new works

hot off the new Etsy listings press,
in the midst of snow falling out my window,
here are some new paintings to enjoy.

now the rest of the story...eHarmony

dear martin, chuck, william, robert, jonathan, thomas, james, david, gary, john, john and john,
it wasn't about you,
honest.

it was i.
as i alluded (okay, stated outright) in a past entry,
some of us are just too delicate
for the cyber scene.

it began with those valentine's weekend
ads (aimed at desperate folk, not i); they sucked me in.
despite having read opinions, forums,
etc, etc, which cursed the whole gig,
and having
started and stopped creating my "profile" (sounds so criminal)
months ago,
i succumbed.

within two days
i was sent about three
dozen matches.
most every one of them sounded like a nice guy
who described themselves as "RATIONAL".

now, did i lie on the 2 million question survey i had to answer to get on this service?
did my doppelganger overtake my amygdala and wipe out any trace of my true homicidal tendencies?

"RATIONAL" is not even in my supplemental vocabulary
and certainly not part of my surface psyche.

i only recall lying consciously ONCE on the interminable questonnaire.
now i forget the lie.
oh, yeah....and an alias, so what,
everyone lies in cyberspace.

btw, this blog is unadulterated nonfiction,
i am so proud this is the one place
i don't lie and feel as though i actually
am in my body 100%.

my virtual journey: pure purgatory.
when i received some "icebreaker" communiques
i froze like a gazelle
in the headlights.

didn't know the rules;
they appeared overbearingly linear
and too RATIONAL for me
to fathom.
didn't have the foggiest
notion what to click or
how to smash ice back.

so i kept running away
from my inbox.

repeatedly i said:
"i gotta get out"
instead of my customary
iamthelotusblossom mantra,
but like the family business or Satan,
they kept pulling me back in.

until the straw
that broke it all.

monday a.m.:
around 10:00 EST
i find more matches have been sent
that morning around 3:00 EST.

addicted to click,
i did and
recoiled
in horror:

CLOSED
CLOSED
CLOSED
CLOSED
CLOSED
CLOSED

six of the new guys
had ended our
relationship
before it ever
began.

the shame.
the rejection,

the urge to voodoo
whoever was responsible
for the empty promise of love
without membership fees
made forty time a day
the preceding week on channel 10.

looking back,
i can say it was not
a total loss.
i learned some things:

1) i am a name-bigot: exotic-with-questionable-phonetics first names sans photos gave me great cause for pause, despite my own numerous exotic aliases used over a lifetime of faux-incognito existence. (and i, a foreign language major, the shame....)

2) a "love of nature" in a man on a dating site does not always mean "i don't care if you sleep with your dog, that's just great." the men i was sent mainly kept hunting dogs somewhere on the property. and (sorry to be so tautological {feb 19})
guns.

3) unlike my chloe, who appeared magically on the monitor one morning as soon as i clicked on "senior cats" at the local shelter, it might not be so slick and simple this time. she came home to stay right away. (i knew she was The One in a heartbeat, you could see it in the pixels of her eyes. we are feline or is that felonious soulmates.)

4) stick with smaller, cheaper, less rational sites that appear to attract your own peeps: making pet play dates and discussing the virtues of the new open acrylic line might be more up my alley.
then again, maybe that will prove too much for me as well, but it's a good thought for others.

5) post the real you. as i said to friend/big brother/mentor/guy with a lot of roles for a lot of people, Dale,
i'm not couching it anymore; going to show the real deal: bumps, style missteps and all. in his wisdom, he suggested to just direct prospects to this blog - cut to the chase.
so here i am, guys:

A dissident Chinese blogger stabbed

A dissident Chinese blogger stabbed

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thanks

i am so grateful to my subscribers,
and get so excited when a new person
signs up,
i have just added a "follow this blog"
section, please
add your pic,
if of course you so desire.

am on school vaca this week,
it is so liberating to wake up
when my body,
bea, chloee or bear-boy
decides it's time.

would like to write more today,
but was just traumatized by eHarmony.
more on that later, promise. just can't keep that one in
but recovery is desperately
needed...i have broken out
in a cold shaky sweat from it.

antidote: more of my famous
brown-rice-flour-agave-nectar-
organic-peanut-butter cookies
(okay, with huge chunks of ghirardelli
dark melted in).
damn, that'll just make me
cry, i thought i had just found
the perfect gluten-free guy.

moral of the story:
some psyches are just too delicate
for scientific and/or
digital attraction.
hmmmm, see three entries ago
for more....
what was i thinkin.

will instead
return to my fave
read of the break,
Wacky Chicks by the one
and only Simon Doonan.
it's so damn affirming.




