This weekend, May 2 & 3, 12-6 pm, is Somerville Open Studios, the biggest arts event in our quaint and scenic town. Naturally, I’m behind my time in letting you all know about it, but such is me.
I’ll be turning my front porch into a mini exhibition celebrating the spring season, its moods, symbols, weather, and magic, featuring our wild city rabbits among others.
Weather Note: The forecast is for “chance” of rain this weekend. Please subscribe to this website or follow me on Bluesky to receive updates in case I get rained out on Saturday or Sunday.
You can also see my collage-assemblage, “Pink Yarrow,” at Somerville Museum, and a new collage-painting, “April,” at the Brickbottom Gallery, both indoors.
Enjoy a sneak peak at some new works in progress, which I hope to bring out for SOS.
On the magic of rabbits.
Rabbit, bring me luck. Rabbit, bring me many. Rabbit, bring me happiness, But for my foe, not any.
That little ditty is my pitch for wild rabbits as a role model for our times, because they symbolize the four powers we all need right now. Good luck to get through the storms. Abundance to meet our needs, one way or another. Joy in love and pleasure. Resilience to take the blows and never back down because, dammit, these are our streets.
I think, for most people, spring is a cutesy-pootsy season of flowers and baby animals, but I see it differently.
To me, spring is a time when the new forcibly replaces the old, dead, and rotten. Spring brings out the big passions and changes everything, ready or not. It’s births and beginnings. It’s melting and mess. It’s bright colors and clean green shoots pushing through the mud. It’s migrating birds, emerging bees, and for me, it’s the rabbits.
The old rabbits of winter, scarred, skinny, and strong. The new rabbits like delicate treasures nested in our flower beds.
Rabbits making the first of many babies. Rabbits dodging a thousand dangers. Rabbits robbing our gardens, lounging in the sun, grooming their tiny little faces with their tiny little paws (omg). Rabbits waging war all over town to claim and defend their territories, be they lush parks or weedy train yards.
If I have my way, it’ll be all lush parks and gardens, because where the rabbits thrive, so can we.
-Jen
Note: This post contains 407 words, which according to western numerology, reduces to 11 and then to 2. In tarot, 11 is the number of Justice in some systems and Strength in others, and 2 is the number of The High Priestess. Justice, Strength, and Wisdom.
It begins at 12:00AM and runs through 11:59PM. For this whole day, we are suspending all non-essential commerce. No shopping. No buying. Especially, no corporate brands or chains. If you must spend money, go to small, local shops, preferably in person, to avoid giving business to Google et al., and pay in cash, to avoid giving business to credit card companies and big banks.
You might think a single day of across-the-board economic shutdown won’t have any effect. But I happen to be a fan of consumer activism, so let me explain why I encourage you to get on board with Blackout Day.
First, this day is just the beginning. We might call it a “shot across their bow,” i.e. a warning to remind the people trying to dismantle our Constitution and way of life what leverage We the People of the United States really hold.
One inescapable fact of the USA is that it runs on money. For good or ill, the US is a mercantile nation. Money is the body and soul of our politics and our power structure.
And there is no money if there is no We the People. The US economy runs entirely on the labor and purchasing of millions of Americans. That’s us doing the jobs and us buying the stuff. Anything that interferes with us showing up for work or us buying stuff from stores slows the economy immediately. If it keeps up a while, our “envy of the world” economy quickly starts to shrink.
And boy-howdy, do the billionaires start yelping when that happens.
Remember the 2008 crash, when the global economy very nearly collapsed and countless Americans lost their homes and were drowning in debt. Remember how the economic pundits and the billionaire CEOs were all over media complaining about the slow recovery after that crisis of their making. Remember how they blamed the American people for unpatriotically – yes, some of them actually invoked patriotism – saving our money instead of spending it like they wanted us to.
Remember the pandemic, when there were no jobs, no open shops, even the supply chains were shut down, but we individual worker-consumers were still getting scolded for not getting out there to lend it, spend it, send it rolling along. I will swear to my last breath that I heard multiple capitalists on US media literally declaring that keeping the economy going was more important than keeping ourselves alive, and we were betraying the nation by staying home just to stay healthy.
