I’m Ready for Winter

When the hell is the world going to look like this again?  I need my little frozen wonderland to superimpose some cheap magic over this wet and dismal wreckage of an autumn.  I’m rather sick of the wet and want to just get on with it.  I honestly can’t remember a fall that took more [...]

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Looking Forward to Christmas

A bit of a rainy weekend, excepting Sunday, which was glorious. The rain seems to have left the trees, in their full glory when the rains began, denuded and the sidewalks covered in leaves. I liked walks in the rain when I was married/dating but now they just seem this side of depressing.  I [...]

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Goodnight, Old Life

Back when I was “severely ill”, before hospitalization, I would practice self-harm; a thing very common in most people with bipolar disorder. I would burn myself, heating the wooden end of a large art brush on a burner element or with a lighter until it glowed a brilliant red, then apply it to my own [...]

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Post Christmas

  Life is taking on a singularly warm glow that I have not felt since childhood.  Perhaps it is having my mother around at Christmas-something that hasn’t happened since I was an adolescent. Or perhaps it’s my meds leveling me out a bit. Something, though, is apparently keeping me in a buoyant state of mind at the moment., and I’m not [...]

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A Wonderful Christmas Day

I had a lovely Christmas day with my mother and her partner and my daughter. When it came time to visit my son and step children at my former home to open packages, I was made to feel very much at home. I even had the good fortune to get an invitation (which I regretfully declined) [...]

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Fear of the Ordinary

 It will be odd in a few days, taking packages to my former home (my ex wife retains the house and the art collection) and seeing no evidence of “me” there.  As to the season-I’m going to try to be extra merry after my little flirt with depression earlier on- going to parties and wearing red and green as [...]

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Children’s Choir

I made this little oil sketch (posterior view)of the children’s choir my five-year old son sings in during the Christmas holiday. (That’s him-extreme right)   Seeing them sing this week apparently stirred something in me. Sentimentality- a word I hate and something I condemn roundly, thoroughly and often, has somehow found it’s way into some of my [...]

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Christmas Cards

 
I’ve finally gotten together a Christmas card design (yes-at this late date) and am busy printing out cards on watercolor paper today. This is the design- New York Snow; snowy, urban and somehow classic-something of the 1950’s “ashcan” school of urban painting is in it. I painted it in a good frame of mind today. Intellectual clarity [...]

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