artist

All posts tagged artist

It Came!

Published December 15, 2012 by Sandee

Painting

Carrie from Hello Sailor is a very talented artist.  She’s a brilliant painter, and I could read her writing forever – her words just carry your eyes.  I also love her sense of humor, quiet and sly.  So yeah she’s gifted.

You might have seen my post about a painting that she named after me called ‘Sandee-Day of the Dead Girl – Dia de los Muertos.’  Well I of course ordered it, and it has arrived.  The package was addressed to Auntie Sandee – so cute!   That’s it, up there.

I was totally teary-eyed when it came.  One of life’s moments to be cherished.  Sharing beauty and kindness from sea to sea — from the UK to west hell, er, I meant, the USA.  Beautiful.

I think I want to get a red frame for it.  Maybe lavender or purple.  Pink wood?

I’m threatening to paint my walls teal and to get pink shades.  I was influenced by a movie with a riverside apartment painted blue and there were pink window shades.  Only my walls will be teal.  So I need to pick out a compatible frame color.

Let’s see how long it takes before I embark on this project of getting painted – I hate that kind of stuff.  First I need to take down my Halloween decorations — ba haha!  See ya!

Punctuation!

Published October 13, 2012 by Sandee

Hey what’s she doing under there?

The Electric Company video I originally wanted to show isn’t available, so the next option was playing this other video from the program.  Rita Moreno’s in it with Morgan Freeman. Here Rita Moreno does one of her looney bin performances that I love.  They’d have made a nice couple.  Morgan Freeman wasn’t Morgan Freeman yet in this.

This show’s older than this artist I talked to today.  I have clothes older than this artist. I think I could develop a crush on him but he’s young enough to be my son, which leads me to tell you of my first plan.

The Electric Company had a Punctuation Song.  In high school I made up lyrics to that melody about masturbation.  I was going to post my lyrics under a video of the Punctuation Song, but couldn’t find it and found the Rita Moreno one instead.  Also I realized that the lyrics to my masturbation song might be too nasty, slutty, hoey, skanky.  Btw I love the relationship that I’m having with myself lately. Yeah, this guy took me there — a little — he had more elements of an intellectual but see that turns me on.  I suppose that’s how I wound up thinking of the masturbation song.

Here’s this other video that’s cute as hell.  MF’s all wiry and RM’s such a pistol:

A Hermit in the Woods

Published September 16, 2012 by Sandee

When I was a kid my dad took us to the home of an artist friend of his.  There were three boys.  One had long, sandy-colored hair.  The mother was a white woman with blonde hair and the father was black.  I was seven.  It was 1970.  Beads hung in the doorways and there were Persian rugs for a bohemian feel.  The boys played tarot cards with my brother and me.  My reading said I would be a hermit.  On my card was an old man carrying a staff in a black hooded robe in a cave .

I enjoyed riding my tricycle alone, pretending that the trees and bushes were a forest.  I had private adventures.  The people walking around were monsters or some other imaginary, vague threat.

Sometimes Dad had to make me play with other kids.  I wanted to be reading, writing stories in my room, or playing with dolls.  The kids would yell up to the window, “Sandee, can you come outside?”  The idea of playing with them was exciting and frightening at the same time.  Once I began hanging out as a pre-teen and teenager, there was trauma.  I wasn’t innocent, but there were rules and trends you had to follow and ugly gossip about other people.   At fourteen, I started smoking, which took the edge off.

Though I have a social life, I’m the same as I was as a girl.  Sometimes people are monsters or vague and imaginary threats.  Small talk can make me physically unwell.  Even in planned social events there is a strain.  It’s because of the way I’m made physically.  I’m not socially awkward the way I was as a child.  I just need a lot of space.

While people get the opposite impression of me at work, being around the collected neuroses, insecurities and various social conditions makes me a mad woman.  This was evident when I worked for a carnivorous corporation.  It brought out the worst in people.  I’m not good with politics and trickery.

That’s why I work in a garden.  Its mission is simply to inspire happiness and to encourage a connection between people and nature.  It’s a heavenly place on the river, close to home and I like the people.

I used to have a vision about being a writer in the woods, an old woman wearing black with a big stick, very much like the staff in my tarot reading years ago.  I’d live in a small house and every month I’d be in touch with my agent.  I wouldn’t have to deal with all the assholism occurring in offices.  I think about that tarot reading now and wonder how close I am to that prophesy.

My father speaks to me

Published September 13, 2012 by Sandee

From my inner ear, in the recesses there and in the brain, you settle and speak to me and I shake my head to feel the fleshing out of this voice that has to do with who I am, and what I want more than anything I can grab, hold, and keep so solidly in a static notion that can only be captured in a moment of creative expression.

