The Tool Shed

Image provided by Magpie Tales

The Tool Shed

Just out back

But so oft forgotten

Repository of the mysterious

And last looked for.

The tool shed shelters bits and parts

Those tools not much needed

Brushes and rollers

Paints and pans.

Snowshoes and snow shovel

All summer long

Hoes and rakes

Every winter.

Every spring and fall

The great tool exchange

Promises to establish some order

In all tossed in carelessly after last use.

I stand poised with doors open

Wondering what is at the far back buried

And just how much more

I can fit inside.

The tool shed

How did I ever do without it

And wouldn't it be nice 

To have two.

Jacqui Binford-Bell

August 2011

My father once remarked that fish grow to the capacity of their tank. We were great keepers of aquariums. We also love our tools. Genetic trait I think. And as I prepared for fall and winter I once again faced the tool shed issue. I do have two - far and near. And once again promised to put them in some order. It is not that I do not do it from time to time but that the tools inside seem to party hardy when the door is closed.

Had I Known

Passage of Time

 

Had I Known
*
Had I known
That March day
As you prepared to drive away
I would not see you so again
Would I have
Hugged you tighter
Begged you to stay
Not merely waved?
Farewell
**
Had I known
That day in July
When your call took me away
From my painting
We would not talk again
Would my words Have been sweeter
Not so in a rush
To get back to my brush?
Love you bye

***
Had I known
That December move away
Your life would be so short
Without me there
Would I have stayed
Endured more
In hopes to prolong yours
Not been so impatient
To get on with my life?
Divorce

****
Had I known
That day in August
Standing beside your bed
You would so soon die
Leave me crying
Would I have made
More time
To spend with you
Should I have foreseen
My last glimpse of you
Would be my last chance?
Awaken

*****
Had I known
That long ago day in May
I said I do
I would not be able
To change the course
Our lives would take
Would I still
Have tried
Would I still have
Loved you so?
Goodbye

******

J. Binford-Bell October 2010

Creative Process - Departures

Dead Horse Mesa 10x24

As an artist I spend a lot of time alone in the studio. But I also know a lot of other artists even if sometime I am more familiar with their work than them personally. But it is their public work and their public personalities I am most likely to know because we socialize at fairs and receptions. At times I can become too familiar with their work and their wardrobe. "That old thing again!" I am likely to think from time to time even of my own work.

Artists get in ruts. Sometimes we seek the ruts because they seem to be demanded of us. Galleries want a Body of Work persona they can market. When they sell one of your paintings they don't want you replacing it with something new! They want another very much like the other. After all that sold didn't it. And when you submit to exhibits and fairs they want your five submissions to be a submission in and of itself. You have to not merely demonstrate that you can paint but that you can advertise and display yourself.

So you stop painting in a certain palate. You narrow down your subjects. And in the absolutely worst possible result you start cookie cutter art. For last year's Rio Grande Holiday show I did cactus flowers on panels - eight 6x6, six 8x8, and four 10x10. I did them because I sold out of the cactus blossoms I had done in a much smaller number at a summer fair. I sold none of them at the winter show.

And so began the winter of my discontent with myself. All along I have painted things I wanted to paint but never taken them out to shows. The gallery I was in seemed to shun them even when what I came to call my dark work won prizes. And because it won praise and sold out of my studio I painted more of it and less of my ever popular New Mexico missions.

Dead Horse Mesa above was a departure. It began as an idle sketch in my "work book" because a patron asked if I ever painted horses. I have several pages of tiny thumbnails of horses and horse heads sketched between photographs of paintings of others I had clipped out of art magazines and pasted in. Eventually I got a sketch I liked.

Hadn't a clue about colors or placement on the canvas or what I was going to do with my foreground. But I decided on a proportion and stretched a canvas. Then stared at it for a week or so as I hung the tracing of the drawing over it in different placement.

Working in my usual sequence I poured the sky and then painted in some of the foreground and decided I had boxed myself in. This sequence works with churches because I know what colors I am using on the church. I hadn't a clue about what color the horses were going to be. So I studied it some more. Hey, it was a study, right? I do all my departures as a study first. Sometimes they never get beyond that stage. Sometimes they never get beyond the stage above. I have three paintings in that place at the moment. I have lost interest in them frankly. Considering taking off the canvas and beginning again. But this painting was garnering positive comments from visitors to my studio and to my fan page. And it had a hold on me.

It remained on the shelf over my painting desk and haunted me. And little by little I would fill in more space until I was left with just the haunting horse heads and skulls. The more I painted the less options there seemed to be for the colors of the main subject and focus of the work.

Major milestone - all color blocks laid in

In the time I had been working on this departure I have finished a triptych, a study for another departure and the finished 24 x 36 painting it inspired, and Canyon Celebration. Finally I refused to let myself work on anything else. When I got to the above stage I almost stopped again. After all it was just a study. I could make notes on what I liked and didn't like, figure out the proportions for the full sized work, and rework the sketch.  But at this stage a customer of mine wanted to see it done.

So if departures are such a big problem why do them? Because I learned so much out of doing this. Certainly more than I learned out of all those cactus blossoms.

