Turns out the only way to get me to give my house a thorough cleaning and hang all the pictures I've had stacked in corners since February is to throw a party and invite all my family and friends.
I've known we were having this open house for two weeks. That's when I sent out the invitations.
So, this week, I kept looking around the house and saying "I should probably do something about that..."
Today I finally did something and it didn't even take all that long.
The place was fairly clean since we've been making the kids do some housework since school let out.
When they were all little I used to make each one of them clean one room every morning before any fun was to be had. They grumbled a lot at first but after about three days there was never more than five minutes of picking up to do and the house stayed clean all summer. I haven't really kept that up since Ty and Katie moved out but I do ask Zack and Josie to clean a room now and then and they do it.
But I decided to vacuum the living room and sweep behind all the furniture and break down the dining room table and put the leaf away and finally hang some art on the last wall which I never did after I painted the whole room orange well over two years ago. I found six pieces, including a large, framed charcoal drawing I did while I was in high school. It's the first piece I ever did at Atelier Lack, with my first great teacher, George Hermann.
George used to be King Henry at the Renaissance Festival. He loved playing that part and he did it for decades. He was a great drawing instructor. He pushed and pushed you until you got it right, or at least as close as you possibly could get to right. He was also really funny although some students couldn't take it. If you walked into his class convinced that you were already an accomplished draftsman, you weren't going to like George very much. It was never enough to render
an apple or
a bottle; if you hadn't drawn
that apple and
that bottle, he would make you start over again.
Some students didn't understand why he did that, but I did. He was training us to see, to understand what we saw and training us in such a way so that someday when we were inspired to draw or paint something really wonderful, we would be able to nail it, and not just get into the general vicinity of what we were trying to express. This is what a classical background does for you. What you choose to do with it is completely up to you. It's like sports; no one can teach a kid to be Tiger Woods, but Tiger wouldn't be either if his Dad hadn't taught him to swing the club properly and to read a green.
George's critiques were the most brutal yet hilarious things I've ever been through. We worked sight/size, which means you set up your drawing board next to your subject and drew it exactly the size it looked to you, depending on where you were standing. Everything was marked with tape. Everything; easel, board height, foot positions. You'd work for an hour or so and then he'd come and stand behind you. You'd hear him breathing back there and the flop sweat would start.
"Well..." he'd say "I'm
probably not going to vomit." But he never said those things in a snarky way, so I never took offense. After such a promising start, he would critique every speck of charcoal you had applied to the paper, explaining why every last molecule of it was in the wrong place or the wrong value.
One time a student tried to convince him that her drawing looked better if you stood back a bit.
"Then I hope you have a tree in your back yard you can hang it on." he answered.
Some students would cry at that, but she laughed, sighed and grabbed her chamois to erase it and start again.
It got to the point where if George said "It's not the worst thing I've
ever seen," it made your day. The best critiques of all were when he stood behind you breathing heavily for awhile and then moved on to the next student without saying a word.
I think that happened to me once.
But maybe I dreamed it. Kind of like that time I went sailing with Jimmy Buffett. Turns out I never did.
George is the teacher who told me that every artist needs two things to create a great painting;
Inspiration to get started
And someone to shoot him when he's done.
That drawing has been stuck up in my office for the last seven or eight years. Time to hang it up again. I rehung all the pieces I'd had to take down in the tv room which I repainted a few months back. I put everything in different spots. With the new big tv, the room has been reconfigured and the wall is shaped differently. My vintage StarWars poster had to be moved to a different wall and that meant everything else is moved, too.
I hung five watercolors around the charcoal drawing. Two are of sunsets. One of those is a study of another painting and one I painted in Antigua. Then there's a small floral and a sketch I did of Zack, years ago when his baseball team was playing at Nokomis and a tiny still life of a china sugar bowl I did in a class with my other great teacher, Rick Kochenash.
The only thing Rick has in common with George is that he was just as funny.
Rick is exactly the same hieght as I am so critiquing my work was easy for him. He always tried to point out everything that was good about a sketch or painting rather than what was wrong with it. He was always very kind to his students.
But he pushed me just as hard as George did and I learned a ton and a half from him. Huh. Four of the paintings in this room I did in Rick's class. That's not surprising; I studied with him for ten years. His class was how I kept from murdering all my kids when they were little. Some people do yoga; I did watercolor.
Then the kids got bigger, I didn't feel so crazy all the time and now I haven't taken a class in years.
No wonder I suck so bad.
It's not like riding a bike. It's like a sport; you have to do it all the time to stay good.
At the moment I'm too busy to care. When I do care, I'll just sign up again.
In the meantime, I've got a bunch of people coming over here tomorrow to have a good time and the chances are really pretty good that none of them will even come in the house. The weather is supposed to be great and the yard looks better than it has in five years, which is when a big gust of wind blew over our silver maple and ruined the back yard deck.
The deck's rebuilt, new trees are growing nicely, Jay and Josie spent the week putting in flowers, and we put up the new furniture Jay got for his birthday. No reason at all for anyone to come in the house.
But if I hadn't hung all these pictures now, I would never have gotten around to it.
When I was done with that, I made five pans of every kind of rice crispy bar I know how to make.
And they're all calling to me from the back fridge.
