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I’m continuing my artistic assault upon my family.  Drawing my loved ones has been such a humbling experience. By allowing myself to look closely at them and examine the shapes of their faces, to think about their lives and my good fortune to know them, I feel so blessed.

Part of me is still afraid that I’m not good enough to even try to express the complex beauty of another human, especially not those I love.  I persist, though, because I know part of it is the depressive voice trying to stop me.  I also know that the more I draw, the better I will get at it.  No one gets it perfect, all artists, writers and creative people are learning all their lives to get closer to perfection.  No one gets to be perfectly perfect, though.

My challenge is to listen as attentively to positive voices and encouragement in my life as I do to negative voices and fear.  That’s a challenge we all face, and making art, I believe, helps.

My son, Timothy Allen, is an artist and works in film and painting.  He’s recently worked on a series of spheres:

Tim’s artist’s name is TheOuterCircle. If you’d like to see his work, it’s here.

 

I’m drawing daily to help manage depression, long-term disability, and life in general. If you’d like to see the beginning of this project, you can see it here. You can also follow me through WordPress or on Facebook.

Your thoughts and shares are appreciated

I’m definitely more comfortable drawing and painting made-up people than doing actual portraits.  Today I rushed through a portrait of my mom, trying to capture her fiery personality.  She loved animal prints and I painted too wet, so the leopard spots ran.  My mother had a quick temper and was impatient.  I guess I come by own impatience honestly enough.  She was a petite and beautiful woman.  She liked to keep her hair short and dyed a brassy red.  I’ll try again to paint her more accurately but I’m pleased with the energy of this one.

I used Daniel Smith Mayan red and yellow, the brightness made me happy.

I’m drawing daily to help manage depression, long-term disability, and life in general. If you’d like to see the beginning of this project, you can see it here. You can also follow me through WordPress or on Facebook.

Your thoughts and shares are appreciated

For the past 5 weeks, I’ve taken a class called Putting the Pieces Together, a memoir class that combines writing and collage.  We wrote for the first few sessions about our lives and the important people in our history.  Now we’ve begun to collage, using the stories, family photos, letters, and anything else we’d like.  Today, I worked on a portrait of my grandmother, Nanny, my mother’s mother.  Her name was Martha Elainer, my mom’s name was Martha Elaine, and I am Martha Joy.  So I want to incorporate the three Marthas in my collage.

Nanny died when I was 12.  I showed a picture of her and my mother to one of my writer friends and she noticed that I hardly look like my mother, but I’m almost a mirror image of grandmother.

This was inspired by a photo I have of her when she was in her early forties.  In doing the portrait, I realized not only are our faces shaped the same, we both have a cowlick with gray hair on our right side.  I love that drawing makes me notice such things.

She was one of 10 children.  Her mother was Swedish and her father Syrian.  They met in Memphis.  She only had one child, my mother.  My mother had 5 children, and I am the middle child.

Nanny was a wonderful cook and treated us to amazing sweets and desserts.  She was fanatically religious, demanding, funny, old-fashioned.  She was elegant and never wore pants, only dresses.  She and my mother had a tumultuous relationship, but I loved her to pieces.  I don’t remember if I ever told her.  She was round and warm, and in spite of her eccentricities, she offered a safe harbor in my stormy childhood.

I’m drawing daily to help manage depression, long-term disability, and life in general. If you’d like to see the beginning of this project, you can see it here. You can also follow me through WordPress or on Facebook.

Your thoughts and shares are appreciated.

I wrote a poem today, after a night of restless sleep:

Modern weapons

In ancient lands

Pierce the crust of our earth

Send tremors

Through our dreams

We lurch awake

In our comfortable beds

Wide-eyed

In the splintered night

Wondering why

Sleep eludes us

 

~~~

I’m drawing daily to help manage depression, long-term disability, and life in general. If you’d like to see the beginning of this project, you can see it here. You can also follow me through WordPress or on Facebook.

Your thoughts and shares are appreciated.