N.O. Love (new orleans)

June has been movement and July is promising to be more of the same. From one end of the state to the other. to Georgia. I saw the Cure play in Atlanta last month and it was as good as ever. Crowded. But music is timeless and if it is good I can make the crowd disappear. Trance out to it.

Solstice. Now time for the heat. Nothing like New Orleans heat I swear to god. All the heat from all the summers before are stored in the concrete, the old wood walls and the brick. radiating outward in the thick damp and stagnant air. I moved to a house in the lower ninth ward that is better than the one I was living in and so the heat inside is more tolerable. I drive to work instead of walk now, though. And I still can't breathe. I am closer to the nearest refineries, but I can't smell them. I can almost see them. If new orleans is a bowl then the refineries line the upper edge of the bowl. Smoke stacks rising like burning stalks, machinery making irregular shapes out of the sky and smoke billowing up til it mixes with clouds and then you dont even know its poison. You may think how pretty. My eyes are swollen and burning every day. I think to myself that I need to move. Should move. The move to this other house was lateral, not upward and the dirt is lead and the sky is going to kill you.

Something is keeping me here though. There are a few more things i need to do. It is a complicated place. and not the violence and not the corruption nor collapsing infrastructure. The actual unspoken invisible social and historical outlines. Bc no one really belongs here but whoever has been here longest thinks that they do. And the new people keep coming and the deafening shouts of gentrification and poverty drown out any sense that could be made.  A couple years ago in this big art spectacle event that lasted months a well known and respected artist made a big light up signage and displayed it on the river that read something like "you belong here." Some weird reassurance or something but its not true.  No that it matters if it was true or not but we don't. Maybe some people belong here more than others. I don't, but its a port city and visitors are historically a big part of the population. the shifting foundation. The plantations didn't belong here and neither do the oil refineries that took their places. the prostitutes, the immigrants, the organ grinder, the dairy that was cited for health code violations and the street car rails that were laid down, pulled up and laid down again. That all came from the census. I used to read the 1880 -1940 censuses for work and stare wide eyed at the names and occupations and places of birth of hundreds of people that didn't belong here. Then came the artists and writers and poets and everyone said 'bohemian.' The housing projects and the police corruption and then the cop that massacred that family in the restaurant. and they just kept draining the swamps and spreading out and then an amusement park bc what could be more American that NONsustainability? They built a fucking tunnel. In a swamp. Still there -  though dilapidated and still cars zoom through it err' day. I feel like my job has given me a level of intimacy with this city that is reserved for lovers that stayed together so long they have turned to couples who have memorized each others vices and hardly recall the starry eyed heart flutters from the beginning. But you still know it must be there. or assume it is and move through the motions of life, confident the spark is there. the commitment may have obliterated it a little, but who cares. That is me and this god damn city.

 

 

shawna atkins acrylic on canvas 2016, crop

The house I live in belonged to lady who left for Katrina and never came back. I am aware of her displacement every day. It can't not define, at least partially, my place in this city.

skulls and layers of happiness

The city is so pretty in the spring. Before the intense oppressive hot wet blanket of summer envelopes us... i love it here. Like I just woke up and the days I hated it were a dream. Ridiculously expensive crowded crooked broken city. I do love you when you are kind. and when you aren't, even.

but i will never love anywhere as much as an isolated spot in a forest where the deer are.

Busy painting. I inherited old frames and a box of brushes from my great aunt... will be interesting to hold her brush..she was 94 when she died I think. a long life. I have the brushes and frames I inherited from Donna and I think... Oh, the things that after death still remain. tangible. in this realm.

The election has gotten into my brain. I care more than I want to. How can one not? vicious. I'm a berner -  as if there was any way I couldn't be.

I paint the world burning bc it already is, not bc I want to see it that way. I feel like the apocalypse has been happening my whole life. When I was a kid - like 15 or so -  This art lady told me that when I grew up, I should marry a rich man so I could make art all day. All the time. She laughed. She said "that is what i did." She did, too. She said she knew I would never! and I was horrified and amused simultaneously. I get it, though. I know what she meant. I live alone and I work alone and I work HARD. I sleep hard and paint hard and when I collapse, I do, but I resume. Bc that is the stuff of survival and the stuff of existence in a corporate controlled capitalist nation. And I got all I ever wanted. Until I decided I wanted something else. Blood in me is pumping toward oblivion.

