When I was telling a friend about the PAL project, this fellow actor looking over my site, asked where was my art? Confused, at first I thought he might be talking about the art of acting. But I realized he was looking around my apartment at all the pottery and paintings that I created and are displayed there. He said you were writing all about acting and the theatre business, but have you talked about your art? These other arts are also your lifetime’s work. Here is my kitchen shelf with all the dishes I made.
It hadn’t occurred to me to discuss my art before that. I realized he was right. Art plays a huge part in my life. It has certainly kept me sane throughout a lot of my life. Never having a lot of money because I was an actor in America, a stage actor, I was never able to really use and enjoy New York City like people who make money do. Going out to eat, buying tickets for shows, attending galas. Unless I had comp tickets, or somebody else was paying for the meal I rarely made it out of my apartments. That’s not exactly true. When I was younger there were constant auditions and constant meetings with people. Lots of friends and cheaper activities.I would maybe just get a coffee, or a cup of soup when out. This was when I first came to the city and was getting to know it. But the older I got, the more I realized I’d have to save something for my old age. I became more cautious about money. What little I had. So instead, I stayed in and I created, I invented, I wrote. I found a myriad of ways to entertain myself in my apartment. It might be writing plays, or poetry, or short stories. Painting with watercolors, or with pastels or acrylics. These art activities actually got established in me during my less than happy youth. Here is a 3 foot long Japanese Lady I painted in 3rd grade.
When I was growing up we moved every three years. Friends made were lost in a few years. Adapting to new places meant more time at home. I learned to knit and crochet. I worked on quilts. I spent a lot of time in my room drawing, copying advertisements I saw in magazines. And art was always present in my schooling. Thankfully. Writing poetry helped me to deal with the angst of the teenage years. When I was quite young I would make/create a lot of my own clothes. When I got into high school I discovered ceramics. Throwing a pot on a wheel felt like something I had done in a past life. It was just familiar. And addicting. When I left high school I spent a year in Detroit area. There I studied Ceramics at Cranbrook, and Art Appreciation and Acting at Oakland University. I always knew I was going to be an actor. It was a great gift to have that knowledge at a young age. There were no indecisive years trying to figure my life out. I had a goal to attain. I just needed to figure out the path toward that goal. In college I spent most of my time either in the theater department or in the arts building doing ceramics. And I did a lot of writing, mostly poetry.
When I first got out of college I had a set of pastel crayons I had bought in San Francisco when I visited in the early 1970s. (Fully the time of the hippies. I saw myself as one). I’d been moved and impressed by Toulouse Lautrec artwork. I bought a roll of brown paper and I began just playing around with the pastels, thinking of his “seemingly” simple drawings. Very often I had nothing in mind, I just drew whatever I was feeling that day. When I would look at the picture the next day I would see something that would surprise me. For instance I was alone on Thanksgiving, feeling blue. I had done the drawing with just some yellow/beige lines up and down it, with some thin red and blue lines connecting them. There was a red shape in it, red drops coming from it. I called it “Alone at Thanksgiving”.The next day when I looked at it I realized I had drawn a rib cage. And this red shape was a heart being squeezed and blood drops coming from it. It representing the sadness of the day. Another day I took every single color out, made an arced line with one, the next color made another line, the next color made another line, etc… and I had them all come together into a big white circle. And when I looked at it later I realized this is like all the souls in the universe going into that great white light that people say they see just before dying. It also had something to do with how all colors blend together into white.
A little later in life as I was establishing my acting career there was a lot of downtime. You spend 80% of your life doing the business, trying to find work. And during those months I would find art projects to work on. It might be buying old furniture and painting it in various favorite colors, designing a floral pattern on it.
It might be sewing a quilt. This is a painting of a portion of one quilt I finished. My Nana started it with old clothes she took apart. My Mom continued making the flower patterns for it with some of our fabrics from clothes we sewed. I then finished more of the flowers and then put it all together.
I had a greeting card line at some point. I actually had several types of greeting card lines that I could do, but I really was primarily just doing one in which I hand-painted each card. I had a stamp that I would put on the back with my card companies logo- Sleeping Cats Cards. I sold these cards for not much money in various stores in Delaware, Baltimore, and New York. Just small gift shops.
