to his chewing all the molding and wood furniture. It was raining. He didn't even apologize. 

I am desperate to paint again. I feel stupid and dumb as though I would not even know how to hold a brush or how to squeeze paint out of a tube, or even WTF I would paint. I also feel like I am on a desert island. I don't like this feeling.

I have eaten a fresh tomato sandwich every day since arriving. Life is still okay. 

A Sad Post.

After placing calls to several mobile vets yesterday, I found one who was able to come by the house in the late afternoon. After examining Fang and speaking with his team in LA, everyone conferred that it was time. Heart failure. He was too weak to walk or stand up. The vet asked if it would be alright to say a small prayer and I said okay. It was almost as lovely as my mom's service. Instead of the unexpected sound of a train passing through, the lawnmower battalion was in the neighborhood. Fitting.

About a half hour later the crematory guy came by in a non-descript green Impala or something, and picked up Dead Fang and put him in the trunk of his car, jarring my whole experience back into the nuts and bolts realty of life. I resumed cleaning years of grime off the white shutters above the kitchen sink. Clorox, Ammonia, and Pine-Sol are smells to be added to The Olfactory Tour of Sad Memories. The house felt empty last night, even with Monster Truck Dog holding watch. I am sad. Thirteen years ago, back in Chicago, Matt asked me if I wanted a dog. Fang, née Max, was a stray. Matt had another dog and couldn't keep Fang. I was recently divorced (not too lucky in love, am I) and so I said, yes. I read the Monks of New Sketes, How To Be Your Dog's Best Friend, and did group training for a couple of days before Fang's laid-back personality got us booted out of group therapy and upgraded to private training. The owner of the post house where I was working at the time, told me the best way to deal with an aggressive dog was to give it love, and so I did. Best dog ever. He never completely lost his edge, but he was Mr. Friendly, even to strangers, 97% of the time. Over the years we bestowed several nicknames on him, possibly only funny to Matt and I. Fang's tail was the perfect height to knock over our martini glasses on a coffee table and our friends called it, "The Tail of Woe." Matt and I promptly corrected it to, "The Tail of Love." I'm lucky to have had him in my life-Fang. Matt, too, I guess.

I'm adjusting to being here. I haven't ventured out except for groceries and cleaning supplies. I'm still working on trying to get the house in order and taking care of personal business. The walls are plaster, so I'm thinking I'll have to invest in another easel. Considering I'm not an easel painter, it's odd, but necessary. Suddenly I feel way more mature than I should be, or else I'm just catching up to be as mature as everyone else already is. I received an email requesting some images in consideration for a temporary showcase suite in LA, and I really need to start thinking about generating a steady income again. Meanwhile, in order to pay for some repairs, I'm going to set up shop on eBay and slowly start parceling out some of the buried treasure around here, like for instance, my mom's vintage rain bonnet collection.

coincidence?

This was the first CAPTCHA I encountered since moving to my new old home. Phonetically, the second word is my street name.

If I have to purchase one more cleaning implement I might scream. On the other hand, Mop n' Glow really does  have an unbeatable shine.

The Palette. 2:38

The Palette, part 1 from Mary Addison Hackett on Vimeo.

Mars: Day 10, 11

I feel like I landed on Mars. A Mars that needs to be ushered into the 21st century. A dusty Mars. A Mars with moths and moles and carpenter bees. I've seen more insect varieties in one week than I recall seeing over my lifetime. I am not a gardener, though on occasion, I have raised tomatoes in 5-gallon buckets and brought near dead plants back to life with nothing more than water. I decided to plant a hydrangea and some tomatoes, but succeeded only in getting the tomatoes in the ground. If the hydrangea does not die before it goes in the ground, it will be a miracle. The neighbors gave it to me after my mom passed and I guess they figured I'd plop it in the ground immediately. I still owe thank-you notes to people. My stuff has not arrived from LA. In order to make room, I am tossing old clothes and clearing out closets. I am reminded of a former student's drawing in which she stated that "death is just another change of clothes." I used to take comfort in that phrase, but I would hate to come back in moth-eaten clothes, so now I'm not so sure. I am grateful to have a roof over my head, a roof that needs repairing or replaced, but a roof nonetheless. I have taken electricity for granted. Yesterday during a power outage, I polished a candelabrum and contemplated being off the grid. I am in suburbia, less than a mile from metropolitan Nashville and just about 2 miles from Trader Joe's and Anthropologie. I swept and vacuumed a portion of the garage, and noticed this morning, in what I perceived to be a declaration of territorial dispute, that a spider had reinstalled cobwebs across my nice clean patch of garage. The big dog has a secret compartment located somewhere in his coat where he tarries dirt and twigs from the outside and deposits them on the inside. I yield a broom 75% of the day.

I can't imagine getting the house and garage clean enough to resume what I considered to be an ideal environment for working. I am lowering my standards. I saw Sherie' Franssen's video of her studio on facebook and was reminded of what it was like to have a painterly studio. I miss paint. I miss my easel and I didn't even use my easel much. I miss my palette. The moving van is due here next week. I still need to vacuum the silt in the garage.

Today I found an X-acto knife circa 1980 in its original packaging, a penny from 1857, and a black plastic bag filled with something lumpy hanging in the closet. I gently opened the plastic bag and couldn't figure out what I was looking at. It seemed to be possibly a shirt or jacket, but mostly there was dark gray fluffy matter and it smelled. It was too creepy to even poke at, so I double-bagged it and and threw it away. I'm not even going to hazard a guess.

