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“I Could Stay Here A While” 24×24

My tank was on empty. Not metaphorically but that too. The light came on in the minivan and I pulled over to the gas station closest to my house. Insert card, open gas lid, chose fuel type, the whole drill. I got everything rolling, clicked the metal piece that keeps the gas a flowin’ without me having to keep my hand on the trigger the entire time, and sat back down in the van, scrolled through my instagram feed for a few minutes only to look up and see I’d only filled up a couple gallons so far. It was one of those slow pumps. I was going to be there a while. So I immediately went back to instagram before realizing, as though by divine intervention, there were other things I could look at. 

The gas station sits next to a harbor. There were boats and darkening clouds. A man still wearing a silver helmet walking slowly but determinedly into the convenience store. Another man in a black t-shirt with writing all over it. 

There were so many birds I couldn’t have counted them if I had wanted to. Some gulls wandering about but also a whole pod of pelicans in the distance, flying away in a V– did I know they did that? I think I did but, after seeing it, now I’m not sure. 

Is this why art professors make such a big deal about drawing from life rather than just from photographs? I looked at my view and then at my screen. They hardly had anything in common at all. One was curated, posed, and I was making it move from one thing to the next with my thumb. The other was expansive, unedited. It was just as random but less forced. Grand but no one to aggrandize it– no photoshop for the grey clouds and the colorless water before me.

“Look up!” a trainer used to tell me when I was working on my running form. “There’s nothing for you down there. Eyes up,” he’d yell. 

So I’ve been lifting my eyes up lately. Maybe part of the reason I find myself running on empty is because I’m glued to a screen that is as much like real life as a driving a car is to playing Mario Cart. 

And you know what? I’m writing this on a screen and no doubt you’re reading it on one, too. But when I finish, I’m going to look up. I’m going to pay attention. I’m going to take three deep breaths and remember that there’s a great big world out there for me. Even in my tiny town, my drop of the ocean, my grain of sand.

If you find a few moments today to look up. I would love to know what you see. 

My art professor asked us, a bunch of bright-eyed students, this back in 2002. Even then, we were still anxious about technology. Post flip phone, pre texting, my friends and I would type out messages to each other on our computers which sat on our desks, grounding us to a space. We’d write “away messages” when we went to the cafeteria or library where messages could not follow. 

My professor talked to us about those machines at arcades that could turn a photo into what would look like a drawing or a watercolor. We didn’t know that in a decade our phones would be able to do that, no problem, plus a good bit more. 

I didn’t know the answer to her question about painting, but the slowness of her words, the nonchalant tone, the thoughtful pauses were driving me crazy. I was hanging on her every word waiting; I had to know and already believed whole-heartedly in whatever it was she was about to say.  

She said she thought it had something to do with texture. 

Ah, glorious texture– that thing you can’t get from an app or a screen. Maybe that’s why I obsess over it, overdo it, and enjoy it so deeply. In a world where I can see everything and touch almost nothing, I throw overflowing globs of paint onto canvas (and sometimes the floor). Touch me, touch me, touch me, I want my paintings to say. (Below is a photo of my cousin and her baby who very much heeded that call).

Texture is my anti-screen, my appeal to remain in this physical world. Texture is how I take up space when I feel most invisible, how I navigate abstract, intangible, and shape-shifting worries, scary narratives that play on repeat in my mind. Texture is the answer to more than the question my professor posed to me nearly twenty years ago. Texture is my comfort and my delight. 

I’m not sure texture fully answers why we need painting. I would bet there are hundreds of other reasons. But it certainly answers it for me. It’s why I need painting. It’s why, even as the world I inhabit becomes increasingly backlit and small, expanding with just two fingers stretching it out, I need changing contours and bumps, mountains and valleys, globs and goo. 

When I was in college, I did a painting series on street musicians. Smart phones weren’t a thing yet, so I brought an actual camera to the French Quarter and wandered around snapping photos of people playing music on street corners, their instrument cases open, oftentimes full of change and one dollar bills. 

The one I remember most vividly was a violinist in faded jeans, a ragged maroon button down, standing next to a bright green trash can playing something classical and, in my memory, quite sad. 