When I was very young I was supposed to marry this guy. I think i was. Well, I could have. I didn't though bc it just all felt so wrong and smothering. His parents died. Both of them. It was so tumultuous and insane and just wild. I remember we laughed So much. and Cried so much. We broke up one time and then later we met somewhere in Lafayette in a parking lot in the middle of the night. I missed a year of college. I mean I attended and all but I didn't know what happened - like it just didn't count. We were together and then we broke up again and we met up again on the steps of the state capital building. I dont know what happened to him. I hope to god he is somewhere good and that he is very, very happy. I'm so thankful we didn't destroy each other. He showed up in a dream recently. people fade out and then reappear. I didn't know it happened that way as time pressed on.

I think I always wanted to rage against a system of oppression. i hated it since kindergarten. The nudges to conformity and boredom.  Away from truth and dirt. The obvious mistreatment of certain individuals by people in power and then the denial of it. Processing injustice. Life here is learning to process injustice and then deciding what you will do about it.

Dirt is the tangible unconsciousness, until I return my skull to the dirt I suppose I am here shedding skins and morphing and deciding the level of intensity with which to apply the next layer.

                                                                     Artemis Sees.....

Shadow Self

  "Shadow Self," mixed media on 4f tx 4ft canvas, 2015

How much of whats hidden down in the shadows is guiding this flesh ship? Waves from the unconscious sea lap tirelessly at our thoughts and actions. Tossing and slamming and churning below a barrier created by the only self you can truly know.

Written like a true 4 infp am i right?

Breathe deep

When i am old and ragged there will be love in my bones, wrapped and tied there with ribbons of sadness splattered with joy. I haven't lost anything by opening my heart even though all the words tumbled out and were away like wisps I held the blood in and I held all of you in til we were faded digital dreams on broken screens 💚🌙🕸

Speaking in Tongues ( love your life to death)

i speak to myself in my head and i suppose we all do
in this culture, anyway. but to exist entirely inside your
head must make some of them go mad
if you were to watch humans moving and see them
only as balls of energy bumping around in a pinball world of light
trees and buildings
the ones burning red and the ones burning green
or blue or purple
if you could see that ....
i dont know. that is how it all looks to me sometimes
i am elevated and apart -  watching it all move. from afar. witched.

I went to the west coast in the fall and then again in the new year
The first time I visited i was 16 and I think all of me did not come back
When i went back it was as though I may retrieve the part of me I left but
instead i brought back a part of the west coast inside my skull. I cant shake it out.

I visited the east coast in the summer and i loved it but not as much as the west coast
the redwoods can erase all the vile humanity from my mind and make me forget i
have a body or veins or that other people scuttle around admiring themselves incessantly
or beautifully even. touching. breathing. loving. filling the atmosphere with emotions and shit.

i have an amazing life. I did everything i wanted. I arrived and left when i meant to and nothing was ever so tragic.

But still there is. The nihil. a visitation or a vigil. for the unspeakable truth, the ever present death.
My blood sisters bound to me with time and sickness and large shady trees in the backyard. We ebbed. flowed away and returned.  When times goes by you get to see how your memories will age. will they fade? or vibrate or blend ? or become so vivid it is blinding to visit them.

My blonde baby girl Aphrodite was chosen by the devil to carry the darkness in her mind. She nearly died til they electro-shocked him out.  She was cured. It was real. I saw her change and then change back.

I texted my ex for a long time before I fell asleep. He wanted advice. I am a sage in a Misfits t shirt on a stack of pillows drenched in moisturizer and splattered paint from a failed art experiment. Okay, I will tell you who you are again -  but I ve been telling you for years. I know you better than you know yourself. But you can't know me. But you know I can help you. and that is good for now.

i dreamed by cousin called. she died in 1997. in the dream, on the dream phone, she sounded like she always sounded. It was her voice. I thought that I had forgotten what she sounded like. But no. it is still there.

I moved to a new house in the beginning of December.  Happily it is still close to the river.  I have to, have to live near the river.  The house was built around 1890 I think. I hope to god it is haunted.

