Making toast in England

The whole front panel lights up, in the order of the colours printed under the manufacturer's name. Talk about useless gewgaws......or maybe they wanted a mechano-electrical object to ape a cyberspace one....

I'm not a fan of the cyberworld.

Oh, sure, I use it. I use toasters and food processors, too, but I don't really have to be involved with them the way I do with a computer. And I don't need help to use them.

But, wait. I forgot. I live in the UK now, and in the first three years, have had a total of five toasters, each one more pitiful than the one before, regardless of price. We had one that produced a rainbow effect of lights as the toast went from white or beige to, sometimes, brown. Sometimes not. And god forbid you attempted to make white toast after granary; it simply wouldn't toast. Nor would toasting one of either kind right after another. By the way, all that applies not only to the rainbow toaster, but the other four as well.

To a former American, this toast thing is unacceptable. For 20 years in the US, I had a ten-buck toaster and it made perfect toast every time on demand, no matter how many pieces it had made right before. (I've gone on about this toast thing before, as my friends well know.) Apparently the simple solution to warm, crunchy bread in the UK is to spring for £110 for a Dualit toaster, which everyone says WILL make good toast every time. But I'm stubborn. I don't want to spend $170 for a freaking toaster (at today's exchange rate). I may have renounced my US citizenship, but I haven't yet renounced my belief that toast is a minor issue in life and shouldn't cost as much as a car payment to produce. Nor be as difficult as getting one's artworks posted in cyberspace. Still, I expect that someday I will run into Curry's and demand a Dualit. I may run in with a loaf of bread--no, two loaves, one white and one brown--and demand that they toast it all before my very eyes and prove the value of that Dualit before I buy the toaster.

I'm not in toaster overdrive. Really. This is all about art, the art of eating. The entire magilla has helped me to understand why the British like cold toast. Cold. Not even a hint of warm. When Simon butters his toast in the morning, it sounds like someone is sanding a door. Cold butter on cold toast followed by room temperature bitter jam with chewy bits in it; I refer, of course, to traditional marmalade. Simon and the dog like it (go figure). Me? I won't eat it, not for an exhibition of my work at the best gallery in Cornwall.

This is awful-looking toast by any standards. It looks like margarine plopped on top of it, first of all. Secondly, what a mess. At least when my engineer husband spreads real butter on cold toast, he does it neatly, edge to edge. Well, maybe OCD a bit, because for him it is REALLY edge to edge.

I don't eat much toast these days. It's too difficult to get the whole breakfast ready and then stand there monkeying around with the toaster to extract a warm and browned piece or two for myself. Why bother? After my toast joined Simon's in the toast rack, it would cool down PDQ. Toast racks, I have decided, are an invention of the devil. But I have two, both inherited from my late mother-in-law. Only a population deprived a priori of warm toast with butter melting lusciously into it could possibly have invented them.

In the US, they are called mail racks.

Maybe when we get the conservatory/dining room built and move breakfast back to the kitchen from the dining alcove where we eat breakfast now, I can pop up and make toast. Warm toast. Wit butter melting into it, and slathered finally with room-temperature Bonne Maman Strawberry Conserve...the ONLY thing to have on toast, except maybe lemon curd.

In the UK, this is a toast rack; it turns lovely warm bread into cold slabs of cardboard. In the US, it's a letter rack. Here's a clue: Most letters arrive cold and are meant to stay that way. Unless it's a bill from the tax folks and you would rather burn it...in which case you will need matches instead. Matches do the same thing in both the US and UK. Indeed, they could conceivably be used to make toast, as well. Warm toast.

So, anyway, back to the cyber world. I expect I'll be screaming by about 3 p.m. (it's not 1 p.m. yet), as I struggle to do the simple task of getting my Etsy store working, or at least started, and dealing with the quotes from the Giclee printer. Simon did the request for me yesterday, turning inches into centimeters and vice versa depending on what was being measured for what purpose. And he turned the Picasa stuff into RGB Tiffs. I mean, what is that? An RGB Tiff. OK. I know it means RedBlueGreen. A Tiff? Some kind of way of storing the bits and bytes and bosons or whatever that happen after you photograph a painting and download it to Picasa. Why it is different from jpegs (whatever that stands for), I have no idea. Anyway, Simon did it. Bless him.

But today he is traveling to London, so I've got to keep myself focused on something other than missing my soulmate. I could paint, but that would be enjoyable. So I might as well take the misery to the max and mess around with Etsy and CafePress and my new website that's almost ready to launch.

