Angie Reed Garner

04:28 pm: now with 300% more parrots
I went back into this one for a few days, so here it is again.


parrot talk, mixed media on canvas, 30 x 30"

Here is a 1800px wide file, 1.8 mb, if you'd like a better look at the mixed media bits, text etc.

10:06 am: yay, and then how can a simple little trip to the grocery store? get so BIG
frandroid asked:

You (seem) to figure in a lot of your paintings, as if in zero-G (that letter again!!) weightlessness. Can you talk about talk about that? Personally, I see it as imbuing the painting with a sense that it is a projection of your imaginary... The paintings might be (somewhat) anchored in gravity but your state of mind that leads to what you paint isn't bound that way.

Anyway, that's my take, you have your own, whether shareable or not...



I was so excited to realize, hey, I finally know the answer to this question. Finally! People often mention Chagall and I never knew what to say, but I do now.
So I said:

Gravity vs. weightlessness is a narrative device my mother uses a lot too... I think for me it's probably about depicting inner vs. outer reality. Outer reality has gravity.

If I meditate with eyes closed, I pretty quickly end up in an experience like weightlessness, I get a level of sensory deprivation just from that, so this device is pretty literal to my experience.

Thanks for the chance to think about this-- it came clearer because of your question.

-------------------------------

GROCERY STORE WHOA

1) I have been complaining, and trying to solve the issue of, setting off security guards at my local mall where I walk basically daily for groceries/coffee/whatever, for almost two years. It has been an issue since the day the mall opened, that some guards have a threat response to me. Nobody needs this kind of gratuitous adrenaline in their day, or at least I do not.

Anyway, yesterday was The Sad Miracle.

S. and I went to get groceries. I ditched him mid-mall to buy some leopard-print leggings that turned up in a shop window, pledging to catch up with him in the produce section.

I had to stop at grocery store entrance and demonstrate that my plastic bag of leopard print leggings I'd just purchased had been properly stapled shut, it's a thing they insist on against shoplifting and the bag check guy staples it for you.

And the guard did something smile-like with his face! To me! I was like, huh?

And then he spoke!

He come already before you! I know, you come separate!

Part of me died, a little.

And the rest of me felt such relief. This ugly uncomfortable thing with the security guards has been going on so long. And it's over now. I am no longer a threat, I am in a new category, I am a feature.

I was recognized and given some kind of treatment as a human being because they finally made me... as a wife. S's wife.


2) AND then at the grocery store, I saw a woman with less hair than I have. She was even taller than me (I am 5'9"). And she had on a major abaya-- beads and a structured collar and shayla (slung around her neck at the time)...

I was so excited and I tried not to stare.

The no-hair + abaya look? will btw be familiar to many some of you...


Reverend Mother Mohiam (Siân Phillips), from David Lynch's Dune (1984)

In her presence, I felt a species of awe.


3) And then, as if 1 + 2 were not enough, I had a hot flash standing in line to pay for groceries. I think it is my 3rd ever.

"S, is it really hot in here?" "No dear, you are having a hot flash." "Is my face bright red?" "Not that anyone who didn't already know you would notice."

10:48 am: done for now-- "drawing the line / bardo transit" diptych
Each panel 40 x 30"





Not necessarily spaced how I will show them, they are stuck up on pre-existing screws and I had to stand on a wobbly chair to get this wonky fuzzy install shot with glare. And I even took 10 to get one this good. One must take risks undaunted.

03:14 pm: "There is no easy way from the earth to the stars." But there is pure gold in the internet.
I was running down this quote from Seneca, said by poor doomed Megara to Hercules...

And found this, someone else trying to find a translation.
I will save you the click...

"Non est ad astra mollis e terris via."

Believe it or not, this was written on the side of a small, round, glass fishbowl one-fourth filled with brown sand and with a porcelain chicken sitting in the middle of it. It was given to my cousin as a present for the holidays by a friend of hers, and none of us can figure out what this means (the friend is apparently aloof, so we can't ask her). Thanks a ton for your help, and I hope that everybody has a happy and healthy holiday!!!

Now what is Etsy for if I can't order up one of these. And why do I not have an aloof friend, to gift me such a thing.

