The Art of Happiness – Page 45

My summer vacation is winding down. I’m trying to squeeze every last drop out of it. My to-do list has been fairly well completed, but my want-to-do list never ends—it just gets pushed around.

Yesterday I went to school to interview a woman who has applied to teach a history/English combo for 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. It’s a challenging schedule, but her enthusiasm, cheerfulness, and positive attitude about teaching were awe-inspiring. I’m hoping she gets the job and some of her exuberance rubs off on me. After twenty-five years of teaching, I am always looking for new ideas and renewed inspiration.

After the interview, I got my keys and went into my classroom. All the student desks are piled up on one side of the room. I think (hope) they’re getting ready to clean my carpet. I look around, just to get my bearings, and pick up my “First Weeks of School” folder. Time to update my parent/student letter.

The first weeks of school are always exciting. I never fail to get butterflies in my stomach as I begin the first day and see 150 new faces anxiously looking up at me, wondering if my class will be fun and if I will be nice to them. A few years ago I began starting the first day by waiting at the door, shaking hands, and introducing myself to each student. I want them to know that I do care about them and am going to try to make their 7th grade year in English a positive one. When they get into class, I start by reading them the picture book The Teacher from the Black Lagoon. It’s about a boy who dreams that his teacher is a horrible monster, but at the end he wakes up and finds a lovely young teacher there welcoming him. I read it very dramatically (I almost have it memorized!) and I move around the room. I watch to see who laughs and smiles, and who resolves to wear a stony grimace throughout the tale. I know that they are the ones who I will have to work especially hard to win over.

The Art of Happiness – Page 46

The students are on especially good behavior those first two weeks. They’re well-mannered, quiet, attentive. It’s because they don’t know each other yet and are shy about talking. I do everything I can to get them to feel comfortable with each other, and that often becomes my undoing. The more at-ease they feel in my class, the less disciplined they become. They start to talk to each other more, and I find myself having to compete for their focus and attention. I have to start repeating myself and raising my voice to get them to settle down and listen to instructions. The more fun things we do, the more they expect—but we have a lot of serious work to do and I can’t be entertaining all the time. Before I know it, they feel comfortable enough with me to make little comments when something is “boring” (is there anything worse??) I’ve learned that I can’t please 150 twelve year olds all the time, but I do try.

I didn’t plan on writing about school today, I guess I just have some of that start-of-the-year anxiety. What I really wanted to talk about was the fact that I finished eight more pages in my Art of Happiness book.

I’ve been working on this book in spurts for the last four summers. Usually when I start working on it again, I re-read everything I’ve already done. It’s interesting to me to see how my choice of words for the poetry has changed from when I started writing it. I don’t have dates for when I completed the pages, but I can remember events that were occurring at different times while I was working on it. I can get a good idea of when I was feeling blue or when I was feeling more positive. It all comes through in my color and word choices as they unfold on the page.

The Art of Happiness – Page 49

Once school starts, my art has to go on the back-burner again. That’s one of the things that makes returning to work so difficult. I always have to remind myself that I’m lucky that I got so much time to myself in the first place, it’s just that it goes by so fast. Like the last four years working in this book. Four years! Where did they go?

Facsimile of an Original Indian Drawing of a Ceremonial Dance

Drawn with colored crayons and pencils by Big Back, a Cheyenne.
Source: Humfreville

For those of you who are not subscribed to my Yahoo Newsletter, I wanted to be sure and let you know about my new web site U.S. History Images. I started creating it last April. I decided that since I had so many books that focused on United States history, that I would create another site for just those images. It’s a big, long term commitment; it took me almost three months to get the last set of images online. So far I’ve included drawings and photographs from the discovery and conquest of North America and the Native Americans who were there when the Europeans arrived. I’m still deciding whether it’s appropriate to include South American indians on this site or not. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. I am using a ten volume set on United States history as my outline for time periods and events. I plan on adding images in chronological order as I find time, while still adding images to the Public Domain Images on my other site. I know, I know – I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. That’s what summer vacation does to me; it makes me feel invincible!

The Art of Happiness – Page 44

Having last week off gave me a chance to add some pages to my altered book The Art of Happiness and to put the pages on my web site. I really like the way this particular page turned out. The blue woman came about in a happy accident. I had applied blue acrylic paint with a sponge to a stencil to make the little squares in the background. Then I used a baby wipe to clean the plastic stencil. I noticed all the blue paint on the wipe and swiped some of across paint across a piece of scratch paper. I loved the way the paper was tinted with color, similar to when I use acrylic inks. The color is deep and intense but transparent at the same time. So I just proceeded to rub the wipe across the image of the woman. I didn’t think about it until afterwards, but the tinted woman reminds me of one of Joseph Cornell’s pieces—The Medici Princess. Cornell liked to use a lot of blue in his work—something about purity, ocean, sky. I guess he’s entering my subconscious and influencing my art work now.

