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.

what I am doing

is what i said I was going to do, right? I moved here for the job, I went back to school, I live alone. This is fine, this is okay -  I am going to be okay. I did what I said I was going to do. It hurts, it sucks. Whatever. I don't know why I suddenly reverted back to a weaker version of me, but I feel like I may collapse if I have to feel one more drop of pain. Anyone's pain. I'm a sponge, im a goddamn sponge for other people's pain. I don't know why. The people that I get close too, i get this overwhelming sort of empathy or something...I don't know why I am so emotional -  I always have been -  it makes everything much more difficult and for no real reason. I am frequently in an enormous amount of psychic pain and i just really want it to stop and the more people I meet the more pain I feel.

I am not sure what is going to happen next.

Happy Halloween!

Halloween is one of the most important holidays to me... I sincerely dread the winter and coming darkness, all those hours of no sunlight make it hard for my brain...I really feel Like Halloween is a time to get myself prepared for that, and to make it as festive as possible. I spent the first half of the day cleaning - and the second half with two grrl friends...we did the haunted history cemetary tour and watched Paranormal Activity at the local theatre. BUT! the coolest thing is that on the tour, we stopped by a law office that is also the local Historical Society Headquarters and they had a wall full of CLEMENTINE HUNTER ORIGINAlsI had no idea there were so many here in town, and the most famous ones to boot (big chicken) Ironically, this is just the day AFTER a forgery scam in the news. So that was amazing and exciting and I ran into my old Art History Professor so it was good to reconnect with her. I wore my witch had and witchy boots and kept thinking how Halloween is the one day of the year I can dress like I want to and no one STARES (like i wish i could dress EVERYDAY) and there were fabulous costumed strangers roaming about  and there were colorful mums and cornstalks decorating all of downtown.....Today I plan on making oatmeal cookies from scratch to take to some of the professors I am still friends with and then go visit my parents. I never eat the cookies I bake. Still. And I am holding off the loneliness...The air is still warm here but beneath that, the nights are gettin cool ..I am pushing back the cold wind swirling around the trees as they begin to bare their bark bones....Trying desperately to not wish for it to be my bones the cold air clings to. Putting this year to bed...remembering where all the ghosts of me have roamed. Gains and losses.

Sun sets on another year.

The Ruined City

So this is a new painting called The Ruined City. Yes, I am painting the end of the world. WELL.
Okay, It's not the end, really, just the way a really crowded crumbley city feels to me. And this is Louisiana and we know about crumbling cities.

I worked the hell out of the surface to get the cracklies in there and I am pretty happy with them.

Once a prof said to me, Ghost Girl, if no one buys your paintings it is because no one wants to be reminded that they are going to die. Bwahahhaha! Really? I think about it all the time, i always have. Not on purpose, either. I finally stopped obsessing but....i mean i still think about it. But it is only bc i LOVE BEING ALIVE (er usually) NOW. and Life tastes like strawberries and sticky sunshine kisses. But you can't just forget the cold death chill. Besides, i have seen some death and I wont forget it - it would be a dis-service to all living things to ignore it....as it would be to put death above LIVING. So love your life to death, says I. And move forward carrying your battle scarred heart. and sing a song of re-membrance and re-growth. Bc out of the ruins, we will rise.

Zydecajun

So here is a pic of me with Wayne Toup,s a zydeco musician who played in Zwolle sat night. I love the accordian, the band was great. Wayne was sweet and funny and he had a very pretty red accordian. Everyone - old people and little kids - were dancing all over the place. It was fun to watch..i love live music..and I love Louisiana, too even tho some parts are stupid and sad.

I was too exhausted to paint this weekend even tho i have a bad ass new jute canvas that clyde gave me. So I drew a lot and even dug out my old prisma color markers to play with. i will post those and my pics from the love/hate show soon.
I dont know if it is work or weather or my increased caffeine abuse but my god i have been sleepy. Half the time I feel like I am dreaming.

I miss those days were i slept all day and painted all night....okay back to work. work smerk.

The Goddess & The Bible

So when i went to my parent's house for Thanksgiving i gathered up some sketchbooks and an assortment of pens and pencils and when i got there and unloaded my car i could not find my art supplies..of course i had forgotten them.So after searching high and low ..to no avail.. for drawing paper i thought Voila! i will just draw on a brown paper bag with a ball point pen. And i did. and I got three drawings that i kind of like even though i was extremely frustrated that i forgot my sketchbook BC I FORGET EVERYTHING or lose it bc i am soooo scatterbrained and when i was a kid it was funny but as an adult it is annoying(..and embarrasing) and so i was going to take pics of these drawing and blog them with an accompanying text about MENTAL ILLNESS and recovery but NOW I CANT FIND MY CAMERA BATTERY so i cant take pictures of these drawings and it seems like i have these RANDOM spurts of manic ADD where i just lose and forget everything and nothing gets accomplished and i get very INC0-Her- ent.