Previous Post

Published June 21, 2012 by Sandee

 

I only ever dreamed of being an artist like my dad.  It’s hard.  I never knew what else to do with myself.  I’m a hippy, I think really.  While my tag is Sword-Chinned Bitch, I’m not a bitch and I never wanted to be one.  My brother gave me that name when I was 12.  We’d had a fight.  I was skinny with a sharp chin.  I told people about it in adulthood and they rolled on the floor laughing, so I thought it would work well as a blogger name.  My friend years ago used to call me his hippy chick, but then he said, oh never mind, because he realized that hippies were really wealthy white kids.  I’ve also been called space cadet, kook, weirdo – most affectionately by friends.

I never thought about making money.  I don’t think in terms of money, not really.  Ask me how much I paid for something and I usually can’t tell you.  I don’t even like clothes.  I remember years ago at this company I worked for we had a X-mas party and Lou Hagopian the director said we’d all be getting a $1000 bonus – this was in 1984. We were in an auditorium at a fancy hotel.  Everybody popped up out of their seats and screamed except me.  My coworkers on either side looked down at me.  “Come on Sandee, aren’t you happy,” the one said.  “Oh yeah, sure,” I said.  I rose up to clap, but it was disconnected, an act.  I didn’t know what the fuck it meant that I would have $1000 extra bucks.

I would like to make a vocation of writing.  But I have to enjoy my day to day life and not project to a future that I would like to happen.  At this age I have learned that one needs money and it makes me neurotic.  As long as I’m comfortable being what I am I guess I’m good.

Ink.[Anette]’s Tee-Shirt is Great!

Published June 6, 2012 by Sandee

Hello Everyone!

I got an Anette tee-shirt!  It fits great and looks marvelous.  I had four pictures taken and I looked like a bobble-head in all of them, so I cropped my head out of it.  Too bad because I was wearing great earrings. Anyway, Anette, my compliments to you, the artist/designer!

This landlubber will be parading around the town wearing this original design…

Yours,

SCB

The Rudeness of Ass

Published May 12, 2012 by Sandee

 

I work at a botanical garden.  There’s a gallery there.  I’m at the front desk.  Some people want to stand there and talk to me like I’m Lucy from Charlie Brown.  They think that the only thing I do all day is count people (actually I do count them).  I hate them (except for the ones I don’t hate).  Would somebody tell these people that I work there?  My desk has a high back extending up from the flat part — like a shelf — so the public can’t see me fiddling around underneath it – maybe that’s it.

Two days ago I fucking wrote the blog post for our website; today I composed some ‘thanks but no thanks’ correspondence; I looked over the artist database that I created for edits; I ate 15 girl scout cookies; I mailed 30 brochures; I ordered lunch for the sun room project committee, &c, &c, &c.  And finally, my proudest moment, I explained some of the art in the gallery to some kids in a real loud and authoritative voice because I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about.

The rat bastards who come in to chat (excepting ones I like) because they’re needy and self-centered – get a goddamned life!  In the name of Zeus I did!  This guy comes in and talky talky talky blah blah blah he says.  I finally say, ‘Ooookay, now, well, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day now.  Nice seeing you now, there.’  Frank Fucker doesn’t get it, so I say, ‘Ooookaaaaaayyy now there, I’ve got to get back to my work now…so, I’d better…”  This guy looks down at the menu that I was trying to order from for the meeting and points, saying, ‘You’re not working – that’s a menu.’  I read ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ so I didn’t bludgeon him with the stapler.  How dare you, Frank Fucker??!!  How DARE you???!!!

My Relationships with Relationships

Published April 10, 2012 by Sandee

Getting married and having children never turned me on.  I thought about both of those things for two minutes.  I knew at the bottom of it that marriage was a prefabricated institution that people went into mindlessly, for the most part. It’s something that people were told that you did, and they just did it because that’s what society said you were supposed to do.  Then once you were together you were supposed to have this enclosure called a house and these little things running around gnawing at your feet called children.  Isn’t the family unit something that was constructed to stimulate the economy?  I don’t know.  There are happy marriages.  But there are a lot of bullshit ones.  I know people married for 50, 60 years who have never been happy.  They’ve had big anniversary parties and everything.  People from the outside look in and think it’s wonderful.  But I know the deal.  My parents were married for twenty years.  While our household wasn’t in turmoil I knew that they weren’t really suited for each other.

The guy I was in a relationship with for ten years wanted kids.  This is part of the reason we aren’t together today.  I love it – I saw this blog where kids were referred to as ‘crotch parasites’.  And Maggie the Cat calls them no neck monsters.  I had pretty much felt the same way until my sister had kids and I fell in love with them.  They helped me to have compassion for all the slobbering brats running around with dirty hands and filthy little faces.