The Medici Princess
from the University of Illinois

And now for some exciting news for all you S.F. Bay Area people. Daniel Merriam is going to be signing his new book The Art of Daniel Merriam: The Eye of the Dreamer at The Booksmith at 1644 Haight Street on December 6, at 7:00 p.m. He’ll be giving a talk too! His new book is listed on Amazon. (apparently it came out in September), but it’s currently unavailable. You can get more information on Daniel Merriam’s book signing by calling the bookstore at 415.863.8688. I’m going to see if my sister will go with me. I am a tad reluctant to go into the city on a work night, but I might have to make an exception for this. Maybe I’ll run into some of my blog readers there!

As the new year quickly descends upon us, I am here to offer a tiny bit of advice to those of you who follow along in my artful journey of life. Are you listening? Here it is: BACK UP YOUR HARD DRIVE!!

Yes, mine is a tale of woe, a lesson hard-won through the grim reality of experience. You think it won’t happen to you, but it will. You will return to your computer after a day of joyful frolicking and will complacently sit down to send an email and discover that the friggin’ hard drive has disappeared. Disappeared without a trace! Why has this happened? It is a mystery beyond mysteries. And the why’s, should you discover them, will bring you little satisfaction because everything is gone. Gone, I say. The pictures, the music, the bookmarks, the email addresses, the logos, and letters, the web pages, the art work. All gone.

The irony is that you’ve been meaning to back-up the data. Oh yes you have. You say to yourself that this is something you MUST DO. You’ve read about it. You’ve heard about people losing everything, and you tell yourself you will back-up those important files. But then you don’t. You have considered getting an external hard drive, but $150 seems like just so much money to spend on yourself, especially during this holiday season, which is, afterall, all about giving. So you put it off. Or maybe you did back-up the data, once, a long time ago. Time has passed so quickly. Was it really two years ago that you burned all your important docs to those CD’s and DVD’s?

Take it from me—tomorrow, if not today, back-up your hard drive, or that $15o you were reluctant to spend could turn into $500 to $2500 that you have to shell-out to the mysterious data-recovery people who work in an unmarked building in an obscure part of town. They are kind and gentle souls who will sympathize with you as they kindly and gently hold your hard drive hostage and attempt to eek out remnants of sectors and partitions.

Now, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

POSTSCRIPT: Go HERE to read what happened next.

Christmas Paper Dolls

When I was eight, I wasn’t getting an allowance or any money of my own. I don’t remember even thinking that it was a possibility to ask for money to buy something. It just wasn’t within my realm of experience at that time. So you can imagine my incredible glee when, as I was walking home from school, dragging the inside of my foot along the gutter in order to kick-up the leaves, I spotted a one dollar bill. A one dollar bill! I was so excited, I scooped it up and ran the rest of the way home.

“Look Mom! Look!” I breathlessly yelled to my mother as I proudly held the crumbled bill up for her to see. She was very happy for me and told me to put it in a safe place.

From the moment I got that dollar I couldn’t stop thinking about how I was going to spend it. Maybe I could buy some Barbie clothes, or some candy. Maybe I could get a 45 record like my older friend, Gail.

The next time Mom went shopping, she took me to the variety store in the little strip mall. I walked up and down the aisle. I had never really gone shopping for myself before, and I must have taken a long time checking the inky adhesive price tags on every little thing. It soon dawned on me that most of what I had originally wanted to buy was beyond my reach financially. But then I went to the coloring book section, and there on the top shelf, spread out in all their glory, were the smooth, colorful covers of the paper doll books. I don’t remember which ones I bought, but I do know that they were only a quarter a piece, and that I ended up buying four of them—one for me, and one for each of my sisters. Mom must have paid the tax . . . or maybe there wasn’t any tax. I really don’t remember.

I do remember that when I got home to my sisters and pulled the paper dolls out of the brown kraft paper bag, I got my first memory of what it felt like to buy something for someone else and how good it felt. We played with those paper dolls for hours. And even though my youngest sister was a little too young to cut them out, I helped her, and we had a lot of fun.

Other times, I would take the old Sears catalog and cut out the pictures of girls and their fashions and try to turn them into paper dolls. I even would try and make those tabs around the edges to keep them on the “dolls.” But the paper was too floppy, and it never worked out very well. Still, I could spend hours just cutting and trimming and giving each girl a name and a family and a history.

I loved paper dolls when I was little, so when I saw some French paper doll sheets for sale at a flea market a couple of years ago, I bought them, thinking I could use them in my art. And then I found some more in some old editions of Ladies Home Journal that I had purchased. So I decided to scan them, clean them up a bit, and put them on the Public Domain Images page on my web site. Now I have about fifteen pages of Paper Dolls and other vintage paper crafts on my web site.

As I was working on these images on my computer, I kept wanting to get back to making my Gothic Fairies. It occurred to me that when I’m making these little collages I’m cutting and pasting paper dolls again, and giving them names, and families, and stories, just like I did when I was a little girl. So I guess that love for paper never went away.