Once, after I had been  traveling, I woke up in the middle of the night with no idea where I was.  The most surprising thing about this  experience was that I was completely unafraid.
      
     I sort of walked around for a few minutes, and eventually figured out
where I was by noticing that the bathroom was on my right, and therefore I must  be at home.  It was all very  matter-of-fact.  It happened again,
months later and in a different place, and once again I oriented myself by the bathroom.  Which probably says a lot about where I spend most of my time, but that’s an essay for a different time.      
 
      I’ve written about undergoing vision therapy before (see Archive August 2011 and September 2011), and I thought that particular journey was over.  I was wrong.  I keep learning new things and seeing things differently and going new places.  And finding that I have no idea where I  am.

      This reminds me of Ellen DeGeneres’ joke about her grandmother taking up walking – and now they have no idea where the hell she is.  That’s me.

      I knew that the vision therapy was going to affect more than just my visual acuity – it would affect the way I see the world, not just the way I see.  That had already happened; you can’t change one variable in a closed system and expect the rest to keep chugging along unaffected.

      I was unprepared for how it would change my art.  At first, it was color.  I suddenly seemed to have a greater facility for, and desire for, great glaring gobs of color.  That’s weird.  There’s no reason that should have happened.  Vision therapy doesn’t do anything about recognizing or appreciating colors and the interplay between them.  But here it was.  I don’t know if I am unique in this.  I do know that in the 1980’s, according to the fashion of the day, I decorated my house all in shades of white.  By the early ‘90’s, I had become so color starved that I painted every room in my house a different color.  And I am never going back.

      Also, in the 2000’s, I went to a big exhibit of work by the late artist Andrew Wyeth, famous for his  rather bleak color sense.  By the
end of the exhibit, I was rushing to get through it.  When I emerged from the building, slightly panicked and breathing hard, I remember thinking, “I’ve got to get away from all those god-awful browns.”

      So I guess my color sense has been a developing thing, and vision therapy opened it up further.  It’s not supposed to do that, but okay,
cool.

      I figured I would be all about learning space, and how to depict it, and utilizing all this newfound depth perception in my pictures, creating vistas and layers and painting 3-D rooms you can practically walk into. That so didn’t happen.  The twelve-year-old part of my personality (about 97% of it) rolled her eyes and said “b-o-r-i-n-g.” 

      But I’ve really got a groove on for texture.

      Ooh, I just want to run my fingers through shag carpet and rocks and dirt and dry orzo and dreadlocks and tree bark.  I’ve become a surface pervert.  Pretty soon I’ll be wearing a rumpled raincoat and feeling up people’s tire treads in parking lots. 
      
     I guess I was texture-starved, too, and didn’t know it, because my lack
of depth perception had made texture, and tactility, unavailable to me.  Who would anticipate that a visual deficiency could also profoundly inhibit one’s sense of surface as well?  

      Okay, so vision therapy, combined with my own particular pathology, united to create some  unexpected results.  All of this has refracted into the art that I create. I have lost all interest in creating pretty pictures – you know, the kind that actually sell?  I’ve been sculpting, and creating weird three-dimensional art reminiscent of ancient artifacts, and abstract paintings with magic elements that can only be seen from certain angles.  It’s been really fun. The problem is that none of this stuff is photographable.  It just doesn’t translate.  I can’t make it flat, and fit it into a 2-dimensional medium.  It won’t squish.  It doesn’t look good on film – it’s not photogenic.

      It’s tactile.  It wants to be touched.

      I have no idea what to do with this website.  Most of the new stuff looks like it was made by a completely different person, because, in a sense, it was.  Not the same eyeballs.  Not the same brain.  Should I start over?  I’ve always been committed to following the muse wherever she leads, even if it’s not a marketable place.  I didn’t become an artist so I could do the same thing every day.  I admire jazz singer Dianne Reeves because she’s so daring. She takes a lot of chances in her singing and in her choice of material, refusing to be limited to any genre or style. She’s willing to let you hear her taking those chances, even when they don’t work.  I want to be like that. When I’m not fondling hay bales and the bottoms of cheap flip-flops.
      