Magpie 77 - End of Youth

Summer Evening, Edward Hopper, 1947

End of Youth

Summer I turned six

Walker Air Force Base

Officer housing

Officer brats playing with abandon

Parents drunk on relief

All were back from Korea

Safe in SAC.

All I remembered

Is I was late for dinner

Neighbors on their porches

Catching the desert air

A sip of Mexican vodka

In gaudy Juarez glasses

The tinkling of ice over laughter.

I slipped in the back door

Limped to the bathroom

Cold water burning on fresh cuts

A whine escaping my lips

Please let them not hear

I begged some unknown god

That had protected Dad over unknown land.

But I guess you have to believe

To get special protection

And where was this god in that garage

Where were my parents then

Why hadn't they missed me at dinner

"You're in trouble," my brother said

As I climbed into the top bunk.

"And you too," I whispered back in the dark

"Especially if I tell you left me there"

Oh, and by the way it ends here

All the special protection I have provided you

You no longer have a big sister little brother

That person is now dead

I thought as I curled in upon myself.

Summer I turned six youth ended

I knew I was alone

Against boys bigger than me and little brothers

Sticks and stones can break bones I would learn

Not being missed breaks hearts

There is no special god of deliverance

In a Roswell summer night.

J. Binford-Bell

August 2011

Image and prompt for Magpie 77 was provided by Tess Kincaid at Magpie Tales.

Bell Tower

Bell Tower

Toll No More

They always had that quality

Of  ghost stories well told

And I always wanted to believe

They belonged to some distant past.

Indian children frozen in a blizzard

Running not from home

But back to their culture

Away from schools where they were held.

My parents would whisper

Words of injustice

Prisoner of war camps

For those that never fought the wars.

One by one they were closed

Reservation schools run by religious zealots

Young stripped of family and language

Stories of abuse lingered long after.

I stood decades later

Looking up at the empty shell

San Fidel Indian School closed

Its church in decay.

The people it sought to assimilate

Recovering their past

And culture

Burying the memories.

J. Binford-Bell

August 2011

The history of Indian Boarding Schools is not all consigned to history. In 1902 there were 100 boarding schools as part of the government assimilation policy for American Indian tribes. Between then and 1973 the population of these schools grew to 60,000 First Americans. A defense of the practice of boarding schools could be made because of the vast distances in areas like the Zuni, Hopi and Navajo reservations in Arizona and New Mexico. Was the boarding school policy better or worse than the forced busing in the south during the civil rights era?

A review begun by President Kennedy of the policy of taking children from their families caused the gradual closure of most of those schools beginning in 1973. These closures were largely due to records of abuse of the policy established by Congress. The schools were often subcontracted out to Catholic, Mormon or Baptists and review was not rigid. Those boarding schools that remain open are more dedicated to the preservation of the Indian cultures and languages and faith rather than its annihilation. And some of the students of these schools in the past speak fondly of their experiences there. Others don't. What I heard growing up in the southwest were the horror tales.

The Santa Fe Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico is one of the remaining schools with a great reputation.

______________

Check out Poetry Potluck Week 47: History and Stories

Canyon Celebration

Canyon Celebration

Canyon Celebration is a revisit of a painting I did earlier this year: Cascade. Artists often revisit a subject especially if the first time they do it they are not totally satisfied. Or they feel there is more to be experienced in the subject.

There are aspects of both of these paintings that I like. But there are also things I have not tried in either that I think I want to try in a third painting.

Cascade

Unpacking paintings I had in Albuquerque I dropped a framed photograph on one and the corner of the frame cut the canvas. Hauling paintings back and forth to fairs I have really ruined very few. Chipped a few frames, broken glass when I did watercolors on paper, but really ruined very few paintings.

I was at first very upset but while this particular painting has been very popular I painted it in 2008 and it has not sold. I never throw away a sketch so I am thinking of redoing it, and finding myself excited by the idea. My style has changed a bit in three years and I have learned a lot about my medium. How I would hate to be one of those artists that is constantly reproducing the same subject over and over. I would be so bored.

Caller of Storms

Old Wind Mill by Skip Hunt

Caller of Storms

Lying beneath the hand stitched comforters

In her mother's old room

She'd hear the steady rhythm of the old mill

Turning to the spring breeze

She'd awake to the turn of the rusty gears

Heralding a shift of the weather.

She thought she could hear it tell

Of the changes of the seasons as the years passed

Its functioning years long forgotten

It stood as sentinel

Its blades against the clouds

And cried, she believed, in a rusty voice of storms not yet seen.

Grandpa used its rise in pitch

As signal to lock up the barn

And herd the family to the dank cellar

 Where wrapped in a quilt from her bed

She would listen to the howl of the wind above

Singing with the tin windmill.

And believe it called up the storms.

The storms would skip and run

Leaving broken trees and torn tin in their wake

When one leveled the wind pump

Her father bolted the downed pin wheel head

To the side of the old metal shed

As a hex sign, he said

To keep the storms at bay.

J. Binford-Bell

August 2011