Twisted October Art

Twisted October Art 

People say I’ve been an adventurer, but it was never by choice.  No matter what the circumstances I tried to keep a smiling face and keep out of everyone’s way.  That facade had to have its escape, and once I had time to spare and free pencils and paints, my thoughts would come out in my paintings. At first, these were imaginary landscapes, an ocean I had never seen, or  the autumn colors on the Alaska Highway, with its naive yellow and red autumn trees in front of the mountains and the winding road beneath.That scene I had visited many times while I was working for my first husband.  We moved house trailers from Vancouver to Whitehorse, at that time.  The spring slush, the dusty gravel summer road, the snow and ice capped curves, where he had some fun with the truck; tagging the pilot car as if we were in a horror movie-, He once ran me off the road, fortunately to the right and open field, and not the cliff on the left.  Great sense of humor that guy. 

 Later thousands of faces drawn on notebooks filling up the cupboards. They are not comforting to look at.

October 31, 1984, My great escape from Alberta and substitute teaching happening on my first trip to Los Angeles. It was a coordinated attempt to sell a friend’s self-published book and a manuscript of mine.  Nothing came of it, except, after leaving the white and black, snow and shadow of the Edmonton airport and landing in LA, hot humid, green, I would never willingly live in the cold again. 

There’s one water color of that long enduring male who came to live with me and the children. He never allowed me to take a photograph of him, but in the painting his face is blotched with years of reading, writing and drinking, mostly drinking.  As a warning to keep away from such men, I have a drawing in my room, the man, like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, on a stick horse, reading and pontificating to the female on the donkey, carrying the food and supplies for survival.  Another painting is there too, the headless nude women running into the forest to provide entertainment to the lusting heads there. The ‘Teddy Bears Picnic,’ I call it. 

The’ Adam and Eve’ painting was done years later, ,during a second marriage,  taken away by the man who had provided the free paint.  Adam, a different man,  eyes and teeth like a beast, Eve, red, like a skinned rat.  The self-portrait clown, with the teacher on the sidelines riding a one-wheeler bike. 

Paintings became more of an escape starting with Chaos, painting during a spring break, after shutting myself in a small room, splattering paint and images, both onto the canvas and the wall.  Recently,  I’ve started to rescue canvases tossed out beside garbage containers.  A beautiful yellow flower, innocuous, transformed into the Ukrainian war, NewYork, New York, transformed into a yellow dusty man crawling along a long sandy shore, with the fantasy waves holding ballerinas, and the sky with the dancing boots, the winged Pasafae, and avatars and omnis, pure white over blue. Reminds me of the book, ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’  Two others, formerly, more flowers changed into death, as the woman grabs a lightning rod and volcanos erupt during the pandemia, and the green earth changes to dragons.

Of the two latest paintings I’m looking at one, a recycled canvas, first covered with leftover muddied reddish brown paint, maybe while thinking of what was once the Middle east and now the continuous war zone of Palestine and Israel.  I washed my hands of it, literally, but instead of drying them, threw the watery-bubbly at the still wet painting. Voila, flowers! ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ we sing in Catalan to fight the war.  Some viewers still see flowers, I only see a war zone.  Dark and sad, I waited, and then tried to put life into it, with a night blue river, dark blue figures, perhaps some falling yellow leaves, a touch of green and yes, there it stands.  It has movement of a sort.

Pictures at an Exposition was playing relentlessly,  repetitiously in my head as I tossed and turned trying to fall asleep. 

The sleeping pills I took early on the night of the 31st, always gave me weird dreams, but this night I was inside one of my paintings.’The Catalan experience.’    I was in the room with Dali’s windows above the red mouth, I was just a black animal or insect where the nose should have been.   The Gaudi walls enclosed on side of the building, the other open to the sea.  A crooked fence made of skinny  black women, with a bell hanging over them. The stairs to the upper floor floating above the entrance. ‘I can’t look at that painting,’ said a visitor, It makes my head hurt.’  Below is Quixote again, along with the Bull and Pasafae I see everyday out my window. 

Worries, My long abandoned children were having their ups and downs in life, some doing just fine, and others suffering, a few of them unemployed, even homeless.  Nothing much I could do for them no matter if I tried or not. Fate has its own resources.  I’m getting old, Teeth some mine, some false, falling out, once even in public.  Too much living, atrophied brain, atrophied pancreas,  soon, if not tonight I’ll be gone. Perhaps after death comes fame, or at least the life insurance for them.  

Lost in a sonambulant dream, I’m dancing, the male masculine push, movement is the only solution.   I pack up the best and worst of my paintings, including a huge puzzle that featured all of Oscar Wilde’s tramas, the rocking horse, the evil dolls, nasty Santa Clauses,  and more.  It is Halloween night, October 31, 2024.  Space on the beach for lots of bonfires.  Wild happy drunken partiers were dancing in their bizarre costumes.  No one took any notice of me, as I borrowed fire from one of the bonfires and  danced into the hot coals to  the set the macabre paintings on fire.. 

No horror in this story, you say. Isn’t life’s daily horror enough?