cottage industry

Grandmother Karma: beyond nostalgia

Through the looking glass of tea, stories, and dark days . . .

Another memoir in the works . . .

Tim is reflecting on 1967, a year of many scenarios.

I do my usual mix of this and that, including painting in the studio . . .

A few thoughts about my grandmothers

are part of this December mix.

My father’s grandparents John and Ella Sommers Oelkers were German immigrants who settled in North Tonawanda, New York and operated a general store on Webster Street. My grandmother, Evelyn, grew up along with her five siblings in a large home on Goundry Street during the Victorian era of the first decade of the twentieth century.

A library opened in 1904 down the street from the family home. Established by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, this library was just one of more than two thousand libraries he made possible across the United States between 1883 and 1929.

I imagine Evelyn wandering about the neoclassical structure and looking up at the colorful leaded glass skylight. I imagine her selecting books—possibly The Call of the Wild, Jack London’s popular new book or Lewis Carrol’s well-established classics: Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871).

The building was transformed into a nonprofit arts center in 1975–the original skylight remains intact today.

I look forward to exhibiting several paintings there next April 2024 along with Mary Begley and Eileen Pleasure in our show to be called Three Degrees of Abstraction.

Three small works of mine are now displayed at the Carnegie and soon to be taken away during their annual December fundraiser . . .

A few other small works were donated in previous years . . .

Also, now on view at The Comma Gallery in East Aurora … two of my paintings are included in a theme show, Wonders, Wild and New.

This one called Watching . . .

This one called Working . . .

I mostly paint on canvas, paper or wood, but I submitted these whimsical works made a few years ago on discarded pizza boxes from local shops—Bocce, La Nova, Just Pizza–and our local shop with an especially great name . . .

Not the first time I took to painting on an unconventional surface, this one is so Buffalo and simply fun–also aligned with the notion of Wonders, Wild and New, a theme taken from a Lewis Carrol passage . . .

I recently heard part of Carrol’s Jabberwocky poem spoken by a hardened criminal on the second season of the TV series, Fargo.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

I was fortunate to have two lovely grandmothers, Evelyn, the one who lived down the street from the Carnegie and Doris, who gave me a beautiful Lewis Carrol book set for my tenth birthday . . .

I never quite identified with all the jabberwocky silliness and I never read them cover to cover, but the illustrations are magical. My edition features the work of the original illustrator.

The prospect of adventure and any kind of tea party remain appealing–Madhatter or otherwise. I treasured the books enough to move them about the country with me to twenty different homes and somehow the looking glass aesthetic rubbed off. Last summer I posted Mirrors and a Hat, a mention of the many reflective objects in my environment.

As I have pondered the Alice books lately, it occurs to me that the book I recently published has a fairytale quality that parallels Alice, a version only possible a hundred years later.

ORDER HERE

One more parallel . . .

The first time I ever got up in a Karaoke bar to sing was with a friend in Idaho Springs, Colorado for my 50th birthday. We sang the Jefferson Airplane version of White Rabbit (along with Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots are Made for Walkin‘).

White Rabbit is on my music flash drive I call “car music.” I prefer listening to talk radio in the car, but when it gets too boring, the music comes on–old favorites that I often play on repeat over and over again–as I played this one just the other day.

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Novembrulage: collage, etc.

Collage, Decoupage, Assemblage, Bricolage…

What is the difference?

They all end with “age.”

Collage is an art technique that involves pasting paper, photographs, textiles, text, and other found materials onto a surface. The origins of collage can be traced back hundreds of years, but this technique gained attention in the early 20th century as an art form when Picasso and Braque popularized “Papier Colle.”

Pat Pendleton

J. Tim Raymond

J. Tim Raymond

Several of Raymond’s collages are featured in a book,

Revenge of the Intellect (full preview available here)

Whereas Collage tends to emphasize composition and is considered a fine art, Decoupage is also a process of affixing papers to a surface, but the aim is primarily for the decoration of an object . . . like this wine bottle I decoupaged several years ago.