Were any of those pundits, capitalists, or CEOs on the brink of starvation from the faltering economy in those crises? No, they were not. So why did they care so much?
If I were an economist, it would be complicated to explain, but I’m not, so it’s simple.
The heads of US industry, the leaders of our dominant businesses, our CEOs and Directors, our would-be American oligarchs are, at the end of the day, little more than glorified peddlers. Take a hard look at them, all those Big Corp brands. They’re all basically hawking junk on street corners, just like a hundred-plus years ago when they were selling liver pills and miracle tonics off wagons and conning yokels into selling their land for wildcat oil drilling.
All these years, all these generations, these latter-day robber barons built their fortunes by conning – or extorting – the rest of us into giving them all our labor and all our money.
When we stop giving them those things, their house-of-cards empires start to shake. It never fails.
A dip in commerce means a dip in profit margins – a hiccough in line-go-up. It doesn’t matter if it’s just a one-day event. The blip will appear on the radar, and the voting shareholders won’t like it, since the only reason for any of these grifters to exist at all is to maximize profits for voting shareholders. Blips don’t maximize.
So on February 28, we will do our best to put a blip on the radar.
If they’re smart, they will listen to our demands. They will back off their attempt to turn the US into a fascist client state to Vladimir Putin. They will restore order, funding, and staffing to the US federal government. They will obey the orders of the federal courts. They will pass a proper federal budget. They will restore our support for our traditional allies and trading partners in accordance with our treaties. They will quit fucking around with things they don’t understand.
If they’re not smart, then there will be more blips. Bigger blips. More blackouts will follow, along with longer boycotts and labor actions.
If they take away our rights from us, we will take away our money from them. If they take away our liberty, we will take away our work. If they take away our Constitution and our system of law and representation, we will take away the life blood of the economy and their industries.
And we shall see who wins the argument. Myself, I’m betting on We the People, because we have the numbers, and without us, they have nothing.
Now, as a movement, economic resistance is relatively slow and requires discipline, organization, and cooperation. It demands that we change long-accustomed habits, that we support each other in our communities, and that we all do some creative problem-solving.
But today is just one day. The first day. So let’s try it out, and see how it goes.
At the very least, not spending money for a day isn’t going to hurt you any.
And remember, this is just for non-essential spending. There are people who would prefer a total shut-down of all transactions, but those people forget February 28 is the last day of the month. It’s Rent Day for millions of us. We must be reasonable. Do pay your rent, by whatever method you normally use. Pay your bills if they’re due. If you have to fill a prescription or keep a medical appointment, etc., take care of it. That is essential spending, not non-essential.
But stay the hell off Amazon. Stay away from the big box retailers. Don’t log into your streaming services. Don’t send money over the internet or pay for anything by credit card. Don’t order in from a chain restaurant via a corporate gig-work delivery service. Just don’t.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I run a small business out of my studio. I would very dearly love for you to buy my work.
But not today. Not online today. Today is for a different kind of work, without which I might not be able to keep doing my life’s work.
You know what I’ll be doing today, instead of trying to sell you my art? I’ll be doing some creative problem-solving. For example, I think I’ll research alternatives to Paypal and Venmo (the same company) so I can offer you a more ethical way to do business with me. Might take some time, but it’s a great day to start, don’t you think?
And I’ll do some artwork, so there’ll be fresh stuff for you to buy as well.
Today is the first day of the economic part of the pro-democracy resistance in the US.
Today is also the last day of the last month of winter. Tomorrow, March 1, we begin barreling into spring. Is there a better moment to wake up? To dump the old in favor of the new? To clean our house?
I went for a walk before I wrote this and saw the first green shoots rising from the ice-soaked ground in a neighborhood park.
That’s an allegory for you, right there.
This is how the weather changes. This is how the tides turn.
Spring is in full bloom, and filling my head with ideas. Behold!
Out and about
The garden is up and running – largely without me, I admit. The daffodils are especially robust this year. (I wish I could say the same for the studio lighting or my poor old camera.)
