Angie Reed Garner

09:51 am: street smarts

street smarts, mixed media on canvas, 24 x 18"

Click image to go see detail shots.

04:40 pm: detail
Here's a detail from street smarts, in progress.



Studio climate control issues fixed, I have an AC. It barely keeps up with the heat, with the power off every other hour or so, but it does it (brings studio temp down to 85-90F).

09:59 pm: Looavull people, go see my mom
Mom is giving a talk on her art with a slideshow/powerpoint
retrospective... go hear her if you can. She doesn't do this kind of thing often
(understatement) and she's got a real gift-- without trying, she reminds
everyone why this art thing matters in the first place.



Register online here.

09:30 pm: "street smarts" in progress
In progress.


24 x 18", mixed media on canvas, unfinished

111 F today. From 1-4 pm, I simply can't think. Studio climate control problems. Computer and software problems, and a dead laptop battery, and no obvious way to replace dead battery. Got thrown out of park (the one with the jogging track) for third time. Overlong, stressy weekend with overworked S. Trying to make travel plans.

Not getting in enough painting time thanks to aforementioned studio climate control problems, and not enough painting time is never good for my temper and sense of perspective.

Too hot during the day to walk Mr. Heathcliff out on the blacktop. He is hanging out in the one cooled room in the house, hourly getting more hyperactive, not understanding why he is not getting his preferred walks on his preferred schedule.

Once the sun is up, it is too hot even to wear him out with fetch on the grass. If I let the heat get to him, just a little, he'd flop over and sleep until it was cooler (like any sensible dog). But I don't want to risk it-- with his black coat, he could overheat fast.

When the power cuts out and his fan goes off, he comes to me and complains.

It's dark now, the temp has dropped to a mere 90 something, and I think it is safe to take him out. Heathcliff claims his brain is going to explode if I don't walk him NOW.

I am pretty sure my brain will explode if he does that sonic howl thing one more time.

The power will prob. cut out shortly.

10:11 am: Scott on the road again
My brother memeselfi took off again on his scooter-- he's in New Orleans at the moment. See photos and read tales on his blog.



He's worked a lot on his scooter, and developed the baggage setup since his last trip. If you can't see, there is an actual saddle for a seat.

12:39 pm: a thousand words minimum
I didn't take this photo, it ran in Saturday's Dawn. I've been thinking about it for two and a half days now, so here it is. I'm putting it behind a cut because it is 900pix wide or so, but it is sized for quick downloads. Read caption for key info/context.

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12:59 pm: odd lot of photos

A typical commercial building, under construction.


This is the best my cell phone could get of the scaffold structure.


The hanging carpet gives some privacy to the workers' living space.


S.'s campus is gorgeous right now. A dust storm was on the way when I
took this photo, it made the greens pop.


If your car breaks down, this is a pretty common way of getting it home. You
get a rickshaw driver to push your car with his foot while you
steer. Or, you sit in the rickshaw next to the driver and push your car
with your own foot while your friend steers the car. Or you get your
friend to provide the foot.

A tow-rope is the other common solution.

I haven't seen either technique used on an SUV yet. Given the increasing number of them
in Lahore, there is probably $ to be made if you've got a tow truck. I think I've only
seen one towtruck, and it was owned by the city. It was deployed with perfect unconcern for
the condition of the car.


Some guy grading papers in a cafe.

12:34 pm: one traffic cycle-- Lahore, Ferozepur Rd.

04:26 pm: corporate luxury (in progress)
This is really not at all done, but I wanted a progress shot to check the composition, so now you get to (have to) look at it too.


corporate luxury, mixed media on canvas, 24 x 18", NOT DONE

Besides this... Urdu lessons, a couple of great bike rides, it is 102 F here in Lahore and I'm somehow fine with ~just~ a fan. Credit to proper desi summer clothes, 10% humidity, and gradual acclimation. Load-shedding now seems normal and on occasion works my last nerve. (I am saving for a battery for my studio-- enough to power a fan and laptop for some hours.)

Reading Ian Almond's The New Orientalists, trying to think how to make paintings that don't invoke an Islamic Other as a mere device to talk about myself/criticize western culture/grind my favorite axe/whatever.

I know in writing this, folks might look at the image above and try to decide if I'm doing Orientalist othering or not. That is kind of a wince-y thing: here is my belly, kick me.

But then, I wouldn't mind if people did think about these issues. And why not start with what I'm doing since your eyes are on it now.

Which is not a request for reassurance, or an invitation for crits in the comments. I'm probably too far gone into my own thing for either to register as anything but static.

