Quel dommage....buche de noel without a sparkler!

Buche de Noel

One year in the 1980s, we went to Paris for Christmas. We had thought at first of going to Portugal, just for a few days, for something different. Our travel agent--remember travel agents? what magic they were!--knew us and said, "No, you will just be bored. Go to Paris. That's where you really want to go." He was right. The worst part was the flight out of Miami, as we lived in Fort Lauderdale at the time; ten long hours across the Atlantic at night. But the best parts, and there were so many, far outweighed the misery of the flight.

When we landed on Christmas Eve day, it was snowing lightly. Magic already! We got a mid-day meal of some sort at a really horrid cafe near our hotel, the Hotel de Varenne, modest but nice and in the 7th arrondissement, to my mind the most lovely section of Paris. Then I bought a hair dryer as hotels did not regularly offer them in those days. I had memorized the phrases needed while being bored in flight. Then we took a nap, finally giving in to the jet lag. When we awakened at about six pm, we went out to seek dinner.

We found, on the Champs Elysees in the nearby 8th arrondissement, a restaurant called La Maison de L'Alsace. It is a panelling-heavy old-world restaurant serving huge trays of fresh shellfish, Alsatian specialties, and lovely wines.

It is impossible to get a table in a good and reasonably priced restaurant on Christmas Eve in Paris. But, for reasons known only to the gods of cultural appreciation, the maitre d' found us a table for two in a raised section of the restaurant next to a table for four--packed in, really--at which he shortly seated a couple, their ten-ish daughter, and a grandmama.

I had the Coquille St. Jacques. Sublime. What my husband ordered I cannot recall, but it probably had fish in it some way or other. We were enjoying the experience completely, not least because the service is perfect there and the French family, though we could not understand much of their conversation, was so engaging.

Finally, it was time to order dessert. I had never had, and had always wanted to have, a slice of buche de noel. Aha! There it was on the menu. Expensive, mon dieu! It was the equivalent of about ten bucks American at the time, VERY dear for the 1980s. What the heck? We were already spending three times what we had planned when the original cheap-date-Portugal-four-days trip had turned into ten in Paris. At Christmas. And New Year's.

My dessert arrived,  borne to me on a platter, adorned with a sparkler flinging points of sizzling light everywhere. I was charmed.

And so was the little girl at the next table. Her eyes went wide, her lips turned up into a wheedling smile, and we knew her Papa was about to spring for a ten buck dessert for his charming little girl.

I don't think I have ever, before or since, loved a dessert as I loved that piece of pure Paris in chocolate ganache on a silver platter.

A good day

Detail from Wedding at Cana by Duccio di Buoninsegna, painted in oil on wood between 1308-1311 (Wiki Commons)

Today has been a good day.

A friend and I have just about completed the book we've been working on; it probably ships to the printer tomorrow.

I tinkered ONE LAST TIME with a watercolour commission and actually packed it up and sent it to the buyer. Simon took some good photos of it.

The Chieftains' Timpan Reel is playing on YouTube. My belly is full of strong coffee and mini mince pies (2).

The dog is asleep at my feet, and the cat is curled up on our bed.

I submitted my bio for an art show in Exeter that goes up next Sunday.

What could be wrong?

Nothing.

No, wait. That can't be. I'm an artist and writer. Something MUST be wrong. If nothing is wrong, then something is wrong.

So this is what I want to know: How could I chide my mother for her constant search for some physical ailment until, at last, she found one and it killed her? I do the same thing but not with my health, just with THE REST OF MY FREAKING LIFE.

Uh oh. Did I just identify something important? Something other artistic types--overly sensitive, prone to looking for the fly in the ointment, prone to both perfectionising and awfulising--are prone to do?

Well then. If there's any truth in the phrase seek and ye shall find, it would pay to cease and desist with the quest for what's wrong. My poor, dear mother died a thousand times worrying about what she might die of until, at last, she had a terminal illness. Which, I must say, she faced as courageously as I've ever seen anyone face anything, seemingly completely at odds with her worry-wart proclivities. She is, actually my hero.

My poor mother was brave, having achieved the certainty she sought.

So what then for us worry-wart artist types? Do we wait to relax into a fulfilling life when there's no more life to have? Worrying, that. I'd rather be happy for a long time than brave for a short time.

I think, then, it's time for us artistic types to embrace wholeheartedly a new (well, quite old) mandate:

"A man hath no better thing under the sun than to eat, and to drink and to be merry: for that shall abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 8:15)

N.B. Ecclesiastes is the Old Testament, before all the good stuff got mixed up with the misreadings of the stuff in the New Testament who tried to make the Hippy from Nazareth into the Corporation Man.

