Here is a drypoint inspired by happy family days when my Grandma (Voa) used to get up early and make flour tortillas for breakfast on her old black and white stove with the griddle in the middle. As soon as they hit the plate they would be slathered with lots of butter and jam and quickly devoured.

I found out later that she’d learned to make them from a Mexican lady who had moved in down the long gravel driveway.

Now “tortillas for breakfast” is one of our happy family traditions: Mexican tortillas in a Portuguese-American family–holding us together through the years: Flour, salt & baking powder, butter or shortening, and some milk.

In this print we have the tortilla maker and four little hungry kids wondering…who will get the first one?

First thinking friends were coming to print because…it is open. Printer’s want to print.

Will it happen?? Yes. And then it does.

After all this time, coming back after 19 months to meet again, only in a completely different building, with no idea how it’s going to be…

And I won’t even get into it. It seems like my angst, my anger, my worries can’t be shaken. And I don’t know what the rest are feeling. My thoughts and fears and my dashed hopes get in the way of seeing the way forward. And I am supposed to lead.

Today’s realization: What we are doing together, even if it’s just three people printing, is what it is all about. Sharing a bit of golden yellow ink today, dipping my brush into your stash of colors, and you at the press pulling your wild bright print. And the knowing the other person is on vacation, at the beach–and knowing that’s great too.

We are three.

That’s strange I didn’t see it. Even if this experiment of a community of printmakers is a failure, it can’t be–because we have been linked. And we are still linked. We are together.

It has taken me awhile to get back to this blog. I have been spending my time in ways that now seem questionable. For instance, printmaking! And helping a community print room get up and running. A room now closed due to a virus sweeping the planet.

It has been one month since my closest print-buddy and cohort and fellow volunteer monitor and I said goodbye, closed the doors and went home. Sometimes we text. Mostly about a one-eyed bunny we left as impromptu guardian to the giant press–now sitting solitary in the bizarre hush and dim of Corona days and nights. My friend sends me pictures of the prints she is sure the bunny is happily making, of carrots and cabbages twirling around on white paper. They seem so exuberant; from a “lucky” bunny, she says.

Pressure: Last year started out slow then went off onto a tangent with a lot of pressure: To fix a sick pet, to put myself back in balance and back in the studio, and to think positively about all that is so rapidly changing around me, in my home town and beyond.

Then it ended with a car accident and an even greater need to seek balance and find some peace. I remember praying for people to leave, having no idea many people would be leaving the planet very soon, permanently.

Balance: The desire for balance has put me on a path of artist and teacher. And indeed, the theme in the news and in life right now seems to be about a battle of balance between light and dark and an overwhelming desire by the many to heal our planet; to be conscious of what will turn us to the light–while feeling pushed by the dark.

Dark and Light: In art these are essential components to the composition and feel of a piece: A beam of light shining down through thick tree trunks to touch gold on a single aspect, the quiet white orb of a reflecting pool in the middle of a night forest (a print I once saw), a patch of sunken pumpkins and garbage glimmering under a wash of rain. But in life, the darkness can feel so heavy at times, even though I welcome each end of every long “shelter-in-place” day–to hide in sleep.

I have been reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s book, Learning To Walk In The Dark. She really helps us see both sides of things. I love her personal stories about her search to understand darkness in its many forms.

She writes: “The source of light is not in the outer world. We believe that it is only because of a common delusion. The light dwells where life also dwells: within ourselves.” (Note: This was written by Jacques Lusseyran, a blind French resistance fighter, from his memoir.)

New beginnings again.

Sometimes it is so hard.  Sometimes it is so very hard.

So don’t blame yourself if you feel the most you can do is produce something so small; like a cookie, or a perfect lemon from your backyard tree, or a rat print of a rat making something…so small.  To give.

Something out of nothing.  Something out of something.  Out of ten ingredients produced by ten other people, you get a perfect thing to secretly munch on at eleven o’clock at night.  Even knowing you’ll stay awake on a chocolate rush.  It doesn’t matter.  Tomorrow is another day.

Even though it’s daylight savings, you haven’t lost anything.

Well, maybe a little sleep and a little sleekness.

But you will be able, when the sun rises, to spring forward with everybody else.  And you will be able to spring back from your doubts or fears or whatever it is you imagine is happening, and feel better.

Whatever it is you are going through you can make things better.

Believe this.  And it will happen.

Trying To Make Sense of Now

January is my birthday month.  It begins quietly and moves forward at a rapid pace. The best thing to do is to walk to a cafe and read, usually one of Jane Robert’s Seth books. If you can find a seat under a light it’s a blessing. You might acknowledge the lovely human who is usually there at the same hour every day, serendipitously.

Then next thing is to scour the bookshop for art books, a mind bending biography (Julia Cameron’s), stuff on angels, and new happy garden books.  It seems I get a boost from all these subjects right now.  And what I really would like is a good time-travel romance…Susanna Kearsley, please hurry!

A book by Juliette Aristides, Lessons in Classical Painting, catches my eye.  I have skimmed the pictures already. The images are sumptuous in this book, and I love the idea of a modern-day Atelier Program (from Middle French astelier  woodpile, and astele splinter), and learning directly from the artist in her studio or workshop.  But now I’ll do the exercises.

Perhaps that’s what I will post this year.  My progress back to being a painter.  And I don’t mean the kind of painter I was for so long, logging miles on people’s walls and trim with a two and a half-inch Corona.  (Don’t ask).

(This journey might be as slow as my blogging.)

The strange feeling and timber of last year is still working through me. I am looking around for inspiration. I am reminding myself that 2016 no longer actually exists. I am wishing for a black Cadillac with driver to take me on a ride through the foothills…

The nature of consciousness and creativity is a subject coming up right now.  How we create something from nothing (turns out thoughts and feelings aren’t nothing).  How we might begin anew and build a happier “now”, or a simpler life that is rooted in joy and compassion, by letting go a little and not hiding.

Joy and also laughter is something I could use more of right now.  As well as organic home-grown broccoli  (If you haven’t had it you really don’t know what that odd veggie tastes like at all).  On that note I will add one of my rat cartoons.

Happy New Year, friends and family of new beginnings!