Love your Life (Lie) to Death. 1.5 inches by 2 inches

embellished and unedited

In all the years I have maintained, or barely maintained, this blog, it has been a repository for unedited junk. I mean, more than that of course. Maybe I should say unedited guts. I hate to edit. It is like sifting through vomit, a mental regurgitation of the subconscious and bad grammar.

the thing about life, is that if you don't stop it, it just keeps going.  Really, time will fly and days and years and memories get distorted, but at times I just think, MY GOD IT IS STILL GOING. I am indeed still breathing and moving about. My best friends brother died ten months ago. My life with her now has the dividing line in it. the before and after the death.

If you stay alive, your life will become marked with deathstones. Markers. The first death I experienced, that I remember, was at age 6. The next at 12. The next at 14. The next at 20. then 26. The next at 32. Another at 32. These were close ones. We were not sheltered from death. I grew up in a very old rural community. People died all the time. They lived hard and loved hard and then when people die you put them in boxes in the ground. Down here the put them in houses above the ground. I like that. You live in a house with people and then as you die you are placed back in a smaller house-shaped structure to be together. forever. below the brick and mortar and then vines.

I feel as if I have lived too long. Stayed alive too long. Despite the misery and the intense despair I have endured and, well, let's be honest, embraced, I have had so much joy. so much intense overwhelming happiness and joy. Bliss. It is something I almost feel guilty about. The lives we fall into on this planet....hell, anything could happen. little circumstantial victims dancing around the planet, fighting and loving bloody murder. holy heartbeats. We are tacked to the earth like writhing roaches on pins, blooming petals and soft skin, flickering hope and cashed out. Its okay. We are more than skin but less than the humanity we envision, I imagine. We are embellished and unedited.

Modern Cacophony, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 2014, Shawna Atkins

Crooked Growth

twisty spine like vine. Growing like you lean, move, walk. You are the operater? or the operated? I start physical therapy next week. The hip has not improved. I have put it off for six months but now I am like, okay, this needs to happen because I can't make it stop on my own.

I imagine my bones, but not as much as I used to. I am just not obsessed with them anymore, strangely. I would imagine them crooked and causing pain and now, I may still picture it, but the picture floats away and is replaced. Predictably, Flesh has become very enjoyable to paint. The stick souls still show up in my art, but painting layers of flesh has taken on a new life. a spark. We are a continuum, I reckon. Mind Body Brain Hand Canvas Soul. Sleep.

My dog is curled at my feet, a little piece of night sky, black and sweet.

I just imagine all thes butterflies fluttering around my head. While the wars wage and my work and bills pile up. It will all just be fine. Sometimes you have to make your own magic.

Criterion

So I had this art show at a restaurant and it turned out pretty well. I sold things cheaper than I should have,but i needed to make room for more. Needed to clear some out. And all the people that go where I go are usually poor. Most of the people that I want to own my work are probably poor. Ha. Anyway i had to quickly finish some stuff and got kind of manic and crazy and it was great.

I'm drawing at work now. Little sticky note canvas. I see paintings in the woodgrain and the streaked windows. I stare and hings turn and morph into drippy paint. It is pretty fabulous. I neglected my precious pretend brain for so long it went to bed. That is how this city is. you have to pay attention to it. to the real world. In the small forest towns I  lived in before you can walk around in a dream world, half imagining you are something else all the time. Its not like that anymore. It is not like that here. It takes guts to live here. Like literally, the city may take your guts, or whatever it is about yourself that you love.

Things change. I do things the hard way. I learn things the hard way. It's okay. I am going to see my parents this weekend, to see Spring and the new puppies and the new calves and all the blooming things. And my lovely parents and their twinkling eyes and now wrinkling skin.  The extra hour of daylight plus longer days is just food for my spirit. Well, that and the Floradix Iron Supplement. Today is actually a good day, one of those days where i actually hope they do not explode the planet just yet.

The Criterion, 2012, acrylic on canvas

 

sick little birds

and their nonstop chirping

I wish i could find a blank cool silent room where i could be alone and rest for as long as it took to not feel this exhausted, this used up and this unforgiven

June 9

Starring scarring fading falling…rising….burned out and then blinked back to life in a waking dawn new light filters through the old panes and across ….ankles, cheekbones and the gentle curve of stomachs.

Days weeks months. I wanted one more day with you.  Cold wind and then rain crashing down like teacups. Chattering like porcelain teeth. A baby cries in a dream startled awake the mocking birds .