All that really helps me these days is for people to share what kind of narrative they make from the image I made. I love that. And it does help me make adjustments, clarifications.

11:44 am: scattered apples
Done.


scattered apples, mixed media on canvas, 30 x 24"

Click image to go to website and see detail shots, not that I wouldn't love to
post a ton of them here. :)

06:15 pm: another progress shot
Closing in on this one...maybe done tomorrow unless I manage an escape from the studio. :)

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10:45 am: artist ISO patron
...seeking support to see:

GOYA IN TIMES OF WAR

FROM APRIL 15 TO JULY 13 2008


The Second of May 1808 in Madrid: The Fight against the Mamelucks Oil on canvas, 268 x 347 cm Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado


The largest exhibition devoted to Goya since 1996.


MUSEO NACIONAL DEL PRADO Ruiz de Alarcon, 23 – 28014 MADRID
INFORMATION: Tel: +34 913 30 29 60 Fax: +34 913 30 28 58 / 53 Site: www.museodelprado.es
OPENING HOURS: Tuesday to Sunday and public holidays: 9am - 8pm. Closed Mondays (public holidays included).
ENTRANCE FEES: Full Price: 8€ Concessions: 4€ Pre-booked tickets 9,5 € ( Free entrance for children under 6) Reservations Tel: + 34 902 10 70 77 and on www.museodelprado.es
CURATORSHIP: Manuela Mena, Chief Curator 18th-century Painting and Goya at the Museum
PRESS CONTACTS: Beatriz Carderera Tel: +34 913 30 29 60 Fax: +34 913 30 28 58 / 53
E-mail: beatriz.carderera@museodelprado.es,
javier.sainz@museodelprado.es

To coincide with the 200th anniversary of the events of May 1808 and the start of the Spanish War of Independence, the Museo del Prado is presenting a major exhibition devoted to Goya. It focuses on the two great canvases of the 2nd and 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid which are currently being cleaned and restored, while also analysing and presenting Goya in a broader context. The exhibition features almost 200 works.



Please kindly budget your generosity to include: plane ticket, three days with the exhibit,
hotel, transit, one decent meal a day, and many many many infusions of java.

Artist will negotiate copyist privs with the Museo, offer patron pick of three sketches completed on site, and one painting in oil on canvas developed in direct response to Goya.

11:45 am: more on Pakistan haves and have-nots, and capsicumanuum takes on Obama re Pakistan
I love this letter exchange. It says so much.

From Dawn, a daily English newspaper here in Pakistan.

On March 30, Dawn ran a letter from someone who took her child to a hospital for an appointment. The security guard would not allow her servant to come in.

(naukar=servant.)

...As I walked in through the front door, a security guard stepped in front of my nanny and told her she couldn’t go in. When I happened to glance back to check their progress, I noticed my daughter and nanny were standing outside the building and the security guard had his hand out to stop them entering the reception premises.

She proceeds to climb on the highest horse she can find, and she goes high indeed. I'd like to quote you just a bit of it, but you don't want to miss any of the flavor.

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10:50 am: hoofing it in Lahore
The past week has been about whelm, both under- and over-. I thought maybe I was doing another round of culture shock (free-floating frustration, paranoia, anger, triggered by "global" disorientation, haha pun, I think I'm too tired to edit this blog entry), but some face time with a friend helped me figure it out. No, some things are just hard.

[Aw shit, I just hit 1300 words, which means this entry is far too long for livejournal. Well… whatever. But I'm heading into the hyperlexic death spiral: every time I find a point of unclarity, I have to add in 300 more words, which generates more points of unclarity, which means I get more and more tired and have more and more to write and I can never, ever, EVER finish this blog entry and get up from this computer. The death spiral is one reason I am a painter and not a writer.****]

ANY WAY. S and I surrendered a car which a colleague of his so generously loaned us for 3+ months. I am doing Lahore by foot, bicycle and autorickshaw.* Also, I've basically transitioned to wearing desi clothes unless I am going someplace hip.**

When I show up on Humber or on foot, and wear desi clothes, my gora privilege temporarily evaporates.

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07:42 am: bookgarden (done!)

bookgarden, oil on canvas, 4 panels, each 18 x 14"

I seriously want to throw this painting a party, it's been a major part of my life for so long. I began it back in November, in Garner-Furnish Studio. I couldn't figure out how to pack it safely enough in our soft luggage, and didn't want to risk shipping it. S. hand-carried for me, on and off however many planes it took to get here (and through all those airport and layovers).

Below are four details. Click any image to go to the website and see more, if you could actually want more, and give yourself a art partier gold star while you are at it. :D
















Here it is shot in the corner of my studio.