Meanwhile, thank you my lj interlocutors, for not being aloof. Your comments are better than porcelain chickens in fishbowls of sand. You are helping me figure stuff out, and there is nothing better than that.

10:30 am: beauty vs. magnificence-- Mia Mingus
Moving beyond a politic of desirability to loving the ugly. Respecting Ugly for how it has shaped us and been exiled. Seeing its power and magic, seeing the reasons it has been feared. Seeing it for what it is: some of our greatest strength.

Because we all do it. We all run from the ugly. And the farther we run from it, the more we stigmatize it and the more power we give beauty. Our communities are obsessed with being beautiful and gorgeous and hot. What would it mean if we were ugly? What would it mean if we didn’t run from our own ugliness or each other’s? How do we take the sting out of “ugly?” What would it mean to acknowledge our ugliness for all it has given us, how it has shaped our brilliance and taught us about how we never want to make anyone else feel? What would it take for us to be able to risk being ugly, in whatever that means for us. What would happen if we stopped apologizing for our ugly, stopped being ashamed of it? What if we let go of being beautiful, stopped chasing “pretty,” stopped sucking in and shrinking and spending enormous amounts of money and time on things that don’t make us magnificent?

Where is the Ugly in you? What is it trying to teach you?

And I am not saying it is easy to be ugly without apology. It is hard as fuck. It threatens our survival. I recognize the brilliance in our instinct to move toward beauty and desirability. And it takes time and for some of us it may be impossible. I know it is complicated. …And I also know that though it may be a way to survive, it will not be a way to thrive, to grow the kind of genders and world we need. And it is not attainable to everyone, even those who want it to be.

http://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/moving-toward-the-ugly-a-politic-beyond-desirability/

The eternal problem is that beauty, which cannot become boring and done, in order to keep being beautiful and keep that money flowing, is always stealing and gutting and neutering and packaging and selling magnificence just as soon as it becomes visible.

Or maybe this isn't the problem. Maybe it's just how things always are, at least for right now. If we aren't paying attention to beauty, I guess we don't have to care what the hell it does. We care about the hell it causes, the human carnage, but we keep our eyes on the prize we choose.

Eternity is in love with the productions of Time.

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

Where any view of Money exists, Art cannot be carried on, but War only.
--William Blake


drawing the line, STILL in progress/not done, left panel

03:17 pm: "drawing the line" progress shot #5, links


Photomerge of the panels. I wouldn't show it this way, I like a gap.



Various links on aging/death/meditation, stashed for myself later, but easy enough to share.



Bay Area folks might know him, Wes Nisker.

He gave a dharma talk I've listened to twice and really liked both times-- titled "You Are Not Your Fault."

http://www.audiodharma.org/talks/audio_player/4007.html

He talks about how we are between meaningful stories-- how evolution, in which his audience in general strongly believes, does not yet have a numinous quality (unless we kind of work at it, which is the purpose of this talk). Chanting the periodic table.

And a written piece "On the Practice of Geezing." There are better and worse ways to geeze, this is more how I'd like to do it.

http://woodzie.org/scoop/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=91:the-practice-of-geezing&catid=37:articles&Itemid=55

I like how he speculates maybe he's just full up of culture and that's why he's not so into what the kids are doing these days. Individual capacities must vary. I'm a hardcore neophile. But know very nice people who cannot seem to get past Renaissance art. They just can't. There is no more room in their hearts.
My considerable disinterest in pleasure travel raises eyebrows, but I've lived on either three or four fucking continents depending on your geography.

Maybe read this book.

Wiki-- 5 remembrances
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upajjhatthana_Sutta

07:28 pm: "parrot talk" progress shot #4 I think

mixed media, 30 x 30"

I think maybe one more round of tweaks. But I thought that a couple days ago. ;)

06:05 pm: "parrot talk" progress shot #3 I think


Now to make it work. :)

11:24 am: no river like craving.
Done for now.


oil on canvas 36 x 48"

( Detail.Collapse )

05:47 pm: another progress shot

oil 36 x 48"
Closing in on it... guessing two more good painting days and done.