Jaipur at 3am

Was searching for an earlier draft of my thesis and came across this stash of files in a folder on my desktop, taken exactly two years ago. Suddenly I'm back in Jaipur at 3am on a Monday night in Brooklyn.

I was coming off a staggering month-long gut-rot affliction and probably had Dengue fever, and yet I was more or less happy, energized, motivated, optimistic. I was spending my mornings out in Bagru working on what would –almost two years later– become Block Shop, and my afternoons apprenticing with master painter Ajay Sharma (whose lovely wife's cooking may or may not have been responsible for said gut-rot).







P. and I had both just been accepted to graduate school. We knew how many rupees for a cup of chai, a bag of milk (it comes in little plastic bags! why not!), an auto-rickshaw ride to Anokhi Cafe, a garland of marigolds from the one-legged flowermonger and reigning champion in the women's division of amputee weight lifters in the great state of Rajasthan (I am not making this up).

I was reading Just Kids. We were out of money. We had no idea what was in store for us.







Somehow we've almost made it through two years of this long-distance insanity and I can hardly wait. GRAD SCHOOL. Over in two weeks.

Hope you're having a good week, vixens. For listening: Something Good by Alt J (but don't watch the terrible video! No one needs to see a poor man's Enrique Iglesias as a rose-wielding Tragic Matador!), which reminds me of something I would have listened to on a rainy New England spring day in high school. For reading, James Gleik's Wikipedia's Women Problem in the New York Review of Books. And before you hurl yourself outta window in utter despair, this baby penguin being tickled. 

Old Dogs in Springtime

Because of the manhunt I couldn't get to Boston to see P. on Friday, so I fled New York to the farm to dog-sit for my parents. I've kept it private for the most part, but you might as well know: Mac's back legs started to go soon after we moved back from India, slowly at first, but now he's completely paralyzed from the shoulders back. Mac (also known on this blog as Biscuit) has been my copilot for twelve years. He is my Life Dog. Steadfast and lionhearted, he's defended me from coyotes, rattlesnakes, scorpions, and the vicissitudes of the heart, but late-onset degenerative myelopathy is getting the better of him in his otherwise spry old age back on the farm. (His body is crippled but he's liberated when he dozes; as I write this, his front paws are twitching as he chases something in a dream.)

I spent six hours answering Block Shop emails Sunday afternoon with Mac at my feet, then at five o'clock I poured myself a bourbon, set my jaw, and headed out to the barn. I rifled through the storage and boxes of baling twine in the now-empty hayloft until I found our ancient Radio Flyer, which contained a mouse-nibbled garbage bag labeled "CHILDREN'S SHOES / 4 GOODWILL" in my mother's neat, faded handwriting. There's probably a word in German for the feeling of finding a forgotten bag of one's childhood shoes, but I don't know what it is.





I loaded Mac into the wagon and took him for a walk down to the edge of the woods where rogue daffodils come up every spring. Mac sniffed the breeze perched like a regal Maharajah atop his palanquin while Dolly chased voles and I filled my bucket.

My ninth grade English teacher made us memorize and recite Wordsworth, but I can only ever remember the first two couplets of Daffodils. But sometimes two couplets is plenty, and I recited them for Mackerel as I pulled him up the hill through the boggy spring fields and back to the house.





I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud
(or, Daffodils)

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

–William Wordsworth, 1807

Ecstatic Painting

Smith's Ranch Drive-In

oil on Indian linen, 48 x 72 inches

Electric Lady

oil on Indian linen, 48 x 72 inches

Wonder Valley 

oil on Indian linen, 48 x 72 inches

Cherry Blossoms

oil on Indian linen, 48 x 72 inches

My thesis show is on view at 80WSE Gallery in New York, and the weeping cherry trees outside the gallery window –whose blossoms I planned my Cherry Blossoms painting around– finally bloomed today so now I can tell you to go see the show. You'll get more bang for your buck that way. Two dozen or so paintings, some big enough to fill your field of vision, some small enough to use as a dessert tray, all oil on linen.

Show extended through April 17th. 

80WSE Gallery

80 Washington Square East

New York, New York

Open Tuesday - Saturday, 10-6

P.S. I AM SO EXCITED. THIS IS MY LIFE'S WORK. HERE'S A PRESENT FOR YOU/ PRIMER FOR THE SHOW. 

Adaptation

We went to our dear friends' sweeeeet, sweet wedding in Gainesville, Florida a few weeks ago in a 36-hour break from thesis prep and Block Shop insanity. I bought an electric-blue pin-up bengaline dress on the Bowery on my way from class to the airport, which, as one might imagine, did not particularly compliment the deliciously Southern Gothic, Alachua County vibe, but never mind, the wedding was a ball. 

Before heading home I stuffed my carry-on with foraged epiphytes from the live oak in the hotel parking lot (illegal? probably), which are now hanging all over our nanoscale Brooklyn apartment bathroom like so many Himalayan hairless spiders. P. has some thoughts about this but I'm not going to share them here.

That whole weekend I kept thinking about The Orchid Thief, and, tangentially, how Susan Orlean is really good on Twitter. But I might be biased because a) I love Susan Orlean and b) I have a proclivity for people who Tweet about their chickens. (Related people who are good at things: Chris Cooper as John Laroche in Adaptation. Genius.) 

But back to Florida for a second, and this big f*cking mothership of a staghorn fern, this polypod Death Star I found in the swamp:

Sometimes nature is such a crackerjack I think I can't make art any more, because you try making a painting better than that staghorn fern. If nature is queen, art is her jester. 