The truth is, I should have been born 150 years ago or so; then the only technologies I'd have had to deal with would have been useful stuff, like automobiles and airplanes.

No one expects you to tinker with those yourself; you just call the mechanic for the former and Virgin Atlantic or Aer Lingus (the two safest airlines) for the latter.

For cyberspace, who you gonna call? I'm lucky; I've got Simon the Computer Wizard in house. But even so, it's weird. I don't need help calling the mechanic or the airlines.

Oh, well. Maybe it's a way of keeping artist types creating more work because. As vexing as creative tasks sometimes are, they are light years better than dealing with the demands cyberspace. And making toast in England.

What politics does to art

Taken in 2007, in early spring, in midtown at mid-day.

It kills it.

Politics kills art as surely as being riddled with bullets from a stolen submachine gun will kill a person. It does it totally, messily, and illicitly. It is the overkill of life. It is not to be borne.

That having been said, what does one do about the many accomplished political cartoonists, for example? Are they worthless? No. In fact, seeing a few cartoons each day rather than reading even the headlines in Google News would probably allow more artists to operate sanely and happily than not.

But then the question arises: Would the political cartoonists actually make more appealing art--which is to say, less depressing art in its subject matter--if politics were somehow to be removed from the daily notice of those artists?

Or possibly I'm getting to this: Would I be able to make more art--paint more, think about art more--if I totally avoided reading about politics?

Ed Koch he ain't

I believe that the answer is most assuredly yes. I mean, who really needs to have their soul depressed by knowing that the witless current mayor of New York City is claiming the Chechen Brothers planned to bomb Times Square next? There are some problems with that on every level, which I, as a native New Yorker but a former American (having renounced citizenship) will happily explain, below:

1. The FBI is purportedly said the Chechen Brothers planned to blow up New  York; one must, of course, wonder if that's their way of justifying the militarization of Boston's streets to catch one scrawny 19-year-old who was half-dead anyway. So that gets taken with a grain of salt, but not until one has used valuable brain space to process it.
2. "There was some information that they may have been intent on coming to New York, but not to continue what they were doing," (NYC Police Commissioner Ray) Kelly said yesterday, according to the New York Daily News. "Information that we received said something about partying or having a party ... It may have been words to the effect of coming to party in New York." Hmmm....either Kelly is right or the FBI is. Again, brain space needed to grapple with this. (Huffington Post)
3. Mayor Bloomberg is fanning the flames of terror by making much of the alleged plans of the alleged bombers to allegedly go to New York to allegedly wreak havoc and commit murder in Times Square. This by the same mayor who militarized New York's finest to deal with people camping out, Occupy Wall Street. This man is a buffoon, not in the same league with the late, great Ed Koch. Not even from the same planet. (I wonder how long Kelly will keep his job.)

Now it may be that this is depressing to me simply because I have a great love for New York City, so great that I felt guilt for living in Baltimore when the Twin Towers were demolished. I felt I had in some soul-deep way abandoned my people. Silly, of course: I had lived in Baltimore for several years. Still, my umbilical was firmly attached to the city of my birth, then, and even now.

New York's noisy Chinatown--still low-rise after all these years, and noisy--where Canal Street cuts through it taking traffic from Brooklyn to "the City."

Bush's league

But then we had Bush. And Bush's wars. And we had a feeling of horror driven by idiots like him to new levels. By gad, we had every rotten thing (wars and lies and wars....), and at the end of it, a monetary collapse that put the marginal livings of so many accomplished--but not famous--artists on the ropes.

How many artists in New York, who once made a marginal living drawing dross for publications for a relative pittance or setting up caricature stands in Central Park to earn some coins from tourists are bagging groceries now? Not that there's anything wrong with bagging groceries...except that when an artist does it, it both deprives an unskilled person of a job, and deprives humanity of the artworks that person might have produced. In short, it is precisely the sort of win-lose-lose situation Bush and his one-percenter cronies--of which Bloomberg is a major one--designed. They win, the population in general loses, and those who work in creative ways lose even bigger because the general population can no longer afford even minor works of art.

Bloomberg is to New York and its arts community as Bush was to American education; an unmitigated disaster. He has turned Manhattan from a place where journeyman artists (and writers and actors) could actually live (not easily, but it could be done, as I know from experience) to one where they can't even afford the blankets to sleep rough over subway gratings. He has turned it from a place vibrant with artful concepts into a sterile package for consumption by the international thieves--bankers, brokers, etc.--who have bought up ALL the housing to sell it to other schnooks for even more money. Until, of course, they pull out the rug, as George did nationally a year before he slunk back to the tumbleweed patch of Crawford, TX.