I would often draw. Not well. I was never very good at “line” work. At some point I just allowed myself to forget line and just play with color. I started painting with acrylics. It was a revelation. I was exuberant in it. The first time I allowed myself to buy a bunch of canvases and paint on every one, I then lined them up in my loft to take a look at this accomplishment. As I stood there I felt some thing I’ve never felt before. A kind of euphoria. An out of body experience, Time was gone, and I was just deeply calmly satisfied. I found a form of abstract painting that I liked to do that was full of vibrant colors. And somehow these paintings would look like many of the places I had traveled, Hawaii, or Colorado. And if not a place, they just represented joy.
Colorado Mountains
Hawaii
Joy
Whenever I would go out of town to do a show I always took art supplies with me. Each show had a different kind of art that I’d be doing. Sometimes it might be the pastel crayons, or watercolors, and at times it was collage. I would use whatever brown paper I could find. Grocery sacks usually. The art would reflect the type of play I was doing. I was working on a play set in Vienna, and I found myself doing a lot of gold work, a’la Klimt. When I was in Denver I would do work that looked more Native American. When I was in Florida I did a lot more watercolor, pools, the ocean, bugs, nature. I have artwork from most of the places that I spent time in. When doing “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” I spent time doing miniatures of scenes from the past.
The one with the house is based on an original one from that time. I do not remember the name.
In some shows I was required to do art as part of my character. In “Lips Together, Teeth Apart” I painted onstage every night a scene regarding my character’s brother’s suicide by walking out into the water.
In “Painting Churches” I played a painter who is attempting a portrait of her parents. I did etching and studies onstage using pastels. The final portrait was done by a local professional oil painter.
I also discovered a fun and easy way to create little art boxes. I would buy those mini cereal boxes. They open up like a triptych. I would get magazines and cut things that I liked or that I wanted to make a statement about. I would create these tiny special worlds inside each box. I made a lot of these little boxes. I was very unhappy at one theatre in Virginia. I made a lot of boxes that had sad or angry connotations. The theater had the saying -“if you like us spread the word, if you don’t keep your mouth shut”. I created a little box that looked like the housing we were living in, with a lot of autumnal leaves in it to show our time there. On the outside it said -“If you’d like us spread the word”. Then you pull back a leaf and look what’s hidden inside. It said- ..”if you don’t, we welcome your comments”. I left about a dozen of these art boxes on the wall of the room I’ve been housed in, in the shape of a cross. I heard they stayed up for many months after I left, until somebody began to discover their meaning.
I have done many forms of collage work over the years. I used some of those images on my first acting website I built. After it was done I realized for the first time, I was not just an unemployed actor, I had a full career.
After the agony and disruption of September 11th I really needed to get centered and calm again. That’s when I went back into my ceramics. I found a new ceramics center that was just opening near Union Square. I discovered new people to be in community with. People to challenge me in my work. Friends. By the end of that first year, I was teaching there. The only way I could afford to do ceramics was to teach. Again I didn’t make much money, so I wasn’t going to be able to afford class fees every few months. Thankfully I was hired in about six different places around the city for the next six years in New York.
Sushi set made with ash from Mt St. Helens Eruption.
The day of my last teaching assignment I came home wondering what the heck I was going to do next. How do I find another job? Then I got a call from the Ohio police saying my father had committed suicide. It was fate. I left two days later to start taking care of my mother who had early Alzheimer’s. I ended up taking care of her for about six years while commuting back between New York and Ohio. While spending more time in Ohio to take care of my mother I became a professor of acting at a local University, the one that I had done my undergraduate studies at. And I built a pottery studio in my basement. This gave me the freedom to begin to explore work on my own. But I missed the camaraderie of fellow potters showing me their creative works and challenging me to be better. When I was with my mom, I did a lot of fabric work, like quilting. She had some unfinished projects that I helped her to create. I did a lot of paintings that were gentle floral works in pastels that I would add these beautiful butterflies that I got from stickers/stamps. They helped to lighten the time.
As always during that rough time, art help me to deal with the stress of caretaking. When my cats died it was drawing portraits of them that helped me deal with the sadness of their loss. When I was breaking up with a boyfriend, I vented whatever anger I had into a painting. When I was diagnosed with (stage zero) breast cancer I painted whatever I was feeling, including a very strange abstract portrait of myself with one breast exposed with surgical marks all over it. Art in all its forms has helped me to create and define who I am, how I see the world, how I’d like the world to be. It has been a refuge, a place to grow and learn, a place to express pain or joy. I cannot imagine someone living a life without it.
