ms. klein hears the mermaids singing
There’s a big blank wall in my bedroom that needs a large thing to occupy it. I tend toward the many-small-things school of decorating, but I’d been thinking about getting all Trading Spaces by creating my own art for said wall. TS usually encourages Mode
But I’m kind of a Grandma Moses—good with tiny little people, not so good with perspective. I figure that I will challenge myself this time by painting one giant fish-person rather than a bunch of little people-people. Because artists have to grow, you know?
Two things this weekend have motivated me to (possibly) take this past the idea stage. On Saturday, I attended AK’s friend’s housewarming party, in which she (AK’s friend) invited everyone to create art for her new walls, as well as anything else they wanted to assemble from her arsenal of paint, canvases, stamps, ya
While I painted a small, respectable picture of a strawberry, as soon as I branched out into 3-D territory, the sucking began. I always think I should be good at crafts because 1) I like to draw and paint and don’t suck too much at it; 2) I’m sort of a girly girl; and 3) I’m a dyke. Shouldn’t that mean I’m able to make a candelabra out of spare bicycle parts?
But no, apparently all I’m able to make is a really ugly vase out of an ice tea bottle, raffle tickets and pink glittery nail polish.
So it’s back to the drawing board, literally, which is a place I’m quite happy to be, especially because I just finished reading Alison Bechdel’s beautiful, eloquent, detailed graphic memoir, Fun Home. The book looks at her gay father’s suicide through a number of different literary, historical and personal lenses, from the Icarus myth to Joyce’s Ulysses to Alison’s own coming-out story.
She briefly covers her bout with OCD, and there’s a bit of an OCD quality to the memoir as she goes over and over the same narrative in hopes of finding the perfect frame for a picture that’s too terrible and too incomprehensible to look at. She even repeats key frames on the page, such as the one where she’s lying on the floor of her college dorm, listening to her mother tell her that her father slept with men. The lead-up and the frames that follow are different in each chapter, a sort of tragicomic book Run Lola Run where the ending is always despairingly the same.
One fun part of reading Fun Home was that AK read it too. Whereas it took me a week, she read it in a mo
Comments
I was like a 6-year-old at the beach the other day when I demanded of Lee-Roy, "sketch me as a mermaid!" I'll have to put his sketch on MR.