Usually, these two can’t stand the sight of each other, let alone the proximity. They’ve been duking it out for Back Yard Supremacy for about two years, but I don’t know what got into them this day — maybe the heat. Each cat each wanted to make sure that the other guy didn’t get the coolest part of the stone wall. I don’t think they know how cute they look (I’m sure they think they look fierce and forbidding: I forbid any other cat to be more comfortable than me.

And Top Cat looks at these two lumps and says to me, “I can’t tell who that is.”

Can’t tell who that is????    Are you kidding me???

How hard is it to tell two black cats apart, considering that we only have four???

Now you tell me: you can see how each of these black cats are vastly different in appearance, right?

First, here’s Timmy:And Blackie:

And Dudley:

And Cindy, who is an indoor cat and not part of the Who’s On the Stone Wall Mystery:

So really, how hard is it to tell which cats are on the stone wall? It should be pretty easy to guess just based on their distinct body language alone, right?

Take a guess. And if you’re right I’ll send you a hand painted cat print card that certifies you for Superior Achievement in Cat Identology.

Deadline is Saturday July 30 at noon EST.

and makes me remember this light on a dusky winter walk a few days before, in upstate New York:

When the sun unexpectedly shone for a bright moment on a snowy day in upstate New York, I ran to this window:

That same sun beam was lighting up this corner of the library.  (What do you read on a day like this? That bookcase contains nothing but murder mysteries — I recommend something English, written before 1950.)

Back to that icy sparkling window: in the upper left hand corner is a peek at the backyard:

This is what the backyard looks like:

In the front yard, there is a gazebo where you can sit and look at loons and beavers on the pond.

And when it snows the very next day, this is what the snow around the gazebo looks like at night:

I want to frame all your comments this week!  My replies were supposed to be attached individually (to Candice, Jacquelyn, and Janet) but turns out that the blogging elves weren’t in the mood and they just chucked everything into the flow.  Julie and Nancy, my fellow  reverent minimalists, and Deborah and Barbara: you are not alone — there’s a few of us out here who still keep our bullshit detectors in working order and we are with you.

Kim: I was heading in your direction for this post anyway but your story makes my job a little easier. Because today I want to talk about something I left  out when I wrote about the “more is better’ style of art journaling that seems to be the esthetic norm of most how-to books on the subject.  Now, I was warned by a professional in this field of art journaling instruction that I should stay away from this topic, that my criticisms would invite a lot of flak from the practitioners of visual abundance so I want to thank Toni, Shelly, and Els for their temperance. I was warned, actually, that this is a controversial topic in our art journaling community (who knew?) and that the debate could get really nasty (who knew?) but I’m going to GO THERE anyway.

What I left out of my monologue about the over-done appearance of art journals these days is my explanation of the difference between art as self-expression and art as communication.

I have almost nothing to say about art as self expression except that I don’t want to have to look at it.

I lied. I do have a something to say about art as self-expression. And here it is: It is very rare that anyone’s self-expression contains any communication, communication being the mutuality of  the experience of art, the acknowledgment that the rest of us are not here on this earth just to be assaulted by your need to be heard. I know there is a myth out there that art is purely self-expressive but that is not so. In fact, one’s act of  self-expression is so exceedingly uselessto the rest of us that when an some one’s act of S.E. actually manages to communicate to the rest of the world, that person is regarded as an artist  and (if the communication is really, really good) is hailed as a genius. (Picasso, Van Gogh, Pollack, and the like: their acts of self-expression brought another element to their work — talent, truth, inspiration, a mystical tapping into the collective soul — that made the rest of us willing to meet the challenge of their art.)  Genius, despite its being another word (like awesome and bizarre) that has been over-used to the vanishing point, is still rare.  Artists are pretty rare, too, even though that word also has been over-used to the point of meaninglessness. 

Self-expression is a good thing, a fine thing, and a necessary thing. It is also essentially a private thing: even those who teach the kitchen-sink school of art journaling often warn that these journals, layered with collage and gesso and cutlery, are too intimate to pass around in public; I applaud these teachers for showing great sensitivity towards their pupils. For those of you who took me to task for wanting to put the brakes on the self-expressive nature of these “altered book” journals I want to assure you that I have no intention of criticising the quality of the work produced or the impetus to go at it. Good for you. Express yourself to your heart’s content. That doesn’t make you an artist, but I’m almost certain that that’s not the point of that kind of art journaling anyway.