A little revelry, then, bunkies: I think our art serves no one if it doesn't serve us well. And, as Woody Allen once said, "Man lives to eat and often there must be a beverage as well."

Make mine a martini!

Art, wires and Pizza Hut

A large peperoni pizza. Hey, just because I didn't like managing a Pizza Hut doesn't mean I loathe the best of all comfort foods. TO BE EATEN WITH HANDS ONLY. NO KNIFE AND FORK ALLOWED. THE NATIVE NEW YORKER HAS SPOKEN! (Wiki commons photo)

This is not amusing. BT has placed its internet boxes on busy corners. Last Friday morning, about 1 a.m., a drunk decided to decorate the bonnet of his car with the backside of the BT box.

Since that moment, we have been paying BT for nothing. For a while, Simon and I used the single wireless dongle we possess to connect, running the thing up and down the stairs as needed. OK, it was exercise. But I can think of better ways.

Finally, with a long siege in view, Simon strung wires from his main computer, down the staircase from the top floor of the house to the middle floor, where my studio/office is, and to my computer so we could both use the dongle at the same time. Of course, we both have to be careful of using too much bandwidth. But still, much better than a constant chorus of "Are you finished with it yet?"

Now then, to tidy up before I go on.

In the US, the ground floor is the first floor, the next one up is the second floor, the third is the third. Simple. In the UK, the ground floor is the ground floor, the next one up is the first floor, and the third floor is the second floor. Confusing. Because I've inhabited both worlds, I use whichever is appropriate to the audience. Problem: This blog has UK and US readers.

A right mess an' all

Anyway, the result of all this interfloor wire stringing is that the house looks like it was jerry-built. This does not please my design-oriented soul. At all. I will admit that my office/studio is not the neatest thing on earth, but the rest of my living space is pretty darn neat, always is, always was. Clutter upsets me. Bad design upsets me. Things out of place upset me. No, I am not all chilled properly out as an artist ought, I suppose, to be. But remember, please, that I was a journalist for 30 years, which meant I really had to know where things were--like my notebook, my car keys, my next meal--and that has sort of been the substrate of my life.

I expect I will, just for fun, send BT a bill for my lost time. Or maybe I should just thank the goddess of communication that the dumbshit who lost it on the curve didn't knacker the telephone service as well.

All this at the precise time I need to be online A LOT to promote my artwork. Sigh. Not that I like doing that social networking thing. But I suppose it beats some of the jobs I've had in the past, including:

Deli clerk. I took the job before college, left it when I sliced my thumb down to the bone on the rotary slicer while cleaning same. That wasn't the bad part, though. The bad part was that I always smelled like chubs, the name by which horrid, rancid-looking dried fish bought by old farts were called.

Waitress/short order cook at a diner near a New York State mental health hospital. OK. Yes, there were releasees who came in, but you could hardly tell them from the staff, frankly. I did it for about three days, but after cooking fried eggs while trying to serve customers including the ubiquitous cops who had come in for their daily freebies...enough already.

Typist in dean's office at the university I went to. Did I mention I never took typing and got through 14 papers a semester for four years with two-finger typing? Lots of wite-out. When I took the typing job, I needed money for an end-of-term trip to Montreal with friends. The dean's office needed envelopes typed and didn't care what they looked like. Finite gig. Thankfully.

Editor of insurance industry magazine. Oy vay. OK. I needed the money. Bush had been elected and the economy began to shut down the minute he opened the White House door, really. The publisher was a fat jackass who demanded I watch Jerry Springer with him in his office any day I hadn't managed an appointment out of the office. He fired me. Thank goodness. It meant I got unemployment payments for months and months, so I rebuilt my freelance business.

Assistant manager, Pizza Hut. No kidding. Really. I did that, as recently as nine years ago. There was another freelance slump, so it seemed tempting. Managers could earn 100 grand. And I love pizza. It was nasty, though. Every night, the till had to balance to the penny, which simply isn't possible in retail, and it was crazy-making to grill every server and hostess to see who might have tucked 17 cents in their pocket, or dropped it on the floor. I got a job as an editor of a dental magazine (not really better, money was worse and the people were slimeballs...but at least I wasn't chasing small change until midnight in the stench of rancid grease.)

Yup, going on line to promote my artwork looks pretty darn good.

Revisions

Well, I've done it. I understand the great masters sometimes did it. Very possibly my Aunt La Te Da, who generally painted blue swans with rhinestone eyes, did it. So, then, it's universal.

What?

Reworking an older painting.