See all the work I've completed in Pakistan here.

06:34 pm: This is what I see when I look out my studio door. Note the floor.

I got my feet wet and walked a loop, so the camera could see the problem.



I don't have lovely cream colored floors with odd foot accents. I have wood-colored laminate floors covered with so much dust that it hurts a bit to turn on the ceiling fans.

When I pick up the book I was just reading just two hours ago, it has a superfine coating of grit that feels like dirty chalkboard.

Home = haven, where one does not have to eat or breathe dust. The dust is becoming a problem.



S. and I have a carefully balanced relationship vis a vis housework. It is basically Marxist: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. I often have more need than ability. So in practice this means S. does the heavy lifting (mopping, laundry, lightbulbs, dishpiles of avalanche proportion). I pick away at normal-sized piles of dishes, and do the tidying up, and make sure at least one bathroom is fit to be used by guests.

I'm motivated by aesthetics-- if a chore will make the place look better, I'm into it. S. is motivated by Urgency and Danger. If a chore falls in between, we generally neglect it until it becomes 1) a total eyesore or 2) a potential or actual housekeeping disaster. Then the obvious person steps up.

We both love snowshoveling, as it involves Aesthetic Urgent Danger, and we have fought over the snowshovel when there was only one. So now, if we live someplace it snows, we have two.

We both throw our backs into cleaning the place when we are expecting guests. We start at the same time and go until the work is done.

When it is crunch time for one of us, the other covers and what can't get done just doesn't get done. Sometimes places are messy, no big deal.

Oh, I also groom Heathcliff. You can see from his dusty butt in the first picture that the poor guy is in trouble. I can get the hair off him well enough, but the dust?

Anyway. This philosophy of housework has served us well since 1996. Our house gets clean enough for us, and nobody is strained. But the Lahore dust...

I mopped the dust every other day when I first moved here. It was just the kind of aesthetic chore that yanks my crank: painting with water and a very big brush. But the floor didn't stay mopped for even six hours. It felt like a really crappy return for my labor. I could have been painting, for real.

We've tried joint Saturday morning cleaning parties, but it turns out we'd rather do other things on Saturday morning. And by eveningtime, the dust is all back anyway.

Dust is our unsolved problem.

And I will show you something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. --T.S. Eliot

Excuse my dust. --Dorothy Parker's epitaph

07:39 pm: meet the TOP HUMBER
(This post is probably interesting only to bike/bike transit people... but I know there are a few on my list.)

This is Top Humber- the Pakistan-made drafthorse of a bike. This dark green Humber happens to be mine, with my groceries on the back.





The Humber logo is a rearing white horse, but the front fender has this
airplane detail. As it says, Top Humber is THE ALL STEEL BICYCLE.

Humber is fierce, being all steel. No driver wants to hit the Humber.



The rear rack easily handles the weight of a full-grown person and a child.



Humber takes a different kind of riding. See that plush cushy seat? Humber wants you to sit on it and relax, really give it all your weight. If you lean into your hands on Humber, Humber gets wobbly.

The other bikes for sale here are from China. Those are not all steel. I think they may be electroplated paper mache. They look flashy but I wouldn't trust one to hold up.

Humber excels for slow/steady hauling people and stuff. I saw a guy moving 10 crates of motor oil on Humber. The stack of boxes was two wide, five high on that back rack-- it was WAY over his head. That said, he was fighting the load and it was a little scary.

My bike handling skills were just enough to get me and those groceries home. I still practice turns in empty parking lots. Humber is not agile. Humber is heavy.

I paid 4,000 PK rupees/$63.47 for Humber. I usually get charged the special American price for things.

I'm the only woman I've ever seen pedaling a bike here. So far so good, although I'm still nervous. Traffic cops seem amused, they smile and point.

Here's a picture I posted of someone else's Humber a while ago.

Bikes have a way that they want to be ridden, a personality. I learned on a road bike, which is lovely for many long miles of nice smooth pavement and an easy mellow runner's high. I never truly transitioned to mountain bikes when they got popular. I know they are better for potholes and curbs--urban conditions--but I couldn't produce the adrenaline they seemed to want from me.

Riding Humber feels like the Zen aphorism: Before enlightenment, chop wood carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood carry water.

03:33 pm: "bookgarden" still in progress
Here are the right two panels--



And here is the whole thing. I'm painting them so they do work as one wide horizontal with no spacing, but they may be installed different ways so...

01:19 pm: in progress

book garden, left two panels (of four), in progress

I saw my first ever wild parrot the other morning, probably a Rose-ringed Parakeet,
sitting on a power wire. No ring around neck and full size, so probably female.

