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Thursday, February 28, 2013

Doggie afternoon



Dog. Dear.

An old dog sleeps under my drafting table, curled up
near the heat. Snoozing, snoring, looking up
when I drop a brush, curse, snort, dab hog bristle angrily
into a dish of turps.

Before her, as I lurched toward dotage, were Poochie, Bozo,
Dylan C. Dogg,
Aldonza.
Then Daisy, Cagney, Murphy.
And now 
Brownie.
Browngirl. Brownitude.
Lady Bronwen Marbella McGee.
Big name, smallish dog, grayish beard.
Noisy, she is. Barks all the time. Terrier mix. Or
something else. Rescued by me, she rescued
me from despair. I had killed Murphy.

Oh, no. I didn't shoot Murph or stab her. I loved her. But
I took her to the wrong vet. Who
missed the diagnosis. Six months later
she was dead. I decided, no more suffering for her. No.
And I took her to my old vet, far away. A good vet.
We cried, she and I, when Murphy left us.

I cried for days. Days. Whole days. In the sun
on my deck, no phones, no friends.
Grief, yes. Sadness, yes. Guilt. Oh yes.

My pit of despair even the sun wouldn't warm away. Or birdsong. Or
anything. And then the truth: another dog. A rescue. Again. A dog
that needed me.

Six hours later, Brownie was home. Peeing in terror, curling up
in corners, afraid to eat until she succumbed to
chicken offered by hand. Peeing if I turned around. Peeing if I left the room.
So frightened. Abused yes, but how?

To this day, I've never raised my voice to her. And still, she pees when
any little thing is odd. Frightening. Strange to her. Twelve years on.
Poor dear.

Curled now in the corner, near the heat, sleeping. She sleeps when I'm in sight or smell. She eats when I provide the food. She barks, snarls, growls when others
enter our...OUR...space.  

She pees, she barks. She picks at her food. She has never
once fetched. Swimming is going dog-knee deep, no more. She sleeps
on beds/sofas/chairs/wherever. She sheds
her coat maybe
four times a year. She shreds
paper. She's canine high maintenance.

The best dog I've ever had.



Wednesday, February 27, 2013

China's great gift to art

String Quartet by Chen Yifei
In the early 1980s, I was studying at The Art Students League of New York. It's on 57th Street, not far from Hammer Gallery. I would often stroll by at lunchtime, if I had scarfed a slide of pizza from the joint next door to the school rather than going to Les Trois Petite Cochons for a then quite new and trendy croissant sandwich. I rarely entered Hammer; it was definitely at the high end of the price scale, and dressed as I was on League days in a paint-splattered denim skirt, I didn't think I'd fit in very well.

But one day, there was a painting in the window that drew me to it like a sunny day in Cornwall pulls me recklessly to the beach. I had never seen such perfection in a modern portrait. I was so entranced, I walked right in.

There were more. And then, in the next room, there were amazingly evocative paintings of China. (See below) I really didn't care about China. It was not on my lifetime must-see list. It was just, well, China. It wasn't, for example, Paris.

A helpful gallery employee came my way and I cringed. Obviously, I was not a wealthy patron of the arts, but rather a lowly student of the arts, despite being beyond normal student age. But he was very happy to show me the rest of the works, to talk a bit about the painter, and to tell me the prices.

I wasn't shocked by too much. I'd lived in New York quite a while, most of my life in fact. I had already determined that, no, I could not borrow five thousand bucks to buy a Dufy, nor to obtain a stunning example of the Hudson River School. I could spend a couple hundred, when the spirit moved me and times were flush, on such things as the little Henry Bright pencil drawing I still have in my living room. It has returned to the land in which it was made, and seems happy. (It was purchased in Noortman & Brod in Manhattan.)

No matter. Back then, right when Chen Yifei began to take the New York art world by storm and tobacco heiress Doris Duke's country home wall by wall, paintings started at $25,000. In 1983, that was a lot of money. Really a lot of money. I had bought a handyman special house outside NYC for not much more than that.

I would give a lot to own a Chen Yifei, but am fortunately wiser now (?), and would not seek a loan to buy a painting. The artist died suddenly and fairly young in 2005, and I have no doubt that finding a Chen Yifei for $25,000 would be an immense bargain these days. I could go to NYC and find out; Hammer is still handling his work. Maybe I should do some fund-raising. Maybe I could deduct the cost from my taxes as it could be claimed as an educational expense.