Assemblage became hugely popular with the anti-art Dadaists, who brought everyday matter into sculptural forms, intertwining art with nature and ordinary life. Tim assembles these on a regular basis from whatever happens to appear . . .

My favorite, Bricolage, can simply be an array of objects viewed together–by chance or intention. Characteristic of postmodern art practice and the DIY (do it yourself) artists of the last couple decades, diverse elements often work together to create new meanings—also indicative of the current throwaway culture, ripe territory for the repurposing and upcycling of goods . . . or the common corner cabinet for “Bric-a-brac.”

Since the 1980s, I have used a bit of collage (paper or textile) to jumpstart paintings–not always, but I find it a good starting point since my work is not representative, but a process of adding and taking away, sometimes entirely covering over the paper, but usually leaving just a small trace of the collage elements, as shown in these details of various paintings . . .

This detail of an early one was more assemblage than collage when this remnant of old linoleum flooring pulled from a trashcan found a way into this painting . . .

Sometimes the collage element contains text . . .

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Poem for the Season: NOT “just words”

10/27/2023

I read this at Fourth Friday Poetry at Dog Ears Books and Café 688 Abbott Road in Buffalo.

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Pencils Sharpened: late summer

There is no back to school here, but there is NOT doing that and doing this . . . a couple art exhibitions, a published book, and a few new notebooks. There is still need for a good pencil.

Separated by a curtain, Cottage Industry Projects represents our individual endeavors and combined activity from the studios of Pat Pendleton and Tim Raymond in a process of adjoined lives and art studios during the last few years.

Opening soon . . .

September 8, 4-8pm and September 29, 4-9pm (during East Aurora Fall Art Walk)
Pat has a painting in INSIDE, OUTSIDE, INBETWEEN
The Comma Fine Art Gallery (17 Elm Street, East Aurora NY)

September 15, 6-8pm
Tim has a painting in Buffalo Society of Artists 127th Catalogue Exhibition
Springville Center for the Arts (37 North Buffalo Street, Springville NY)

Tim’s growing collection of assemblages on the hill out back.

Late summer blossoms flourish.

Last beach days.

Recently Published . . .

Bookemon Creative Author Press (hardcover, softcover, ebook)

Order Here

Please add your name to our mailing list for occasional posts and studio updates.

A new notebook is always good to have. Write it down before you forget!

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Mirrors and a Hat: unbearable lightness of being

My last post was several months ago and also featured mirrors. I have collected an assortment of mirrors along the way. There is something about the dispersion of light and intimate view of the material world–the metaphors around reflections. Since the author Milan Kundera recently passed away, I watched again the popular late 1980s movie based on his novel. Despite the wonderful cast, Daniel Day Lewis and Juliette Binoche, it turns out that major players are also the mirrors and a bowler hat.

The lightness of being in part is an analogy of life as an outline, a sketchy version of what could be without second chances to re-do or correct. Young Terez complains about her provincial town “It’s so boring. Nobody here reads. Nobody here discusses anything.” Fortunately, she has the sense to move to Prague where she found more than just readers and discussions.

Milan Kundera has been quoted as saying this:

Characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

Even though it seems that everything has already been said and done, I think there is still room for new perspectives. I hear so many complaints lately about our damaged ability to focus on reading, possibly due to information overload and the tendency to scan rather than comprehend.

So … if nobody reads, why write a book or publish one? Nonetheless, I did that. The 92-page, 26-image softcover book is available for $14.23 from Bookemon Creative Author Press.

The central feature of my title is a mirror. I seem to live among a wilderness of mirrors.

My book features a photo of a mirror from 1992. This weathered mirror remains with me…

The bowler hat from the Unbearable Lightness movie is what we all remember. I had a similar hat back then…

One of the stories in my book also features a hat, a different hat.