     The truth is that I don’t really know what I am interested in
artistically anymore.  It’s sub-verbal.  All I am doing is putting the medium in my hands and seeing where I go with it.  
  
      I guess I’ll be all right.  As long as I can find the bathroom.

    We must have heaven, at least a little once in a while, in order to navigate earth.   
    My husband and I bought ourselves a fountain for our anniversary.  I am creating a haven, and I thought it would add to the nirvana atmosphere.  It certainly does. There are many other components of a haven, too, though; some can be real and some can be pretend.  What you can't actually obtain can be summoned from memory or imagination or books once read long ago.
    When I was a kid, my haven was my suburban back yard.  It was a whole world to me, and the rabbits and the crows and the Queen Anne's Lace were my best friends.
    Now I have a fountain and bird feeders and wind chimes and chickens.  Yup, chickens.  That part is hard to explain.  You have to watch them poking around in their silly way to understand how they contribute to the bliss factor.

    You have to create bliss in order to withstand the grieving, when it comes.  
    But bliss is it's own reward, too - worth doing just for the doing of it.  Some say that paradise is a garden (the Koran) and some say it's a library (Jorge Luis Borges).  What if it's a garden where you can read?

    I like to say "create your bliss" rather than "follow your bliss", as Joseph Campbell did.  To follow something means that it exists somewhere else, away from you.  And you might never find it.  If you create it, it's yours.  Always.  Now, and in memory forever.
    Spring reminds us to remember to create our bliss.  In fact, it forces itself upon us with a big sloppy kiss.  The Greeks and Romans and Norse all held wild bacchanalian fertility festivals to honor the power of Spring.  They understood that Spring, and the deities associated with the season, controlled mighty, far-reaching kingdoms.  The ancients said that all the gods bow before Venus.  That is how important love and flowers and sex and seeds are to life, and to living.
    Many cultures continue to celebrate Spring fetes and fairs and holidays today.  Even grim Soviet Russia celebrated May Day.  I think these Spring happiness parties are so ubiquitous around the world because they are so necessary.
    As a people, we have gotten away from this, to our detriment.  We expect ourselves to just keep grinding away in our offices.  I don't think it works.  It just makes us crazy.  Like if we just keep repeating these autonomic motions, somehow we'll forget how much we want to be outside.

    The words "haven" and "heaven" must derive from similar roots.  We can surely survive without an actual, present heaven - we're doing it every day we're alive.  But can we survive without a haven?  A port, a refuge, a slice of goodness pie?  Why would we want to?

    So many people forget to make themselves happy. 
    It is tempting to think you need lots of "stuff" to make a haven.  After all, I bought a fountain.  It isn't truly necessary, though.  All it really requires is a state of mind.  Even the concrete and asphalt can be beautiful in the spring.   

    You probably don't need an actual fountain to find your bliss.  Maybe all you need is a fragment of lyric in your head:

    The truth is, I don't know what it is that you need to create your bliss.  Yours might be different than mine.
    But I do know that you must create it.
    Let the Gods of Spring roll over you and have their way with you.  Celebrate your surrender to all that is bigger and more beautiful and stronger than your daily existence.
    Then you'll recognize heaven, when you get there.  
    Your heaven.

There are times when I suspect that I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer.  I have lived under one of the major appoach routes of a busy international airport for, oh, say, thirty years, give or take, and I only just noticed that the nightime flight lights make really cool patterns.  Like for art and photographs and stuff.  Duh!

When I have one of these Moron Moments (especially one that lasts uninterrupted for decades) I can't help but wonder what else I've been missing.  What would my life be like if I could really turn on all the parts of my brain?  Or even just a few more of the currently unused bits?   Would I suddenly accelerate into something like the creature-planet embryo Kubrick was trying to show us at the end of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or would I just be me, version 2.0?  Does the moth look back on the larvae with shame, or with giggles?

