Friday off! Vacation day! Yay!

Have apparently lost my prescription sunglasses, or they've been stolen from my car. Booh. :( I seem to be incapable of holding on to a pair of prescription sunglasses for more than a few months, whereas I've had my Versace non-prescription ones since 1995. Go figure.

Put up two weeks' worth of clean laundry last night, organized and inventoried my closet for fall, figured out what gets handed down or given to charity. Now, if I can just iron and do my housework today, back to the studio for me and the next drawing series next weeek.

Guilty pleasures

I found a place that sells perfume decants. One can order a teeny-tiny vial of basically anything in the world one has ever dreamed of inhaling, no matter how expensive a full bottle of it would be, and no matter how esoteric the scent. They even have some vintage bottles left of perfumes that are no longer made, or that have had a change in formula (but I wonder how gone-off they may be?). It's a great idea, and also a great way to wear something for a couple of days to decide if you like it before you spring for a bottle.

If you, like me, are into perfume like some people are into wine, check it out:
http://theperfumedcourt.com/

When I got my Hermès twilly they had the good sense to include some Hermès perfume sample vials, two of which I'd spritzed in passing while running through the duty-free of some airport in Europe this summer: Un jardin sur Nil and Un jardin meditérranée. There was another one in the suite I thought might have been the one I loved best, Un jardin apres la mousson. This decant outfit sent me the missing third one, so now I'll puzzle it out. Love all three, but I think it must have been jardin meditérranée that smelled so good as the hours passed and it changed on my skin.

I'd like to write about perfume like other people write about wine. The first whif brings forward all kinds of associations, since, as I've written, for me memory resides in the nose.

I was wanting to try out some perfumes for fall with leather and tobacco notes, so Caron's Tabac Blond has arrived, and Knize Ten. Knize has been intriguing me since Vienna, because Mayerling murder-suicide Prince Rudolf had a scent created for him they still sell to this day. I can't remember now which one it is. Will have to do some research. Knize Ten right out of the vial had a really lovely black flower note -- like narcissus? -- but finished like new tires. Ew. No, not for me. Tabac Blond is much better. Dietrich wore it, but it has that synthetic note in it, like Chanel No. 5, that does not please my nose, but is a hallmark of perfumes of the thirties. What's it called? Aldeyhydes? It's what I can always still smell in what's left in a dried-up vintage perfume bottle and I don't like it.

My nose is overwhelmed tonight so I have to wait until tomorrow to try something I've never had the opportunity to try before: Guerlain Jicky. It's the turn-of-the-century grandmother of my own signature scent, Shalimar. I can't wait to smell what part of it is Shalimar and how it's different. I'm betting much more purple, if it's from the fin de siècle.

I got a tiny Guerlain Vol de Nuit, my old high school favorite, for old time's sake. It's more gardenia than I remembered, but lovely. And a tiny Bal à Versailles, a formerly very popular but now extremely hard to find perfume that smells like baby powder and exquisitely frosted white cakes -- in fact, I wore that one to my second wedding.

I discovered this decant outfit on my mission to find a sample of the perfume Deneuve authored in the seventies. Got it. Not suprisingly, it's related to YSL's Opium, my disco diva period favorite. Very strong, very exotic, an oriental in genealogy. I would never wear it except around midnight to go out. And, surprisingly, it seems like a scent for a brunette, not a blond.

If you like to read about perfume history and search by notes, this decanter has a very well-organized site, and also gives formulation dates, notes and so on for each scent. I could spend a small fortune, tiny vial by tiny vial, on research.

But, hands-down, for me House of Guerlain is it. Every one of my favorite scents is one of theirs. And then, Caron, very, very hard to find in the States.

I must admit, though, I have worn bourbon as a perfume. I love the way a really good bottle smells when you just open it. Or even Jack Daniels, when you first break the seal and inhale.

I smell h e a v e n l y right now :)

Well, this is cool!

