Resuscitation

"As one gets older one sees many paths that could be taken.  Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion."  - Jasper Johns

I've been going through my years of archived photos today. It will be 10 years this Fall that Kafuffle Designs was born out of a need to find my creative voice again so that I could survive my failing 16 year marriage.  After my first daughter was born, I had decided not to go back to the 16 hour days of movie advertising.  I continued to do freelance from home, generating all of the artwork for KROQ calendars and events,  hand tinting photography for advertisements and greeting cards, creating logos, and even illustrating a book.  When computers deemed my skills archaic, I stepped away from advertising....a bit sore from being replaced by a machine pretty much overnight, but also a bit relieved because I HATED what I was doing.   I didn't hate all of it...KROQ was great, and they paid quite well, but everything that I created was about reading other people's minds...trying to extract what was in their heads and getting it down on the page.  Ever since I could hold a crayon, my creativity had been my voice, as I was terribly shy, quiet, anxious kid.  I preferred to say things with artwork than with words...and as an adult, that is one thing that hadn't changed.  As my marriage was ending I immersed myself in paint and paper and found objects...I became obsessed with resurrecting broken things and breathing life back into them, and they in return filled my lungs with the fresh air that I needed to find my voice again.  When I look back at my archived photos I am reminded of all of the different stages of growth I have gone through.  It's difficult to describe " what I do", because it kind of looks like a shotgun blast of unfocused creative output.  I find it easier to say what I need to say if I combine a lot of different mediums....I don't like rules very much, which is funny coming from a person who keeps her anxiety under control, not with drugs, but with a ridiculous amount of structure and planning.  Art is my release valve...it is the one place where anything and everything is possible and I let my hair down.

Flight Delayed....

"  I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."  - Edgar Allan Poe


I have found it difficult to find anything very interesting to say lately.  These past few months of days filled with phone calls, medical research, insurance companies and all of the bills that follow have left me feeling exhausted and creatively brain dead.  Having a normally incredibly silly child who is suddenly in chronic pain has tethered me, necessarily, in the real world.  For many people, this reality is what they do every day of their child's life.  I have been spending time at the Children's Hospital....I have watched these courageous parents and their even more courageous children.  When your child is ill, you find inner strength that you never knew you had.  For me inner strength and inner peace do not hold hands though.  My peace only comes from my creative voice.  Without it, I lose any sense of balance and other parts of my life suffer....my ex husband and I were just discussing this the other day....my creative wings have been temporarily clipped, but feathers grow back.  I know that I still have the ability to fly, it just takes patience and more work right now.  This has given me an appreciation for the crazy world of creative expression that I have been allowed and encouraged to live in most of my life.....I have so many people to thank, especially my family, for picking me off of the ground and dusting me off, or at least having the kindness to not laugh too hard when they've watched me trip and try to cover it with a intricately choreographed dance.  Thank you.....for seeing me as a better person than I see myself, and for kicking me in the butt when I've needed it.  I am blessed.  

Navigation

" Have you ever noticed that when you struggle to hear something, you close your eyes? "

-Marilyn Vos Savant

I haven't written a post in a while.  I made a resolution at the new year to compose at least one new post every week.  It had nearly become a weekly habit.  Some weeks I had more to say than others, but it was something that was always in the back of my mind and I'd always post something, even if it was only a quotation that appealed to me along with an image of one of my original pieces of art.  But life is rarely predictable, and at the beginning of March, it decided to throw me a huge curve ball.  When the map you have drawn out for yourself flies out of the car window, unless you have some idea where you are going, it can kind of freak you out a bit.  At the beginning of March, I had everything mapped out.  I was completing new work to submit to a magazine and had an upcoming show to create pieces for.  It was an incredibly busy time, I knew exactly where I was going and what I needed to do.  My creative voice was singing.  And then Reese came home from school with a splitting migraine headache that would not go away.  Today is May 2nd and she has not experienced a headache free day in 59 days....my new map consisted of pain control, ER visits, entire days spent on the phone trying to find the right people to help her, and doing my own research on the web.  Every day for the past 2 months has been consumed by worry, paperwork and visits to doctors. Our new reality has become a harsh one with the diagnosis of Chronic Daily Migraine Syndrome....I haven't worked out a map for this one.  And yet, while this has all been happening, I've needed to keep the image of the old map in my mind, because I couldn't just turn around and head home....there were commitments I had made to myself and other people.  I have had to strain to hear my creative voice through all of this, which has been a very unusual thing for me.  I was elated to hear the news that all four pieces that I had submitted to Altered Couture had been accepted into the August 1st issue, and I was able to create 21 new pieces for the Hopkins show which is taking place this Saturday....having these commitments saved my sanity and has proven to me again that I am capable of far more than I know.  Reese is beginning a new medication to go along with her drastically modified life.  We are in the process of attempting to salvage what is left of 7th grade, as she has missed 2 months of school through this....our battle is still an uphill, but I'm a runner, so I'm ready for it.  It's still a struggle to hear my creative voice, but I close my eyes and focus on it at some point every day.  My maps are mostly drawn in pencil now, for easy modification and when they fly out of the car window we are getting a little better at just winging it.....

