Auld Lang Syne

Horrible photographs of the last two drawings I worked on (allllll day today) in 2008. Above, all us Baldwin children as we looked every November of our lives, sitting on bleachers together. My mother has taken pictures of us with our (usually rotting) Halloween pumpkins every year, and has courageously allowed me to borrow them for a few months. Below, the epic stain on our kitchen ceiling in Ithaca, created just last week as a result of my father leaving the bathroom sink running while he was taking a shower. While taking a shower yesterday here in San Francisco I started admiring the grey spotting mold on the bathroom ceiling and am considering rendering it into another big drawing to go with this one.

Above all else, I hope that in 2009 I work on projects that I'm excited about, that I produce lots and lots of amazing drawings, that I sleep 8 hours a night, that I have good relationships with my new advisors, that I continue meeting new people and building a community in this city that still feels new. And then above all of those things I will pick up my penwomanship, will be a steward of self-care, and get my mother's fiddle re-strung.

Otters in the dark river

I've been going through old family pictures to get ready for a new drawing, thinking a lot about photographs and home, and when I read this last night I thought it was so lovely:

These are photographs of my children living their lives here too. Many of these pictures are intimate, some are fictious and some are fantastic, but most are of ordinary things every mother has seen-- a wet bed, a bloody nose, candy cigarettes. They dress up, they pout and posture, they paint their bodies, they dive like otters in the dark river.

They have been involved in the creative process since infancy. At times, it is difficult to say who exactly makes the pictures. Some are gifts to me from my children: gifts that come in a moment as fleeting as the touch of an angel's wing... (***please forgive Sally here and read on)

When the good pictures come, we hope they tell truths, but truths 'told slant' just as Emily Dickinson commanded. We are spinning a story of what it is to grow up. It is a complicated story and sometimes we try to take on grand themes: anger, love, death, sensuality and beauty. But we tell it all without fear and without shame.

-Sally Mann on her own work, in Immediate Family, 1992

Versus

These two pictures were lucky finds that I got in Portland, lucky because I found them on different days, in different drawers. All of this luckiness led me to have pictures of two sides of baseball game fans. I love all the white sunbrellas, the bored little kids, the deep shadows under the bleachers. In the studio right now, I'm piecing together photographs I took at home and I really like how the cutting and pasting encourages me to deviate from truth. On the drawing I'm doing right now I'm trying to figure out how much information is essential and how much can be omitted. In the pictures above there is no evidence of a baseball game besides the tall metal cage in the middle and the fact that people are sitting in bleachers to watch something-- you can't even see the field. For the drawing I just started, of a kitchen ceiling, I'm trying to figure out if I really need to include the light fixture and the place where the cabinets meet the ceiling, or if I can just let this huge drawing of a ceiling stain speak for itself.

I think (work with me here), that these pictures kind of summarize the editing process I enact when planning a new drawing-- I try to figure out how to illustrate a story without being literal (for example, without showing the baseball field), then I try to imply a tension (the facing bleachers) and figure out how to work with what's left, what kind of rules I want to make for myself, how to make something that's smart and interesting to look at. And let's be honest, I also like these pictures because I think baseball is a great sport, especially baseball in the 30's and 40's, when these pictures were taken. It's a game with so many contradictions-- it's formal with uniforms and rules and dirty with sand and swear-words, it's a slow game with fast-paced punctuative interuptions, it's two teams, but each player is incredibly vulnerable and alone when they're up to bat.

goodbye and hello

Yesterday, after 15 hours of being on airplanes, I finally made it to San Francisco, and it feels good to be back in the studio today. My good friend, Sarah Lipkin, is down here for the week from Portland so I've hit the ground running-- we woke up early(...-ish) and walked to the studio where I started planning a new (HUGE!) drawing of the kitchen ceiling stains from my house in Ithaca. There's a lot to do, a lot to worry about and a lot to be excited about too. And with the new year a mere 90 hours away it's also time to draw 2008 to a close.

I have a tendency to have existential revelations when I'm traveling on airplanes and this past cross-country pilgrimage was no exception. These experiences usually fall into the classification of life questions like, "I wonder, if the plane starts to fall out of the sky, if it would be better to watch it out of the window or to have the window closed instead?" I find planes pretty terrifying-- it's so much metal and skin hurling through the sky at piercing velocity. Arriving at any destination safely is rewarded with an incredible sense of mortal relief! The top picture is Ithaca at the end of the lake, with the inlet running south, the hills rising on all sides. The second picture is the sun setting towards the west on the other side of the plane-- beautiful!