Two other firsts: first conversation in Urdu with people who don't speak any English, first bike ride in Lahore, first Lahore German Shep dog show. All pretty neato cool.

I like Urdu. For some reason my brain is willing to soak it up, maybe the euphony is greasing my mental gears.

Learning about water conservation-- how to wash dishes without running rinse water, how to re-use wash water for houseplants, etc. I've never before lived in a city that really had to worry about water shortages. Portland OR was just getting worked up about it when I left-- brown lawns were the thing to have.

My house has a reserve water tank in the back yard, which automatically fills whenever there is municipal water to fill it. When municipal water does not flow, we turn on a pump. This gets reserve water up to the main tank on the roof, and from there by gravity down to our faucets. We share this reserve tank with the four people who live on the first floor, plus the garden.

The neighbors "upstream" from us have a pool. When they fill/top off their pool, the water does not flow to us. It also does not flow for other reasons, namely, there is not enough water.

Long story short, this water conservation stuff is not theoretical and not about being a good citizen, a good guest in this country, or even a good neighbor. It would be worth doing for these reasons, but that is not why I am hauling graywater out of the kitchen for my palms. It is because there is only so much water in the reserve water tank and it has to go a long way. I never really know how long-- when the water gets cut off, who knows when it comes back on again?

Also learning about war against mosquitoes. Soon it will be too hot for skeeters but right now, it is me vs. them. The house is screened and sealed as best we can seal it. One move to the other side of the world and I have gone from wanting everything organic and nontoxic to "Angie Reed, queen of poisons." I have six different poisons to kill mosquitoes.



It takes one poison, doxycycline (antibiotic), to help me live with the mosquitoes I cannot kill. You can see the doxy packaging in the detail above.

Doxy prevents malaria and elephantiasis. My Pakistan doctor was not very impressed that the US travel clinic put me on doxy.

Actually, he snorted. Then he told me that other medications do a much better job of protecting against malaria. But, since I am tolerating the doxy well and it has other benefits (like, no more freaking sinusitis. WOOT! But I have traded sinusitis for the flu, go me, go south Asia) he gave me his blessing to stay on it.

I don't think my Pakistan doctor is worried about malaria. Actually, I don't think I have met anyone here who is worried about malaria. But then, I have not yet met anyone who gets the level of mosquito bites that I do. I don't think my doctor understands that, as far as mosquitoes go, I am a hot number.

S., who lives in the same house and sleeps in the same bed, has yet to get a single mosquito bite.

I get from two to fifteen bites a night. I got two bites while I was writing this blog entry, in the middle of the day. This is with vigilance and the aforementioned six different mosquito poisons. If anyone comments "mosquito netting!10101!!! I will scream. I will scream, ship me some or tell me where to buy it. Everyone thinks mosquito netting is out there somewhere. But where is it? Nobody seems to know, because nobody really bothers.

I suspect that, whatever factor it is that I have that attracts mosquitoes? Most people here do not have it. It took me over three months just to find personal mosquito repellent in the store-- the kind you put on your skin and clothes. The bottle says a product of research by the US Department of Defence [sic]. I think that means DEET.

People here just don't bother using it, although they are commonly outside in the early evening. I think they are not getting bit.



I was reading about India and sacred cows. It is thought (don't know if it is true) that mosquitoes preferentially bite cows over humans. So if a cow is hanging out by your house? She's protecting your family from mosquito bites/malaria/dengue fever.

Here is a paper talking about cows protecting people from malaria. It is on the internets and must be true.

I told S. that I am his sacred cow. Surely he would have been bitten at least a few times if I wasn't there inciting mad mosquito lust. They do buzz his ears, they just don't care to bite him.

Immediate future holds more house projects to get ready for the heat (it is 86 degrees right now, but that is SO not hot). Bug screening so we can sit out at night/move the mattress outside, and shade screens for back porch, and at least one air conditioner. Probably one for my studio too.

With power outages at six hours per day and no guarantee this won't go higher especially with people using air conditioners in the heat-- we can't just rely on air conditioners for cooling, even after we buy them.

I don't mind no AC right now. I'm happy with a ceiling fan-- I have not even bothered to turn it on today. The house is well-designed and the heat is mostly dry. But it is going to get a full thirty degrees hotter, and the humidity will come. Last summer it hit 122 degrees-- an even 50 Celsius. I am told that, in 122 degrees, your breath feels cool as it comes out of your mouth.

02:07 pm: urdu lessons
It's probably done.


urdu lessons, mixed media on canvas, 36 x 36"

Want a detail? ( Oh, sure. )

Click either image to go to website for more details.