An Altered Life....

" Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations."

- Faith Baldwin

Today marks a milestone of sorts. One month ago, my twelve year old daughter came home from school at the end of the day with a monster headache. It has been a frustrating month of struggling with doctors, insurance company red tape, phone calls ( Five hours one day), emergency room visits, and experimenting with medications. Prior to this, I had happily been preparing for a wearable art exhibition/sale....the first I have been part of since venturing into this altered clothing endeavor. But this month long migraine has altered our lives. It has beaten us to a pulp really. Instead of excitedly finishing her last week of school before Spring Break and planning a birthday party with friends ( Reese is 13 on Monday), my daughter has spent a depressing, painful month lying in bed in her darkened room, briefly venturing out to doctor appointments and the occasional brief errand to try her sea legs. Before this happened we had an idea of what our every day was going to be...now it's a mystery to us. I've continued in my preparation for the upcoming show, but it has been with much less joy, in between bouts of pacing while composing the next message for a doctor in my head. I have felt blessed to have this show to look forward to. The tunnel has felt very dark and lonely and filled with peril lately...but if we squint in order to blur all that is immediately surrounding us, we can faintly glimpse a faint light at the end.

A Giant Pain....

" Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life, but define YOURSELF."

-Harvey Fierstein

This post is being channeled through a mother of a 12 year old girl who has had a constant migraine since March 5th....it is the 23rd today. You do the math because I'm a mess. Matters of the brain of a nearly teenage girl are complex (an understatement), and when you are attempting to discover the root of chronic gripping cranial pain, every stone gets kicked over. We've been assured that it isn't because of anything life threatening ( thank God), but so far there hasn't been a single medication that has made more than a dent. I want to thank all of the people who have been coming out of the woodwork with suggestions based on what they themselves have done for similar pain....I will listen to anything. Dancing around naked in the moonlight wearing a goat mask, though.....really? It was really cold last night.....

Is it emotional, psychological, are there things going on at school that I don't know about. People can be horrible ( I prefer to use the word' shitty' actually, and I'm really punchy....so there ya go) to one another. Girls are the worst offenders. Boys punch each other in the face....girls are terrorists. Reese is very much an individual ( don't know where she gets it) very strong in her convictions about being her own person. She is very well liked by nearly everyone. To have made it to school two days out of three weeks because you've dragged yourself there, headache and all, and be met by a table full of other 7 th grade girls who used to be friendly to you, having a full on disparaging conversation about you when they are seated right behind you, and you can not figure out how the dynamic changed so drastically while you were away.....Reese says it doesn't matter, but I know it does. She has really big beautiful wings, but wings are funny things. They give you the power to reach great heights, but they are also extremely delicate and easily injured. So, you group of horrible 7th grade girls, I don't believe that you are the cause of my daughter's headaches, because your opinion doesn't hold enough weight with her. But be warned, if this behavior continues, I will go through the proper channels to have all of you verbally punched in the spine ( to coin one of Reese's phases).

We are off to the emergency room right now for the second time in a week....because we have permission....thanks HMO. I'll keep you all posted. Please send up happy thoughts for my wee girl ....

" Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create."

- Albert Einstein

Purpose

" Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time"

-Thomas Merton

I've been feeling very unsettled lately, exhausted emotionally and physically.....and unable to string together enough thoughtful words for a blog post last week. I've been delighted to have an invitation to exhibit and hopefully sell my work along side my sister's lovely creations at a Wearable Art fashion show and sale in May in Minnesota. It has given me a purpose for all of my frantic creating, which at some times can seem manic. I can't seem to turn it off. My hands need to be busy creating something all of the time. I carry work with me in the car wherever I go. I can't remember not being this way. Today while I was sewing, I began thinking how, at times, the way I work is similar to how Sarah Winchester built her sprawling San Jose mansion, with workmen building around the clock for 38 years. Her belief was that as long as she continued building, ghosts wouldn't haunt her, and she would continue to live. Sometimes, my continuous activity is like this.....when ghosts haunt me my work gives me a place to quietly hide and contemplate and work things out in my head and my heart. It does make it difficult to hold my hand however, because there is always a needle in it.