Goodbye Ithaca, goodbye Mom, Dad, Papa, Will and Dennis, goodbye high school friends and Cayuga Lake and gorges and familiar streets, goodbye snow and yellow house on Salem Drive. I stole rags from our family's rag bin-- old scraps of towels, sheets, and memorable pieces of clothing. They seemed really important when I found them, and these are probably the largest volume of stuff I brought back here to San Francisco with me-- when I unpacked last night it was kind of embarrassing to discover I had just carried 10 lbs. of rags with me across the country. I'm reading a book Alice lent me called The Heart Line, a piece of fiction based in San Francisco and written in 1907 right after the big earthquake that knocked the city down. It's all about San Francisco's mediums and spiritualists and ghosts and good-for-nothing tricksters. Last night two characters discussed how San Francisco was a place where anything could happen, things that couldn't happen anywhere else in the world, a good passage to read as I barrel my way into a new year. Hello San Francisco, hello small room, hello graduate school and scrambly streets, hello ocean and fog and Mexican food and apple fritters, hello new friends and unfinished drawings.

my half-birthday

It's my last day in town and I have got one unfinished drawing to show for the week. But (!!!!) I have so many new ideas and hundreds of photos in my computer ready to be translated into something better. The one drawing I've been working on was the one of all our pets together-- the picture below shows the general layout. Finding the cats was such a debacle, and Dennis and I ran all over the basement to get Spike and Einstein, the brother cats, sons of Missy.

I looked over the checklist I made for this week and found that I had done most of the things. Interestingly, the drawings I was most excited about (based on my parents belongings) are probably going to be put on the shelf for awhile. When I found the broken bowl from Spain that my father glued back together for my mom, I found it dissappointingly small and not really in so many pieces as I elaborate in my rendition of that story. It seems to me I should probably just buy a big old ceramic bowl in San Francisco, smash it into itty bitty pieces and then glue it back together myself. Now that would be interesting.

Let's see, I took pictures of the carvings on the piano, of the huge coffee-colored stains on the kitchen ceiling, of the wallpaper, of the pattern on the china, of the yellow paint peeling off the side of the house. I think all of these things are as epic as the bowl, maybe more embarrassing, which usually means they're more interesting too. We'll see. It's my last night in town and it's 8:00pm and dinner still isn't ready (normal), my mother is horrified at what my brothers are watching on tv, the dog is eating all of the cats' food and I'm waiting for Hannah and Rebekka to pick me up and take me to Purity to get the best icecream in the world, (Bittersweet Chocolate). Oh! And this is important! I'm 24 1/2!

Thirteenth (and final) day of X-mas!

We had a great Christmas today, our latest ever (starting around noon), the least presents ever (pretty much every body got socks, lots and lots of socks), the longest lasting ever (it's 7:00pm, we're all still here, all still in our pajamas, all still waiting for dinner). I've done no drawings at all, but I feel great about it-- I think I was confused over what 'doing research' meant-- if I was trying to pump out drawings, really, I wouldn't be able to fashion up new epic Baldwin stories. That being said, tomorrow I'm drawing all day, taking pictures all day, and then heading to Kinko's with Mom to make photocopies of things I don't trust myself to take to San Francisco.

The top picture is the first ornament our family ever got, about 25 years ago. The second shows the effects of the economic recession on the North Pole.

two tries

The digital era is constantly confounding me. I learned how to take pictures with a small plastic camera that my father got for free from Time Magazine from sending in some sort of rebate. He bought me film and I ran up and down Grant Avenue taking gray pictures with crazy light leaks. We would drop off the film and pick it up a week later and I would see what happened for 4 bucks a roll. The rule was to try to take the best picture you can the first time.

Since being here in Ithaca I've been taking pictures of friends and keep finding myself working with this same frugality. Sometimes I force myself to loosen up, telling myself that I can edit later... but here's the thing about that-- when I take 10 pictures of someone, they all just sort of start looking the same. And they become less precious. When I take only one picture of someone, it always looks great to me because it's the only one-- I love how their smile is crooked, their mouth is open, their hair sticking out to the side, their hat shadowing their face, their eyes looking somewhere else.

I like this picture because it's two tries at the same shot of Harry, Ginny and Bert. Each one is different and the print admits and celebrates their differences. Harry officiates, Ginny sulks and Bert mediates. When I found this photo there were a couple of other prints like it in the same box, and I thought they were so interesting because they begin to solve the failure of photography to tell the truth. Of course, this is a problematic thing to say, because what does truth even mean? Well, I'm not sure, but I guess that the problem for me is that with digital photography the person carelessly snaps and then edits the pictures down until there are only a few really good looking (read: predictably happy) ones left. And the problem with only taking one picture with an analog camera is that you don't see the moments before and after the picture-- that the person is posing more than they would for a digital snapshot. This diptych has both qualities-- the imperfection of film photography and the implication of time and fluidity of emotion evident film or a digitally shot series.