On the flight back to JFK I finished the best novel I've read in 2013: Mat Johnson's hilarious, ingenious Pym. Featuring Edgar Alan Poe, an unpublished slave narrative, an all-black expedition to Antarctica, yetis fighting over Little Debbie® snack cakes, and a repositioning of African-American literature in the context of climate change and the paintings of Thomas Kinkade™. HOW CAN YOU RESIST. 

Ok, that is not all, but it's all for now. Have a great weekend. 

xo 

Block Shop Now Taking Pre-Orders

Bloggeurs! We're back in biznaz! Block Shop pre-orders for April 1st shipment are now available online:

blockshoptextiles.com

FINALLY! What took so long, right? I'll tell you: all our scarves are hand-printed one at a time with hand-carved wooden blocks (as opposed to screen printing). Our process is incredibly involved and production is dependent on weather and materials, and, of course, unforeseeable events that make India so blessedly thrilling and frustrating; an anti-corruption protest in Jaipur might cripple highway travel for a few days, or a Hindu wedding might halt printing for a week. You just never know, and (as anyone doing business in India will tell you) it's challenging to plan for You Just Never Know.

Because we sold out of our entire inventory in less than a week when we first launched in December and demand remained high, Hopie and I thought it better to hold out on pre-orders until we developed a solid, sustainable business plan with our printers. The challenge was to scale up production while maintaining the integrity of our product, and that, my friends, is what we've done.  Both Hopie and I and our team in Bagru are thrilled about our plan moving forward, and that means more scarves for *ewe.* 

What we're most excited about: starting today, for every scarf Block Shop sells, we'll donate $2 to the Bagru community fund to get a mobile eye care clinic to come to the village. Lack of basic corrective eye care is one of the most fundamental health care problems in the community, and Vijendra came up with the idea immediately when we proposed a social project. We can't wait to visit in May and get things rolling!

Thank you for all your support. So many of you have helped spread the word –our Instagram hashtag #blockshoptextiles shows you wearing our scarves all over the world– and this week Daily Candy opened the floodgates (after some love from Tomboy Style, Miss Moss, Designlovefest, City Sage, Design Crush, and others) and we are just blown away by the response. THANK YOU! In gratitude I give you this regal Bagru cow wearing a necklace. She says NAMASTAAAAY. 

So, spring pre-orders, here. Have a marvelous week!

Show in New York

My show at 80WSE Gallery on Washington Square East (in New York) is up for one more day. If you're in the Village swing on by! My great-grandmother, Helen Park Stockman, is finally getting her due a century later. GO GRANNY, GO! My essay and more details below.






ULTRAVIOLET 1913-2013: HELEN STOCKMAN AND LILY STOCKMAN

Helen Park Stockman (1894-1985) was a New York painter and member of Robert Henri’s core group of pupils at the Art Students League in the late nineteen-teens and early twenties. Her male mentors, friends, and peers –George Bellows, Stuart Davis, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Edward Hopper, Arthur Dove– would go on to become the standard-bearers for early American modernist painting.

While inspired by the watershed 1913 Armory Show and ensconced in the camaraderie of Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery, Stockman viewed the bombast of the European vanguard as ancillary to the distinct cultural identity of New York. Washington Square Gallery founder Robert J. Coady articulated this shift in 1916: what these New York painters were after was “not an illustration to a theory” but “an expression of a life, a complicated life– American life.”

Stockman drew from the surrounding industrial landscape to plumb the complexities behind the glimmer of 1920s New York. Such was Stockman’s painterly agenda and existential paradox: “modernism” for her was freedom and individualism (women’s suffrage had just been passed as the Nineteenth Amendment) mirrored against a plane of anxiety about the future (she painted View of Hoboken in the years between the World Wars).

Before coming to NYU’s MFA program in studio art, her great-granddaughter, Lily Stockman, apprenticed in Buddhist thangka painting in Mongolia and Mughal miniature painting in India. These experiences provide the scaffolding for her own ideas about the physical process of painting, our relationship to influence, and our debt to –and freedom from– art history.

The taxonomic name for purple passion vine, Gynura aurantiaca, comes from the Greek gyne, female, and oura, tail. The more intense its exposure to sunlight, the more vibrant its purple hairs; given the right conditions the gynura will intensify in color over time.

ULTRAVIOLET 1913-2013 is timed to coincide with the centennial anniversary of the 1913 Armory Show and the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This marks Helen Stockman's first New York show since she exhibited at Babcock Gallery in 1926.

80WSE Gallery
February 26 – March 5, 2013 
80 Washington Square East  New York, New York 10003

Hazelnut Pollen for Midwinter Malaise

Pictures from our anual trip to Franconia, New Hampshire, just after Christmas. Suddenly I find myself slunk dark and deep (to borrow words from part-time Franconian, full-time depressive Robert Frost) into that cheerless corner of the calendrical doldrums: the third week of February.

But have no fear, internets! New York institutions seem to roll out the jocular art this time of year to keep the old chin up:

Wolfgang Laib's hazelnut pollen piece at MoMA
Dieter Roth's chocolate factory at Hauser + Wirth
Giorgio Griffa's nonchalant unstretched linen paintings at Casey Kaplan

Also? I have a small solo show opening this week and my thesis show opens in six weeks. And we're relaunching Block Shop with new inventory, like, any MOMENT. Hence the especially quiet blog these days- more Vietnam posts to come when I can manage. Thanks for sticking with me and have a marvelous weekend!