I wanted you to have these little backyard winter birds to enjoy. Print them out on cardstock, cut them out and use them as ornaments–or print out a bunch and string them up as a garland! Thanks so much for your support over the past year, and I’m looking forward to great things in 2012! What are you looking forward to?

Click on the picture to download the hi-res version. Ornaments are about 3.5″ tall. Enjoy!

Apologies for the poor scan; I’m in process for another deadline.

When it’s all said and done, the last person on the mind of the dying man is his mother. Isn’t that true? I’ve spent about twenty years convincing myself that I didn’t need her. Not really. After all, she had her life and I had mine, and they weren’t quite compatible. So post-adolescence, I moved on.

That is, until I lay in a hospital bed a month ago with a weird heart…thing.

Then, did I want my husband, or even my kids? No. I wanted my mother. I wanted her badly. Achingly. I longed for her in a way that I hadn’t ever allowed myself. With an irrational, panicked need, I wanted her to crawl into the narrow bed with me and just hold me. Or just be next to me. I remembered a time she had bronchitis. I was too young to understand that the word “bronchitis” did not connote a terminal condition. My mother told me to put my ear on her chest and listen to the whistle in her lungs. I was terrified. She, a nurse, probably just thought it was kind of…cool. I remembered her saying a lot of words I didn’t understand when I was little. “Suicide” was one. Until I consciously separated my life from hers at 15, I lived in a state of tension, thinking I would surely lose her.

As a teenager, our relationship was intensely strained, full of terrible words and unpredictable actions. When she and I went to live together in a Columbus Circle-area apartment, I never saw her. She was physically and emotionally unavailable to me. I essentially lived alone from 15 on. And I didn’t really miss her. It never bothered me much that she wasn’t there at some of the big events: prom, graduation, awards ceremonies, performances. I was independent. Even when I got married, had children, I was able to call the shots. I had a leg up on the relationship. “Early adulthood” and all that. It helps to think of oneself that way.

But in a hospital bed, one feels smaller than a human can shrink. Baby-sized. I-need-my-mama-sized.

For the past month, my swan book has taken a turn. I knew there would be a mother character in there. But once I had been in the hospital, my mother embodied that character. The silence I encountered from her. The utter unknowability of a mother who struggles with emotional illness. Watching her interest in my own children and imagining that I live in them, and she is somehow nurturing me. The inner embarrassment at needing my children to stand in as do-overs.

But the work is redemptive. The story is going somewhere incredibly redemptive. I can truly see my mother with deeper compassion. But more importantly, I see myself with greater compassion. I see myself as someone…needy. Someone capable of weakness and neediness and needles and machines; not all the time, but powerfully when it comes. I am so grateful for the chance to finally see that in myself, after convincing myself of my strength and independence for so long.

I love my mother.

I need my mother.

I first learned about gannets from a movie about St. Kilda. It reminded me so much of the fjords of Norway that I read as much as I could about this wild, windy place. I had also read some about the health of the people of the Hebrides in Weston A. Price’s book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. It seems that until the mainland European diet reached the Hebrides, the people there were of optimal health, even though their existence was incredibly bleak and spare. They thrived on the oat crop, fish, and seabird eggs (like gannets). They were incredible climbers because of the egg-collecting. Once sugar reached them, it was over. Disease, tooth decay, and the eventual annihilation of their society ensued. They abandoned their centuries-old practices of lifestyle and began to “starve” due to their new dependence on outside food sources from the mainland.

I’ve always been a bird-girl. Birds factor heavily into my work for many reasons. (Put a bird on it!) The swan is an interesting inclusion to me, however. I had never understood the fascination with them as “beautiful” birds. Sure, they’re graceful, but they’re not that much different from geese. And I saw a goose attack my mom when I was young. I was not a fan. Interestingly, before I did the Seven Swans cover, I had been formulating these images of a girl flying over a forest clutching the legs of an eagle as a symbol of freedom. It was only when I was asked to do that album cover that I ventured into swans. And then, they were everywhere in my mind.

The image of this girl, urchin-like, with completely unkempt black hair against this proverbial image of grace was something I couldn’t get away from. In fact, I’m still not sure what it all means yet. But it has allowed me a space to explore myself in the midst of a frankly terrible year: of intense misunderstanding by friends, the collapse of a community I was part of, the calling into question of my motives and intentions, and even my very worldview. My physical health took a strange turn so that my body felt like a rebel against my governance. Everything has been a wild card for the past two years. Everything. I wasn’t even sure I could trust my own thoughts.