I recently listened to an interview with author Tim Kreider on The Unspeakable podcast. A popular quote of his was mentioned because it has been used frequently as a meme:

The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known

That sums up my current point of view about releasing a memoir about myself into the wide world of readers. Yet, there can never be too many stories about the lives of women. In the spirit of Nora Ephron:

Slip on a banana peel, people laugh.

Tell a story about it, you are a hero.

Creating the book, completing it, and self-publishing has been a process. More on that later.

One more item about mirrors, a poem by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

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Moons and Mirrors: reflections and connections

Five months since the last post on this page. Months of Winter seem to have slipped by as we carry on with our interests here. Lots of posting on Instagram at Tim Raymond Studio and Pat Pendleton Studio. Tim is preparing for a show (Sticks and Stones) at Hunt Gallery in Buffalo during April 2023. He recently posted a new painting that got me thinking about connections, as I do. More and more, I see parallels and reminders of one thing to another.

I love the title of Tim’s recent painting, THE MOON’S HAND MIRROR. I also could not help notice that a recent addition to our kitchen art display, my pizza box painting from 2015, Harvest Moon is somehow related…

and also somehow related is a recent acquisition, a vintage Bakelite hand mirror in a lovely yellow…

Speaking of mirrors, I have been working on final preparations for The Shape of Becoming: Woman in the Mirror–a memoir in seven stories to be published this Summer, a demanding process that I will be writing about at some point when it is behind me.

The world is a mirror and everything becomes strangely (pleasingly, predictably, happily) connected and reflected.

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Enough: poem, biking, bonfire

I picked up this little red book of poems of big ideas by Diane di Prima (1934-2020) at the airy bookshop/cafe Fitz Books. Originally published in 1971, Revolutionary Letters remains relevant, such as this letter #17 . . .

we will all feel the pinch

there will not be

a cadillac and a 40,000 dollar home

for everyone

simply

the planet will not bear it.

What there will be is enough

food, enough

of the “necessities”, luxuries

will have to go by the board

even the poorest of us

will have to give up something

to live free.

The poet’s mention of the forty thousand dollar home price in the late 1960s would be ten times that amount now, depending upon the location. However, her message remains intact.

There is so much enough.

The season of Autumn is soon here, a time of lush abundance in Western New York after many days of sun and rain.

Our world has moved far beyond the pandemic restrictions of two years ago when a drive down Route 5 to see a house in an unfamiliar place led to living here on a road where nothing happening is the main event.

Yet, this kind of nothingness is more than enough.

Last week the harvest full moon appeared out back over the trees (shown with a string of weathered Serendipity Flags–more about those in the SHOP page at the top of this site).

The Hydrangeas are turning pink outside my office window. Quan Yin rests upon the window ledge, The Goddess of Compassion holds a vase of water that cleanses and nourishes the spirit. Given to me by an exceptionally kind nurse during a time eighteen years ago when I was recovering from a serious illness.

These sneaky weeds miraculously circled the deck railing without any coaxing.

Tim’s studio and yard Crocs have been recently adorned (by him) with some happy clownish ornamental stripes.

The cherry tomatoes continue to appear, along with the basil.

A single pink rose requires no words.

This older favorite painting (Rose Arrow, 2012) that hung over the dining table for too long has been replaced with another from my vault (Island, 1986).

This hand-blown glass heart, a gift from a friend, hangs in my kitchen window to remind me of enough.

Tim and I finally visited the paths around Evangola State Park on our bikes. It was quiet with just few cars parked in the lot by the beach and picnic areas–a few campers still enjoying the picturesque grounds. The trees there have full round tops like the kind young children draw.

Always happy to be rolling through the breeze on two wheels once we are out doing that, these times are less frequent. Tim was once a bicycle messenger in Washington D.C. and again in New York City. I rode this very bike in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. However, this is what happens now . . . From time to time, one of us presents the idea “We could go for a bike ride.” The possibility is then pondered until time passes and each of us simply carries on with our interests here, as we do. The bikes remain in the garage.