I found this twig on Otto

I found a cart, pulled it into the kitchen, and officially have a makeshift studio. I started a painting, but mostly out of rote, which is to say, I wasn't challenging myself to shift focus, although it's a decent start. These things change, so starts are just starts. I assume at some point this experience will filter into my paintings, but I still cannot say how. I guess that's why it's visual. A friend thought that I would break with tradition and turn the living room into a studio. It's a radical idea but deserves more thought. Meanwhile the kitchen seems doable. Does this mean I've been demoted? I've never worked at a kitchen table. I'm slow to challenge the authority and inherent structure of the house. I threw away a bunch of dust rags-old shirts and baby undies that had been stashed in the linen closet for obviously a very long time. I didn't feel like keeping them. The logic that everything is useful tries to take over. I resist. Since the flood, I am concerned the garage will not make a good studio. The house is naturally dark. As a painter, I am desperate for natural light.

Perhaps it's not as bad as I'm portraying it to be, or maybe it is. It's certainly more than what I imagined.
So far:
Possibility of needing a new roof.
Crawl space has mold and fungus.
Crawl space has crickets. The good news is that the crickets eat the fungus. Nice ecosystem.
The pool needs to be filled in. Meanwhile, some yet-to-be-seen, semi-aquatic creature calls it a home. Perhaps, it too, is eating fungus.
Electrical system functional, but needs updating.
Moths.

I am here until I figure out what's next, and maybe then some. Sometimes I am uncertain.

Dusk is nice. The colors are different here. I need to paint.

Will someone remind me why I'm sweeping silt and sifting through moldy textbooks from the 30's instead of renting a crappy studio?

I'm feeling twitchy from not painting. I am making progress cleaning, but it's hard to tell.
True confession #1: As some of you may know I have been moving and packing stuff at one place or another since mid-March. I'm over it. The deadline is gone, but I still need to clear space for my stuff when it arrives. In a moment of "quick what else can I throw out NOW, I grabbed 2 large paintings from my art school days- like the very first ones I did-and instead of ripping them up first, I just loaded them on the van, stretchers and all. They weren't bad paintings, but I have been feeling particularly unsentimental and overwhelmed about the generations of stuff I have to sift through around here. Art I did in kindergarden, high school, and college is no exception. And yes, my mom kept everything I made. Everything. So I get to the dump and as one of the workers unloaded the van, he commented what a nice painting it was and he kept it. I didn't tell him it was mine. It was a nice painting, but a) it was student work, b) I wasn't going to show it and c) I wasn't going to sell it. I'm kind of glad it didn't actually go in the dumpster, but I still feel strange, like maybe I should have hung onto it for posterity. Meanwhile, I'll have to take solace in the fact that some guy who's job is hauling trash has a decent piece of contemporary art on his wall and is probably chillaxing with his feet on a coffee table he also rescued, smoking a fatty and drinking a can of beer. I'm cool with that. I think it was also signed. oops. I shouldn't be so rash.

By end of week I want to post some new work, which would mean I need to make new work. I could probably find 6 cubic feet of relatively "clean" space to work in. I have paints, I have a couple of brushes and I have canvas. I kept thinking about Pollack today. He worked in a barn. I haven't visited the PK studio, but historically artists have hardships and less than state-of-the-art studios. I should be able to work around a few buckets of silt, spideys, and termite-eaten wood, yes?

I'm tired and going to bed. A friend asked me if I was scared being in this house by myself and I said no, not with two dogs, but monster truck dog just whined and it sounded like a door opening and I jumped. Fang is holding steady and even eating dog food again. The guy is like a supersoldier.

Life is different here.

For one, everything seems to be spread out over the space time continuum in a different order, For another, I'm getting ready to smite AT&T Broadband. In all my life, I've never ever ever had a more annoying hold recording. The Internet sucks here. Hi-speed my ass. I shudder to think what lo speed is, considering I lose connection about every 3 minutes. I'm grumpy tonight.

I cleaned a small section of the garage today, or more accurately, a cargo van piled high with junk went to the junk yard. Nothing particularly interesting- a 10-foot pole, the skeleton of a dead bird, a canvas tent from the 60's, broken lawn chairs, assorted rusted metal things, a box of something that had disintegrated into something else, an interesting piece of antique furniture in several parts for which I could not figure out, and which was also in a state of sad affairs, a broken spinning wheel, and 6 boxes that my parents never unpacked, or even opened from when we moved here in 1968, to name a few. I opened one up: empty jars, like the ones that Nescafé and Tang came in. I also finally got around to sweeping some of the silt left from the flood. Ideally the garage will be my studio as soon as my studio stuff arrives and I finish cleaning it.

AT&T finally disconnected me from the phone que queue. Not a good sign. (I always forget the extra ue, in queue, in attempt to combine cue ball and queue.) 

I can't wait to paint again. I keep saying that or at least I keep thinking I'm saying that. I was looking over the original deed to the house and noticed I may keep horses, dogs, cows and chickens, but no other animals- in a pen on the premises for the benefit and pleasure of myself and my guests. I could also establish a stable for horses and mules, etc. for general use by the community. I don't care for horses. Oh right, what does that have to do with painting? Exactly. I feel like such a city girl after all these years and suddenly the burbs are sucking me in. I bought two tomato plants. In accordance with the deed, I saw that I may also have a garden, a laundry yard and an incinerator provided I hide it with a hedge. An incinerator would be nice right now. 

tired. bed.