Or maybe I'll simply have to keep dreaming, and go back to my own work, a portrait on the easel right now that is, I'm hoping, quite derivative of the Chen painting at the top of the page.

I'll let you know. 

Waterside Village by Chen Yifei




Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Enchantment Enough

Cornish sheep in a rainy springtime (c. LH McBride 2013)


Dark clouds from the northwest, laden, pinned to the earth beneath the white ones from the southwest. Stalled, they scour'd

the land with branches torqued, torn from trunks. They raked
the fields with hedges' trees bending low.

Like a dingy skirting board, sheep huddled close to the base of hedgerows,
out of the rain where even bending branches couldn't reach. Out of the north wind, miserable despite their wool and cleverness.

A herd of black and white cows in the field below made a photo corner, filling the triangle in the hedged field separating them from the sheep. Fairy Cross Farm, 
the signboard said, intimating

Enchantment

Such as one might find in a month of too much rain. 
Enough to be glad one isn't a sheep.

Monday, February 25, 2013

Crisp and Dry


Sand fiddler crab (c. Laura Harrison McBride 2013)


Crisp and Dry. That's what the packet said. The packet
contained some sort of cracker
I thought. She shoved me
a bit, snarled, "Pardon me." I was standing beside
an open bit of supermarket conveyor belt
she wanted to put her groceries on right then
and she did.
Banged each item down.
It was my fault the cashier was slow and
the man in front of my husband was
having a conversation and
ignoring his duty--that lady might have said--to
hurry up and move on
on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

So she slammed food onto rubber, pursed her lips...not that it
made any difference. Puckered, she was. Coated 
with an invisible layer of 
age dust. Crisp and Dry.
Lips pursed, wrinkles darting right left and centre refusing to
let go their disapproval. Colourless eyes, colourless glasses.
Straight short grey hair stuck
out in clumps, badly cut. Grey wool slacks bagged at the knee. Shapeless 
jersey in some muted colour. Mint green? Lavender? No matter.
No makeup. No jewellery.
Crisp. And dry.

Widow? No. Women of her age, having lost
a spouse, keep up their looks in hopes
of meeting dear Fred in heaven. Spinster, probably.
Crisp and Dry.

Not crackers. Cooking oil. Solid stuff, hydrogenated. Deadly, 
slowly. Her cooking would be crisp and dry, 
veins hardened like her manner in time.

People say, often, that crabby old people are crabby because they are old.
I think they are old because they are crabby, crisp and dry.


Limpets


Limpets. (c. Laura Harrison McBride 2013)

The little town clings to the hills rising from
the small harbour, the working harbour,
a harbour that spawns fishermen. And Fisherman's Friends. But this is
not about the untimely death
of a singer. Not a lament for the man who lamented "The Last Leviathan"
and made me cry. Every time. Every time I heard his poet's voice.

It is about life on the windy coast of Cornwall. It is
about the landscape. It is
about the messy farm atop the hill. The farm where
black earth, inked with generations of bovine
excretions, maybe blood, perhaps
petrol spills slithers between rock buildings and
aluminium buildings and wooden
buildings. But the house, higher up, sheltered from the
sweet sickly smell of a dairy farm.
The house, large, not too old, but still
looking as if it never gets any warmer than yesterday's tea.
Held up, like drooping teats with an underwire bra, by iron crosses
hammered into the wall, two of them, to hold crossbeams in place, floor
above floor. Sooner
or later, it will tumble down.

In town, streets barely a car wide, snake 
around ancient dwellings. Cornishmen
and women lived in them, do still in some. Others
cater to the ice-cream-flavoured tastes of emmits. Emmits, 
Cornish for ants, crawling from Up Country to the unspoiled shore, spoiled
with demands for fast food, entertainment, surfing lessons,
gewgaws and gimcracks to take back.

Above the town, a clearing offers a coast view of big rocks, small birds.
People pulled along by dogs in coats sniffing posts, ignoring early
daffodils seeking warmth in weak sun. Suddenly hungry, haring off 
toward Polzeath and a beachside cafe
open all year. But cold. "Larry, turn up the heat," the woman squawks to
a man taking not much money in for surf lessons in his cafe back booth.
The latte was excellent.