The other thing that happens regularly is this . . . One of us proposes a plan: “Shall we go into town (meaning the city of Buffalo) for __________?”

So many events are happening in full force each week–the city is bustling with energy. While we do attend some–go to appointments and visit people–more often, we choose to forego the hour-long drive.

Why leave?

While debating whether to go in on a recent Friday night, our neighbor invited us to a bonfire. We welcome any chance to be better acquainted with the others living nearby on this road where people tend to keep to themselves. Something was happening.

SUVs were parked all along the edge of the grass as their friends assembled around the fire. We arranged our folding chairs and found bottles of beer. The chat focused on youth hockey as kids ran between hot tub and trampoline. Teen boys roasted hotdogs in the flame. We found some common ground with someone from a couple blocks away discussing sump pumps and generators, a topic that would have been totally foreign just a couple years ago. Now, an issue of urgency and great interest as we aim to keep water out of our basement art studios.

It’s good to know your neighbors just enough . . . then retreat back across the road.

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Not the Daily News: ordinary life

Poet William Carlos Williams wrote: so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

Consider a yellow chair and a green shed.

In 1986 I pulled this sturdy oak chair from a dumpster on Franklin Street in downtown Manhattan. I carried it around the corner to my art studio and painted it black. Eventually, it was relocated to my apartment and painted red. Then it was moved to Colorado where I painted it yellow. It has moved with me several times. After leaving it out in the winter elements, its usefulness was exhausted. I placed it in the fire pit for a final send off.

Soon after my chair fire, Tim burned some of his older paintings found with water damage after a winter in the shed. A few days later he announced the need to paint the shed green. One thing leads to another.

One yellow chair disappears and another shows up . . .

We are quite happy to have this pop of color in our main room. After sitting in this yellow chair for a few weeks, I walked about Tim’s studio and noticed the appearance of golden hues in his formerly muted blue-gray-green-brown paintings. Hmmmmmmm.

He often states this about his work:

I am both inspired by the beauty found in the degradation of nature and concerned with the devastation to the environment caused by the manmade world. During this time of the Anthropocene, my painting represents an ongoing exploration of building textural surfaces of the warming planet.

More recently, that expression of the warming planet is the burning of the planet–fire.

As the earth experiences excessive high temperatures, often more than 100 degrees, our 80 something breezy days are a gift. Painting in the cool basement is a pleasure.

The phenomenology of yellow chairs and green shed reflect the lived experience of how ordinary life become art. The ordinary things surrounding us are the vehicle to experience the poetry of being here and the motivation to create.

I have been known to state this about my work:

My paintings are interior landscapes. The process of arranging and layering materials is a way to dialogue with my particular human experience in the time I am here. I see painting as an object or place for contemplation informed by memory, ideas, nature, and the senses. A former Art Therapist, I experience the process of making art as a path to healing and meaning.

This recent painting evolved over several months and was created in a fairly methodical meditative way to reveal this diptych titled Nuance, a word that has been spoken more and more in the public sphere during recent months. We are living in times of outlandish events and discussions that do not always include the subtleties (nuance) required for better understanding. I came upon an image of a painting I made in the mid-1980s titled Coexistence. I see a connection between that one and this other more recent one.

Humans reside in the precarious space between the manmade world and the natural world.

Man and nature in harmony . . .

Sometimes nature wakes us up in the midst of the most idyllic surroundings. A couple posts ago, I wrote of a writing retreat I attended in Guatemala. My room overlooked a pristine lake surrounded by volcanoes–pretty impressive for someone who usually wakes up in the humble environment of western New York. I encountered a Scorpion there.

It hid inside my robe and stung me first thing in the morning on my second day there. Fortunately, it was not poisonous. Every culture draws symbolic meaning from this creature. Generally, all that I have read indicates that a scorpion encounter is an alert. Akin to the snake shedding its skin, a transformation of the past is in process.

