JAY

My brother, Jay, was born 49 years ago.  He has Down Syndrome. He is a funny little man who stands about 5'6" and is getting quite wrinkly.  He loves all of the members of our family and asks about them often. He enjoys drawing and painting and I think he is a good artist. He lived with our Mother until she died in 2009.  Now he lives with my sister, Lynn.

One day when I went to visit him and Mom, she gave me a piece of paper and asked me to draw a teddy bear she had.  I did a simple line drawing of it and gave it back to her.  She then showed me the drawing that Jay did of the bear.  Then Mom asked my sister do do a drawing of it, but she declined. Mom wanted to have the three of us draw the bear so she could frame them together as art from her 3 children. That was the inception for a project that Jay and I did last year.  I thought it would be cool to have an art show displaying paintings that Jay and I did using the same subject matter and medium.  We painted during the winter of 2010 and hung our show last June in a local coffee house, Bainbridge Bakers. I called the show, "As Renee Sees it, and As Jay Sees It". It was a great success. People seemed to really like the concept of the artwork and we sold several paintings as pairs. We were delighted.

 We have been painting things I see around the Island and fruits and vegetables.  As a sneak peak I'll display a couple of paintings we've done.  This is my mailbox.  I like to point out that the story is not the mailbox but the bushes behind it.

This is Jay's mailbox.  I think he did a great job capturing the flora behind and the perspective of the box.  He works hard at his art and takes it very seriously.  It makes him happy and he is proud of his accomplishments.  Mom would be proud, too.

As we finish our sets, I'll post them.  There are too many things going on in our lives right now for me to get a firm date on our next show, but hopefully in September. Until then, enjoy our work.

CONGRATULATIONS 2011

Permit me a moment to brag.  Yesterday, my daughter, Roxanne, became a graduate of the University of Washington.  I am so full of pride that I am bursting at the seams.

 I thought that graduating from college was no big deal.  A lot of people do it. As it turns out, it is really quite difficult. Many kids attend college at a young age when they are full of questions, and rebellion with the urge to live life on the edge and experience new things and sensations.  That, in itself is dangerous. Then you throw in all the hard work, the studying, the expectations, the hang-overs and it can become a bitter uphill battle.  But then, maybe I'm talking about my college experience.
Most of the time, kids don't have a plan. They know they want an education, NEED an education but don't know what they want to do with their lives. Those are difficult choices to make at 19. Junior or senior year they can reach a burn-out where the burden and the decisions become too great, so they take "a year off" and alas, never go back. I'm not sure what you learn in college except maybe stamina. So to all of the graduates of 2011, who had the stamina to see it through, Congratulations! YOU DID IT!

Roxanne graduated with a BA in Dance.  She is a beautiful dancer and it gives me great joy to watch her.  She has always enjoyed dressing up in costumes and dancing around the house.  Wherever there was music, in a grocery store or department store or elevator, she would dance. I think she still does.  Beyond the obvious, however, Roxanne believes in the social, political importance of movement as a way of making a statement and causing change. (Rox, if I got that wrong, forgive me.) I certainly think it's true when I watch the varied forms of dance from modern to ballet, contemporary to hip hop. I may not like what I'm watching all of the time, but it certainly makes me think.

 Roxanne worried about being a dance major, but quoting the author Virginia Woolf who recommended that women honor and hone their creativity and not "become crazed with the torture" of silence, I urged her to follow her passion no matter what. The artist within us cannot be silenced, it just can't.  It creeps out in unexpected ways.  Bring it out into the light, give it wings, let it soar.

I know that Roxanne will go on to do great things.  Her talent is amazing and she is an intelligent, articulate young woman. I wish her every blessing that life has to offer.

(I love this picture because it shows how far off the ground she has jumped.)

MAKE HOLY

A dear friend of mine, Susan, sent me a wonderful book a couple of months ago.  It is called "SIMPLE ABUNDANCE" and I read it every morning. It is a book of days and obviously, I'm on June 1 today.  The author is a woman, Sarah Ban Breathnach,  who has inspiring thoughts on the art and joys of being a woman, a wife, a mother, a cook, a housekeeper, a lover, a teacher, (you can fill in more...)  Her insights really make me stop and think and maybe rearrange my life just a little bit each day.  She brings authenticity to the art of being a homemaker, which unfortunately, has become a disgraced and a lost art. It is too bad that we, as women of the 21st century, do not take the same kind of pride in homemaking as the women of the 19th century. We are just too busy.

I was contemplating laundry day.  Years ago, a woman set aside one day a week to do the washing.  It took all day and was quite a chore.  Today, of course, every day can be wash day and the job is much easier. We put less and less time in the simple joy of making our family's clothes look nice, though.  We grab clothes from the dryer in any kind of rumpled state and throw them on.  I still iron, but I know few women who do.  Not that I'm better than them, I just find it to be a meditative process. I like doing it.

In today's article, Breathnach writes of the Goddess, Hestia, who has deemed that housework is holy.  Hmmmm, some days it seems far from that. So I found one of my paintings, a facing page from my elf book, and I wrote a little script for the inside.  I might make it into a print for women like me to put in our laundry rooms, just as a reminder that the things we do matter.