Just be aware that the result of all your efforts might be of exquisite value only to yourself because of the intensely personal nature of the craft. Also, since there seems to be an entire industry that depends on your buying stuff to cram onto those pages, to some of us, that makes the whole enterprise seem a little gimmicky, the antithesis of art or, even, self-expression. Is all I’m saying.

My purpose in writing about all this is to suggest, from my own humble experience  as a freaking awesome communicator, that the art journal can become a meaningful conveyor of biography, information, experience, emotion, etc. You know, like a book. Like a good book. As opposed to a book-like object. An art journal can be the ocassion for a wonderfully mutual exchange: I give you my carefully thought-out text and illustrations and you give me your attention (no small thing in American culture), for which I feel honored and you feel like I’m a freaking awesome communicator. The way to do this is to temper self-expression with awareness that something — coherence, self-control, mastery of the craft, and respect (did I forget anything?)– is owed to your reader.

So, what have we learned today? We learned that I am the last person to teach anyone anything about self-expression, seeing as how there are already many people willing to show the way when it comes to that. But I will gladly share what I know about communication, something I cherish (Ha! Extra credit for using that word seriously!) . And those paint-chip brochures I raved about last Monday: think about the heavy-duty communicating going on in those — yes, they just want you to buy stuff, but they also hit all the same nerve circuits that a really good art journal should. Which I will enumerate next Monday because my fingers hurt from all this typing (Shorter Blogging is my New Year’s Resolution).

I’m still on my Winter Whites kick that I began on Monday with my post about 28 shades of white. Today I put up some photos of my most recent experience of January. Next Monday I will be putting up my art journal pages based on these two posts, something January-esque about light that I’ll have discovered this weekend when I sit down to paint, after having thought a bit more about what I seem to like so much about 28 shades of colorlessness and find something that is worth communicating. Right now, I have NO idea. But I’ll work on it.

Hence the title of this post.

Not to pick on any specific “How To” book on Making Journals, Scrapbooks, and Albums Beautiful, but this (see above) is the kind of craft project that is ruining a generation of art journalists. Besides instructions on how to splatter, carve, scrape, rip, applique, and glue all kinds of material (and paint) onto the blank pages, these books also invite journalers to add silverware, collage, threads, stamps, grommets, found objects, metallic doo-dads, and “encrustations” onto the prepared surfaces. Why? Why?

If the object of all this busy-ness is not to torture an innocent piece of paper then I don’t know what all this effort is about.

I don’t want to put any one’s hard work up here for ridicule so I’m not scanning in pictures of some of these “art” journals, but the results that I’ve seen of such over-wrought decoration reminds me of a criticism that the great Arthur Danto once leveled at the paintings of the superstar artist of the 1980s, Julian Schnabel. Danto said that Schnabel’s paintings had all the  hallmarks of “serious” art: they were large, the paint showed evidence of furious brushstrokes, the subjects were iconic, and the titles were anguished; the visible effort (Schnabel was famous for embedding his canvases with broken dishes and for heaping on the paint like it was Play-Dough) convinced a lot of naive consumers that his art was important. But to a connoisseur, all that effort did not hide the fact that the work was cliche and silly.

Same with the current style of art journaling. The distressed pages, the bulky hand-made bindings, the layered text, the bleeds (especially the bleeds) all make the journals look artistic…but no amount of applied crap can hide lack of originality, individuality, and content.

So throw away all your Art Journal How To books. They are only good at showing you how to imitate  art. What I want to show you, here in VivianWorld, is how to find The Real Thing.

I should know: when I was an expert at Christie’s auction house, most of my daily job was separating the fakes from the genuine article. Any antiques or decorative arts specialist sees a LOT of fakes in her line of work – some fakes can be quite good in theirown right and that can be kind of intriguing, but some stuff is just soooo bad that it was just insulting. In time, I ceased to be amazed that a person could mistake a strand of plastic Mardi Grasbeads for a pearl necklace (true story) and became plain disgusted. I wanted to yell at them (those people who dragged in hideous porcelain knick knacks, sloppy enamel jewelry, cheap knock-off objets) “Have a little self-respect! Stop settling for such crap!”