Coastal Cornwall. Real, still, I think. Despite emmits. Despite foreigners
like me. 
Some claim, I have, to be here, 
having grown up on a cold island in the north Atlantic. A sand island, 
not rock, stretching out from sparkling Manhattan toward
England. 
Offering sea spray and even, in my youth, a few fishermen. 
A few daffodils poking out early. Horses. Chickens. Ducks. My yes, Long Island ducks. And fresh seafood.

Like a limpet I am, clinging to anything I can reach at the
edges of continents, the edges of the sea.  A fisherman's friend,
the limpet. Something to gather when fish don't run. Limpets
are always there.
At the edge of the sea. Doing sea things.
At home by the sea.

Friday, February 22, 2013

Bread and jam today


Maria. c. Laura Harrison McBride, 2013

Winter is late. Freezing. Cold draughts limbo under front door,
roll up stairs and zig around banisters to
attack me in my studio. Not, no
I will not buy fingerless gloves. I will turn on a space heater. I will
because I am not Degas, this is not Paris, and
I have a meal ticket. A man who
supports my engaging the arts to do battle with
whatever demons make us
all of us arty folk
engage ourselves in repetitive futility.

The best do not repeat. The wealthy
do. The wealthy artists find
a gimmick, a gimcrack, and crack their
muse on its sharp, metallic edges
all the way to the bank. Schnabel pottery on canvas--
oh dear, and other
New York talentless...well, I had better not go there. But,
No frozen, northern-lighted studio for them; they can afford heat. Lights.
Models.
Holiday trips to exotic lands. I can
turn on the heat, thanks to my meal
ticket (dear man, my soul's bread and jam.)

I can labour at one-offs until I tire, then go
downstairs, toss costly grounds
into the French press, stick a piece
of favourite once for-rich-folks-only
white bread into the toaster. Slather butter, spread
strawberry Bon Maman to my heart's content.

Brown bread. I used to bake, before the meal ticket, and drench
in butter and honey still warm. In the old days, the days when
I couldn't turn up the heat. I had no meal ticket. But I wouldn't...no,
never...I wouldn't use a gimmick to attract buyers. Ate brown bread, honey, not much else.
But no gimmicks.
No.

Thank god for my tall handsome meal ticket. I owe him my (he)art.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Painting yourself into a corner

If you've ever seen the old--really, really, really old--US TV series I Love Lucy, you'll recall the episode in which Lucy and Ethel are redecorating a bedroom. They decide to do it themselves because tightwad Ricky Ricardo, Lucy's bandleader husband, is too cheap to pay painter/paperhangers. Needless to say, Lucy--or was it Ethel? Well, one of them--ends up pasted underneath the wallpaper before it's all over.



Last week, I felt I had done much the same thing with a painting. I had reworked it and reworked it and reworked it. When a friend asked this morning what I had done with it, I said, "Well, so far I haven't slashed it."

I also did some really crummy work at life drawing on Tuesday night at Krowji Artists; not the fault of the model, nor the venue nor anything except just substandard seeing and producing by me. I got one respectable portrait out of it all, yet another aspect, I have concluded, of my favorite model's most mobile face.

What have I learned from all this?

First, when a painting goes wrong...just wrong...no matter what your friends/lover/spouse/cat say...abandon it. Do it early. Stop wasting time on a losing proposition. That's why, for oil painters, god made gesso. For watercolorists....other side? Scrap? Colour tests?

Second, not every line that drips from your fingers will be Rembrandt class. Really? Really. Get used to it. Stop beating yourself up. We simply don't know anything about what Rembrandt threw away or painted over.

If you have a model whose face or body vexes you, keep at it. It is your major learning experience. I mean, what do you learn from repeating what you already know you can do? Only maybe, just maybe, don't yell out in the life class, "Alex, stop THINKING! Your face is changing." All models' faces change during a pose, some more than others, though. I have concluded that your most difficult model will be your best teacher...just as my hard-headed, stubborn, intelligent horse was my best teacher for that skill. I got dumped over a good few fences first, though. Still...he taught me everything I know about jumping horses, enough that I have been able to teach others for decades.

I think models might be the same. So (note to self), after the next rotten drawing/painting session, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again. (And no, there are no other cliches I'm planning to use today.)




Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Instant Art: Savior of artists? Or a disaster?