Gulls casting shadows across the rippled sand. A ruined castle and a brand new plan.  A life bursting forth from a shell, cracked across the sea floor twelve times and then washed away again.

The broken vase in the garden of dirt and this concrete prison cell sold over and over with real estate signs rotting down to the core of a trashy river.  A River Rising without permission and a million landlocked knock kneed jaw thrusting punching pushing….

Up river to the lake, all for a glimpse at the stars home is this nest, wisps of thread and sticks and scribbled words faded into looseleaf. Then your lead broke. And your heart broke. And a thousand clichés tumbled out like bouquets.

The admission of guilt, the freedom moves up stream to a place were deer sleep and reflections are never seen in dew drops on pear leaves opening for mist at morning and all across the sleepy soft ground the grass pushes up, reaches for everything

I Circle the Fish

fish swimming circles inside my skull, i am.
right, wrong
write wrong
words.
say them.

Distracted. Not liking myself very much. I want OUT of my SELF.

bad things are everywhere.

good things are everywhere, too right? promise me this.

No promise good enough to keep. How long til i get over losing you? 

yes you. all of you.

 Mistakes were made, fallen flowers landed incorrectly...near your stare.

stony stare- silent creaking stairs at midnight. Careful.

I dream about my grandmothers house so often. She died in July. The day before my 32nd birthday. I haven't been back to her house since that day. My heart is so heavy with generations of loss handed down to us so we would not forget but this is heavy how do i move? Carrying all of your hearts on my back, blood drips twirling in such cataclysmic patterns over my calves and thighs and spatters over the stars on my feet down to the earth. the dirt i want to be.

I did it all for love, but sometimes a horror down inside me suggests that I did it all for obsession. a bundle of sick chemicals. buzzing outward toward your brain circuits and empty chest.

I miss you like you are dead and since you aren't i feel as if i am cheating the beloved dead by the comparison of mourning rituals. I am not. I am not.

I miss my mother and my father and the tree outside the dirty window in the house i grew up in. I need more adjectives for my clumsy chunks of words falling like drunk fish and landing like those platform black shoes from the nineties that were so good for stomping down streets littered with paper and vomit and broken glass and the flyers from the show we drove 5 hours to see.
we were never disappointed.

I have this overwhelming desire to cry your eyes out. starve your heart out. splinters for my bone machine rusting away under waves of flesh ebbing and reaching up for the moon. something is going to change and one day it is going to be better than this.

I am Patchwork

 

Stiches and scabs. This is where the healing begins. This is where you make it happen, how you keep going how you swear to the sky you won't give up. I want to give up. i want to dig a shallow hole in cool damp earth and feel it press against my back and shoulder blades and dig in and relax and sink. I love the earth, when i was younger, I  would happily dig up worms and roots and marvel at the shades of black and brown and tan and sandy grain and fluffy soil and how it felt soft like my mother. Under my nail and between toes, it felt like home all over me.

Nothing feels so good and real and whole and honest and that is where i want to be, every particle of me wants to dissolve back into it, every particle but one.

and that one particle has your name it, whoever you are.

i love you.

i am patchwork. i am pulling it together.

i am reaching for the sky now.

Soul Implosion

This is the flyer I made for my Graduate show several years ago. I found it digging around in the digital ash of my past. I have decided to revamp  my other blogger blog, which is solely artwork with very little commentary.
If you are interested, you can follow me here  shawnaatkinsart.blogspot.com


I desperately want to keep this blog going, just lately it has been difficult due to job searches and my volunteer work at out animal rescue group.

I hope all of blog-land is peaceful......

Shake out the Ghosts

 i feel the keys beneath my fingertips....swirling.... words are senseless. I am at my parents house deep in the woods and when i am here i feel like I don't exist...like i have transferred to another realm. The only safe place on earth.
There are some things i have always suspected and one was that God didn't like me very much and the other one was that I was meant to be alone. Quite possibly, I made this up. Regardless, the adventure of The Self Fulfilling Prophecy can NOT be denied.

