Post Creative Let Down

Gateway by J. Binford-Bell

Creating a painting, I realized today when I at last finished my latest, is exhausting. And exhilarating. You want to shout, "I did that?" when a plan comes together and a painting achieves a marriage with the image you have carried around in your head. And then there is this huge let down not unlike drug withdrawal. Specifically withdrawal from speed.

Photography does not do this. It is so immediate in comparison and is not the manifestation of an internalized image but an image you internalize. Nor does painting in a formula manner. Yes, you may sit down to do your 14th church painting for a fair or a retail order and something surprising happens.

But to conceive of an idea for a painting. Refine it in your head over a number of days or weeks. Then finally commit the idea to paper and pencil, and at last to canvas. Only to go over the colors again and again in your mind before putting paint to canvas. That is a horse of a very different color. And not every painting an artist does is that sort of creative birth. But is is those paintings an artist wants to create.

Since I gave up painting for three to four art fairs a year and decided to stay home in my studio and paint for exhibitions and myself I find I am painting less but enjoying more of those wonderful creative births. But they do leave you rather drained and wondering if you can do it again.

I want to do six more paintings within the next two months. I want to do them for exhibits I wish to enter and to establish a base of more recent works. I did not paint for a while after leaving the fair circuit. It seemed there were enough paintings on the walls of my studio and I really didn't feel I had any more new ideas to generate. And I focused my energies on photography. But the muse is back. She was back in 2012. I am proud of the paintings I have done. I looked around the studio this morning and counted the works I would feel honored to have in a solo gallery show and was pleased. But an artist with her own studio needs enough depth to not empty the walls or pull work from other places or go back too far into the archives. Six more would be a good buffer. Which may be why Georgia O'Keeffe had 1000 paintings in her studio at the time of her death.

Gateway in the Binford-Bell Studio and Gallery

I am very happy to have this one completed today. Tomorrow I begin the sketch for the next one.

Never Promised You Flowers

Bristle Cone Pine with open cone

The drought has sort of killed spring. Greening up of grass and the blooming of wild flowers is WAY behind schedule. But yesterday in the Val Vidal I saw signs of hope. Or a desperate attempt to reproduce before the plant expires to the drought.

Standing Brave

While the flowers were a sign of hope they were also sad because of their reduced numbers and what if there is no rain will be a failed attempt to reproduce. There were flowers but also an alarming absence of bees and butterflies.

Nor were the flower sin lush green meadows but surrounded by dry and brittle grass that crunched when you walked on it. There is a trout pond behind these flowers but the water is so low that when I got down to photograph the flowers the water did not show.

I got this one photo with just a hint of water by going up a hill and then lying in a depression, like my friend Jessica below.

So both photographers and flowers are going to extreme lengths to pretend it is spring. It is not. It is a death knell. And a warning we may be too late in reversing the effects of climate change.

Happy Birthday to Me

Reflections on Life
by J. Binford-Bell

Last year was not an easy one. There were the usual struggles in life which lately seem to be economic and physical. Getting older on a fixed income isn't for sissies. But the big hurtle last year ways my age. A very small number of people in my family have made it past 67. Okay, I am just one day past that number but still it is past.

Mother and Dad both died when they were 67 (three years apart) from health issues. Somehow you get to overlook tornadoes that took my paternal grandmother at an early age. I was somewhat gratified to find out I am not the only person to obsess over getting through the age in which a parent died. But I figured I had a double whammy since both parents died at my age. And there were times I really was not trying that hard to make it to 68.

It was a tough year financially. Couldn't get or keep or get rid of tenants depending on where I was in that cycle of advertise, rent, evict and repair. My preoccupation with making the mortgage payment made it hard to allow my creative muse entry into my soul.

I won a few photography contests and sold a few prints but painting seemed beyond my ability or at least my soul. I didn't recommit my spirit to paint on canvas until just recently. Even have entered in a few shows. But it is hard to commit to memberships, subscriptions, diets, exercise plans, finishing the great American novel, or beginning that book of images and poems when you do not see continuing to 68. Hell, I didn't even see the need to get my free Medicare Wellness check up but I did get a tetanus shot after I survived the fall while gardening.

Mardi Gras, my aging standard poodle, and her health issues didn't help much. Nor did the bipolar winter. And let's face it, the totally imaginary spring. I probably read too much John Steinbeck in my youth because I was even linking my life to the drought. Maybe if I expired on some huge rock in the landscape it would rain, my chronically ill neighbor would at last die and free his wife, Mardi Gras would be young again, my ex-husband would stop tugging on my foot from the grave, and my paintings would be in great demand because I was the late and great undiscovered artist.

