Boats on the Sea of Marmara

Boats, 2004

Seeing Izmit through new eyes, how the landscape changes at the onset of winter, the last few days of rain hinting at November. Boats on the water. Smoke rising from factories. Mountains foggy in the distance. Drawings that chronicle daily life, where cold laundry whips in the rainy wind. Where that bright spot of yellow and red is heightened by the gray sky. City streets that get dirtier rather than swept clean in the rain. How painted concrete buildings have a story of their own.

How do you identify your center?

Ferries and mosques, seagulls and bridges. Quintessential imagery of Istanbul. 

In drawings and flashes of ideas, many that remain untapped in Jungian shadows, I explore the reasons I am here and not there. I write and make art to ask questions and explore the answers, not to wear the painter's hat. Different vehicles, same driver. 

Christina Katz talks about what's at the center of your writing career, essentially what you are offering in the work you do. Her metaphor is espresso at Starbucks, and how from that one elixir of life, all forms of frothy and mentally-stimulating drinks can be made. Being in several fields at the same time - art, writing, design, curating - has me tapping walls like a contractor looking for support beams to find a clear and direct way to say exactly what it is I'm offering. 

It's an ever-evolving task. Shifting from mommy mode to artist mode to editor. When I tap into a creative flow, it turns me on. Makes me know that positive, life-affirming change can happen when you do what you love.

How do you identify your center? Does your center of gravity shift with time?

Watercolor images copyright Rose Deniz.

An opening in Ankara

Photos from my opening in Ankara on May 31, 2010. Photo credits Sera De Vor, one of the most fantastic and enthusiastic people I've ever done an interview with. "American artists share their vision of Turkey" in the Hürriyet Daily News June 5-6, 2010.

Monica and me with Thomas Leary, Public Affairs Officer at the US Embassy

Thanking the US Embassy for its support of the exhibition.

Process-oriented

From 2002-2004, whenever I went into my studio to paint, I read books. I started nearly each and every day with an hour or more of reading and note-taking, checking for new books in our tiny but well-stocked art library. My MFA in Painting thesis had more poetry than painting in it with 'titles as tenets as they related to various ideas and influences' (directly excerpted title). I was hot for Emily Dickinson, James Merrill, and appendixes. I included two, and the second appendix had endnotes for the endnotes.

Appendix II mentioned:

XII. Dutch coffee, which sometimes I miss to distraction
XIV. The color pink
XVII. Deep discounts

And a list of all the vehicles I had driven until 2004.

While I read and wrote, I smelled oil paint in our studios because we had poor ventilation. My professor listened to Eminem while peeling backing off of sticky vinyl to apply to her metal canvases. I did make paintings, big explosive ones that had volcanos, nuclear bombs, and sexy squiggles that I called map symbols. Later, I switched to paper because my work seemed better-suited to the hand-drawn and immediate, magnetized by words.

How does a hybrid of two-or-more comparable things: reader/note-taker, painter/writer, mother/expat, traveler/homebody, for example, allow something previously undiscovered to emerge?

The alchemical mixture of science lab-slash-library in my studio allowed for process-oriented discovery, and six years later the language of color and paint continues to transform.

The Art of Cultivating a Creative Life

20 women sit around long tables pushed together in a corner of a café in Istanbul on a Saturday morning. The clink of coffee cups, the murmur of orders being placed. I pace around a little bit, preparing myself physically and mentally to talk about creativity to this group of professional women that I have been a part of since 2007.

The painter Robert Motherwell reportedly always started his day with figure drawing, though in his finished work, literal figures are scarce. He did it because it got him up and moving, pushing kinetic energy around until the good stuff could come out. He knew the power of drawing.

I have planned a drawing exercise for this reason, and I move around the room, saying hello to all the women who have come: a mother with her 6 month old baby and her 4-year old daughter, a salon owner, lawyers, entrepreneurs, writers, bakers and teachers.

