Time to Play Again

I’m reading a book about aging, The Girls with Grandmother Faces by Frances Weaver. The book isn’t about getting “old”; it’s about aging, something that happens to us from the day we are born.

I am retired now. Not to say that I don’t work, I do. I work on painting the house inside and out; I work on landscaping and maintaining the yard; I work at maintaining my other house and wondering whether the expenditure of effort and money is balanced by the fact of simply having “my own” house that I don’t live in.

My retirement came as a shock to me. I had planned to retire in several years, but not just now. I had planned financially for retirement day, but I was still emotionally attached to my work and I identified with my “mission” in life, which, coincidentally, had provided me with a decent living.

I’m finally beginning to adapt to being retired. I’ve realized that now I can do, and learn, all those things that I’ve had to put off for lack of time. I’m only half way through The Girls, but I’ve picked out some recurring themes:

• choices
• decisions
• energy
• imagination
• serenity (to accept the things we cannot change)
• recycle (make ourselves into something new)
• options
• learning

I like the idea of “imagination”. If we don’t imagine ourselves any different tomorrow than we are today, if we don’t imagine that our aging will be any different from our grandmothers’ aging, if we refuse to take risks and to make changes and then accept the results of our choices, then we will become our grandmothers. We will continue to do–and to repeat–what we already know.

I know that I have a lot I want to do. I do not see myself living in one house for the rest of my life. I have moved several times in the last 10 years, and I know I will move again at some point.Today I wrote to a friend who just bought a new house, that I love the excitement and the challenge of moving. I love to try living in different types of housing: I lived in a house in the suburbs for 20 years; then I moved to a condo in an urban area; then I moved to an apartment in another, but more urbane and cosmopolitan, urban neighborhood. I’ve lived briefly in a manufactured home in the desert, and now I am living in a house in a resort-type environment. I have yet to live in a cabin, a Victorian house, a dormitory, a yurt, senior housing, or in the mountains, or on a farm. I still have all those places to live before I am 100.

I know that everything I do is colored by how I choose to perceive the outcome.

Marion

While I was away in Vt, I began a portrait of my friend, Noreen’s, mother, Marion. Marion passed away several years ago, but I was lucky enough to get to know her well and to be with her and Noreen as Marion passed through the various stages of Alzheimers. I drew the portrait from a photo I took of Marion and her friend, Hilda. Both Hilda and Marion were then in the middle stages of their disease, although Hilda was slightly more progressed than Marion. Hilda lived in an assisted living facility and we were just getting Marion ready to move to that same facility. We were happy that she would have her friend Hilda just down the hall.

Colored pencil in Canson notebook on cream colored paper.

Imported from theredstonechronicles.blogspot.com

Creativity

I drew this picture of my granddaughter from a photo taken on Thanksgiving Day 2006 when she was 6 months old. I used colored pencils on cream colored paper in a cahier notebook. The pencils are a new set that were included in a “palette” or pencil case that zips open to display an array of pencils arranged by color and shade. Although they are no-name pencils, I like their feel as I draw with them and they blend pretty well with a stump. The point on the “flesh”-toned pencil broke frequently though; now, that is the shortest pencil in the palette–usually a distinction reserved for my black pencil.

I’ve done a few portraits now, all in colored pencil. When I started drawing, I didn’t plan to do portraits; I was fascinated by line–especially in old buildings, and I intended to focus on drawing architecture. My first attempts at drawing portraits were merely “flings” at fun and challenges to myself to see if I could draw mouths and capture the life in my subjects eyes. I’m discovering, though, that I do love doing the portraits.I’m going to a family reunion next week in VT. I’m hoping to get some good candid photos of my family–especially of those of us who have been graced with “character” lines on our faces. I’ve been acquiring a collection of drawing pads and notebooks thinking that I would like to dedicate each to a particular subject. Perhaps I’ll be able to fill a notebook with portraits. . . .

Imported from theredstonechronicles.blogspot.com

Bathing

>My project over the last two days has been to add color to pencil drawings that I started a while back and that have been sitting unfinished in my sketchbook. I’ve been using watercolor pencil, watercolor paints and various types of paper and have been with experimenting with the properties of each.

I also collected the pictures that I had done in the past from their various hiding places, in drawers and boxes and among various sketchbooks. I realized,then, that there was no way to track (and analyze, of course) any improvement or change in how and what I was drawing, so I scanned everything that I’ve drawn to date and uploaded the pictures to a file on my computer.

Despite my analytic temperament, there is something that makes me feel somewhat bohemian and adventurous when adding color to drawings. I always feel apprehensive when I begin a picture, even if it is in pencil; and then, even more apprehensive as I add ink and color (Oh my god, what if I ruin what I’ve already done)–but then, I just get into the color.

 

That is what happened with Bathing. I drew the pencil outline of it several months ago after watching a friend dry herself with a towel. Never having attempted to draw an entire body before, I was nervous–but as the body flowed from my pencil, I remember thinking of how wonderful it would be to take a dip in a pond under the light of a full moon, wonder if the shimmer on the surface of the pond was from the water or from the moon above, and ponder on the mystical qualities of the solitude and the light of night. I pictured a body glowing with the white of the moonlight. Later, as I added color, with water color pencils, then a clear wash to blend the pencil colors, and finally with watercolor paint, I felt my strokes getting larger and larger as I fell deeper and deeper into the picture and could feel the water dripping from my hair, the softness of the towel on my body, and the silence of the moonlit evening . . . .

Imported from geocities.com/c.redstone August 7, 2007–first attempt at blogging