The thing is, I really loved the portrait in the original painting. It was done, in fact, as a sample of a dog portrait for sales purposes. And it is of my own little dog, Brownie, aka Lady Bronwen Marbella McGee, at her favorite place, South Milton Sands beach.

As it happens, Delacroix repainted the background of his 1824 painting, Massacre de Scio, after seeing how Constable painted backgrounds. Fair enough.

Massacre de Scio, Delacroix,1824 (Wikipedia)

And, I have repainted the background of Brownie, because I have decided the painting was a perfect candidate to morph into a naif.

I have liked naifs since I first saw a great number of them in Paris eons ago. But with all the art training I've had, it seemed silly to me not to use the techniques and knowledge imparted to me by the modern masters who taught at The Art Students League of New York, where I studied, and which I also picked up by modeling for Silvermine Guild in Connecticut and The New School's art classes in NYC.

But I came to a conclusion recently: Unless one is doing angry paintings, perhaps all other paintings--except portraits--are too ephemeral in today's world to be meaningful. In a world where anyone can Photoshop any assortment of elements into something else and call it art. But naifs--primitives--are a bit different. They are more honestly the reaction of an artist to a place, person, event or even idea than most things, I think. And a reaction, to be valid, must simply BE, it need not be expressed in a particular manner.

That having been said, primitives are, indeed, very mannerist. They would have to be, as the artist is not only expressing his or her reaction, but is also expressing it in a way completely individual to that person, simply because that person has not been trained, taught to think of line in a particular way, or of colour in a particular way, or composition, or anything. 

Even trained artists will express as themselves. My nude drawings are nothing like the turgid, Renaissance-like work of my first tutor, Gustave Rehberger. (I had an abortive first attempt at studying at the Art Students League. I unwittingly signed up for Rehberger's class, and was so terrified of him that I dropped out in less than a month. Truly, his raw power distressed my soul and even years later, when I would happen to pass him while walking on 57th Street, I would quake inside myself and cross the street.)

Nor are they like the precise anatomical work of Robert Beverly Hale. Nor yet like the more commercial style of D'Alessio...or any of my other teachers.

They are like me.

BUT  they do depend on what I learned at the Art Students League and elsewhere.

The primitives I have painted require that I forget all that and simply go to the subject itself, choose colors along the lines of what pleases me or what I think might make the painting please viewers or both. And, as it happens, viewers who can't spend multiple thousands for artwork for their homes, it seems to me, are generally not interested in difficult works, or works that one needs to have read all of Germany's modern authors to understand, or that will only look well in a Philip Johnson-designed minimalist house.

They are interested in colourful work that makes them happy, reminds them of good times, nice places, swell food, cute doggies, happy children. 

I decided, first and foremost, that after 40 years working mainly as a journalist--and even now, penning rants about current political conditions in the US and the EU because although it's a dirty job, someone has to do it--I needed more HAPPY in my life.

I'm not going to disavow my education and cease doing work in other genres. But I think the way to get happy is by painting some primitives. With luck, others will like them, too.

Brownie's Excellent Beach Adventure, copyright Laura Harrison McBride 2013

Copyright Laura Harrison McBride 2013

Philistines abound; avoid their cheap advice at all costs

The Horse Fair by Rosa Bonheur (1852) (Wiki Commons) This picture is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of New York: I spent hours of my youth sitting entranced before it, and knowing the story of Rosa Bonheur who refused to do needlework to become a painter instead.

NOTE:  If you are having trouble reading this, please click here. Blogger seems to have issues today.

I'm fairly certain I'm a feminist. I don't, however, think I would call myself a feminist; I think I would call myself a progressive pragmatic humanist. Which means? That I believe in humanist ideals for all people, including women, but we are not there yet. Feminism implies too much of an Us v. Them mentality for my taste. And I believe that the entire world will benefit when the entire world is equally valued, equally paid and when the innate characteristics of all sorts of people are equally valued.

This morning, viewing a slide show that accompanied the story "23 things every woman should stop doing," on Huffington Post, I noticed they had recommended the book Get To Work...And Get A Life, Before It's Too Late by Linda R. Hirshman.

Included in Hirshman's "strategic plan for women" was the following advice: "don't study art."

I am appalled. What was this woman thinking? Or not thinking. Is it really better to become an accountant for the potential of big money when your heart says to be a painter? Will one, in fact, make big money if one's heart is not in it? And if one does make a relative fortune despite a lukewarm attitude toward the work itself, what happens after 40 years of that? Does one then curl up and die immediately of regret, having beaten one's muse into an early grave? Maybe trading passion for the pocketbook explains all the sour old bats one meets. 