I have been writing stories in my head but they don't make it to paper. Or pixels. Stories about Stella and a chance meeting with an old friend at a cofeeshop downtown. In a town i have never been to. She criss-crosses an unsmoked clove cigarette between her forefingers in an effort not to smoke and has a sandwich in her purse in an effort not to eat. Over strong coffee she discussed the possibilities of a strange love that she has been denied. He leaves her alone with her sketchbook. In the story i can't decide if hot tears splash down her face, if a girlfriend texts her, or if she shrugs him off and sketches his stupid fading face.

So I just leave her there. Sitting at the table...with messy hair and a dark haired boy heading toward his car in the parking lot..after squeezing her shoulder on the way out. "Take Care, Stell" are the words he leaves her with.
Stella and her sister Gypsy Rose. Hanging out in my head reliving their childhood and their parents' death and the old pick up truck and the dusty road and countless fruitless love affairs...an overdose and  walks in the cemetery.

oh well. Sometimes i mash my fingers into my face to feel my cheekbones and jaw bones. My babyfat face has gone. Sometime in the past 4 years it flickered away. Sorry you didn't get to see it, she was a sweet girl. I feel my father in the bones in my face. My cheekbones match his. and I remind myself that i want to become Wise like him. and Just. and Fair.

In a few minutes, I am going with my mother. We are going to clean my grandmother's house. My grandmother is 90 years old and she is coming home from the hospital soon. My heart is heavy. I love her so much. She is 90 years old and she is tired and I know this.

Her father worked in the oilfield. and so did her husband. and her son. and so did my father. and my husband was supposed to, I'm sure, but i left without him. Left  the idea, i guess. It wasn't what I wanted, and hey, it's not my fault that he didn't exist. That times changed so fast and I wanted paint and poet and rock n roll. My future is so unknown. I want to go to New Mexico. The farthest thing i can imagine from a swamp. I have no idea what i am doing and i feel the past slipping away ..years, decades, a generation gone....the stories I forgot to gather have scattered away...i drip paint like tears down my face in an effort to remember what we have all lost.

I didn't fit the mold or follow the path. My heart pumps out love and hate like oil and water.

obsidian

Let me make one thing perfectly clear as obsidian.
I have no idea what I am doing....but I am glad.
My (godawful) job has taught me what i am NOT....and I don't fit in there and I am so HAPPY. If i can withstand this without gettin' bitter or losing my shit, then i can possibly, hopefully become a better person..right? RIGHT?
Making money has not ever been an obsession of mine...sorry I guess i'm a  bad capitalist. whatever. Maybe that is a luxury.... that i was able to not be obsessed with money but these suit and tie guys with there 8 jillion rules JUST FOR THE SAKE OF MAKING A RULE just depress the living hell out of me. How can we get anywhere meaningful? I made the mistake of an internal journey instead of an external one. But i will tell you one thing.
i am liking what i am finding...after i dug through the gore and pain...there is something in here. something worth saving.
inside of me.
s

You mean nothing to no one but that is nobody's fault.

"I had a lengthy discussion about The Power of Myth / With a post-modern author who didn't exist
In this fictitious world all reality twists / I was a hopeless romantic, now I'm just turning tricks"

In our last conversation she mentioned the word "empowerment" as a way to get through life

i had heard it and read it in all this therapy/recovery stuff. empowerment. It's like sometimes you skim

the words that can't apply..(which is why i always have to re-read.) It is an Action word. something you have to DO.

Move. Act. Change. Being really avoidant,...well its a problem. I'd almost rather be terrified, frozen, prepared and

ready to fight this imaginary THING. You can't see it and i almost always can't see it but I know it is there and I have to obsess and do all these THINGS to like starve, for instance, and count and place things and cover them (ocd what have you)

suddenly you drop all that and go join an Animal Rescue Program. And you are thinking that you neglecting a small dark world that

is SCREAMING and begging for you to return but you say NO. I am putting on normal clothes and brushing my teeth and going

to pay a bill. or sign up for a class. or join an acting troupe. or actually make a friend and hang out with them and drink tea and NOT

become codependent and twisty and obsessed with their past and present and soul and brain. I am being normal. this is normal. great. now i am obsessing about being normal.

So, you know, what better way to be empowered that to be an activist for this thing you are recovered FROM?