One of my recent drawings got picked up by a flickr group as an icon used to invite other photographers and artists. And supposedly the administrator of this group may use three of my Botticelli Venus images posted recently in an upcoming discussion forum.

It's always gratifying to learn that people you don't even know from all over the world have somehow stumbled upon your work on the internet.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/venus-aphrodite/discuss/72157616218261856/

Was to have been my next tattoo...

or at least half of it was going to be, as a wedding tattoo.

Who knows? Maybe I'll still get my bird. But I need to find a tattoo artist who can work it out totally for me. Those birds are really small on my Blue Willow dishes, so I'm mainly just guessing.

Blah. Stayed up too late last night, sewing and book-binding.

It's hotter than Hades today and boring. Most everyone is on vacation and it's quiet, too quiet. Think of all the millions of things I could be doing if I were at home and free.

My mind keeps returning over and over to Pollock's Toy Theatres and Museum in London today. If I were in London, I would go there and draw all day.

Bring it on, Mack truck.

(Drawing: My First Tattoo, Age Twenty-One)

Because I have spent the last ten hours documenting and mounting in my web archive every single print, drawing, painting and doll I've ever made that I want preserved there. Hundreds of images, neatly categorized. My whole life's work, back to juvenilia. I am covered in charcoal, pastel and paint, and a white sheet may be ruined, but it's done.

I should feel a huge sense of accomplishment, but there are still all those blasted photos to scan. And scanning is much less enjoyable and more time-consuming than tacking huge drawings up and photographing them. But those will be next. And then, finally, I will be caught up with my own artistic output, except for the performance part of my career.

Now I am going to sit outside and enjoy a well-deserved cup of strong coffee!

I'm touched that people are so kind to me.

I decided, since I was buying groceries anyway, to go ahead and order the cake for the Anti(dote)Wedding today. I explained very briefly to the nice baker that I was doing an exhibition and performance on the day I probably would have been married as a ritual end to this chapter of my life. He was a man in his thirties, and his eyes got moist and he told me how sorry he was and that the cake would be beautiful, he promised. I told him not to be sad, that it was fine, really, that I'm an artist and this is just how I have to process my life. But he was genuinely sympathetic and it was so touching!

Same thing happened when I talked to the florist about the wrist corsage I ordered. She promised me it was going to be exquisite and exactly as I had envisioned originally when X and I were making wedding plans.

And when I told a co-worker about having gone ahead and bought the dress I had picked out and that I'm going to wear it anyway (not just for the show, but afterwards, too), and about "performing" my vows for the witnesses gathered just as I would really have done to X at the wedding, she teared up, too. She's getting a divorce, so, of course, she's probably super-sensitive about affairs of the heart right now.

It's all fine! Really. And I am just fine. In fact, I'm more than fine. Look what a period of creative output my heart-ache has fueled since January. But I am so deeply, deeply moved at how sweet, kind and tender-hearted everyone has been with me as I plan this show. Thank you. Vous êtes très gentilles.

Most of my favorite ghastly dolls...

are now photographed and up on my flickr portfolio.

I love to photograph them in atmospheric light; it's a kind of "playing" with them that I enjoy. And some of them are fairly scary, even if I made them myself.

Now that I have a digital camera and a scanner that works...

I've been spending quality time with my flickr portfolio and my writing archive site on blogger, Somnambulit, for the past couple of evenings. If you're interested, take a look. I've tried to embed slide shows of the photographs and drawings that go along with various written pieces and travelogues.

I'm not there yet, since all the photographs prior to 2006 are prints and will have to be scanned. And we won't even speak of the hundreds of 36" x 28" drawings that must be tacked up outside in natural light to photograph them. Or the lithographs. Or the hundred scary dolls that need special, atmospheric lighting to document.

Bob's death has definitely driven home the lesson that this is the year I must catch up with myself documenting my own work. I resent it, since it takes time away from making new work. But, slowly but surely I will work through the backlogue, and, someday, it will be done.