My stepdaughter, Julia, on a day only the sparrows wanted to hang around in Paley Park; spring monsoons had arrived. But the park is open even in winter.

I love New York

There is no real art in New York anymore. I wonder if there are any real people. Apparently, there were still a few on 9/11, because the city rebounded. New Yorkers don't take slaps in the face kindly, but they are kind in helping others recover from same. Bloomberg's New York is plastic, pre-fab, cookie-cutter...any pejorative you want to use.

I love New York. I really do. I love the dirt. I love the wind whistling up the granite canyons of old skyscrapers. I love the Paris boulevard feel of Park Avenue in midtown. I love the docks. I love the accents, all of them, native and foreign. I love the coffee shops. I love Paley Park, a vest-pocket park half a block from St. Thomas (Episcopal) Church, which I also love. Paley Park is sandwiched between skyscrapers, has a 2-story waterfall (man-made), sparrows and a coffee kiosk. On fine days virtually all year long. people sit at tiny tables under spindly trees, enjoying the water-softened hum of New York and a coffee and a bit of pastry, which most share with the sparrows. When I once hosted 14 Russian actors for four days in New York, that was their favorite place. They liked it even better than lunch at the Player's Club. They knew it was quintessentially New York, filled with New Yorkers doing New York things.

But I don't love what Bloomberg has done to it. Sterilized it. Militarized it. Bowdlerized it. Decommissioned it as a place where art is born.

I think I cannot read news any longer. Nothing drips from my brushes, and all that drips from my eyes are tears of loss.

Gestures you'll want to make....

Progressive gesture pose with back-and-forth changes every 15 seconds for several minutes.

When I first studied drawing, my greatest love was the gesture drawing. One minute to capture the essence of the way the model was standing, sitting, lying, squatting, kneeling.  I'm still partial to them. I almost never do what most would call a finished drawing in a life-drawing session. To me, because of the way the Art Students League taught, life drawing is for learning, not for creating works of art--although sometimes something becomes a work of art because of its extraordinary and unexpected grace or strength or design or vibrancy or expression.

Last evening's life session provided a form of gesture I had never experienced before, a sort of progressive gesture routine, almost a dance. Indeed, there were two different formats, both interesting to work at.

Perfect, now change

The first involved the model changing pose completely about every 40 seconds six or seven times. Timing was at the model's discretion, so it was not exact. All the better; what you had when the pose changed forced you to think instantly where on the page to place the next pose.

Of course, if one were to draw tiny figures in one part of the paper, that would work. But it would also violate one of the main thrusts of the gesture pose: achieving freedom both in the forms on the paper and in the artist's use of his or her hands and choice of implement. In short, every instructor you will ever meet will tell you to find big sheets of paper and draw large figures.

That, in addition to training the eye to see movement and hand to create it in two dimensions, is essential to good gesture drawing practice.

There is no time to change sheets of paper or even turn the pages of a newsprint pad during these poses, so it's either draw as the masters recommend, or minge down into little teeny crabbed drawings all over the page.

Drawing outside the box

The second progressive routine was in some ways even more interesting. In it, the model chose a pose with both feet on the floor, and one with one foot up on a stool. He then moved back and forth between the two poses about every 15 seconds, self-timed.

I rarely draw in pen at any time, certainly not usually in a life class, when my weapon of choice is usually sepia Conte crayon for several reasons. I like the color. You can swipe a kneaded eraser over errors and they'll mostly be erased, but you can still discern later where your eye/hand went wrong, but perhaps no one else can. Good for the soul...or confidence. If you do get something good, you can tune it up later and the newsprint paper I use will discolor to a nice, medieval-looking shade of yellow-beige, which delights me. And if you do get one really right, it looks great in studio lights. Again, good for the soul/ego.

But for the second progressive poses, I chose pen. The result was far looser than most of my work; it had to be. In such a short time, one can search out only a couple of structures of the body, and the search is with a pen. Making a mark; if it isn't right, moving it...but without erasing. It is a demanding, but also immensely freeing, exercise. It might show you that you know more (or less) than you think you do about the structures and movement of the human body. It's good to know what you don't know so you can fix it, and what you do know so you can devote your energies elsewhere. It will train you to remember, mentally and physically, where you made a mark the last time that phase of the pose came round and begin there.