A painting by the late Morris Katz, Instant Artist


I almost owned a Morris Katz painting once. Katz, who died in 2010, billed himself as the Instant Artist. In the late 1970s, when I was writing columns for Dow-Jones about the gargantuan resort hotels in New York State's Catskill Mountains (aka the Borscht Belt), I encountered Katz one night. All the hotels had nightclub shows, virtually every night. Sometimes, the shows featured name acts from Hollywood and Broadway. Sometimes, they featured singing waiters from the hotel. Sometimes they featured Morris Katz.

Katz would get up on stage with a palette, a couple of palette knives, a canvas and an idea to paint a blue version of a forest in ten minutes, bantering away the whole time. Then he would perhaps do a pink version. And then a realistically coloured version. I caught that show one night, wrote about it, and, the next time I stopped by to see the hotel's general manager about something, he handed me a painting Katz had left for me in appreciation of my column about him.

I couldn't accept it; it was Dow-Jones' policy that no writer should accept anything worth more than a cup of coffee. I was the exception; I was hosted at the hotels, often for a whole weekend, and that was OK because I wasn't writing journalism; I was writing things to pump up the Catskills' economy. Still the exception did not extend to tangible items, so I took the painting to the executive editor--it would have been crass and insulting to refuse it outright--to deal with.

I didn't think Katz created great art. He probably created some appreciation of art and artists, though, and that's all good.

But Katz' development of "instant" painting makes me nervous. Back then, what Katz did was an anomaly worthy of note in some way. It had no particular influence on the art world at all; it had more influence on the Guinness Book of World Records, in which Katz holds a couple of titles. Now, artists are into the daily painting chase, posting each deathless, and sometimes soul-less, work on etsy for cash flow.

Cash flow is good. I'd like some. But how good is making art into an instant thing? We already have instant photography light years beyond Polaroids. There are iPod apps, apparently, for creating art, able to turn virtually anyone into an artist, whether they have any imagination, any skill, any desire to create lasting works.

Are we, by doing the painting-a-day routine, simply cheapening our art until it will have no value at all? That would be fine in a Star Trek universe, in which people are all paid the same and simply do for their income whatever it is their talents and interests suggest. Starship captains were paid the same as starship cooks; the only difference, really, was how they chose to spend their income on the holodeck.

We are not there yet. I wish we were. But we won't be in the lifetime of most working artists today. So I ask: What are we doing? Are we cutting our own throats in the medium term for a little cash flow in the short term? And is there any remedy for the situation?

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Bits and bytes are bummers

Every so often...well, not every HOUR....but often....I have to assure myself that I am not the world's worst artist. I am assuming most of us have those feelings of wormhood every so often, often being a relative term.

Anyway, I spent two hours yesterday and two today on one of my remaining journalism cash cows, with the result that I swore loudly at technology and wanted desperately to kick the computer across the room and pick up a paintbrush...but didn't. It's a topsy-turvy day, though. I want to go for a walk; sun, in Cornwall lately, is particularly prized. And there's a life-drawing session tonight, and I happen to know one of my favorite models (who is also a friend) will be the model this evening. Which means that I have yet another chance to get his face wrong.

Mind you, he's a good-looking man, a pleasure to draw in many ways. But...and this is the really tough part...his face literally changes according to what he's thinking. And he's very smart. He's always thinking, and as a Scot, he enjoys that Celtic lateral thinking modality, letting the dots connect and following them happily wherever they lead. Bloody impossible to get THE ultimate likeness. But I'll keep trying. Happily.
Alex, focused (c. McBride 2012)



I'll struggle a lot more happily tilting at the windmills of Alex's up planes and down planes and implied motion and negative spaces and positive spaces than I would monkeying with bits and bytes and other digital garbage, and even with the words I'm cramming into the bits and bytes. I found, during this morning's misery with writing, that I have made a shift. I used to write--even journalism, really--with the right side of my brain. It just flowed. Now it's torture. I'm assuming I'm attempting to make the connections with the left side of my brain, like an accountant for crying out loud, and it just isn't working. But I'm reserving the right side, I think, for the shift to art, which cannot be done on the left side. Cannot. Period.