The relationships that I was in were probably less than suitable, except for one, because I never had relationships in my mind as a goal so to speak, therefore, I would just wind up with people, because I hadn’t really thought about what would be right for me.  I’d just be walking along and here somebody would come and want to hook up and I’d say, “Ain’t got nothing better to do.  Sure why not.”

There were instances where I wanted to be with a particular guy and once I was with them, I wanted it to continue. But overall, I think I’m so self-contained that being with someone else was not a huge priority.  When my ex asked me to marry him it was that same “ain’t got nothing better to do” attitude.  I had been with him for a while.  One morning we woke up, he looked at me and said, “Let’s get married.”  I said, “…Sure, why not.”  He called the Justice of the Peace but they weren’t open.  So we didn’t get married.  Whew!  Though he is a great person and I loved him, and still do care about him, I know I dodged a bullet on that one.

So I was never that girl who had been dreaming of her wedding day since she was eight years old.  I did fantasize about being in love with boys and having really good sex.  And I did have major crushes.  As a girl, when I did dream about being with a man as an adult it was a man twenty years older who owned a boat.  The recurring scene was him steering it wearing a white hat.  Besides this murky image, I would often say that I would want my man to be a combination of Mr. Spock, Rod Serling, Jimi Hendrix, and Frankenstein.  My boyfriends haven’t all been much older than I and a couple have even been younger.

Okay, so this is where it gets weird.  When I idealize about a man now, he’s usually muuuuch older.  I’ve had crushes on a couple of men in their 80s.  One of them is pushing 90.  I’ll be 50 in November, so this still qualifies as much older.  I had my father around so I don’t know what this wanting older men thing’s about – but I won’t belabor the phenomenon.  It doesn’t have anything to do with me not wanting to have sex.  Oh, no, I do want a sexual relationship with them.  I realize it wouldn’t be sex in the classic sense.  And I know for a fact that you can have sex with someone’s mind, or something like this.  There are many aspects to sex.  This one guy pushing 90 I find actually sexy.  There’s this whole community of them who belong to clubs, they drive, and are very active.  This one gentlemen’s wife died so he actually goes out on dates, and he’s told me about friends who try hooking him up with women.  I wouldn’t mind a cool, old, cult figure kind of guy with a commanding presence. Maybe a cool old artist of some kind.  I’ve always been drawn to character.

At least I have more love for children now, since my sister’s had them.  It opened the door for me to receive a whole level of energy that I was shut off from before.  But I still don’t have any regrets about not having any of my own.  I always say mine would probably wind up in mental institutions.  While I still wouldn’t mind a nice old man, I always admired the women in my life who weren’t desperately looking for a man to fill up their space.

When I was a little girl I had a vision of me as an old lady dressed in black with a shot gun living alone in a small house in the woods.  My dad had brought us to visit some artist friends of his once.  They had kids.  We all went to the room and played tarot cards.  My reading said that I’d grow up to be a hermit.

Portuguese Love

Published March 30, 2012 by Sandee

 

At the Wave Hill gallery Sunday I explained Teena Marie to an artist from Portugal.  Why?  Be-cause, Teena Marie sang the Portuguese Love song !  I told her, “Teena Marie was a white American who sang like a black woman and she was a very popular R&B artist in the black community.  She went to Portugal and fell in love with it, and with this guy and she wrote this song.”   I sang with my eyes closed in passion and played air guitar to illustrate:   Come on in Por-tu-guese.  Say you love me baaaa-by.  Come on in Por-tu-guese, say you love meeeeee…  Saaay it to me, say it to me, say it to me, say you love me ba-by, Por-tu-guese love…

“Ohhh…,” she says when I finish.  “Yeah she really loved him, and on the beach and everything,” I told her.  We talked about other things too, but what started me on Teena Marie was our discussion of the Portuguese landscape.  I thought of Teena Marie on the beach with this sexy Portuguese guy playing his guitar.  By the way, I don’t think Teena Marie plays the guitar in this song.  I just played air guitar in my version, plus everybody knows Teena Marie did play the guitar anyway.

The artist was really friendly.  Her artwork by the way was kick-ass, photographs of trees completed by her sketch imaging.  She was intrigued by Teena Marie, so she got a pen and a piece of paper.  In her heavy Portuguese accent she asked, “How do you spell the first name?”  “Oh yes, it’s T-e-e-n-a,” I said.  I’m thinking, Holy shit!  She’s really gonna listen to it?!  I’m sure my fine air guitar and song rendition had everything to do with it.  I wonder what a woman from Portugal would think of a song about Portuguese love written by a white woman who sings like a black person…