My grandfather is learning how to use his digital camera and showed my mother and I dozens of pictures this morning of his ladyfriend Mrs. Brain (Madonna) who sadly passed away this September. He hammered me with questions about what it means to be in art school, which made me feel like such a child. I wish that I could show him this blog, but I'm not sure it is manicured enough for approval from his generation. But I like it that way, and I like me this way, unmanicured and imperfect, my mouth open, hair sticking out and eyes looking somewhere else.

Twelfth day of X-mas!

My brothers and I gallivanted about with Papa in tow to stock my parents stockings-- hilarious! It's awesome now that we're older and Christmas isn't so expectational-- maybe I'm just speaking for myself here, but I don't really feel like my parents owe me Christmas presents, a feeling that I guiltily remember having. My mom and I are baking a pie and listening to

Clarence Thomas's "Back Door Santa." While my brothers and I were gone she sneakily baked all the cookies so we would stop eating the dough out of the fridge in the garage. Tomorrow is Christmas.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Adrienne sent me an email yesterday about a book she's reading by Rebecca Solnit called A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and I thought it was the loveliest passage. Here I am twiddling my thumbs in Ithaca, sorting through stale boxes, and thinking about what is inside of them, thinking about what is here, what it means to be here and what part of here is part of me and what parts of here I will drag 3,500 miles accross the country to continue thinking about for next semester. And here is Rebecca Solnit saying exactly what I hope to in far less words and far more beautifully.

"When I first began to write, I had been a child for most of my life, and my childhood memories were vivid and potent, the forces that shaped me. Most of them have grown fainter with time, and whenever I write one down, I give it away: it ceases to have the shadowy life of memory and becomes fixed in letters; it ceases to be mine; it loses that mobile unreliability of the live, just as the blouse ceased to be something I recalled being inside and became the garment worn by that unrecognizable toddler in the snapshot when it was handed to me. A person in her twenties has been a child for most of her life, but as time goes by that portion that is childhood becomes smaller and smaller, more and more distant, more and more faded, though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world and were going back into the darkness from which you came."

Eleventh day of X-mas!

Yikes.

In my grandmother's clothes

Last year while I was home for Christmas my mother had brought home a pile of my grandmothers old clothes from Long Island and wanted me to try them on. After much haranguing and bribery, I did, and my brother helped me take these pictures. These were clothes my grandmother, Mary Tuite Costich, had worn before meeting and marrying my grandfather, from her days of being a young single secretary in Manhattan. Our family watched Holiday Inn today (a Baldwin/Costich family tradition) and my brother asked during the beginning sequence-- did people really used to go out just to watch two people dance? My mother told him to ask my grandmother about it, who apparently used to go out dancing a lot when she lived in New York in the 1940's. It's fun for me to imagine my grandmother jitterbugging and kicking it old school, especially in the totally dame duds that have now been passed down to me. We did, of course, get rid of most of the clothes, but a few dresses we kept and are hanging in my mothers closet for us to rediscover another year.

Tenth day of X-mas!

I accidentally deleted the picture for today, so this one is going to have to do, a picture I took last year in Ithaca during Christmas. Last night before going to bed I realized that now that my youngest brother, Den-Den, has finally outgrown me, I'm the smallest in our family, the first time since Will was born 20 years ago. I wish I could say I started on the epic to-do list I made a couple of days ago, but I've been mostly comatose under a heap of blankets since getting here, still recovering from my 16-hour pilgrimage. Tonight I have a date with my mom and some photo boxes to try to find a single picture with every single person in our family (all 5 of us, all 4 grandparents) although she has already wagered that one does not exist. I think I would like to make some drawings of these 9 people together, since I comprehend their relationship with one another so proximate which is, of course, an incredibly self-centered and entirely predictable understanding of the geometry of family.

Ninth day of X-mas!