I must admit it makes me feel a little better about my productivity as an artist to start to see my written and visual archives come together. Once I finish the making of something I'm no longer interested in it and just shelve it or store it as I move "on, on, on to the next one." This archiving process makes it clear to me that I really haven't suffered any long periods without artistic output. While I'm not as productive, say, as Picasso, I have managed to crank out a fair amount of work considering I've always worked full-time and that I raised two children while making the work.

Finished the first doll for the show.

I really like it. But I won't entirely document it until the show. It "does tricks." And it is really, really brutal and scary.

Those German Expressionists should have made dolls. But I guess they were mostly men.

Damn! Look what I found...

on some French guy's blog!

Jane Birken and Brigitte Bardot in bed in what appears to be some kind of soft-core vampire porn movie. I have no idea at all what movie this is. Will have to consult imdb immediately.

http://bonjourplanetearth.blogspot.com/2009/06/il-etait-une-fois-brigitte-bardot-et.html

Can't figure out how to embed from the site he nabbed the clip from.

****

Wait! It's (English title) If Don Juan Were a Woman. I've seen it, but forgot this segment of this epistolary movie. And it was Brigitte Bardot's FINAL movie.

Making a Ghastly Doll.

She has a jaguar mask.

Up early,

my dear old friend having departed at the crack of dawn to retrieve her beloved dog and help her adult son move today back home. I had walked Buster by 8 and so sat down to re-read Senso, since I now have done.

Yes, definitely, this is the new series: Senso Furs, somehow combining both Senso and Venus in Furs to make the drawings. Yep, I can definitely get into this. And, much to my surprise, the two boxes of sharp, new pens required to draw and ink another series had magically materialized in my mail box yesterday, when I hadn't had time to check the mail.

I'm going to make two or three new dolls for the August 14 in-house show, make one textile/embroidery piece for the show, and then, the paper for the drawings gets torn down. I'll fester thoughts and ideas while I sew this week, and then, I hope, start drawing the next week.

And I also know what I'm going to write next, which has nothing to do with the drawings, but that I'm not tellin' yet.

Yay! Art ideas!

But I still have to scan all those old drawings and photographs for the archive :(

One of my two best friends from high school,

with whom I had a kind of Three Musketeers relationship, is visiting this weekend. We did the math and realize from the current ages of our children it's been twenty-five years since we were together in the flesh. We've written and e-mailed over the years to stay in touch, but this is the first real reunion we've ever had.

She's a minister now. When we were girls, she was a Goth before there was such a thing, a real Wednesday Addams, down to the long black velvet dress she often wore and her torrent of waist-length, black hair. When she was called to the ministry and went to seminary I said, "Seminary is surprising. If she had said she was joining a coven of witches or becoming a Satanist, I would have said it wasn't surprising."

It's so odd to think how our two lives have turned out. And how both of us, viewed as "outsiders" or outcasts as girls, both of us fatherless, have ended up spending a life in service to others: she to the members of her congregations and I to students. No one who knew us in high school or taught us then would, I think, believe this turn of events. Except, perhaps, our art, ballet and drama teachers.

It is rather astounding the way the lives of that bunch of hippie kids from a sleepy, dusty backwater Texas town eaten up with religion turned out: one got another Grammy this year, one was a fashion model, one is a composer who makes works for choreographers, one is an opera singer in Australia, one is a recording artist, one is a recording engineer, one was an actor off-Broadway, one is a famous Egyptologist, one is a world-famous concierge, a few are painters and professional musicians. When all is said and done, I guess, we are all alike in one way: we left and followed our youthful passions and dreams. Tonight I feel a little sorry for everyone we went to high school with who stayed behind. High school may have been the best years of their lives, their golden years. For us, the outcasts, the slow starters, it was a place and time we could not wait to leave far, far behind.

I Planned to Die in the Arms of my Soul-Mate (La Bohème)

The Epilogue series is complete. Twenty-one drawings. The best work of my life.

And now, perhaps, I sleep again.

And travelogues of Dublin and someplace else -- Assissi? up on Somnambulit.