The next time you go into Home Depot (or Lowe’s, or your local home improvement center), you’ll find plenty of authentic art journal inspiration in the paint aisle. No, not the cans of paint: the free paint-color brochures that are there for the taking.

Paint companies spare no expense in producing these beautiful brochures — the photography is splendid and the production is lavish and the text is efficient and evocative. These brochures are not selling you paint: they are selling you  mood, desire,  fantasy. If you want to learn how to present a complex sense of yearning, recapture a delicate frame of mind, catalog a cherished memory, study how these paint companies do it.

I have before me a brochure for white paint, called “An Inspired Collection“. Besides the photographs of white objects and tastefully decorated rooms full of white walls and white-ish furniture, the brochure invites you to “open yourself to the possibilities of whites — the feeling of simplicity, openness, calm, elegance…”

And the brochure opens up to reveal paint chips: 28 shades of white. To show you cool whites and warm whites, “to help you choose the exact shade that speaks to you”.  (Hey — it’s January; this is a good month to think of new names for all the colors of snow, as long as we are talking about shades of white: Ice Queen, Winter Silence, Deep Stillness, Hush, Dream of Rio de Janiero, Vanilla Frost, etc.)

Among the 28 shades of white in this brochure there’s Heirloom Lace, Adobe White, Navajo White, Glazed Pears, Featherstone, Pegasus, Ash Mist, Dogwood Blossom, Mountain Grey, Moonlit Snow, Sentimental, Rose Dust, Peach Linen, Silent Delight, etc.  And that’s just the whites!

Now, I don’t for a minute think that every word in these brochures is totally sincere, but there are days when I need a boost to get out of a creative rut. Or I need help in switching my mind on. On those days,  I thumb through my paint brochures and something– an especially weird shade of green, an intense blue hue, a rich tint of red, a sales pitch in the form of a koan (“the possibilities of white”, for example) — will flip a lightswitch in my brain and brighten some dark hidden corner where I can excavate something new, maybe even something surprising.

Inventive color, carefully chosen words, uncluttered presentation: these are things that you will also learn from a simple paint brochure. No gimmicks — no splatter, nothing scraped, ripped, appliqued, glued, mounted, punched, threaded, or encrusted. Just a nice, clean, focused message.

And that’s enough. In fact, it’s plenty.

The next lesson is on Thursday: Another January source of inspiration.

What is that? The first January of the rest of our lives — some lame, greeting card  new-age message of do-gooding status quo-mongering from the ’70s?

Well, if you think  that’s as good as January gets you are WRONG, my friends.

January, as you know, is the WARRIOR Month. Get through January and you are a glorious AMAZON, a Warrior Queen, a Spiritual Gladiator, a Demi-Goddess of Light. January is the month when we come face-to-face with the Darkness the Dread and I, for one, vow to make it through these coming 31 days with boldness, audacity,  creativity, and a little champagne so I can handle everything that that ratty-assed measly-minded  January-re-do month of February has to throw at me. And when I say February, I mean Life.

Are you with me?

ARE YOU WITH ME?

Every time I blog this month it will be to extol (if that’s the word I mean, a combination of to praise and to incite) the pleasures of January. And when I say the pleasures of January, I mean the small daily triumphs of spirit by which we win our daily battle against gloom. And when I say gloom I mean the fake, happy-talking, conformist forces that want us to buy stuff at the mall. Boldness, Audacity, and Creativity can be ours for free. Or, at the most, for the price of a cup of Lapsang Souchong tea. (For those of you reading along, I’m talking about page 9 in When Wanderers Cease to Roam; for those of you cracking open a diary for 2010, let’s journal our victory over January together.  And when I say January, I mean…well, you know what I mean.)

And champagne isn’t so expensive either.

P.S. Last week’s rain and 52-degree weather washed all our lovely snow away so Top Cat and I took the hybrid upstate into the Northern Tier (of The Empire State) above the Snow Line. We went to the town of East Meredith to visit our canine cousins Malcom and Lily and to toast the memory of one fine dog, Angus Braveheart. Here’s some Upstate New York Dog Happiness for you all:

Happy New Year to Us All.