A little sketchbook tour
Inspired by the energy of the season, I’ve been letting all my ideas make their pitches. Those glorious daffodils again, this time in two vases. This year’s solar eclipse – from photos. We didn’t get totality over Massachusetts, so while I took a moment to observe the partial over my studio (safely!), I also watched the totality over and over, live on NASA tv. The little Medusa concept doodles happened because I am convinced Medusa and the Gorgons were solar mythic beings. Next, ephemeral springtime forest plants – North American bloodroot flower and fern fiddleheads. (Did you know, that part of the violin is both named and designed after the plant?) All of these sketches are plans for future artworks.
The color sketch was just testing out some watercolor pencils. I’m not particularly in love with this set, but the SATOR design is an idea in development for some typographic abstracts. The SATOR square is one of the oldest good-luck charms in western culture, found decorating doorways of ancient Roman buildings.
And finally, testing out different pens – a dip pen, a bamboo reed pen, and a fountain pen – the one in black. I sketched with a glass pen, too, but forgot to photograph it. I like them all, but I think the reed pen gives that Real Artist vibe, at least in these little drawings.
In Other News
New small paintings are ready. I’m just editing the photos. I’ll post them separately, and they’ll be added to the shop soon.
An Alchemy of Dragons is on a brief hiatus. As I prepare to introduce the second protagonist, Iarius, and expand my characters’ world, I found I need to corral an explosion of plot bunnies. I also realized I made some mistakes in the earlier chapters. So I decided to pause, rework some details, and get more of the story written in advance of posting. Maps are being drawn. Character portraits are being designed. A world-building wiki is coming together as I go along. I’m pretty excited about the upcoming improvements. Watch this space.
Happy Vernal Equinox Day! I thought I’d celebrate the season with a selection of some new and older works on the seasonal theme. No explanations. Not in any particular order. Comments and questions are welcome.
A dragon in a thicket, An Alchemy of Dragons, Ch. 2
Happy lunar new year, everyone! I hope your winter has been cozy and all is well with you and yours as the Year-Beginning Season comes to its close.
I love that the universe gives us three chances to start every new year over the whole winter. We get the solar new year at the Winter Solstice, the astronomical new year at Earth’s perihelion in the first week of January, and now the lunar new year, which was celebrated yesterday.
Considering how dragged out many of us were in December and January, getting to count February as an additional start is especially welcome.
However, proceed with caution. 2024 is the year of the dragon, which is a double-edged sword. If you were born in a dragon year, it’s all good, but if you were born under a different sign, you’d better check your auspices. Rabbit-year folks like me, for instance, are advised to look both ways crossing the street, stay out of fights, take our vitamins, and generally behave like smart little bunnies.
I’ve checked Chinese astrology, western astrology, and western numerology, and overall, they all promise a year of great change and a mixed bag of challenges and opportunities. So … yeah, looking at what’s on our plates already, buckle up, kids. It’s going to be a ride.
That’s why I chose the illustration above as my greeting to you. That dragon was in quite the tangle in An Alchemy of Dragons, Ch. 2, but our protagonist, Erran, was able to use the brambles to make his escape. In real life, thickets are nurseries where new forests are born. They offer traps for some and havens for others. Little critters who learn the ins and outs are safe in there. They can find everything they need – food, water, shelter – and come and go as they please. Blundering clods like hunters, on the other hand, can barely get in, and if they force their way, they’ll have a job getting out again.
I think that’s appropriate for this year.
I’m sure you noticed that it’s been another while since you heard from me. I’m doing the stuff, but I can’t quite decide how I want to present it to you.
New small paintings are coming to the shop soon.
I’ve been reworking the structure of the Alchemy of Dragons serial, which may require adding material and reorganizing the chapters again, but I am very pleased with what I’ve got. I had been using the wrong plotting system, and the deeper into the story I got, the harder it was to plan what should come next in the telling of it. Putting together a system that works for me became my main winter project, and I feel like I’m on a much better track now. I’m as optimistic as I ever get.
Video and audio experiments are also in progress. Watch this space for further news on those.
Finally, just about all my online tools need refreshing. Figuring out the best options is an ongoing puzzle. There will be tweaks to the website arrangement, the newsletter, Patreon, and subscriptions. Nothing shocking, but hopefully some functional improvements, like my writing system.