Burning yellow chair.

I have been working on a collection of stories, Woman in the Mirror, inspired by a photo from 1993 . . .

I hope to have this available in some published form one of these days.

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Pandora’s Box: horror, guns, and sadness

A hundred years ago Gertrude Stein wrote one of her truisms that speaks to this moment:

There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.

Carrying on as an artist is nearly impossible as mass shootings mount up around us. Without time to process the 10 dead at the Buffalo Tops supermarket just blocks from where I lived a couple years ago, another 21 were dead at Robb Elementary School in Uvade, Texas, mostly fourth grade children.

I could gaze into the green trees and turn all this troubling energy back into my paintings and stories. I could binge-watch television, read a novel, walk, ride my bike. I could turn away from the articles, posts, and news.

No. I can’t stop wondering about how we got to this point where 18-year-old young men wearing body armor terrorize and slaughter others so casually. I can’t stop wondering about the parents of those children. I can’t stop thinking about the two teachers who died holding their young students in their arms. I can’t stop thinking about Joe Garcia, who died of a heart attack in the aftermath of his wife, Irma’s death–and their four children left behind.

Curiously, a couple weeks ago, Tim noticed that the cover of our local Buffalo Spree magazine seemed to have a hidden skull image. He tends to see these kinds of things and I do not until he points them out. Pure coincidence? Some kind of omen? Or possibly, the cover designer was just having a bit of fun.

About Guns

My brothers had a few plastic toy guns sixty years ago, but those toy guns were not allowed in the home of my grandmother, the mother of four WWII veterans. The photo of the Rifle Club in my high school yearbook from 1970, shows a motley crew of about 20 guys in a school of about 2000 students. The outsider interest group was often the brunt of jokes, but never posed any threat. I see that the school no longer has a Rifle Club.

During the Clinton presidency of the 1990s, assault weapons were banned and gun violence did diminish. Then the Columbine School shooting happened in 1999. The devastating incident in an affluent suburb of Denver served as a great wakeup call to make sure no such thing ever happened again. I attended a talk by political activist, Michael Moore when he came to Denver to address a packed stadium and rally the call. I visited the parking lot of student cars turned into a heartbreaking memorial shrine of flowers, photos, and mementos. The weapons ban was just lifted just 5 years later during George W’s administration. We know how that has turned out.

Brian Bilston’s poem, America is a Gun is chilling:

England is a cup of tea.

France, a wheel of ripened brie.

Greece, a short, squat olive tree.

America is a gun.

Holland is a wooden shoe.

Hungary, a goulash stew.

Australia, a kangaroo.

America is a gun.

Japan is a thermal spring.

Scotland is a highland fling.

Oh, better to be anything

than America as a gun.

I imagine these words as a beautifully illustrated children’s book that most of us would be ashamed to read to any child.

I am learning about gun culture. I found an article from a couple years ago detailing the popularity of the AR-15, a version of the Vietnam War weapon developed as a civilian model in 1980–the weapon of choice in most of the recent mass shootings. Tim recalls the one he was given for service in Vietnam. He had six weeks of training, was required to clean it, attend target practice, and keep it by his side. Fortunately, there was never a need to fire it during his noncombat duty.

The typical owner of an AR-15 has been a 35-year-old married man, but a younger demographic of enthusiasts and more women are now included, as evidenced by the 60+ hashtags on Instagram including ar15 in the wording–millions of posts showing the weapons, owners with their weapons, showing their kids how to hold the weapon, and all imaginable variations.

What is the appeal? “Some compare the AR-15 to a car chassis, others to Legos or Mr. Potato Head. It is relatively easy to take it apart, reassemble it and modify it—including changes to the caliber of ammunition it fires.”

This rifle costs between $700 and $2000. Instructions for DIY are widely available–just one part (the lower receiver) requires a background check. The other parts are fairly easy to obtain. Some with access to 3D printing are using the technology to manufacture firearms. Guns made for personal use do not need to be registered.