So it was a dark year. But then what highly creative person with a wild imagination doesn't have dark times. It can even be viewed as grist for the creative mill. I made it to 68. Happy Birthday to me.

Satori - Part II of on the Road to Raton

Distant Promise by J. Binford-Bell

Supposedly for a good black and white landscape you need a noisy sky. I feel as if my life this winter and spring has been a noisy sky. So much going on around me. Some things I have written about like the tenant situation and some not. Some things I have actually not been aware of myself. It is like not noticing the clouds until a dark one shuts out the sun. And some nagging little things I ignore because to acknowledge them might give them power. Denial is a God given survival skill after all.

The bad tenants and the things I had to do in order to rent the apartment to get a good tenant of course caused financial issues. And it takes a while to catch up once you get behind. And that of course causes stress.

And then some years back I committed support to my neighbor when her husband was diagnosed with a fatal cancer. At the time I made that commitment she and I figured months. It has been years. Not all of them critical. But since Good Friday his health has taken a downward spiral and his post traumatic stress has made him very difficult to live with and he refuses to believe he is dying so she cannot get hospice help. Caregivers sometimes die of the stress they are under. Sometimes they die before the person receiving care. I am not sure what the stats are for people caring for the caregivers but suffice it to say it ups the stress.

I carry my stress in my neck and shoulders. Not good since the CBT and neck injury. And I have a high pain threshold so I get along entirely too long with denial. To distract myself from recognizing the pain I eat. Standing before the mirror Wednesday after my bath and before taking off to Raton it hit me how much I have been eating. And in the early part of my Road to Raton meditation I put it all together. In Raton I bought more of my favorite and most effective over the counter pain reliever and began taking the minimum dose. And away went my nagging hunger. Movement is easier and the thought of exercise now seems less like torture.

Less pain and less stress. If I can get back into yoga it will mean all the less stress. Hopefully the noisy skies in my life will follow suit and quiet down.

Satori on the Road to Raton

Hope of Rain by J. Binford-Bell

Yesterday was another trip to Raton. Another two hours each direction to search the barren landscape for buffalo or antelope or signs of rain. Another opportunity to Zen Out as I like to call it. I have always been a chop wood, carry water sort of mediator, and trapping me in a car with the cell phone off is almost like taking a retreat weekend on the fly. And yet I so resist this repeat journey. I have the road signs memorized even. And the effect of the drought on the land has been painful to see.

And yet drought comes and goes especially in the high desert. It is difficult to remember that with the extremes in weather we are now seeing. There is more and more proof of climate change. This drought might not end. And yet the trees think so. Their roots deep in the aquifer they have leafed out yet again. Their fresh and hopeful green a stark contrast to the dried grasses and barren soil. Toward the mountains on the north side of the highway there were building clouds and wisps of evaporating rain. And to the south there were dust devils blowing the parched soils as if they were powdered sugar.

The barren wastes without a taste of water
J. Binford-Bell

And yet the windmills were working to quench the thirst of the livestock and wildlife looking for the springs of green.

Windmill on the plains
J. Binford-Bell

The winds were horrific and all the livestock hunkered down. Only here and there was an antelope on the highway side of the fence looking for the grass that had not been eaten to the bare earth. And yet just a few miles down the road there was standing water in some of the creek beds and dry arroyos and previously empty stock tanks. Some of the dry thunder heads had produced brief but fierce down pours and the grass had responded with the first hints of green.

I found myself taking hope from the land we once so abused with overgrazing. Maybe, just maybe, it ultimately will not matter how much water we waste or how much we ignore the evidence or the history we can read on electronic tablets.

Maybe eventually I will even learn from my repeated mistakes I make. Just maybe I will heed all the lessons I have ignored; Recognize the similarities when another person like one in my past shows up again. It is a journey we continue over lifetimes. And sometimes it seems entirely too much the same. But it is the subtle variances we need to see or we will pass this way again.

Yesterday's journey made just the smallest of shifts in my attitude. From the trees I took hope. The glass is half full. And it will rain again. And there will be another difficult confrontation no doubt. But it only adds to my strength.

How does my garden grow

Bokchoy

This is my first year to plant bokchoy. I love the stuff. I eat it raw like other friends eat celery. And I use it in stir fry and salads. It always seemed to exotic to plant but when I saw the heritage seeds at my favorite garden supply I decided to give it a try and then promptly forgot I had.

Seriously. Yes, I have a journal where I have drawn my beds and penciled in what is planted where but do I bring it out for reference in my garden? No. My Garden Journal is an evening activity where I recall the temps and progress and latest modifications. I discovered the bokchoy yesterday when I cut back the chives to dry some.