Then one of the women at the dinner party gets a phone call from her daughter in England — it’s midnight there and she’s calling to wish her mother a Happy New Year. The woman tells her daughter “Happy New Year to you too, dear” and shuts her phone and smiles sadly. “She went to Europe for the Summer when she was 20,” the woman explains about the girl who just called, “And she met an English boy when she was touring Monet’s garden at Giverny and she married him and she’s lived in London ever since.”

The parents around the table comisserate with her — it’s hard when your child lives an ocean away.    I guess.     Because all I could think was:

That bitch stole my life.

That 20-year old girl who when away for a Summer in Europe who met an English boy in Monet’s garden at Giverny and married him and lived happily ever after in London: That shudda been me. WHY ELSE did I hitch hike up and down the whole of freaking France the Summer I was 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, … until I was 29  except to have some dashing foreigner fall in love with me and whisk me away to his fabulous foreign country? [Oh, sure, I'd had my own fabulously foreign first husband but I wasn't going to let that get in the way of a good sulk.]

I don’t know who that girl is, the one who stole my life, but she’s making me  plenty mad this New Year’s Eve. Seething, raging, get-drunk-as-quick-as-possible mad.

The wisest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say to me was “Vivian, everything works out in the end.“  No, nobody said that to me that night – I was too busy working on giving myself what I still remember as The Worst Hang Over In My Life.  It was about five years later when I got that wonderful piece of advise. …which I didn’t believe then, really, until the next year when I met the man I call Top Cat and he took me away to the wonderful foreign land called Long Island.

It’s true. Everything works out in the end. “It might not be the way you think you want it to turn out,” my friend told me, “But it does work out, you’ll see.”  I’d like to add that it might not work out when you want it to, either; but it does work out in the end, just dandy.

I don’t begrudge that unknown girl in England her (my) life anymore. And I can hardly remember that version of me, that New Year’s Eve, who had almost given up on the future. But then again, I’ve tried to stay away from New Year’s Eve parties ever since.

Me and Top Cat are planning a picnic dinner in front of a roaring fire in the fireplace surrounded by our cats and some quilts for when the champagne makes us too drowsy to stay awake until midnight.

Happy New Years to you all, past present and future.

[I did this embroidery of Giverny in 1990, back before I had a grudge against the place which I have totally forgiven it for. I'm not the only person to have been robbed of my rightful life, am I? Or to have a resentment against a certain place on the map? I'm not that peculiar, right? Right?]

This is the house on the corner of MacDougall Street and Bingham Avenue, about six blocks from my house on Long Island. I would be happy to live across the street from this house just so I could look out my livingroom window and see this Wonder Wall every day. As it is I have to walk  five minutes to get here, in all kinds of weather, so I can check up and see what effect the time of day and the atmospheric conditions are having on this, my favorite blank canvas on the Isle of Long. (I have a collection of photographs of this exact scene in every season, in rain and shine, in the morning and in the afternoon.) Everything about this view thrills me: its symmetry, its pitch-perfect hue of yellow (somewhere between the yellow of a No. 2 Eberhard-Faber pencil and Dijon mustard), the way it presents itself without ap0ology or irony,leaving itself so open to interpretation. This (above) is The Wonder Wall after the Great Blizzard of ’09, about three days ago.

You know what also makes me happy? Knowing that I have the BEST readers out there: it makes me happy to read all your Comments, even if you didget those white go-go boots that shudda been MINE ALL MINE and you have moose walking up to your front porch (how do you think that makes my poor cats feel, huh? Knowing they are not moose?) and have entertained at the USO and had a childhood in Africa and you have the Rocky Mountains in your backyard and you live in England  (remind me again: Why am I writing about me when I’m clearly about the least interesting person reading this blog??) and otherwise show how very wonderful it is that the internets have brought us all together these past months. It’s been a GREAT 2009 (for me) because of youse.

Thank You, everyone who Comments. And Thank You everyone who reads and don’t remind me that I am the least interesting person etc.

I am always trying to make my blog better and for 2010 I have a few ideas that I’ll be throwing up for discussion. But that’s for future posts (suggestions are welcomed)– for today I am leaving you with this picture of the front of my house the morning after the Great Blizzard of ’09 because it makes me happy that Top Cat painted the whole shebang this Summer to make one of my life’s dearest wishes come true: I now live in my own yellow house.

