Living Out Loud

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, I will answer you: I am here to live out loud.” - Émile Zola

About 10 years ago, when I worked at a bookstore in Newport Beach, California, often spending my paycheck before I left work, I picked up a little blue book called "2,001 Things to Do Before You Die," (apparently, it's not in print anymore, but you can get it used at Amazon.com with a different cover that I like a lot). I used to buy a lot of random books like that. Come to think of it, I still do.

The remarkable thing about this book was how many things I checked off right away ... things I had forgotten I had ever done... other things that were among my favorite memories... some very specific things like this one:

* Drink mulled wine on a snowy night in Prague.

I was oh-so-excited to be able to check that off the day I bought the book. And I still remember that night; I was wandering with friends through the Christmas Market in Old Town Square, sipping mulled wine. The booths were lit up with strings of colored lights and there were just a few snowflakes fluttering through the air. Magical.

And then I guess I forgot to keep checking things off. Today, Kim Kotecki's post about life lists at her blog Swingset Reflections reminded me of this book and I just pulled it off the shelf. I haven't looked at it in a long time.

First we'll start with the things I probably won't ever do:

* Swallow a goldfish
* Throw my panties at Tom Jones
* Ride a boxcar for a couple of days
* Grow a beard
* Shave off my beard
* Quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys (I don't think my husband would ever speak to me again)
* Be a Dallas Cowboy's cheerleader (He might speak to me again if I did this, but it would take a while)
* Tear a phone book in half with your bare hands
* Ride a motorcycle south on U.S. 1 in California (North, sure. South, no.)
* Eat pufferfish sushi (I did read a great line about this in an old Nat Geo, though: One man's poisson is another man's poison.)
* Be Woody Allen's therapist


Things I've done:

* Drink the milk from a coconut with a straw (at Angkor Wat on the hottest day ever).
* Shake hands with someone famous.
* Decoupage a table
* Learn French, German or Swahili (interesting choices).
* Travel Route 66
* Parasail
* Savor moonshine
* Pretend you don't speak English (this is always fun).
* Wear a feather boa to work
* Travel alone
* Love a teddy bear
* Have delusions of grandeur
* Play croquet
* Attend the Olympics (1984 equestrian events. They were very low-key. We brought our own lawn chairs. I don't think we even had tickets)
* Ride Space Mountain
* Learn to say the alphabet backward
* Watch a baby being born
* Kiss the Blarney Stone
* Predict a trend
* Squeeze a glass of fresh orange juice


Things I would love do to:

* Teach English as a Second Language
* Run a used bookstore
* Attend the seventh game of the World Series
* Learn to sew
* Hot-air balloon over a desert
* Learn to sail
* Drive a Maserati
* Swim in each of the Seven Seas (I guess I've got to choose from the following nine:

• Adriatic Sea
• Aegean Sea
• Arabian Sea
• Black Sea
• Caspian Sea
• Indian Ocean
• Mediterranean Sea
• Persian Gulf
• Red Sea

So far, I've managed the Mediterranean, in Nice. It was lovely, once I worked my way out past the hordes of people. I remember the water being very sea green. )

* Build a tree house
* Unicycle
* Stomp grapes in Tuscany
* Finish your dissertation (after I start one, of course)
* Ride a gondola in Venice
* Sing and dance with gypsies
* Memorize "Who's on First?" (if you scroll all the way down, you can hear an audio version)
* Research your family tree

And the funniest thing in the whole book?

* Cornrow your Westie

Now I think I'll get around to actually making my own "life list." I've made many lists before, but never quite a comprehensive one.

What would be on your list?

"LIfe is either a daring adventure or it is nothing" -- Helen Keller

What an honor...

It is so way past my bedtime, but I'm procrastinating, of course, and I just discovered that one of my maps was chosen for a Treasury list on Etsy:

"Map Your Journey"

How cool is THAT?! Yeah, now I'm a little too excited to go to sleep, so back to procrastinating it is.

(Incidentally, a number of those prints I promised are now available at my shop, along with a few new original maps and related watercolors. Take a look and let me know what you think!)