I had always been influenced by the Christian mystics like St. Francis, Julian of Norwich and the Desert Fathers and Mothers; quiet, intense music; poetry by Emily Dickinson, Rumi and Czeslaw Milosz, and other influences that were mystical and mysterious in nature. I also experience  dreams and visions. Now in the minds of powerful people in my life, that aspect of who I am was being called dangerous, and aspects of it even heretical. I am a deep lover of God, and an orthodox Christian in belief. But fearful accusations flew, and I never expected it would affect me the way it did. The wildness, the wilderness I felt internally was bewildering. I’m just coming out the other side of it now, but I do feel that I understand my makeup far better than I could have without that trial. I’m more committed to God out of a deeper and truer place, and more committed to myself and my convictions, and more sure of the treasures that exist in my heart, carefully laid by an infinitely loving hand. Simply put, the things I like are the things I like. (*insert smiley emoticon*) I have a certain makeup, and my soul thrives on certain soul-foods. Do I understand the feeling of being spiritually “unkempt”—even dark and wild—against the grace of God? Yes.

Lizzie is the daughter of one of my best clients (and a dear friend). I’m so fortunate to have a handful of clients like her who really trust me and believe in what I do. When she approached me about teaching Lizzie, I was apprehensive at first. I would do anything for this client, but I’m busy with work and family; I didn’t know how I could fit it into my schedule. But almost immediately I thought of an approach, and I just decided to start with the basics: a two-pronged approach of drawing and art history. I decided that because I had no other students (nor am I interested or able to take any more) there was no “semester” format–lessons would continue year-round–I could just take my time with her, going at a flexible pace, really sitting back and working with Lizzie’s strengths and weaknesses as they came.

In our first season together last year, I focused on a basic survey of art history, moving forward in time from paleolithic times to the Renaissance. Each time period we studied had an opportunity to work in a similar respective style. For instance, in studying cave paintings, I gave her conte crayons to work with–not because this was similar to the technique that those artists used, but because it was an earth-based material and I wanted her to connect on that level. (I was reminded of my aunt Ruth’s lessons when I was a kid; she made a refrigerator box-version of the caves at Lascaux and had me paint them.) Lizzie essentially copied a piece that she liked. (I will amend this post to include the piece soon.) I am a huge advocate of copying as we learn to draw and paint, because we always draw from those that came before. Our study of Early Christian times afforded a look at portraiture based on the Fayum mummy portraits. And so on, forward in time, thinking about the “why” behind the “what” of the artist’s and society’s need for depiction of any kind. In the process, it was an amazing refresher for my own work. I hadn’t realized the need for a survey since I last had one back in 1996! The ability to connect with the universal and timeless need to create really gave me fresh perspective on my own vocation. I couldn’t have predicted how vital this would prove to my own work process.

Lizzie is hardly a blank slate. She has an eye for color, contrast and line confidence that astound me week after week. She just attacks each project I give her–and yet she is teachable, humble, and a still water that runs deep. She’s not talkative, but not sullen either. Her mom thought lessons would be good for her because she was having some challenges and needed something to focus on. How could any of us have known how the simple act of a weekly art lesson could impact her? She is now showing confidence in trying new things in school, has more focus in all her studies, and seems to be more settled in her skin. And what 11-year old couldn’t use more of that?

Lizzie comes over just about the minute I get home from picking my kids up at school. I hardly have a moment to decompress. But I am instantly calmed when we start our lesson. I put on some Simone Dinnerstein piano and everything dials down five notches. Often, I have my own work to do, so I work alongside her. It’s a simple atelier environment. Here we are working together: she on some color theory exercises, and I on a piece for Illustration Friday. It’s great because it takes the pressure off me having to be the “teacher” and instead we work as peers, more or less. It strips away any sort of competition or feelings of unworthiness from the student as well. Sometimes she can see things in a fresh way that had been laying dormant in me. We’ve been doing fairly mundane color theory exercises for the last few weeks, but boy, they’ve reminded me of trustworthy ways of mixing color that have opened my eyes again. Look at the subtle yellows on the palette below. She didn’t need any coaching from me at all; once we did the color theory pages and saw how mixing (each row, respectively) one half of the color mixture, then the other half, then the complement, then the tint, gave her an understanding of color shifts that enabled her to fly the following week when we did a simple still life.