When I showed the reference photo to my painting professor, she was struck by the juxtaposition of the elegant violin and the shabby scene. He belongs in a tuxedo in a concert hall, she said. I hadn’t been able to articulate what I found intriguing about the image, but once she voiced it, I knew that’s what had drawn me in, too. 

So now, decades later, I’m painting at weddings where, more often than not, there’s a second line band and the musicians wear suits and ties. I snap pictures of them, and in my paintings put these dressed-up players in fields and valleys where again they do and don’t quite belong. 

It’s borderline that corona beer commercial– find your beach– where the sip of a corona transports some corporate worker to the zen of a beach, only in this case, the act of creating is what takes you someplace lush and temporary. Oh, how I relate to these musicians in their work clothes at weddings. And no matter how many times I’ve done it, I so often get swept away in the color, the shapes, the sounds of what I’m doing to my blank and previously untouched canvases. 

Context is flexible. Changing it creates it. 

Creating is work and toil. And it is blossoms and blooms.

Musician paintings like the one that starts this post and others will be part of the “Linger” collection coming to my site in July. Stay tuned. And if you want an email about it, make sure you’re on the list.

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My husband and I built a house. That is a funny sentence because we didn’t physically build any of it, but that’s what people say. That’s what I say. 

What we really did was dream of a home near the water and a coffee shop that also sold books. A home on land with oak trees we could squeeze the house underneath without disturbing. 

We met with a nice woman at a house off the beaten path and she drew it for us. Then, a year later people started bringing trucks and lumber to the land, and nine months later there was a yellow house where there used to be just grass and trees. 

I’m writing this on the porch that the woman drew as the focus of the house. It’s a warm June morning and I’ve got the fans on. The dog is gazing at the woods across the street, no doubt hopeful a squirrel will emerge from some limb or shadow, and she’ll let it know whose home this is. While both dogs felt immediate ownership of this place, it is taking me a while. So much about here feels like home and so much still strikes me as foreign. 

I remember when my dad turned forty because my mom threw a surprise party where she served a huge sandwich in the shape of the number 40. We ate off it for weeks in a kitchen that was part of what I thought of as home my entire childhood and most of my adulthood. I lived in that house since I was a baby and only left it when I went to college. I knew every crevice and closet. My cousin and I would climb out the window and onto the roof, lie on our backs, and look at the stars wondering if they were in fact real objects or just little holes in the universe where the light was sneaking through. 

My husband and I didn’t really build a house so much as watched one being built– participated via proximity. And now that it’s here we are slowly learning to think of it as home. I thought maybe it would happen all at once, but it obviously takes time. It takes memories and moments– that’s the real building and it adds up, starts to accumulate– like a painting that develops from a blank surface. I suspect that the feeling of home will sneak up on me and eventually envelop me without me even knowing it. I suspect I’ll wake up one day wondering how this place could have ever felt unfamiliar.

Maybe part of building this home is sitting on the porch early in the morning looking at the trees and writing about it. Maybe once I witness the leaves changing color a few times, I’ll be part of the world they inhabit. 

I’ll be forty soon, and I’m still building what my parents had long established at my age. My blended family is still fresh, our memories and traditions still forming, still taking shape. I still hit the wrong light switches before the right ones and forget where we keep the colander.

The working title for my new series is called “Linger” and, true to that spirit, it sure is taking a while. I hope that I can learn to also linger in this process of the home we’re building. That I’ll savor it and hold it close without smothering or suffocating it. I hope the kids will feel a deep sense of home and belonging, that this yellow house will invoke in them a sense of warmth and security. That they will know every crevice and closet. That their own kids will run down the stars like buffalo the way they do now. That they will sit on the porch (and definitely not the roof) looking at the stars, feeling certain they have a tiny but firm place in this world. 

The painting that starts this post is one I did in my studio. I didn’t look at my house or even a photo of my house when I painted it, and relied instead on the memories that are just now beginning to form. I love the childlike nature of what developed when I was just playing around with crooked lines and globs of paint, using my studio time to reflect on this crazy notion of home, to pray for it to be a safe and welcoming place, to hope deeply for the kids that will grow up inside its walls.