Well, you know what? It is really hard to be an activist for a condition that no one believes you have. or had.

it is really hard to be surrounded by people who say they love you but when you form words your mouth is just

numb bc you cant make words that covey the slightest accurate portrait of what is inside you.

so you draw it and you paint it and your parents can't bear too look bc the painting are painful and 

most of the time i don't even think my therapist believes me. Anxiety. i have anxiety and i have fear.

Oh. Sorry. I thought it was God. (i really did)

i don't understand how anyone can love me if they don't know me. and i don't feel known.

i don't want to die unknown, but then in another way i kinda do. just crawl up and disappear. go away as if i never was.

that kinda sounds okay sometimes. That last love, he said, "you cant leave me bc no one knows you but me"

and it sounds like some controlling bs but the thing is, he was right. It was true. So sometimes he called me crazy but sometimes he

said My god there is nothing wrong with you. he said it so much. i got angry. i stopped taking my medicine. i stopped all of it. i didn't tell anyone. after a few months my skull was a living torture chamber for my brain. I tried to tell him what was going on.

"ohmygod see this is the shit you don't need to say. to anyone. this is the shit that is gonna get you back in the hospital.and you need to stop it bc there is nothing wrong with you. i'm going to call your parents... do they know how you are"  

i got back on my meds eventually but, like, i think everyone just kinda thought i was lame for doing so. So after that i just you know shut most people out except for my few obsessions. and he moved on and all which is great bc he was an amazing human being even though the was, of course, not equipped  with the skills to handle what the hell ever ever was wrong with  me. (NOTHING)

i "recovered" i eat. i got a job. it has been years now, since i recovered from nothing.

 i look an my paintings and  cry. i am numb and no one knows who i am.

Tea cups and fish: a death story

Death makes me feel....


panicky
terrified
horrified
overwhelmed
distressed
nauseous
regretful
mournful
sorrowful
reflective
paranoid
resentful
confused
shocked


for starters. and the emotions roll in like tidal waves. You steady yourself...and then there is another. You know you have been in therapy too long when you  grab a pen and LIST your EMOTIONS by name..or wait Are those feelings? gah. nevermind. I think i failed Therapy.


So who falls in love with a dying woman anyway? not love. but love., that is


i do. i did. Bc i need her and i don't want to her do die.
but she is going to.
I almost met her by accident. we seemed to love the same men. not in the girly catty way, but really -  we found the same gold souls and by touching them, touched each other. I held her hand in mine just last night and was so reluctant to let go..to see her slip away into the forever. 


It was HER art that saved me...that stopped me from giving up. When no one could understand what i was trying to express...when i was so lost, and scared and shy and ...One of the professors showed me a few images of her work. After the intense shock of just how GOOD it was (better than textbook-art-history-museum-stuffs and this woman lived an hour away?!?)I was eerily aware of our similar images. Mine were like, crayon scribbles, compared to her excellent technique but holy mary. Tea Cups and Fish. i mumbled, "tea cups and fish....and bones, she paints bones"
Symbols that mean more than words can say. Symbols that came so naturally to me, that when asked for an explanation i would just make one up. To protect the actual meaning. Nothing stronger more intense or strong or fucking fragile than teacups and fish bones. And she thought so too. she understood.
So i suppose her work gave me strength, and it let me know that what i was Painting,Seeing, Expressing, Feeling, was not  WRONG. It was Art.
Years and years later i fell for a person who was, unbeknownst to me, her best friend.
So we all became friends. And it felt like a family that i fit into even when i was covered with ghosts and paint.
And i have to remember. i HAVE to remember the strength i saw in her
bc that is the strength that is going to get me (us) through this...strong like teacups and fish.

It's where she lies

Is this my Mask?

Sometimes I feel so tired..inside
This painting is old... a few years.
But it still rings true.

my brain is churning and these waves
of panic keep going over me.

I have to figure something out
I have to figure out whose mask this is

Sometimes i mourn the loss of each day
I know you have to look forward and
everything...
but i remember who I used to be and
it seems like that person is dead somewhere

the good of her
and thebad of her

life is about lettin go, i keep learning that.
I keep learning that i HAVE to let go...
 i have not learned how to do it and not let it HURT.
Do you just let the pain wash over you? do you just sit with it? it hurts SO bad.
I told someone two days ago that i was not depressed anymore but...
I think i was just not depressed at THAT moment.
each moment feels like a whole new mood. This is very exhausting.
I see the doctor tomorrow.