Since it isn't likely to happen, I'm free to suppose that I would turn into something wonderful.  Notice I have not mentioned the possiblilty that I would just become a slightly more effective sociopath.  Or an even bigger  pain in the ass.  I could join the semi-pro ranks instead of languishing here, unappreciated, among the amateurs.

Maybe I would just take better pictures.  Ah, the joys of daydreaming.

I have never been the kind of artist (or person, for that matter) who could see the beauty in the industrial, the wastelands, the dissipated, the forgotten, and the forlorn.  My response over the years to the growing airport traffic above me has not been to appreciate the miracle of air travel; the ability of people to move all around the globe at will; the lights traveling across the sky like the chariots of minor gods.  I have learned to block out the ever-increasing, overbearing noise.  I thought it would save my sanity.

I have been listening to all the Spring birdsong, trying to recognize  the different birds, and I have been having a lot of trouble maintaining my focus.  I realized that I automatically shut down my listening apparatus when the planes go overhead.  Which is often.

I have chosen a willful, selective deafness, and closed my brain to a piece of reality.  At what cost? 

What other beauties have I been missing? 

The Dresses

      Some articles of clothing have a power far beyond how often they are worn. In fact, it seems that the fewer times one wears something, the greater its influence. The wedding dress is the most obvious example – there are entire TV series devoted to the subject of finding the perfect gown.
      I imagine that this is so because some garments embody our deepest wishes and dreams: if the dress is just right, then the marriage will be, too. It is a form of magical thinking. Thus explaining it, does not, however, lessen how powerful the pull of the perfect garment can be.  
     There’s more to it than that, though. I think certain kinds of dresses represent deep archetypes, and while we can discuss what these dresses mean all the day long, there are profound subterranean psychological attractions going on about clothing that can never be dissected.
      I recently started painting dresses. I didn’t realize that I was painting what is known in the art world as “still life”; I thought I was creating figure paintings, just without the people in them. After all, to my mind, I wasn’t painting the dresses as dresses, I was painting the states of mind they represented. My subject wasn’t the dress itself; it was the way it feels to wear certain kinds of clothes. (I discovered this is impossible, or at least, I am not skilled enough to do it. So then I thought, well, I’ll just paint The History of Femininity through Dresses. As if that would be easier. I have settled for the understanding that sometimes as an artist, one has no idea what one is doing, one just has to do whatever it is one is doing as best as possible, get on with the painting, and leave the philosophizing for some very empty day in the far distant future. Yet here I am, still philosophizing.)

      If I say to you, “Little Black Dress,” you not only know exactly what I am talking about in terms of style, you know the mood that goes with it: sophisticated, elegant, sexy. Glamorous.
      When I painted “Little Black Dress,” the first of this series, I realized that by leaving out the model and just painting the dress, I had made it Everyone’s Dress. I can’t necessarily see myself wearing the same dress as some beautiful model, but I can substitute myself for an invisible woman. And then I can imagine what it feels like to wear that beautiful dress. Perhaps I can do this even if I never actually wear that beautiful dress. 
     How many people’s lives are glamorous?

     Second in influence to the wedding dress must be the prom dress. I think a lot of unexcavated dreaming about the future gets tied up with prom dresses. There is a coming of age element with the prom dress that I think has already passed by when you get to the wedding dress.  
     There is something heartbreaking about prom dresses. Maybe it is more of that magical thinking; when I put this on, I will no longer have to worry about my skin and my hair will look like I meant it to do that and I won’t feel so stupid all the time. That’s the looking forward part. There’s a looking back part, too, depending on the phase of your life span. The looking back part says Jesus I was just so terribly young. That’s why so many artists (I am not blazing the trail here) are painting frilly, poufy 1950’s prom dresses. Those dresses embody that youngness so much more obviously than the prom dresses we actually wore. Those fluffy frills speak so clearly about how youth lifts off in the slightest of breezes and blows away.
Forever.
     Loss and yearning. One dress can paint one thousand emotions. One dress can encompass so many dreams.
      Young girls want to be sexy. Old girls want to be young.