So this photograph is of a goddess sculpture i made out of sculpty a million years ago and i don't think she ever really got finished but..maybe she should read the Old Testament.That may finish her. hee hee. The bible actually, i drew on every page...graffiti style... i drew and wrote about feminism on every page. (maybe i will photograph those later.. i'm sure ill find my batt charger, like, in my SHOE or something next tuesday at 7am when i totally do NOT need it.) Feminism and Christianity is something had a hard time making sense out of when i was a kid and i think i identified with the christ thing of SUFFERING  way to much and sometimes I think the Eating Disorder played into the Martyr role and it got tangled up with that.

as if you could redeem something or someone or even YOURSELF by suffering.

Holy Anorexia is a book about that but i never read it. Sometimes i want to poke around in books on the subject and sometimes i want to turn my head...

turn it into the soil

the earth mother goddess and moon light

and just forget all of these complicated things...

Thanksgiving day i fed the cows with my dad. I got to feed them pellets by hand and i got cow slobber all over me and it made me laugh and it made me feel so happy.

I have a lot to be thankful for

moo

october

so on of my myspace friends is doing webisodes about our small town of Natchitoches and she asked if i would be the featured artist for October (the coolest month) i agreed & she came over and arranged my paintings like this and had me talk about the. The slideshow is up now and i guess the parts with me talking will be up soon. Its here. i left my paintings like that. I guess if all else fails one day i could build a house of them. heh.

I worked at the paper for 11 and a half hours today. It was so busy. Thank god for overtime. Ellie was certainly happy when i got home

ellie.

Skull Caps & Dog Moms

Okay here is me and the tattoo hat and the infamous ELEANOR. This was an adventurous walk bc we decided to explore a place we had not been, a place off the trail that had just been mowed. We were tearing through the grass when i hear a Yelp and immediately spin around to check on my dog. She is froze in mid-step with her paw in the air staring dead at me. I call her, but she whimpers. I go to her and discover she has a million sticker balls in her fur and several stuck deep in the pads of her her paws. When i squat down i get stuck  in the butt by a million more sticker balls that are covering my pants leg. I said uh oh LE, we got in the bramble patch. So packed her out of that little field and then removed the thorns. She cried and my fingers BLED!! We got in a BAD briar batch.  But then i was the dog-mom hero in a tattoo your skull hat. I love the skull bc she has RED RIBBONS in her hair. i mean it's a b/w white photo but the ribbons are RED. and they are in her..well..not hair but..you know. And speaking of another awesome dog mom

here is my REAL moma

  This is how she spends sunday afternoons. Lounging with dogs. They kept kissin her face, so she pulled her hood up, but then they tried to pull it off to kiss her some more. Except for Mopsy, the grey one, the just really really wanted to lay on  my moms belly but she kept falling off. Epitome of cuteness.

And to continue in that theme, here is the badass Amanda Barron, who is doing makeup for widepread panic's halloween show in nola, with her badass dog EDGAR Von Barron. Yay for dog moms.

 

eclipse this

painting
Originally uploaded by angel in the dope smoke

i have so much work to do today
god i love green tea
Patchouli is the best smell
i like how my puppy's ears smell
shoes are so much fun i just got some
earth shoes so i can
burn more calories with every step*
reading about incantations made my heart beat faster.
to speak a gods name...to Invoke.
Well i tried to eat tuna but dear god...it's crazy-awful
i need a low calorie high lean protein source that DOES NOT involve a
dead animal
why do i love peeling/picking skin???
i love when bright eyes says
"looking skinny like a model with yr eyes all painted black
you keep goin' to the bathroom always say yu'll be right back
well it takes one to know one kid i think you've got it bad"
well here is a painting but i never paint this way
i did this to prove something
and i probably didn't but oh well
the past two mornings i woke up at 4:44 with
the night unraveling all around me

Collage

Here is a collage i made for a cd cover for a friend. It is some found photographs, my photographs and some of my paintings.
Like a quilt, little scraps, its just a glimpse of a little life...

Bang! Bang!

So got new hair. Kinda makes me feel panicky though. Never had bangs before. I'm just afraid it makes my face look fat. i always worry about fat and i just ascribe some arbitrary meaning to it, though. Anyway I'm weird about my hair. I have always hated having it cut. its part of me, dammit! There is energy in there! My DNA, anyway! Literally i feel panicky. like Im losing something i cant ever get back. Hair. So i dreamed i went to this shack type house in some city - it was like a group home with lots of old guys and in a back room and there were piles of hair everywhere and it felt really bad, like i shouldn't look. The lady that ran place was angry at me for looking. I think they were selling their hair as wigs or something. But i didn't know if there was scalps in there, too.
Still reading the Carl Jung compilation book.
Still don't understand dreams or subconcious. Working on it. But the basic tenant is that there are no real fundamantel SYMBOLS for everyone - just meanings. so your symbols can really on be interpreted by you. Everyone may have a meaning for freedom; Horses don't equal freedom for everyone, for example. Anyway i feel sick. What was this about? Hair? Yes. i got new hair. Do you like it?