Many conversations wear their Sunday best,
brimming with words who all comb their hair
before leaving the mind.

I ache for the dialogue that arrives
courageous and unrehearsed,
and unabashedly dances
between us.

My wonderful parents took our kids for the weekend and instead of cleaning the house I bought 2 large canvases and went to the studio to paint yesterday after they left. This painting is one of them.
Then last night Mark and I had so much fun at friend's wedding and we still have all today on our own. This is the longest we have had on our own together in 12 years! And it feels GREAT!

"Mom! Mom! I think somethings wrong,
my lips are turning blue, am I going to be Ok? "
a panicked Kieran cried out to me soon after he had been holding some blue coloured paper money that he had made in his mouth. I reassured him that blue lips generally signify that we aren't breathing but if he could talk, it meant he was breathing and he was fine.

I unfortunately do not feel fine...
the endless details and clutter of everyday real life are strangling me...
and I can't breathe properly in my head.

Intoxicated with passion
...this is a painting I started 4 months ago and with moving my studio, setting up the new one, and all the chaos with summer vacation, I never finished it. A couple weeks ago I threw some more paint on it one late night but it still wasn't sure what it wanted to be.

Yesterday afternoon I revisited it and as I went to move some sticky collage elements, they lifted some of the paint off. I kind of liked it and so I decided to tear some more paint off. It appeared to be just white paper underneath which I found odd, but honestly I had painted and layered most of it so long ago that I didn't have a clue what was under there anymore. I then took some sandpaper and started to remove the paper, just to see what might be there...
what I found was all the music notes that you see appearing through the paint.

Thus teaching me its important to remove some of the surface layers in our lives to find the music and passions that we have buried underneath...and it sometimes requires sandpaper.

In my opinion,
life is about communication...
its that simple.
seek the people who really see you,
who speak your language;
who understand what you are saying
and
have something to say back to you...
and its good to drink red wine while you do it.

.

There are moments in my day
when I feel like I know everything.

Then out of the blue
a paper airplane flies gently through a wall
and I realize how little of everything
I really know.

Authentic treachery is found when we abandon ourselves,
becoming deaf to the whispers of our spirits
and blind to the powerful potential therein
~Joaquin Mariel Espinosa

Ok, first of all,
thanks Jan (my Best Girl Friend in the whole world) Barton
for hanging out at my Fringe booth for me last night
while I drew at the Ahava Day Spa party...
(I think you can totally pull off the artist thing!)

Also thanks Cathy from Ahava
and all the lovely women that I drew...
It was really a pleasure to meet you and actually have
the relaxed freedom to talk
and draw at the same time
Oh and lastly.... I would just like to thank whoever
was responsible for finding and returning my left brain to me yesterday.

Every morning now
she is awakened by words.
where have they all come from?
what do they want from her?

some stand patiently
at her bedside
waiting till sunrise
others tug and pull and refuse
to let her rest soundly any more.

Its not unfamiliar
she has been through this
with her children
at a time when her sleep
had a staccato mark above it

So she rises
greets them all with a slightly battered smile
and listens to what they need to tell her.

some are on their own...
"intoxicated", "humility", "passion"

some come in twos...
"French Toast" and "Happy Birthday"

and others already have their little cliques...
"Authentic, creative expression and communication"

she holds them
cuddles them
nurses them
wraps them in coloured quilts
and tries to rock them gently back to sleep

but they won't sleep

They follow her around the house
begging to be drawn.

so she asks them to
form a line,
a phrase,
an analogy
whatever they like
and she sets up her easel.

Each letter poses patiently
and then moves aside for the next

this is a a pattern she is very accustomed to

and she feels exhilarated because
she is drawing again.

"LOOK at ME, LOOK at ME"

You know I have been thinking a lot lately about the word "validation" and who needs to be validated...

If you are a parent or a teacher of young children that answer is obvious. We all do. We all need on going proof that we exist and that it matters to someone out there. I think its a basic human need to "continually feel validated throughout our lives", especially about the things that make us unique.

Of course, the older we get, the less comfortable we feel screaming "LOOK at ME" across the room, so its easy to dismiss that need and think we should just get over it. However, that line of thinking leads us down a path where we then allow people into our lives who sustain that belief by hoarding, negotiating, and controlling their offerings of validation. Over time we get convinced that there is something wrong with us because we crave verification that we are alive, that we are understood, acknowledged, seen.

Recently I experienced the difference between being a student in a workshop where I felt seen and one where I felt invisible, and my experiences were very coloured by that. I suddenly realized how much power an instructor has and how its not all just about the transfer of information from one person to another.

Although I am still in the process of redefining this...I think a good teacher is someone who really sees the student, tries to take the time to understand what they need and offers it in a way that allows them to feel acknowledged, seen...validated.

dis·trac·tion (d-strkshn)n.
1. The act of distracting or the condition of being distracted.
2. Something, especially an amusement, that distracts.
3. Extreme mental or emotional disturbance; obsession:

You know I've been thinking...Distractions in life seem to get such a bad rap. Right from childhood we are taught that we should focus, pay attention to what is being taught, stop veering off course. I really don't know why. Of course, if you are driving a motorcycle or are responsible for replacing someone's lungs, I think focus should really at the top of the list, but the rest of the time, I think distractions are valuable, occationally intoxicating and undoubtedly necessary in life.

I think if you go through life with absolute and impeccable focus on the "planned destination", the "next achievement", or the "projected goal" something gets missed. Even when you are passionate for something, its important to look around once in awhile and see what else catches your eye.

When I think back to my travel days, the memories that I hold dearest seem to be the ones where I veered off course temporarily and found myself in a place I didn't even know existed as a possibility...a kibbutz in Isreal, a hostel built into the trees in New Zealand or 3 accidental days in Bangkok.

I believe our distractions teach us things we didn't know about ourselves; what moves us or speaks to us, and how important it is to just not do what you should be doing and have fun sometimes.

The challenging part of course is knowing when its time to get back to what we know we need to be doing.

I believe that understanding the world is a lot like seeing the world, and the visual illusions to which the eye is prone provide exquisite metaphors for the cognitive illusions to which the mind is prone. When you first look at Escher's painting everything seems fine. But as you inspect it you suddenly realize that what you're seeing is impossible...each section of the canvas is coherent but all those possible parts add up to an impossible whole. Escher's work exposes the masterful fraud that our brains perpetuate upon us, the neural disaster that we call reality.

-Daniel Gilbert, from Seed Magazine - December 2007

;
a semi colon...
what a sexy, puzzling yet misunderstood punctuation...

and the people that love them (and over
use them)—even more so.

There is only one success
—to be able to spend your life in your own way.

Christopher Morley (1890 - 1957)

As I was de-cluttering my office the other day, I found this old article, about a cartoon strip that I was asked to draw. The thing I found the most surprising (and I don't mean the big hair) was that it was 24 years ago!
Where does the time go?

There weren't many words left behind today to put here...
and no time to draw or paint...
so I am posting "negative space".
So here is all the blank space around the drawings that I will do
(when the kids all go back to school).

Last Thursday I had the last minute opportunity to draw at an Eskimo game for the City of Edmonton (thanks Tad!) and today I received this great photo taken by Gary Dyck (thanks Gary!)

That's "Punter", the Eskimo mascot that I am drawing.
I think this picture was taken around the time that my van was being towed.:)
Next time that I draw at an Eskimo game I will find out EXACTLY which LRT lot I am supposed to park in.