THANK YOU for all your support
!!!
xoxoxoxoxox
MaryK

THANK YOU!!!

la marr

The actress slumbers next to my bed. Safe inside a makeup case no doubt once carried on a train by an elegant traveler. The scent of the open luggage puts me on the express track back somewhere, buried in the archives of mind.

After attempts to scrub its surface, remove the age spots, i have given up. The photo in the battered frame with no glass likewise has seen it all or at least, much. Hedy breaking down with age glances over her shoulder with the inimitable come-hither gaze. She is my guardian angel, la Magdalena, mi virgen de Guadalupe, Her Majesty of the Boudoir.

Don't know how she got there, in the case. Apparently showed up one day for the job and stayed. Hedy looks, how i feel. The inner actress walks out on stage with no understudy into a new scene which dawns each day while
Hedy stays home.

Improv is so unsafe till you hear that sound
so you stand applauded and take the bow.
You go home and tell her how it was and
she gives you the look.

how lucky

wow, how lucky can a girl get, inclusion in not just ONE but also a SECOND Treasury on V Day.

fine-art artists on Etsy are charged up and advocating for each other;
these treasuries will expire within a couple of brief days.

like exotica, they bloom ecstatically and then are gone,
please give them a view.

on shortcutting soul

Masterpiece



Foreshortening



Detail



Vandals



Witnesses


Sometimes at the end of the day, i admit stumbling into the local Price Chopper and purchasing the plastic box labeled "Sweet Cornbread," in desperation to chomp into something other than the pen gritted between my teeth during the last meeting.
You can eat a lot of "Sweet Cornbread" b/c it's: sweet, greasy and kind of tasty. But if the machine that mixed the batter missed some spots, you experience the merciless bite of baking soda.
Even worse, some batches have random kernels inside, which are usually clustered all in one spot in the pan. Faulty composition.

But hey, i can throw paint on a wall willy-nilly too.

Which brings me to recent email from friend Dale, in which he writes about doppelgangers...the split, the reality, maybe the sincerity, the struggle (that's my interpretation of what he said, anyway) of creating digital vs. "real" art. He's feeling the pressure of bumped-up dates of gallery shows, for which new "real-deal" work is needed, and he's been playing on his mac.
Will the real artist please stand up?


Pillow Talk


Resist and Relax


He's not alone: perhaps it's the guilt for being able to make images so fast, so fun, so software. Forget the ever-popular "it's just another tool" mantra: it is, and it isn't.
It ain't a paintbrush nor a pastel (even though it can feign smudging like one) and the hand sure is not involved in the same way, and the body doesn't feel engaged like it does after you've "really" created.

And besides, we of a certain, "experience level" on this planet were trained in the opposite direction and belief system.
It fries your circuits to think it and by intimate association you, could be deemed wrong. or obsolete.




Flesh and blood creators are scandalous, irreverent, just as the organic-brown-rice-flour-blue-cornbread thieves were above. Computers are not.

Suddenly a machine to intervene; there's something spookily 3rd-person about it in a way printing presses are not.
My guess is that vibratory properties of the work shift, the more electrical connection occurs at creation. And therefore the different feel, feeling, resonance of the work compared to standing in the presence of thick paint on canvas.

A voyeur who didn't go to art school and has no ability to actually finesse his/her way out of a design crisis with the miracle of creative cunning, heshe stands at the ready to make whatever changes you wish.
This apprentice needs no hand strength nor motor skills, forgive the bad joke, to erase, blot, scrape, or blend. With a seductive lack of kinesthetic effort, all is possible, fixable, reproducible and impermanent, just click.
Instant death, instant birth.
Instant karma.


Menestra

Like making crudité your sustenance, there's no heat. Unlike menestra de verduras, made a jillion ways, upon which i survived for a couple of months while studying in Spain, its ultimate alchemy based upon variation and length of heat. Old world, new world; can't we be roomies, cohabitate sans combat.


It looks beautiful



Hurry, get it done.
You shower too long.
Get the shot, Werner, for godssakes.
Can you imagine.

Who will we be when all the Cézannes are gone.

Like doing el Camino de Santiago in a golf cart,




or praying in a pew instead
of on the road,




somehow it doesn't translate.