I loved Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I might have a copy of that book around someplace. I might read it before I write something serious again. Or not. I think the right side of my brain will have to become a sort of inviolable temple, dedicated only to art, and to getting Alex finally--someday--perfectly RIGHT.  I'm not getting any younger, after all.






Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Boadicea, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and art

Boadicea, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and art

 

 American Boadiceas

Gloria Steinem (Wiki Commons)


Betty Friedan (Wiki Commons)

Shirley Chisholm (Wiki Commons)

All three were founders of America's National Organization for Women, NOW


Late yesterday, a friend put a question to her Facebook friends: Should men be allowed in the delivery room?

It turned into a very disrespectful discussion, but mainly, I think, because feminism, the sort of feminism that fights for women to be equal with men, has now been degraded into a sort of Hallmark card version in which women prove they are strong by giving all their essence to men, rather than celebrating and reveling in their own unique abilities and demanding respect for those. But that's another issue for another column; indeed, when I'm done painting today, I think I shall take it up either on my own blog, Cafe de Flore, or on my Suite 101 Ethics channel.

However, the whole thing really disturbed my painting rhythm. Why? Because I did spend a lifetime as a journalist, and part of that lifetime as an adjunct professor teaching the logic and rhetoric of writing, before making way for my first love and the study of my 30s, painting.  In yesterday's discussion, one of the commentators was so badly schooled in both logic and rhetoric that she thought the way to make her point was to call me names. She is an American, and worse, she got both her BA and her MA from the same university, an incestuous thing and certainly not designed to broaden a person's field of inquiry or depth of knowledge.

I have never had a child because I didn't want to. I spent decades ensuring there would be no pregnancy. And yet, I believe that the issue, as part of all women's lives, is essential. And, as it happens, it relates both to what I'm painting and to the current political morass in the United States.
***

I am painting a portrait of Queen Boadicea, the Icenii tribe's answer to the Amazon Women of Middle Eastern/Mediterranean mythology. Boadicea was real, a warrior who set out to avenge the rape of her daughters by the Roman invaders of Britain. In the painting, she looks disappointed, as if she knew she would fail.

Note: Celtophiles generally call her Boudicca, although there is no evidence, really, for how it was spelled or said. Various chroniclers spelled it various ways. However, in Latin and in the names of many venerable sculptures, it is Boadicea, and for me, Boadicea it shall remain, being both of the period (although Roman) and more lyrical.

My painting of Boadicea arose from a sketch of a model at Krowji Artists in Redruth, Cornwall, where I go to draw from life models as often as possible. The model that sparked the painting has a facility for portraying emotions, and I suspect she might have been disappointed in something that evening. Maybe the cold. Despite numerous heaters, there was a chill even for those with clothes on--it was right at the beginning of winter--and she draped herself in a feather boa for one pose for a little bit of warmth. It is now a rabbit fur wrap, in the painting.

But I digress: My point is that it is incumbent upon women--in my opinion--to retain for themselves all things that pertain to their essence, and childbirth is certainly one. In the United States at the moment, Congress is doing everything in its martian (and I mean as in warlike) power to pound women into nothingness. It has refused to enact legislation protecting women from rape and beatings; the several states have enacted legislation making it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion without first conducting ultrasounds, other invasive procedures, or both. In short, they are institutionalizing the spiritual and bodily rape of women, and women like my adversary in the Facebook discussion are enabling it through an approach to feminism (in my opinion!) that virtually hands our womanhood to men on a platter, complete with knife and fork. There is no place where a woman's spirituality and physicality are quite so intertwined nor quite so essential as in childbirth, I think. For most women--women who do not labour in the arts or politics, for example, and give birth to other products every day--the labour of childbirth might be one of the few occasions to glory in the unitary essence of creation.

But, said my adversary, that isn't fair to the men in our lives. Really? When they stop forcing themselves on women, as rapists or even selfishly demanding non-rapist partners....When they acknowledge ALL their children in and out of wedlock and support them without the threat of jail time....When they stop enacting laws to ensure their sperm is deathless regardless of what it costs the women they impregnate....then perhaps I'll listen to a chorus about bend-over-backward fairness to the sperm donors. Until then, I think women do all of us a disservice for being so overly concerned about ensuring a male place in the delivery room. If it is a woman's choice that a man be there, that's one thing. But it needs to be an opt-in situation, not an opt-out. As it is now, women and hospitals all expect the father to be present, putting the onus on the woman to create HER birthing experience the way SHE wants it.