I might do more pen and ink work. I kind of like it....which is something that surprises this academically oriented perfection freak thoroughly.

Good company: Mark Rothko, Robert Henri, Georgia O'Keeffe...and me

Art Students League of New York. (Wiki Commons)

Mark Rothko, Georgia O'Keeffe, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Henri, George Bellows, Norman Rockwell....

I never met any of those illustrious artists, but my initial art education happened at the place where they, and a pantheon of others learned or taught, the Art Students League of New York.

I've probably mentioned that before; it is probably the single educational experience in my life--and I never chose a school or instructor that didn't have an excellent reputation--that I value above all others.

I valued it when I was running an ad agency in South Florida, an experience I often refer to as Swimming with the Sharks. And yes, by the way, I got nibbled on and decided maybe that wasn't for me.

I valued it when, in angst over the troubles at the agency after I shut it down, I began seriously studying horsemanship at a premier show barn in Maryland.

I valued it when I wrote all manner of odd and interesting things at the executive editor's behest for a daily newspaper in Bristol, TN/VA (it's on the state line.)

I valued it very highly when I went back to freelance writing, the job I had done for 20 years before the awful Swimming with the Sharks experience.

I valued it more highly still the couple of times finances forced me to take jobs editing crappy publications in Baltimore. One of those publications was about insurance, for god's sake. I called the publisher Chunky Skippy behind his back, because he was fat and reminded me of a previous gormless publisher I had called Skippy, many years before. He also demanded that I watch the Jerry Springer TV show with him any day I hadn't managed an out-of-office meeting at 3 in the afternoon. That job was, all in all, low art in every way.

But it was still not as bad as the job I took at a dental consulting firm where the man who graduated 2nd from the bottom of his dental class taught other dentists how to make tons of money by milking their patients dry. (My UK readers: Don't be alarmed; this is something that could only happen in America.) I spent only three scant months turning his natterings into columns for the American Dental Association magazine and other dross. I'm proud to say they fired me. Not for my work. They fired me because I had dared to suggest that it was unseemly for the IT guy to make racial remarks about my assistant in my presence and I wanted it to stop. Apparently, that was a little too post-Civil War for them, so they fired me. As well, they attempted to deny my state unemployment payments but failed miserably when I told the African-American examiner what it was all about. Now THAT was high art.

I've had lots of opportunities to value my education at the Art Students League, but until now, I only sporadically used that education. I'd paint a commissioned portrait now and then, a rendering of someone's new garden landscaping in watercolour, some trompe  l'oeil for an interior designer and so on.

But now I'm putting brush to canvas just about every day, wondering what will happen all these years later. Will the foundation laid in classes with Robert Beverly Hale, Tom Fogarty and Gregory D'Alessio be evident any time soon?

Every so often, I visit the League's website, just to get a refresher dose of the noise of West 57th Street, the dusty-painty-solventy smell of the League's halls and rooms, the image of the homeless woman who used to almost crawl up the stairs to the ladies' toilets a couple of times a day; no one cared....although she did smell a bit. I think most of us gave her lunch money from time to time. In retrospect, I can't help thinking of Phil Collins' song Another Day in Paradise, although I was at the League several years before he released that song.

I need to remember that the man who most often placed his easel next to mine in Hale's class was a former pimp who had made tons of money, moved to rural upstate New York, and spent four days in NYC at the League because it was what he always wanted to do before he was a pimp.

I need to remember a couple of evenings in the Member's Life Session standing next to the late Peter Falk (Lt. Columbo), who was also a member and came to draw when he was in town. He usually took his shirt off, as it was hot in the life-class rooms. I don't recall what we might have spoken about; probably just the sort of Hi, how are you, how long is the next pose, do I have time to nip out for coffee sort of thing. Yes, sure, it was exciting. It was. But so natural for NY.

Anyway....today in my visit to the League's site, I found a notice that someone had done a short film about the League. I clicked it. I watched it. For almost ten minutes, I could be back at the League, hearing the New York accents, a smattering of non-English accents, the rumble of traffic...all of it, the heady mix that every League student wore deep in their  being, the accompaniment to the painty smock or ink-stained fingernails they wore on the outside.

I miss it. But I wouldn't trade Cornwall for it, not now.

I'm just thankful I have the memories to access, and every now and then a little help with that, plus the pleasure of living in Cornwall with my husband, my dog, my cat and my intention to finally pull all the disparate parts together into something I hope might be called art.