My Work at the Red Queen Gallery

I am delighted to announce that a number of my maps -- both treasure maps and maps of fairy land -- will soon be available at the Red Queen Gallery in the delightful town of Onancock, Virginia, just off Route 13.

(The photographs are my own, taken late at night before I took them up to Onancock; the paintings look oh-so-much-more-lovely in person, I swear, swear, swear!)

8" x 10" maps (11" x 14" frames)

Trove Island

Kingdom of Delight

Island of the Yellow Dragon


5" x 7" paintings (8" x 10" frames)

Island of Intrigue

Schooner #1

Kingdom of Mirth




High Winds Island

4" x 6" paintings (5" x 7" frames)

Three Rocks Island

Sea Monster Breath

Four Trees Island

It was hard to say good-bye to these maps -- I feel so close to them -- but I wish them well on their journeys to new and exciting lands.

I also plan to make prints of these paintings available at my Etsy shop very, very soon.

Off With Your Heads!

Not really, I promise.

But I did promise exciting art news today...

... and I am overjoyed to announce that I took ten paintings to the Red Queen Gallery in Onancock, Virginia yesterday. What a perfect place for them to embark on their new adventure... particularly considering that my classmates started calling me Alison Wonderland in first grade, and I had quite a fun romp as the Queen of Hearts one Halloween in Prague (ah, but I digress. That's another story)... and Onancock, pronounced on-NAN-cock, is a quirky and charming town just off Route 13, frequented by sailors arriving via the Chesapeake Bay. If you're driving along the Eastern Shore, do stop by and visit the town; you won't regret it.

Here is the lot of them, waiting to head off to new lands. I will miss them - we've become so close in our time together - but I wish them all the best on their journey and hope they each find a wonderful new home. You can see the individual paintings at my RadioGirl Designs blog, here. And I will be offering prints of these paintings on Etsy very, very soon. Please stop by for a visit in the coming weeks!

For Your Visual Pleasure

I'm bleeding (that's not the visual pleasure part) and one can neither paint nor mat paintings when bleeding. It's no big deal, really, just the glass equivalent of a paper cut, but it's on my right thumb, and while I can type while bleeding and holding a paper towel to my right thumb (talent, yes, I know), I can do little else.

So I've assembled a short photographic jaunt for you to enjoy. Have a lovely weekend, all; I'll be back next week with some exciting art news.

(Please note, some of these photos were shot with a digital camera, others with a 35mm Pentax K1000 that had an embarrassingly dusty lens, and I haven't got the time to clean them up in Photoshop, so forgive me.)

If you're driving through Winslow, Arizona, isn't it a requirement to get out and stand on a corner, even if you're not looking for any girls in flatbed Fords? For that matter, I didn't see any Fords in Winslow. Only Chevys. Odd, that.

Rancho San Rafel, a beautiful park in Reno, Nevada. If you ever visit, stop at the Wilbur D. May Museum. They have a shrunken head. Wilbur D. May was one of those pith-helmet-wearing safari-hunting explorers, and in the museum created from his possessions, yes, you read correctly, there is a shrunken head. Worth seeing.

This is the landscape of my childhood (well, from 9 to 18). I like cities, some of them quite a bit, but I carry this wide open space with me. Unfortunately, it's getting ever more crowded, but such is the way of the world.

These are the sunsets I grew up with. I think I took this picture way back then, too.

This is near Graeagle, California, which I had to look up to make sure I was spelling it correctly. Of all the photographs I have ever taken, this is my favorite. It's on some things in my CafePress shop, so if you like it, check out the shop.

This is for you, Catharina! I went on a trip to Salzburg, Austria, with my class while I was an exchange student in Germany. This photo stands out for me, because I still remember, 16 years later, that at the exact second I pushed the shutter, bells started ringing all around me. Beatiful, melodious bells.

Close to Home

Keep your fingers crossed for the people who live at my favorite place on earth. My thoughts are with those who have lost their homes or who might and the firefighters; may everyone stay safe.

Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe, October 2001

I Dream in Ink

What is the world coming to? First I steal my own posts; now I'm stealing back my comments. But iHanna had an thought-provoking post on journal-keeping, and I wrote a long comment, and I have the pictures to go with it already, and voila! A blog post!

This is a composite photo of the shelf on which I kept my journals before the renovations. Now, unfortunately, I've had to pack them away to make room for art supplies, but someday I hope to bring them out again. They are my life, literally, on paper, and therefore, deserve a little place of honor, I think.

I’ve kept a journal since I was seven -- the first one was a Nancy Drew diary complete with lock and about three one-sentence entries. (One of those entries is about going to see Return of the Jedi with my dad. I was very excited. I wrote two sentences.). You can see that journal on the right, the thick ivory-ish book seventh down in the stack. I never throw my journals away. My biographers might need them. Or the great-grandchildren, anyway.

I've had tiny journals and huge journals (see the one on the far left?), fuzzy journals and leather journals, spiral bound and other-bound. Most of the journals from my teenage years are pink. The fourth (black with white polka dots) and seventh (blue shiny) journals from the left are the two I kept as an exchange student in Germany. That's when I started buying journals with cool designs and interesting textures. That's about when I started calling them journals instead of diaries, too. In college, I bought the funkiest journals I could find. On my road trip in 2002, I stopped in Oxford, Mississippi and bought a plain red journal with a magnetic closure, at Square Books. I think it cost $12. I filled that journal in four weeks. And I liked that journal so much that I detoured through Oxford again on the way back to the East Coast so I could go buy another one. I'm not kidding. In Philadelphia, I started looking for journals I could keep in my purse, journals that could take a lot of abuse. That's how I eventually started using Moleskines (well, okay, so, I read that Neil Gaiman uses them and that prompted me to try one). Moleskines, as journals go, are almost boring, but oh-so-sturdy and practical, and there is also something indefinably magical about them, which may be why they have such loyal fans. They feel like a writer's journal. As opposed to what, I don't know. Because they feel like artist's journals, too.

I am not sure I can even articulate what keeping a journal means to me, or how it's changed me, because it’s been such an integral part of my life. But I can tell you that when I don’t write in a journal regularly (and I’ve occasionally gone up to six months), I start to feel quite fragmented. I try hard to write morning pages, although often, it's only morning in Hawaii by the time I get around to it. I understand my own feelings better if I write them down. In fact, I often don't even know how I feel about things until I write in my journal. Writing is how I process my life, in the way they say dreaming is our mind's way of processing. My journals are dreamlike -- they ramble, they float, they can be surreal, and often, they probably would make no sense to anyone but me. But I don't know. I don't let anyone read my journals. If I did, I wouldn't write the way I do and they wouldn't work anymore.

See, my minute-to-minute thoughts are very analytical, very curious, very problem-solving, and rarely directed inward. I’m a textbook INTJ, if that helps explain. I'm one of those people who’s constantly asking “Why?” and "How?" and "What?" like a little child… why is the sky blue… why is the bridge built like that... what is electricity (I made my husband explain that one in great detail)... how does the economy work... I usually have three or four tracks of thought going at the same time, most of which have nothing to do with me or my life. (Which explains the vacant stare so often seen on my face. I'm probably thinking about agriculture in Antarctica.)

My journal writing, on the other hand, is almost pure emotion. I do sometimes actually use them to keep track the events that have happened in my life...

... or in the world around me...

....or just as catch-all scrapbooks, when I didn't have the time or interest in keeping up a big scrapbook...

... or even approximate Latin translations of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." But they are usually, long, rambling explorations of my feelings, sometimes venting, sometimes exulting, sometimes pondering. Because I already know what happened, you see. So my journal is where I get in touch with myself. Sounds so cliched, but it's what I do. In fact, the emotions in the words are often so intense that, ten years later, I can step right back into events I forgot ever happened.

So you see what keeping a journal means to me. My journals are my life.

(Incidentally, I know these photos are all from my college journals, and I have no idea why that's all I shot, but like I said, the rest are in the attic now, so that's all I've got except for these.)