This one went to my amazing friend Alana. My son was scandalized that I sent her mail with nudity. Ah, 8.

My friend Cynthia came for a visit with her adorable son, and while the boys played in the pond (frogs! newts!) Cynthia decided to give me a long-desired painting lesson. She’s an amazing artist (this is one of my favorite of her paintings; the colors of the forsythia are so incredible in real life) and has been telling me for months she’d help me learn to put paint on paper, something that absolutely TERRIFIES me. (This is not a rational fear. This is not even an articulated fear, meaning, I don’t have words I can put it into. But paint scares the shit out of me.) When she arrived, as it happened, I had paint out for the Babe, who was busily painting a rock she found by the pond, and, oh, her entire body. Cynthia, bless her, jumped in. She painted the Babe’s picture, the Babe painted hers, and then she directed me to get a piece of paper and a brush for myself. She set up a still life, and started teaching. I was so irritable, and tense, and not particularly gracious about the enormous gift I was being given. By the end of what felt like hours but was probably only 45 minutes, I had a semi-lucid portrait of a papaya, and a headache. I felt like I’d been run through a mangle.

I was so visibly on edge that I felt terrible for my friend; I couldn’t even fake ease, so stressed was I by the paint everywhere (The Babe had taken to pouring it out on the paper, applying to her legs, and so on), the sudden appearance of my mom, who is incredibly supportive of my artistic efforts but through no fault of her own makes me feel like I’m a big fraud, and my own anxiety at how hard it was to process and replicate patterns of light and shadow and color. In the end, I produced something that, from a good distance away, looked plausibly like its subject. I will try again. But meanwhile, I love working in the ultra-forgiving, cut and paste world of mixed media collage.

The piece above arrived at my friend Hilary‘s today. She is all heart, all woman, all breathless living-with-a-capital-L, and I love her. She and Cynthia, I realized tonight, remind me of one another;  though they are so different,too, they share a quality of creative passion that I treasure.

Mailed week of May 10, 2010

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.” –August Wilson