“For many, it is a symbol, the embodiment of core American values—freedom, might, self-reliance.”

Freedom? Might? Self-reliance? These values are fairly empty of true meaning in 2022 when what is needed more is interdependence–cooperation, kindness, caring for others.

Self-reliance in today’s armed nation is more of a “me and mine first” attitude. Is that supposed to be freedom? Sadly, a couple of the police bold enough to enter the school in Texas as the shooting was raging on were racing to retrieve their own children, not do their job. Desperation leads people to remarkable feats, a self-reliance of another kind. Determined mother, Angeli Rose Gomez, turned the tables on the chaos by climbing a fence against the orders of the police to gather her 2nd and 3rd grade children waiting in terror.

Of course, there is now renewed urgency for legislation to ban assault rifles and expand background checks. Many other possible ideas to decrease gun violence are up for debate. The obvious one that comes to mind for me is raising the legal age or requiring parents to co-sign and accept liability for any wrongdoing.

As long as decisions are based on cost, money, and power, little can change. Mental health issues rise out of an uncaring world. Human beings need meaning and a sense of worth and comfort to have concern for others–all seriously lacking today and not easily corrected.

Once again, public personality and podcaster, Michael Moore, has offered a different suggestion to curb the gun problem. Why not remove the second amendment from the US Constitution? Eliminate the debate by eliminating the words that are too-easily manipulated and misinterpreted: A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

So, how do we all get along in a country of 334,800,000 others?

Daniel Pinchbeck writes: It does feel to me, more than ever, that we live in prophetic times, an epoch of culmination and abandonment, realization and surrender, a kairos, an adventure into the black depths of night and dread, yet streaked with slivers of illumination, of ecstasy.

Yes. Perhaps this is some kind of turning point that will be revealed later on, but Gertrude Stein’s “no answer” seems to more accurately reflect the multitude of answers that all fall short.

Martin Luther King once spoke of a “mountain of despair.”

Today, it feels like a pandora’s box that has been opened to broken treasures.

But still, we can look ahead. We always have small actions available to us–vote, pay attention, care for self and others . . . make art.

Pablo Picasso turned the tragedy of war into one of the most famous paintings of all time (Guernica). Tim manages to retreat to the studio every day. For now, I am more inclined to retreat to drawing flowers on my ipad.

We carry on.

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Words & Pictures: finding poetry everywhere

It’s April 3rd and we are into National Poetry Month. Tim posted this haiku on Facebook today:

Morning and still,
A little snow sweeping,
Across the deck.

I wrote a previous post about the three simple lines. Now and then I create what I call a “Picture and Word Box,” essentially an image with a haiku. I created this one today:

This photo was taken at a memoir writing retreat I recently attended in San Marcos, Guatemala on Lake Atitlan. I left there just one week ago on a boat at 6am. Then, a couple hours were spent in a van, a drive through mountains, and small towns. This last leg of the journey was poetic. The idea of arriving home began to feel questionable as the experience of hairpin turns, steep drops, magnificent views, third world marketplaces, airport layovers and delays mounted. Here in Western New York, a ten to thirty-minute drive just about anywhere is the norm. This thirty-six-hour trip home became an adventurous ending to the entire journey, but well worth a week in such a peaceful place of beauty.

Rebecca Solnit wrote in The Faraway Nearby:

The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn’t a story; it’s a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

The Write by The Lake retreat was focused on personal memoir, a process of picking out just the right constellations of events to make stories. The author, Joyce Maynard, has had a prolific writing career and shared her intimate teaching style with our small group.

From poetic experience to poetry . . .

Tim had this published in our local newspaper a couple weeks ago:

Just as hats, coats, and pants come together in a poem, a haiku can be simply this . . .

It is snowing here on this spring day, but I am reminded of greener days that will soon arrive.

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