I have a feeling a lot of us have been gnawing things over in our burrows all this winter, but the celestial clocks have turned, and the new season is just about here. Yes, in damp, icy Massachusetts, we just got another winter storm advisory for next week, but the days are undeniably longer and brighter. Buds are developing on trees, the backyard birds are already starting to sing and pair up, and I started spring cleaning today.
This one is about the gifts the universe sends us, the treasures we pass by on the road.
The moon was particularly beautiful over Somerville last night, when the storm clouds parted. It was bright enough to light my room, overcoming the street lamps. The wet air smelled of spring.
By the way, we call April’s moon the Pink Moon, not because it looks pink, but because it’s the month for pinks, the flower, to bloom. Indeed, my city is filling up with flowers now.
I repurposed one of my blue landscapes for this collage. Sometimes an image has more to say, and I will often revisit older pieces that seem like they want to go in a different direction. In fact, I won’t let go of a piece until I’m sure it is what it wants to be.
This has been a difficult winter for us at the apartment attached to the studio. I’ll tell you about it at some future date. For now, suffice to say, we are dealing with unhappy things, and the least of my troubles is that my nearly decade-old Mac computer finally broke down. I write this on a loaner PC (thanks, Mom), and due to various techly things I’m not coping with right now, I can’t upload any of my new photos to prove that I’ve actually been doing stuff. So… whatever. On the scale of things, the computer is annoying because it doesn’t matter, but it does interrupt.
I’ve been working on paper sculptures of eggs and rabbits, naturally, because yay-spring. Also working on my occult detective novel – again. And that one ambitious project. They’re all coming along rather nicely. I wish I could show them to you.
Instead, I’m adding some spring-ly works to the Shop, beginning with four small landscape paintings, the Blue Lakes. They are kind of misty and moody, and they speak both to my state of mind and the time of year. I used paste-paint on paper and improvised with folds, blots, pulls, and mark-making. In some you can spot finger impressions, creases, and other flaws helping to build the image of a watery landscape.
The Blue Lakes Series
Every so often this March, look for more paintings and collages to the Shop, in celebration of the season.
Someone I admire recently observed that creative work is therapeutic. It takes one out of oneself. It’s true. These past few weeks, the meditative ASMR of my pen on the paper, and the brush applying layers of paste and paper, and birds jumping around in the tree by my window has been my refuge. Engaging all my senses in my materials – the textures, sounds, smells, colors – making adjustments as I go along, not overthinking things but just floating in the process – it’s pretty much the only thing that lets me forget my cares for a while, lets me feel just free and existing.
It doesn’t last, but the work is always there, waiting, anytime I need a break. There’s a life-lesson there, after this traumatic year. If you have something that gets your mind off yourself, that feeds your senses, and leaves you with something positive at the end of the day or hour, indulge in it. It’s medicine, and we all need it, as surely as we need a vaccine.
…any minor world that breaks apart, falls together again… — Steely Dan, Any Major Dude
Staying at home, maintaining physical distance, and working on a new piece for spring.
This is for the “Construction/Deconstruction” group show at the Brickbottom Gallery, scheduled for April 16 – May 16. Details may change due to coronavirus, so watch this site for updates.
My experiment: “Painting” dried flowers with thin skins of dyed tissue paper. The flowers were collected last fall, after they had gone to seed and dried naturally on the plants. I am trying to restore their summer colors. I like the effect – it kind of looks like paintings rendered in 3D. This work-table still life shows pink yarrow and hydrangea in progress. Far in the background, blurry behind my coffee cup are more yarrow, seaside goldenrod, and white pine, waiting their turn. The yarrow are from my own garden. The rest were collected from roadsides, and the hydrangea I actually found in a parking lot where it had been dropped by the wind. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the broken china and egg shell yet.
I’d been tinkering with this technique for a while, but the disruption we’re all going through with the coronavirus pandemic has inspired me. “Construction” and “deconstruction” are classic Art Words, more or less abstract concepts we creatives often dance around with. But as things kind of come off the rails around us, it occurred to me that “reconstruction” is what art really does. Artists see things, and take them apart, and then we put them back together, a little altered, interpreted, understood in some way, and made part of the human conversation. Our work isn’t done until we’ve got it all together again somehow.