The title of my talk is The Art of Cultivating a Creative Life. I hand out sheets of paper and pencils, and we do one of Betty Edward’s exercises from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I do this to dispel the “I can’t draw” so “I’m not creative” myth. I also choose this exercise because it relates to perception. How we think we see a chair, a hand, a house, but what we really see is a symbol. By slowing down our brains, we trick it into overriding its impulse to see the symbol of a hand and not its network of lines, hangnails, smooth nail beds, and curve of the thumb. Some women grasp a shift in their awareness immediately, others later as I talk about the application of a seemingly simple exercise to the borderlands of work and home, to professionalism, to adapting to life as an expat in Turkey.

I talk about navigating new territory abroad. About being faced with making decisions in the gray areas of bi-cultural life. I talk about reinvention. The spark. Creativity as a way of being and not just the action of sitting down to make something or write something. I talk about the magic of dialogue, concluding by putting out the extraordinarily uncomplicated idea that all moments in life are art. And then I pose this question:

Can you identify where you feel moments of spark in your own life?

Now, where are yours?

Fall Delights

Staples at a Midwestern Thanksgiving dinner table? At our house in Wisconsin: turkey basted according to a timing method made by my engineer-father, champagne for the adults to sip while waiting, broccoli/cauliflower and cheese-whiz bake, canned cranberries, mashed potatoes with gravy, green beans, butter on French bread, and pumpkin pie. For a saucy tale of secret ingredients at the holiday table, read cultural producer Anastasia Ashman's post here.

Here in Türkiye, I do what I can to recreate our meal, but it is never quite the same (though I've become much better at making gravy than I used to be!). I tend to throw in some healthier alternatives, but canned cranberries have never disappointed me, despite how unreal they look coming out of the can, ridges in the cranberry mold shaped like the aluminum can. Food and fall go hand-in-hand for me because the kitchen seems to come to life, me and the kitchen less sweaty and grumbling than in the summer when cold soups and salads are staples. In the fall, rich flavors mingle with our expectations for sharing meals together, sheltered against the cold. What keeps you fed body and soul during the fall? Afiyet olsun!

Drawing from life

I've been fumbling around the idea for awhile that the things we see online get digested so quickly. So I'm posing a little challenge to myself that for an unspecified period of time I draw the things I love and want to share. I've started doing this already.  Gretchen Wagoner's print here, is an example of the direction I'm moving. So is the black tea latte I made last week. I may throw in some photos from time to time, still, and my illustrations will certainly use mixed media. Covertly, it means I can justify hoarding Moleskine watercolor notebooks. This also means that if you want to share something with me - something you love or work you do, that time and mutual interest permitting, I'll do a little drawing and post it here. It may take me longer to do it, maybe fewer posts, but that's part of the experiment. I hope you'll enjoy! What do you think? xo

Drawing diary

Pumpkin + soy sauce + feta cheese? On a bed of pasta it has three of my favorite things: sweet, salty, and nutty with a dash of hazelnut oil. Top with walnuts.

Rescue Remedy

My anecdote for the unpleasantness of the common head cold is a homemade spiced black tea latte. What's yours?

A Day of Rest

 Big Sky, Little Hideaway, 2004

It shouldn't surprise me that now that I've finally got time to work (baby sleeping, Topi at school), I'm indisposed.  The snails in our neighborhood have more energy than me right now, using it to bravely cross trecherous sidewalks, of which there are plenty (snails and trecherous sidewalks). The same snails that I adore and point out excitedly to my husband or kids or to passers-by and then accidentally step on with a horrible crunch, usually at night, after a rainfall. If I've mentioned this before, I'm sorry. I still swear I can hear the tiny snail scream as it suffers below my hoof. My husband, when he really wants to touch a nerve, calls me affectionately, "Snail Killer."