After a sleepless red-eye through Philly, several flight delays and then switching onto a plane to Binghamton I am finally home, incredibly tired and surrounded by loveliness. My brother, Dennis, has finally surpassed me in height, and the kitten I saw last time I was home is now a precocious gentlecat. The shower still leaks, the bagels are still impeccably wonderful, the god still barks a lot and it's as cold as a middleschool dance floor. Merry Christmas from David, Denie, Will, Dennis, Missy, Spike, Einstein, Credo, Cisco, Kringle, Chumley and myself.

the birds and the bees

I spoke to my parents the other day to get ready for a new drawing that I've been thinking about for over a year. My mother sent me a copy of their wedding invitation the summer before last and I thought then (and still do) that it was so lovely-- the insects and flower are my father and mothers graduate dissertation topics respectively. The story goes that after my parents were hitched they went to Latin America to help eachother with field research. They took my fathers collapsible kayak and paddled down a river until the water shallowed so much that the river bed scratched holes in the bottom of the craft and my parents were submarined. They pulled the kayak and all their things to the side of the river and my father hiked barefoot through a field of poison ivy. A sidestory here: when he was a kid, my father had not been allergic to poison ivy, and had been the brunt of many Indiana summer-camp dares to rub it all over his face. Decades later and he had his first allergic reaction, unfortunately, all over his legs, on the bottoms of his feet, and between his toes. Usually when this story is getting told my father emphasizes how horrible and itchy he was, but underscores how he had helped save the day (David Baldwin, family martyr). My mother usually likes to talk about how incredibly unsexy it was, them being on their honeymoon and him being rashy from the mid-thigh down.

I asked my parents for the scientific names of the things they studied since I was having a hard time getting images on my own. There is, as it turns out, an incredible variety of milkweed bugs-- but my father studied Oncopeltus fasciatus solely. For years I've been telling my friends that my mom studied a flower called Silene ecbalium, but on the phone she corrected me, as no such plant exists. Her dissertation was about a plant called Ecbalium elaterium, and then she studied a plant called Silene latifolium when we lived in New Jersey. I had morphed the two (incredibly dissimilar) plants together, which sounds like good premise for a drawing-- what would Silene ecbalium even look like?

Eighth day of X-mas!

coming around third, sliding into home...

and then, while I am there:

-drawing of the mom's bowl that dad glued back together
-rubbings of the pie safe and the upright piano
-find and collect old unsent letters and postcards
-find pictures of entire family (which include all 4 grandparents)
-interview family members
-try to take one picture with all 6 cats and dog
-gather trolls for troll-king drawing
-find the apology letter dad sent from UU church
-find things with stains
-take pictures of ink stains on dad's sweatshirt
-picture of Mr. Popaduik?
-picture of Baba-Gee and Didi-Ma?
-find old journals

-find old books for project: The Super Joke Book, Ferdinand, Watership Down, How a Baby is Born, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Masaii Mara, Diary of Anne Frank, I, Rigoberta Menchu, Dear God, It's Me Margaret, Just So Stories, Edward Doty book, Anatomies...
-go to Pastimes, Ithaca Bakery, Farmers Market, Ludgates, Wegmans
-gather small plastic animals (ask Dennis first)
-check out old family shoes in the garage
-find baseball mit
-get hair cut at Chez Rachetta
-find and connect with Rebekka, Hannah, Rachel, Lauretta, Seth, Lauren, Zachary, Ms Gergely
-walk out to lighthouse, Stewart Park, Cascadilla Boathouse, train tracks
-get sample of forsythia bush
-take pictures of dad's college blanket
-draw mom's rock pick
-start sorting with mom in basement
-watch old family movies
-watch Holiday Inn
-get family recipes (Fig pudding, Mimi's chili, mom's tortilla & cookies, etc...)
-photocopy dad's picture of the giant harp
-the box of mica?
-the tape recording of the sit-in?
-dont forget this! Mimi's handbag!
-interview Papa
-visit Grammy in Center Moriches
-hug parents frequently
-drive around with brothers, get pizza, talk about parents


These pictures are from past homes-- the top one I took of Will when he was about 4 and I was about 9 when we lived in the small green and white house at 10 Grant Avenue, the bottom one is from the tri-color duplex at 520 East Main Street. Today when I was looking at the second picture I saw, for the first time, my father's college blanket hanging off the back of a chair in the background, which was weird because I had just included its discovery in the very long list above. My grandmother, on one of her visits when I was in highschool, rearranged my bedroom without asking and I got very upset with her when I came home. My father didn't know what to do, sympathizing with my feelings but also recognizing that my grandmother was 'just trying to help.' Then he founf that she had put this blanket into the goodwill pile, and all hell broke loose. Total Baldwin family meltdown. Words (not nice ones) were thrown and my grandparents went to a hotel, refusing to let my father drive them to the airport (they were leaving the next day). The funny thing about this part of the story is that they took our car. I dont know how, but somehow we pulled through that one and everyone still loved everyone else. The real point of the story is that you don't mess my fathers plaid wool blanket from college, yet another sacred vessel of Baldwin history.