Some of us go ahead and paint--forty years later--because we have a nest egg or a working spouse and don't need to scrimp and save through retirement. But some, having squandered their youth and strength rushing down paths they really dislike, are simply locked out, unable to raise either the blood pressure or financing to follow their passion, their dream. 

How sad. I can tell you first-hand that living a life for a paycheck--even a paycheck achieved by relatively satisfying work--is no substitute for expressing the life one wants, regardless of the size of the paycheck. Waiting 40 years to do what one loves is damaging, not only to one's soul, but to the world deprived of whatever in one's heart was yearning to be free.

A Baby Boomer searches for life

My first love was theatre. But my father talked me out of studying it at university, or maybe it's more as if he was so frightened that I'd get ahead by lying down, as it were, that his disapproval of the whole idea influenced me. So I decided I would be a writer instead. It never occurred to me, not even at university, that I could work in theatre without being an actress which did, in fact, bore me to tears. I loathed learning lines, and if there was ever a show I was in during my youth in which I didn't do a bit of improv because I hadn't learned my lines, I don't know about it.

So, writing then. I went to journalism grad school. I became a journalist, a pretty good one. I made a good living for 35 years or so. But I was never, ever happy about it. Firstly,

I'm an introvert, and it took a bit of self-flagellation to get me to pick up the phone. Eventually, though, I got stuck in and had quite a bit of fun asking politicians questions they didn't like, even face to face. One of my favorite moments was asking one such question of the Secretary of State of the state of Tennessee; he saw a female journalist and expected fluff. HAH! The look on his face was almost worth the price of admission.

Maybe that's what kept me at it, the fact that I was having a good time making a decent living in what is still, I hasten to add, a man's world. It is the rare female journalist who gets the kudos. But I digress.

Following yet ANOTHER wrong path

Several years into that career, my need to express demanded to be let out of its cage. I started by going to the New York School of Interior Design. I like nice houses. I thought if I did that, it would be a REAL profession, with real money...etc. And a chance to...dare I believe it?...dabble in art. Of course, the fact that I aced the colour course without actually waking up and the instructor was a horrific witch and endured the chatter of dingbats throughout the period furniture lectures...well, it was a non-starter.

Finally, I gave in. I went to the Art Students League of New York for real lessons in real drawing and painting with real instructors, so real that they had to be working artists, well represented, even to teach there. 

And I never looked back.

I loved art school. I really did. So many interesting people, aside from the chance to actually learn how it's done. But I failed again to switch horses. I made a small attempt when I lived in Florida to start a gallery for my own work and a friend's, a former architect who had become a watercolourist in his retirement. But I depended on my freelance writing income to support it...and a major client went belly up. End of experiment.

Hard to get stuck in when one has been dulled for 40 years...

So...here it is...I am retired from journalism, though you'd never know it to see my byline all over the place, but now I write only what I want, not only what is paid for as I did before.

I'm having a hard time getting stuck into a career in art; my career should be over, after all. I should be doing nothing but what I want and traveling. I've paid the piper, paid my dues in several wrong professions. I'm getting, well, old if the truth be told. (Reference the line above about raising the blood pressure and the cash to finally paint, sculpt or whatever later in life.)

Still, I have begun doing what I want. I am painting, although the usual socially/culturally influenced negativity that afflicts most women puts the brakes on my forward movement more often than I would like. (Must work on that.)

But worse, I spent an entire life denying myself what I wanted to do: art. Theatre, art, or even writing poetry (something else that seems to have taken on its own life all of a sudden.) I was a journeyman journalist making a good income writing about stuff that seemed to be useful, and that sometimes I even enjoyed, for instance, the years when I was a theatre reviewer. But it didn't feed my soul. It fed my horse, and my horse fed my soul. But then, I view riding a horse over fences as kinetic art; indeed, that's exactly what I was doing, and doing well when I managed to win a ribbon.

All this chequered past makes it all the harder to begin now, knowing I cannot in this lifetime achieve the mastery of a Rembrandt, the temporal fame of a Basquiat or Hockney, the money of a Warhol.

I would like to meet Linda R. Hirshman and possibly punch her right in the nose. How dare she tell women not to pursue their passion! How dare she assume for others that having work that pays well is all a good life is about. I think money is the least a good life is about. I'd tell her to get a life before it's too late, but I doubt she'd hear me. Apparently, the demands of a dying culture are sufficient for her: work, save, put off anything that makes your soul sing. Get a life, you know, one of those cookie-cutter things one can find on TV.

It's bullshit, her statement. And it needs to be put in a paper bag and set afire on her front steps so she gets the full benefit of the stench of her soul-deadening plan for women. I've got a few choice words for the editors of HuffPo, as well.