five minutes to five

His name was Bill. He was the second old man to approach me today. The first told me my pants remind him of a hot rod, so, when Bill approached, my defenses were up. He wore a baggy sweatshirt and a ballcap; he carried a cane. There was a tentativeness in his gait that made me understand the depth of his sincerity. I overheard the young woman at the counter tell him, no, we don't carry domestic beer, a subtle lilt of judgement or dismissiveness in her undertone. Alright, then I'll have a pale ale he says, and shudders a little when she tells him it'll be four dollars. He digs through his pocket, hands her a bill, and carefully refolds the change with trembling hands and tucks it back in his pocket.

His nose is purple; his hair is a subtly greasy white, his wrists are papery and bruised, his eyes far away and sad. He's come for the VA, he tells me—after asking me to move my purse and taking the seat next to me—but he got here too late, and now it's closed until Monday. He'll have to stay in a hotel all weekend. He had a heart attack on Wednesday, he says, and then they found a spot on his lung. His wife died recently, he tells me, and now he's sick too, a far-off sort of floundering in his eyes. He coughs; it is the quietest, deepest cough I have ever heard. It is like ice breaking a hundred miles beneath the surface of the earth.

I ask when his wife died. January twenty-second, he tells me, five minutes to five. For a moment his eye contact is piercing, but then he looks away; I get the sense that I couldn't reach him if I tried. He looks as if he is drowning. Slowly. He is drowning and he is not fighting it. He says something incomplete about not knowing what to do with his days, about spending too much money. All I can do is listen, offer my attention. I offer to look up directions to his hotel; I lecture him good-naturedly about allowing his worried son to take care of him. Allow him this, I say, It is his turn. He tells me he is 72. He talks of driving trucks all across the country. He does not get too deep—not beyond his five minutes to five. Of course, I can't really imagine anything deeper. He was between busses, he tells me, when he collapsed, on Wednesday, and woke up in the hospital. A heart attack. And then they found a spot on my lung, he tells me quietly, repeating his story. He is making it true, or untrue, scrambling to find the truth in it, grappling to take ownership of this, his story. I see it in his face, the struggle to make it his own, the distance from this new truth, from everything that's happened since five minutes to five on January twenty-second.

Official business

My art blog has taken a little trip and moved itself over here.  (http://shelleychamberlinblog.blogspot.com/)

Join me.

Printmaking with Portland Cocktail Week

Last month I had the privilege and pleasure of leading a t-shirt printing event for Portland Cocktail Week. Bartenders + ink + stencils + t-shirts = fun!

Today I woke up with that small sour lump lodged between my throat and my sinuses. After a brief foray out into the world to meet a friend and his lovely new lady, I retired to my apartment to hunker down and hibernate. But when my dinner plans fell through and all I wanted was chicken soup and ginger lemon tea, I donned my rubber boots, my goretex jacket, and my newly made fleece armwarmers, and rode my bike through the downpour to the grocery store.

Outside, the leaves glowed yellow and crimson under the looming grey sky, and squirrels darted back and forth across the slick streets gathering nuts. That's actually what brought me here today, the sentence assembling itself in my mind as I rode, the chuckle. I've gathered just about enough nuts, myself. Don't need anymore of those, thank you. Wishing as I pedaled, that it was spring, that it was time for planting, that the wild sloppy summer was splayed out in front of me. Wondering what, exactly, I have to harvest this season—everything I planted seemingly razed to the ground. But I thought of those squirrels, scurrying up trees, gathering nuts and seeds, tucking them away; this isn't exactly their harvest either. They've planted trees over the years, but not these ones. And that offered some solace, a flash of new perspective. I've been planting seeds all of my life. I can take my harvest from anywhere that has borne fruit; it doesn't have to be the new growth planted last spring. I don't have to have planted it at all.

The metaphor made my breath expand in the rain, and made my afternoon seem a little bit softer. So I brought home my goods from the store, and made soup in the glowing yellow light of my kitchen, curled up on my couch with my cup of tea, and listened with gratitude to the wind and rain outside my window, the soup bubbling on the stove.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

There have been some major life changes in the last couple of months. Some good, some hard. No, scratch that... All good. All hard. My feet aren't exactly on the ground again yet, but I've been feeling alive in a way I haven't in a while. It feels strange and brave to talk about this here, but it's what/who I am, right? Isn't that what it is to be an artist? Raw-edged. At least the kind of artist I am, the kind I want to be. I've spent the last few years pursuing the particular vein of making public space for the private and intimate.

It makes me think of my first or second term of grad school, of a man who didn't stay with us in the program for long, but he made an impression. He was a little more than most of us could handle, but he would raise his hand in discussions, and count off on his fingers: raw, naked, vulnerable and lost. This is how he felt, where he was, what his world meant to him at the time. He was an aging surfer, a lawyer, a man whose life had veered from the path he had anticipated, and he was trying to make sense of new terrain.

These things aren't exactly true for me. I don't feel lost. If anything, I feel suddenly, joltingly found. But, new terrain, that's the case, to be sure, and to be an artist, there is always a fair amount of that grappling. There has to be.

I've been waking up in the middle of the night with ideas... feelings and ideas, and today, finally, I gave myself to the studio, to the press, to color and shape, to the particular kind of motion of hours passing while I work. I spent the afternoon with ink on my hands and I feel it all in me again. I feel that river coursing again. I feel like myself. I feel myself, and one notch deeper. I'm excited about this new terrain.

I made monotypes and played with layering color, neither of which I've explored much in a long time.

And here's little a peek at a few of the pieces I was working on.

on the wing of a bird

I've been in the studio again the last few days, practicing making things from the remnants of what's been broken. I am gearing up for a new body of work that is eliciting that tingling feeling in my fingertips, the one that makes everything feel brighter and better... and, you know, possible. I have an installation/performance in the works for next year that's rapidly tumbling and growing into an event I'm pretty damn excited about. There will be more details to come, but in the meantime, here is a detail of the wing of a bird in flight painstakingly constructed from shards of things that were once whole, things I have loved, believed, things that had to be broken in order to take flight:

Nourishment

The haze of the holidays is finally lifting, and today there was a small peak of sun. My mind has been filled, mostly, with the personal and mundane: shifting objects and patterns to make space in this home for another person, making meals, hibernating, gestating art ideas, feeling the rumblings of spring's imminence. I've spent some time out shooting with my new camera, and making things from what I find. Always. There is always that. The what do I make of it in my life. That's been focused on film for a time, and, suddenly, food.

I have become obsessed with food. Where art blogs once sat, food blogs. Afternoons in the studio have become afternoons in the kitchen. Maybe it's the comfy feeling of sharing my home with the man I love; maybe it's the hibernation of winter, but maybe there is something else here too. Nourishment. It's a word that has flashed across the screen more than once over recent years. What do we do to nourish ourselves, each other? What feeds us?

For the first few weeks of this month we did a bit of a cleanse, and every time I drank a jewel-colored glass of carrot ginger beet parsley juice (or whatever the combo of the day), I felt it. I felt a tingling rush into my body of nourishment. I feel it too in conversations with good friends with whom deep and true understanding is shared. I feel it when I witness someone in power speaking the truth, or when I see someone without power respected, honored. It's not as present as it ought to be in our world. And I know that I'm one of the lucky ones. It is, in fact, a palpable presence in my world. Wholesome food, love, connection, kinship... what nourishes you?