Seventh day of X-mas!

Well, I don't really have much to say about this one, except that it says on the back that this picture was taken on Christmas Eve, testament to how parents have to work harder at the whole Santa conspiracy once babies turn into kids and start remembering things and asking suspicious questions. Also, I'd like to see that kid stand before we put him on the bicycle. Just saying.

Rewind & Remind

I spoke to a highschool boyfriend, Tim Simrell, yesterday on the phone. The last time I saw him was in August-- he and Seth Bernstein called and woke me up and we took a midnight walk together through the cigarette suburbs of Ithaca, NY. I'd been thinking about Tim because of my project and a memory I want to make a drawing about. The winter of my freshman year in college, Tim's grandmother had fallen and hurt her hip and his grandfather was having hard time taking care of himself. The couple had lived in a small cottage at an elderly community called Kendal At Ithaca, and moved into the main building until they were in better health.

When I came home from college during Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks, Tim and I would go to their small house to feed their huge long-haired cat. On one of these visits I was sitting on the couch and put my hand on some sort of glass orb, which Tim told me to flip over. On the bottom side there was a sticker with his initials: TWS. Years before, his grandmother had given Tim and his sister, Lindsay, sheets of these round stickers on which they were told to write their initials and then put them on everything that they wanted to have someday. Once he told me the story, I started looking on the undersides of objects and furniture and, sure enough, almost everything had a tag with either LMS or TWS written on it.

This was two years before I would lose my first grandparent, and Tim's story may have reminded me of their mortality. I mostly just remember feeling really sad. I have always had a hard time in old folks homes-- when I was little our girlscout troop would go sing Christmas carols at one and I would just cry and cry when we were supposed to shake these old strangers' hands. Six years later and I find myself thinking about that story still and wanting to make a drawing about it. I called Tim to ask him what his sister's middle initial is, and we briefly exchanged talk about Ithaca, mutual friends and plans for Christmas.

When I got off the phone I thought it would be funny to play mixes given to me by Tim, but none of them would play, having been scratched into disuse long ago. It would feel really weird to throw them away-- mix cds have the emotional stature of mix tapes, but once they get scratched they are pretty much the ugliest and most useless things to hold on to. This picture is of the only three I think I have left-- the rest were borrowed by friends, left at old work places or lost at college parties a long time ago. Rough Cut is the first mix cd I was given, and I remember bringing my brothers boombox into my room and playing it over and over again trying to decode its meaning. The Mara Sessions is full of Sim Redmond Band, DMB and Ben Folds Five songs. Rewind and Remind was sent to me at college after we broke up for the first time in October (for about 14 tragic hours). I talked to Adrienne last night about them-- how they're so weird and plastic with their Sharpie-scrawled messy handwriting accross the fronts, and how maybe that makes them perfect subject matter for a drawing, where I get to hold them in the light one more time before finally throwing them away.

Sixth day of X-mas!

For our family, putting out Christmas decorations is pretty much the last thing we do to celebrate besides opening presents-- the Baldwin/Costich family likes to stroll into the holiday at the very last minute. I used to absolutely disapprove my parents seeming lack of care, but now I think it's pretty amazing. Our tree is usually some wonky bargain bin tree bought on Christmas eve-- we turn the patchiest side towards the wall. We forget how to put the tree's trunk in the base every year, and usually wind up tethering it to the curtain rod to extend the lives of our ornaments and cats for when they climb up into it. And, every year, my dad misjudges the height of our living room ceiling, which is now scarred with scrapes from the tree-tops of past Christmases. I love the sound of the tree hitting the ceiling, the climax to lots of family bickering over whether or not it is going to. It's usually this day that the droves of stuffed animals come out, our stockings that Mimi knitted, the ridiculous festive mugs with candy cane handles, the Santa pez, the Christmas music archive-- I mean, I could go on and on and on. How did we get this much Christmas stuff anyways-- we, a family who pretends to forget that Christmas is coming until the last possible day? I pity the families who actually celebrate it "appropriately," starting the day after Thanksgiving-- they must feel anchored to their basement storage with their mountains of Christmas kitsch. Breaking family tradition, I found myself oddly preparing for Christmas today-- I unbashfully sang "Santa Baby" as I biked through the Mission and to my studio this morning, and I'm proud about it.

windows to windows

I had a strange day, and took this picture in Doron's studio, which is the only thing I made today worth looking at.