I garden in raised beds placed under a poly tunnel. No rows just patches of future plants arranged sometimes by color. Literally. I am an artist you know. And I have planted carnival carrots and rainbow chard and red Romaine lettuce. It is extensive planting. Every available space taken up to discourage weeds. And so it fits under my poly tunnel. I garden at 8250 feet so most all plants have to be protected from late frosts, summer hail storms and just the normal cool nights.

A Canadian friend asked about my beds and I dug around to a picture of this spring before the plastic went over the PVC ribs of my tunnel.

Raised beds and containers before inner tunnel ribs

Bare bones of the double tunnel

I spent a lot of time this year jockeying around my containers. My squash and tomatoes get planted in containers. The above arrangement was not the final one. I deleted the square ones on top of the 4 x 4 beds and moved the near end container to the opposite end. I had just read on line that plants which bear fruit have to have the most sun and the far end gets that with the plastic raised.

Polytunnel, plastic raised, showing tomato tepee

Tomatoes with blossoms before the end of May

Tomatoes are one of the plants I could not grow before the polytunnel. And this year I planted ones raised from seed in my studio outside in the tepee on May 15th. Noted that in my garden journal. There is now a drop light in the tepee to keep them warm nights. Last night was 27F. One tunnel raises the temp 4 degrees and two 8 degrees.

Strawberries

 The strawberries are just under the large tunnel and they took a frost hit. You notice the brown on some of the leaves? It has taken them a while to spring back but I was rewarded with a blossom and new leaves yesterday.

Rainbow Swiss Chard in Carnival beet bed
Low center raised bed in previous picture of uncovered beds

Red Romaine
Almost ready to be thinned for baby lettuce salads

This year I started some plants like the Swiss Chard inside my studio. The first of May I planted seeds in the raised beds giving me plantings at various levels for harvest. I want to get more seeds for beets, carrots and bokchoy to do a mid summer sowing in harvested spots to carry me into late fall with greens to eat.

What amazes me about the poly tunnel system is how it extends my season for gardening. I once never even planted cold weather crop seeds until mid May. I planted seeds this year May 1st and put out seedlings from the studio on the 15th of May. So the really good news for me is it is not June yet and my garden grows.

Reflections on a Misspent Youth

The joke I used to tell was that when I entered college I was 80 and when I left about 20. I was Miss Goody Twoshoes during high school because my mother was sick, my father not coping that well, and I had a little sister to look after.

Mother, in her infinite wisdom made me turn down a math scholarship to an "away" college and enrolled me in UNM because she didn't think I was adult enough. At which time fate stepped in and promoted my father to a job in Denver. His joke was they could not get me to run away from home so they ran away from me. It was the wild and crazy '60's and after a very strict upbringing I turned pirate. I had three rules that stood me well: 1) do not get pregnant, 2) get your bachelor's and not your MRS degree, and 3) do not get arrested. The last may have been just luck but I worked hard on the other two.

If the 60's were insane the 70's were even wilder. I had the bachelor's degree, the pill and the number one status symbol of my age -- the FBI file. My resume, without careful editing, by the time I entered my red neck period (1981) qualified me for only one thing , authoring a tell all book. Whoever came up with the t-shirt - Been there, done that - obviously knew me or traveled a similar path.

So last night exchanging memories with one of those friends who shared parts of the decade of the 1970's I had no regrets but somehow see did. Wasn't she with me in the VW mirco bus crossing to California with 9 kids, two dogs, a goat and not enough money? Or when we dumped everything but the VW at her parents in San Fernando Valley and took off to visit a beautiful and sexy friend in Hollywood.

So why does she now have to hang with an alcoholic with a Harley Davidson? But it was Jan that did the Harley's with me. And only me that did the alcoholics. You think, however, she would have gotten some wisdom from watching me make those mistakes. Not that I really list any of my adventures in my youth as mistakes but they definitely shorten up the bucket list. A changing world with video on every cell phone would have deleted a few things I already checked off.

I felt like a mother when I sent my friend off this morning on a hog driven by a man already sipping from his flask to the Red River Memorial Day Run now infested with biker gangs and not just Vietnam vets. Surely she knows what to avoid but then after our wild and crazy hippie days she (and the new dude) are Rush Limbaugh fans and registered Republicans.

I meanwhile am contented doing some gardening and later a bit of painting. The dogs and I walked through the fog this morning on land a long way from the noisy stream of bikers. I am too old do repeat my youth and do not want to anyway. Been there, done that, and have the mental bullet holes to prove it. I got lucky.