With coral-tone shutters and lime green doors (the house has two front doors: this is the old one , which came with the original front porch 100 years ago) because I’ve also always wanted to live in a house that has New Orleans colors.

P.S. I live on a street with a lot of 100-year old houses. Those lime-green doors didn’t go over all that well with the neighbors.

Sazeracs for everyone!

Milk and cookies, pretzels and mustard, cream cheese and celery, Lennon and McCartney, butter and biscuits, etc.

And now, let me present to you,  Cinnamon (on the left) and Butterscotch (on the right).

My most delicious candy recipe is: Combine one Cinnamon Life Saver with one Butter Rum Life Saver for a taste treat that is as complex as long division and as much fun as watching your least favorite relative get so hammered at the holiday get-together that you can already hear the hang-dog hung-over apologies he’ll be whimpering the next morning: “Grandma, you know I didn’t mean it when I said that you can take your bossy know-it-all judgmental self and shove it up your hypocritical controlling butt, please don’t cut me out of the will.”  (Note to cousin Biff: Grandma always liked me best anyway.)

Yes, some things just go together: gin and tonic, Currier and Ives, shoes and socks, Sodom and Gomorrah, baseball and apple pie, marshmallows and camp fires, Hershey and kisses, end-of-the-year holidays and unresolved personal issues.

Try my Cinnamon and Butterscotch recipe. And let’s talk 2010 on Monday.

Until then, I cannot keep all this cuteness to myself:

That’s Butter. Chasing imaginary birdies in the snow. And after a hard day’s play, the backyard cats like to curl up in their rabbit hutch:

I customized this myself. I wrapped THREE tarps around it and I put up plexi-glass panels over the wire siding, and I hung up TWO down-filled sleeping bags inside and padded it all with floppy cushions so there is plenty of space to burrow in the corners and get cozy. But they always like to crowd around the doorway: that’s Lickety and Oscar (who counts as half-a-cat because he used to live in the backyard next door before I put up this cozy rabbit hutch and now he’s over here every day).

I also made up some cubbies in the garage:

That’s Taffy (above) in one of the cubbies, and that’s Butter (below), curled up in a non-cubbie box that happens to have one of our outdoor-seat cushions in it. 

It’s 20 degrees out there. How can that be comfortable? How?

It figures that I’d go to all the trouble of making up four little cozy cubbies in the garage and he’d pick the least cozy non-cubbie as his own.

And speaking of toruble, here’s Taffy, on his way out to look for some:

Have a great weekend, everyone. See you Monday.

It all started when crazy cousin Biff started to air his grievances. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festivus.

“Yo,” I said to crazy cousin Biff, “In this family, we keep the i in Druid in Solstice!

I really told HIM.

Ah, the holidays.

Happy Holidays, my dear readers, Happy Holidays.

I know how busy we all are, so I am holding off on the wordy posts until next week — that strangely dead time between Xmas and New Year’s — when I want to get all gooey and gratitudy and WORDY.

[Here's my Art Journal Tip of the day: when you want to do a series of forms (in this case, above, I wanted to do a series of sleds) the best way to find a lot of reference pix is eBay. Really. I got almost all of these sleds by capturing pix on eBay -- everything...EVERYTHING...is for sale on eBay. I love it.  Want to see what an old rotary phone looks like? Find it on eBay. Want to check what a sun dress from the 1940s looks like? Find it on eBay. Want to research the appearance of French perfume bottles? Look it up on eBay. I know, I know: What would you do without me telling you how the world works?]

Enjoy these last lightening days of December, everyone.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-kk5Xt4Ps

This is my 11-inch snowman at 3:30:

4:30 (it was dark already by then):

5:30:

6:30:

7:30:

8:30:

9:30:

And then I said “Oh, the hell with it. I’m not trudging out there in snow up to my knees.”

And first thing next morning, I went out in search of the disappeared snowman:

I had to dig him out from under 13 inches of snow.

It’s the First Day of Winter!

All us Druids are celebrating the Return of the Light.

There’s a shop in downtown Roslyn (where I live on Long Island) that sells Light, in its most materially beautiful forms.