Right now, a lot of us feel like we’re watching things fall apart, but we’ll get through these times. Nothing will be the same, but we can rely on the continuity of construction, deconstruction, reconstruction. The artists, writers, poets, musicians, etc., will tell the stories of how it all went down, and each of us will add our memories to it. We’ll reconstruct our world, with a little more weight of experience and a little more light of understanding.
This process is slow and delicate, perfect for being under a stay-at-home order. And sometime after I’m done building my memories of last year’s flowers, this year’s flowers will be blooming everywhere.
Wow. You wander off for a month and look what happens.
I’ll start by hoping everyone out there is okay and comfortable at home with lots of soap and disinfectants and everything they need. We’re all doing fine here at the apartment attached to the studio in charming, scenic Somerville.
I was going to tell you all about why I vanished again, but it was just the usual February lost-in-the-weeds stuff. The seasonal joys of taxes, insurance, and bureaucracy. That melting of the brain and spirit and knee joints that comes with the melting of winter. All my favorite creatives were posting stories about taking stock and starting over, and I was all set to jump on the bandwagon. World events intervened, however. Boy, did they ever.
So quick catch-up: February sucked the way February does. I did finally finish that damned dollhouse roof that had threatened to derail the whole ambitious project the dollhouse belongs to. Trust me, you didn’t want to watch me do it. The project, by the way will be either a graphic novel or visual story, a suspense thriller set in and around this dollhouse. Working title: Orchid Beach.
I am committed to three public events with the Brickbottom Artists Association this year. Details will be posted separately. First up will be the Spring group show, “Construction/Deconstruction,” in mid-April. I’ll be showing a new experimental project.
Right now, I’m listening to Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” and settling into preventative semi-self-quarantine – doing my part to flatten the curve on COVID-19. For the foreseeable short-term future, I’m going to be listening to a lot of music. Doing a lot of art and writing. Reading books. Binging tv with my sainted mother. Planning my garden and starting seeds. Desperately trying to train myself not to touch my face. (Aagh! I can’t do it!!) Writing blog posts. No really this time. I promise.
I spent these first few days painting colored tissue paper onto dried flowers for that experimental project because, you know, when you’ve just gotten loose from an endless hell of miniature roof shingles, you want to dive right into the most delicate, fragile, slow, difficult, tetchy-fussy project you can think of. It looks amazing, though. I’m really excited about it. Just wait till you see.
This coronavirus thing – I’m not going to sugarcoat or skip lightly over it. It’s pretty heavy. I’d be lying if I said I’m not a little nervous, mostly for my mom’s sake. But we’re prepared, and we have each other and our friends. We’re about as on top of this game as anyone can be, I think.
Plus, it’s Spring. The birds are courting. The flowers are coming up, the trees are budding. It’s hard not to have faith in the future.
Life carries on, and so shall we all. We’re going to wash our hands, maintain polite distance, be considerate of our neighbors, and get through this latest challenge. I decree it.
So jump on the comments or Facebook page and let me know how you plan to ride out the pandemic. What’s on your play- and binge-lists? What projects will you finish? Where will you go for solitary walks, or will you write your play, or learn to bake bread, or work on the problem of human-powered flight?
For now, please enjoy some photos of the Orchid Beach dollhouse under construction, the first of several sets of teaser images to come.
Spring starts this Wednesday, March 20! The trees are budding. The first green shoots are showing through winter’s litter. The birds and animals are setting up house. The sun is higher and warmer, and everything seems full of energy and movement.
I celebrated by making my annual mistake of cleaning my rooms. I learned that I don’t need any more clothes or hair ties, my cats don’t need any more toys, and the only things that are ever truly lost are the ones that are a big pain to replace. I didn’t even do the Kondo method, and I’m overwhelmed – but motivated afresh.
Experiments with monoprint continue, and I’ve started a small set of collages on paper using natural botanical bits. This first one is a tribute to the season and our city rabbits down by the Mystic estuary. It belongs to my ongoing series about walks around town.
Jen Fries Arts 