The final drawing of the Epilogue

...is going just the way I dreamed it. But I had an eerie experience late last night as I drew feverishly. I very distinctly heard my refrigerator door open and close, as if there were a ghost in my kitchen, or as if my own fierce drawing energy had caused a poltergeist to come into my space. My hair stood on end. I had to call Ali and talk for a few minutes, and go outside.

I was having really intense thoughts as I drew about the concept of "soul mate" and I had even been crying a little about having missed mine in this incarnation, and about how very near he often seems to me. I just can't seem to break through to him. I miss him so terribly sometimes. Sometimes my heart hurts for both of us, since we can't seem to find one another this time.

It's probably the sadness of dealing with the very final emotional dregs of my most recent romance's ending that caused this metaphysical event. My mind and my heart are so strong. I was finally able to weep last night, after all these months, and admit to myself how very sad I am that I was wrong, that Felix was not my soul-mate after all, as I had once thought. And to acknowledge that I feel sad that in being wrong I was "unfaithful" to my real soul-mate in giving Felix the love I meant for him.

I probably shouldn't even write such things because it probably sounds like total craziness to everyone but me. But my past-life love is always hovering so near me, and I am so near him. I must have loved him so much I can never escape the vestiges and echoes of our love even in this incarnation. I feel I have long lived my life as his invisible widow, grieving the loss of the love he and I shared.

I know: Goth. 19th Century Romantic. Wuthering Heights. Yes. It is exactly like that, and I feel it, always, keenly, exactly like that. For me, it is always real, always tangible and so, so bitter-sweetly sad.

My darling, if you can read what I write here through the dimension that separates us, please, please be waiting for me at the end of time. I have searched for you for forty years, and I am so sorry about my recent mistake, thinking that, in Felix, I had finally found you again. Please forgive me, my darling. Open the refrigerator door all you want to, to remind me you really are there, loving me always still, and always waiting for me.

Working on a four-day drawing...

which I hope to finish tonight. Then one last drawing to go, and the series is finished.

I already know what I'll do next: a series based on Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs and on Boito's Senso. I have to re-read both of them to figure out how to integrate the books to do the drawings. But doing so will give me a couple of week's break from incessant drawing and staying up half the night, which I probably need. A change of pace, catching up on my sleep and a battery re-charge is probably a good idea now, and I have out-of-town guests coming until the end of this month.

The Anti(dote)Wedding exhibition and performance plans are coming together really nicely and I'm actually looking forward to performing. Suze's daughter, Frankie, has agreed to accompany me on cello for one piece. It's always natural for me to want to close any cycle with a performative action, a kind of public ritual. And any excuse for a party.

Oh, and just about everything I planned to include in my writing archive is now up at
www.somnambulit.blogspot.com
It may still be a little rough because I haven't given everything a final proofing and polish yet. Desolé.

Somebody said if they owned both Hell and Texas

...they'd move to Hell. And I know why. It's forecast to be above 100 again today. Maybe not as bad as last week's 105. But not less than 100 either. It's unbearable, and I have to set the alarm for the crack of dawn to even get poor Buster any kind of walk at all without risking his life from heat prostration. I guess, starting this week, I just walk alone. I don't think he can take the heat, even in the stroller, when the air temperature is over 100. Which it still is at 7:30 p.m. these days.

I'm working on the second to last drawing of the Epilogue. I should be completely finished with the series by mid-week. Wow. I think there are twenty-two of them, and most are twice the size of the original LTRH suite and all are in full color. The in-house show and no-wedding performances are definitely happening; Suze and Jack were "in" immediately, as is Jimmie. I need this performance ritual to close the circle and this chapter of my life completely. I think I'm going to call it the Anti(dote)Wedding. And August 14 has always been my very favorite day in the year, for reasons I never knew myself, from childhood on. That's the day I would have chosen for the wedding.

Epilogue Frontispiece Finished.

L'épilogue de Dangerose
Dangerose as Carpacci's Lion of St. Mark's Venice

Vraiment, Felix?

A diptych with Ferret, below.