So, sleep was difficult. I worry--even though I renounced my US citizenship just over a year ago--about what is to become of American women in the face of all this wimpiness and pseudo-earth-mother-cum-smiling-airheaded helpmeet, a return to a pre-Betty Friedan/Shirley Chisholm/Gloria Steinem way of life that celebrated female servitude by putting men in charge of life--the doctors--and elevating men as sperm donor/partner/whatever to a role that usurps women's power and interrupts her communion with the essence of womanhood in many cases. Again, if a woman wants it that way, it needs to be her decision, not the culture's, not the hospital's, not the government's, not the partner's. And these days, she'd have to fight to make a private birth experience happen in the face of immense societal pressure to let men in on the secret without a second thought.

***

This morning, I finished Boadicea's face. And her wild hair. All that's left is finishing her garments and her extraordinary golden torc...and that particular difficult birth will be complete.

I suspect I shall dedicate the painting to real feminism, and when it sells, shall give a portion of the proceeds to the National Organization for Women in the US, and possibly its counterpart in the UK.



Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Boadicea and other global issues

Tuesday, February 12, 2013


Boadicea--or Boudicca if you must (Wiki Commons)


Work on Boadicea, Queen of the Icenii.....

Her face has been repainted five times. So far. I think this is the last.

She's younger than I thought...not my fault. It's just the way the paints happened.

And yesterday, she told me in no uncertain terms that she did not like the blue/black/white tartan I had sketched in. Now she's in emerald green.

And so it goes.

This morning, the light source changed. Repaint all the highlights, all the shadows.

And now that I've removed her boob--not really, just painted a garment over it (does this make it a structural element?)--I suddenly realized her fur cape had to move a little.

As every artist knows, you change one thing...one little thing...and suddenly, the whole balance of the painting is in a cocked hat.

Her left shoulder isn't right. Or is it the fur? I loved the fur, spent a lot of time making it rabbit...something Boadicea had lots of access to, since she lived about 63 AD, well before the blight that virtually wiped them out in England, during the last century, Myxomatosis. The Australians introduced the disease in their country in the 1950s to cut their rabbit population back; apparently, it did NOT do the job, since the monster jack rabbit is still the butt of Aussie jokes. However, its emergence in the British rabbit population was a disaster. I'm not going to post a photo of a poor little bunny with the disease, but if you want to see what it did to them, click here. And then it killed them. Thousands of them.

From the Wikipedia article about it:
Rabbits suffering in the last stages of the disease, commonly called "mixy" or "myxie" rabbits, are still a common sight in the UK. Unfortunately, the disease has wider consequences apart from the death of rabbits. The Spanish Imperial Eagle and the Iberian Lynx, among others, are now almost extinct because the decline of the rabbit population, which is about 80% of their diets, has caused mass starvation. It is not uncommon for shooters to specifically target infected rabbits, viewing the act as being merciful. However, in 2005 the UK Land Registry conducted a survey of 16,000 hectares of its land and reported that the rabbit population had increased three-fold every two years – likely a product of increasing genetic resistance to the virus.
Maybe we should think of changing things in paintings as the death of a species; the roll-on effects can be disastrous. Except we can get up from our comfy chair, pick up the brush...and create that world anew, with or without myomatosis, as we prefer.

Healthy British rabbit, my favorite kind (Wiki Commons)


***

On that repainting of Boadicea...I read a critic's comment the other night about modern paints and painters. Quoth he, modern paints have a flat, white look because we buy paints in tubes instead of crushing lapis lazuli, etc., to create our own pigments which we then mix in our own medium. Since that moment, I have abandoned my long-standing ability to mix any color on earth and get it right, a skill I learned not at art school but at my short-lived foray into interior design. Being an art junkie all my life, before I finally gave in and studied art itself, I thought interior design would do it, so I forked over some cash to the New York School of Interior Design for a colour course and a period furniture course. The colour course was great, even though the instructor was an awful woman. (As I recall, she lived in an apartment once inhabited by horror movie star Bela Lugosi. I think she caught something.) The period furniture lecture was horrid, mainly because it was full of teenage bimbos more interested in Studio 54 than a career. (So now you know how long ago THAT was....) Anyway, I didn't last long among the decorators; my heart was in the studio.