I suppose that if I have enough energy to muse about dying snails, I should have enough to work on one of many things that make my desk look like mini-pilgrimages up the Pyramids. Neatly stacked things does not mean organization, though. It means orderly disfunction, in my world. It means that in the process of trying to arrange my life and control it that I make little piles of things, group things together in platonic relationships so that I feel better.

The lack of energy does come from something legit, though. It started with a few unhappy grumbles of my stomach three days ago (could have been the excessive amount of chocolate milk I was drinking with my children, just like Topi likes it: milk in a glass with two scoops of chocolate milk power on top, not mixed, so he can scoop out the chocolate and ask for more. I protested this until I tried it out myself, realizing it was delicious.) and has turned into my late-summer-early-fall stomach flu. Without fail this time of year for the last three years I have to eat salted potatoes and rice with yogurt (and butter, because I can't live without the butter) and wave goodbye to my family as I cloister myself in the bathroom for a week. Sorry.

I chalk it up to the seasons changing, or that my life tends to change in some way in the fall, mimicking the start of the school year like it used to. Either way, despite the unpleasantness, forced rest is usually just what I need because most of the time I am either really excited about something or panicking about it. Both can happen in the same five minutes. 

I'm reading a book that everyone else is reading right now about another 30-year old who's personal experiment (this time, in the kitchen) turned into literary fame while I rest, and waiting for feedback on some work I've done so I can do revision #210. The calm right now, the illusion of calm, I should say, is only because I've gone through my Gmail and labeled everything so they are in neat little subcategories. Look, no mail! But my TO DO label in bright red still haunts me from the left-hand side of the screen and I meekly look at it and hope it doesn't start flashing. 

Does anybody really listen to their body when they are worn down, tired, anxious and overdoing it? If you do, pray tell. I have lost count of the number of times I've cut back, made changes, etc, to slow down the pace, and I pretty much always end up right where I started. In the most pleasant way, I am grateful for this because I always find things that captivate me that I want to do, make, learn about. On the other hand, over-committment and exhaustion go hand in hand. Even reading becomes a sporting event, hurtling through pages so I can start another one because I just don't know when I'll have the time again. But regardless, this time I'm listening to the clanging bell of my body telling me to take a break and only moving my fingers about the keyboard because the idea struck me that you, too, might relate to that. And if so, I'd like to know about it. 

Rainy Day Pages

Just after having said we were having sunny days perfect for photo ops, I woke up to rain drenched sidewalks and brilliantly green trees and grass from an early morning storm. Not the ideal day for hanging laundry outside, but I've got a down comforter on the line that I hope won't take three days to dry. Rainy days make me want to cozy up and make things more than on sunny days, and I've taken a few pictures of recent notebook pages in progress. I'm never sure when a page is 'done' but it usually happens after I see enough disparate things working together, like mixed and matched patterns, contrasting colors, pale palettes against complicated surfaces. I usually use a graphic notebook or line free sketch pad, but this time I found a kraft paper journal at a stationery store and thought I'd give it a try.


If you journal and sketch, what kind of notebook do you prefer?

Return to Sender

The sketchbook that I sent to the Art House Gallery got returned to me today, and I have no idea why because none of the little boxes were checked on the USPS sticker. Sad me. But check out the really cool stamps on the envelope! When I send out a package, I never see the stamps because they only weigh it and put it in a stack. Only when someone on the receiving end shows me, or like today, I get a package returned, do I get to see the stamps.

The stamps with the soup in it says "Yüksük Çorbası" which must be a traditional Turkish soup. 'Yüksük' directly translates as "thimble" and sure enough, those little white pods look like thimbles. Maybe one of my Turkish friends can enlighten me about this soup? And then tell me how to make it? It looks delicious.

Happy Tuesday, friends. Oh, and notice the very lovely fabric staging the wayward package? Yep, lots and lots of happy fabric came my way this past week thanks to these three Etsy shops: Down Shadow Lane, It's Sew Me Fabrics, and A Fabric Outlet. I couldn't be happier. Now I have to start sewing!