I want those hot-air balloon chandeliers.

Happy Solstice, Everyone!

(Scenes from the Long Island Sound, my holiday card for 2009)

Happy Chris — Hanu–Kwan–Solstice! The Return of the Light!

Now, go forth and LIGHTEN UP .

P.S. Pictures of the backyard cats (who were kittens last year — this is their first Winter as BIG cats) exploring the new landscape of snow are posted on the page “First Snow 2009″. Enjoy.

I am a little bleary-eyed this morning. I went to my agent’s Holiday Party last night in Manhattan (those blue roses were the centerpiece on the hors d’ouvres table — it was that kind of party) and rubbed elbows with literary people. Literally: I RUBBED ELBOWS with one of my writing heros: Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Neil deGrasse Tysonis an astrophysist; he’s in charge of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He’s also the host of Nova on PBS, and he’s written several books — his latest is about how he downgraded Pluto from planet to celestial object to the howling objections of school children everywhere (who knew Pluto had groupies?). But he’s my literary hero because of his first book The Sky Is Not the Limitwhich is his story of how he became one of three African-American astrophysicists in the world.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an elegant writer: he writes really good sentences. Some writers can’t put together a decent sentence to save their life — they need to pile on info, a paragraph at a time; not Neil deGrasse Tyson. He can write a sentence that does heavy lifting (as far as being loaded with meaning) and make it seem featherlight. Sigh. I love reading Neil deGrasse Tyson. One of these days I will post some of his finest sentences up here so you can read for yourself, when I blog about my crush onNeil deGrasse Tyson.

And there he was, chatting with my agent when I walked into to party. I didn’t dare go over and say hi. [Yes, I have the same literary agent as THE Neil deGrasse Tyson. I can't believe it either.]

This is the fourth year that I’ve gone to my agent’s Holiday party. The first year I was so shy (I hadn’t even finished my manuscript yet for When Wanderers Cease to Roam) that I stood on the side with Top Cat and watched the book people talk to each other.

The second year, when I knew I had a book deal with Bloomsbury but was a year away from publication, I stood on the side with Top Cat and listened to a crashing bore [a frizzy-henna-haired old hippie] talk to me about her book, a career guide for visual artists. Well, at least she talked to me.

Last year, my book had been out for a month and had not raced to the top of the best seller list, and I stood on the side lines and talked with a young short story writer about the manuscript she was putting together. She was very sweet and the kind of hip young person who would never have talked to me when I was thirty years younger, so I enjoyed the time/space continuum where part of me was 23 and “cool” for once.

THIS year, my book had just been praised by Nancy Pearl (still feeling migh–tee–fine about that, by the way) so I felt, for the first time in the history of my agent’s Holiday party, like a real writer; I walked right up to people and said “Hi” and introduced myself and got to know several very interesting up-and-coming stars of the literary world. But I still did not have the nerve to talk to Neil deGrasse Tyson.

BUT: while I was standing near the hors d’ouvres table talking to a young writer about our works-in-progress Neil deGrasse Tysonwalked past me and brushed my arm, and I looked at him and smiled “Hi” and he said “Hi”, and got some bruschetta. I think I managed to sound cool and all. Yes, I’m almost sure I sounded  pretty cool.

And oh yes, Patty Smith was there. [Yes, I have the same literary agent as THE Neil deGrasse Tyson and Patty Smith. I can't believe it either.]

I spotted the (Australian) travel writer Tony Perotti and I went over to him and told him how much I like his work and then had him listen to my Australian accent. I’d had two glasses of wine by then, so my Australian accent was working pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. Tony was gracious enough to agree with me.

In conclusion, I had so much fun this year! This was the first time I felt like a writer among writers and, compared to feeling like a doofus among writers, it is THE BEST FEELING ever.

It’s taken me 53 years to feel this way and it almost makes me dizzy. I don’t know how a person in their 20s or 30s can have the same feeling and not have his head explode. I know that if I had had any small measure of this kind of self-esteem in my 20s or 30s, I would have thought I was halucinating.

Next year, I’m going to my agent’s party and I’m going to walk right up to Neil deGrasse Tyson and say something stupid because I’m a fellow writer, dammit.