Incidentally, I included the photo of the Liquitex acrylic because we found out something important: quality matters. (I used Golden Acrylics for my own work, but they were a bit cost-prohibitive for this stage of her development. We’ll move ahead when she’s ready.) We had started using the Liquitex Basics (student grade), but it was an exercise in futility; I simply couldn’t teach her how the paints actually behaved because the quality was so poor, and it took massive amounts of paint anyway. So we switched to the artist grade Liquitex, and what a difference. Lizzie is still learning about brush care, so I don’t have her working with Kolinskys, but I do provide her with good papers: Bristol, good sketch, and a good toothy drawing paper. It doesn’t make *any* sense to me to train someone to use crap. A good middle grade artist-quality set is essential. In our case, we spent under $100 for pencils, paper, conte, paints and brushes. (FYI, the palette I teach with consists of cadmium red medium hue, alizarin crimson, cadmium yellow medium hue, cobalt blue hue, and titanium white. I also have pthalo blue and green, which I will use in more advanced color mixing later on. I also use a gel medium and slow-dri retarder.)

The bottom line is that every artist should take on a student–even just one!–for these reasons:

1. It freshens your own approach. You can’t help but learn something new when you are teaching it, especially the basics. You may think you don’t have time for this, but for one hour per week, it’s an investment in your own growth that you can’t afford not to make.
2. It reminds you to always be in a posture of learning from others. As the centurion said to Jesus, “I am a man under authority, but I also say to this one, ‘Come’, and he comes.” I also take occasional classes from illustrator Doris Ettlinger, and stay closely connected to my Children’s Book professor from Parsons, Pat Cummings. I am also starting a critique group because I am seeing the necessity of outside critique that one loses after leaving school. We always have to remain lifetime students in some capacity. I don’t care if you’re da Vinci or Chuck Close: you never truly “arrive”.
3. And most importantly, it helps you to pay it forward. We all had a teacher or two that instilled confidence in us when we were developing. For me, those were my aunt Ruth, and Bette-Ann Goldberg at LaGuardia HS of the Arts in Manhattan. And by some stroke of grace, I am able to give that gift to Lizzie in this season of her life.

Thanks, Lizzie, for making my life richer. I’m so looking forward to seeing you grow even more.

Quickly this developed into a theme, a work process, and a group of characters, that I could not escape. I have a fairly good idea where the story will go, after just about a year of living with it. It’s becoming intensely autobiographical as well. In fact, I’ve just started my collection jar for a trip I’m planning to take to Scotland this coming spring. My heritage is in Dunfermline, near Edinburgh, and I’ve always wanted to visit the Hebrides, Iona, and other outlying isles. When this swan girl story started to take shape, it coincided with a deep reminiscence of a place I visited in Norway called Helleren.

Helleren is one of the most wild and windy places I’ve ever been. And it felt inexplicably like home. The Helleren houses were built under a protective cliff outcropping around 200 years ago, though the site has been inhabited for time immemorial. The southern fjord region is insanely beautiful, freezing even in July. Something about the North Sea captured my heart forever, because it felt like my heart made into a location. And standing in the red house at Helleren was like standing inside myself. It’s a treasured place. I felt…understood there. It was an abandoned house in the Norwegian trust. I have no Norwegian heritage, but as I said, my kin do hail from the North Sea—right across the North Sea, in Scotland (and Ireland and England, back to the 1580s, as far as I can trace). Whenever I see pictures of that region, I feel this intense ancestral pull. I felt that the house at Helleren was a foreshadowing of where I will live in Heaven—the “mansion” that’s being prepared for me even now. Even though it was a small space, it contained the universe for me.

I’ve always been an extrovert—not a flamboyant one, but I like people, and I think I’m pretty easy to get along with. I make friends fairly easily, I’m not afraid of conflict, and I can be a natural mediator because of that. But there is a major “loner” component to my personality that comes from the artistic side. It’s an interesting combo; I think if I weren’t an artist, I’d be in HR or something. So…thank God I’m an artist. Ha, ha, hahaha. But I’ve never really explored the lonely places in my heart. It’s not *necessarily* that I’m trying to anesthetize that part, but rather that I’ve taken it for granted throughout my life. However, as I get older and have more responsibilities toward others, I’m finding that the “extrovert” and the “loner” are headed on a rapid collision course. It’s coming out physically in some interesting health events, but the fact is that I’ve not been a good steward of holding those two facets in tension anymore.

So, I’m writing a book, and, so, I am going to Scotland. More in the next post.