Speechless

"A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used ...

 Powerlessness and silence go together.”

-- Margaret Atwood,

Second Words: Selected Critical Prose

Self portrait 6-7-13

“Each of us has one. 

Each voice is distinct and has something to say. 

Each voice deserves to be heard.”

-- Terry Tempest Williams

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice 

Self portrait 6-7-13

  

 “It's easier not to say anything. 

Shut your trap, button your lip, can it. 

All that crap you hear on TV
about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. 

Nobody really wants to hear
what you have to say.”

-- Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

Night comes creeping

“Fading light means more than just the end of another day. 

Night is when terrible things emerge from their sleep and seek soft flesh and hot blood.”

-- Jim Butcher, Turn Coat 

 

Self portrait with spider 6-6-13

“The thought burrowed into her heart as darkness fell. 

It coiled in her guts as she wedged herself amongst the boughs of a tree to sleep.

And in the morning, it woke with her and clung to her back,

riding on her shoulders as she climbed down, hungry and exhausted from nightmares."

-- Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities

 

 

Self portrait with spider (2) 6-6-13

“You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. 

I wove my webs for you because I liked you. 

After all, what's a life, anyway? 

We're born, we live a little while, we die. 

A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. 

By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle.

Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.” 

-- E. B. White, Charlotte's Web  

Get it together

“I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held. 

Trying to control what cannot be controlled. 

I am tired of denying myself what I want for fear of breaking things I cannot fix. 

They will break no matter what we do.” 

-- Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

Self portrait 6-5-13

“And oh she had been broken. 

She hid it well, but Ross knew from personal experience 

that once you had put the pieces together, even though you might look intact, 

you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.”

-- Jodi Picoult, Second Glance 

“Something has got to hold it together. 

I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue.” 

-- Tom Robbins

Everything goes

 “Following all the rules leaves a completed checklist.
Following your heart achieves a completed you.”

-- Ray Davis

Self portrait (scanner image) 6-4-13

"What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart?

 Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly? 

I hope it sees clearly because I can't any longer see into myself. 

 I see only murk."

-- Fred [voiceover], A Scanner Darkly

Self portrait 2 (scanner image) 6-4-13

 

Truth is, I can get a little bit rule-happy. 

Not so much with other people, but definitely with myself.

I like to (well, I don't know if I like to, but I seem to have a persistent compulsion to) create self-imposed structures and guidelines and boundaries and requirements for myself so that I can (I think) manufacture my own sense of accomplishment, and self-worth, and good-ness. 

I tend to pile up my rules (which change arbitrarily according to my whims, which doesn't make them very good rules) like a fortress of sand bags that I stack higher and higher as a break-wall along my shoreline, as a defense against erosion from the onslaught of  crashing waves, so that I don't crumble into the sea.

As long as I stick to my rules, I can make myself feel good-ish. Better, anyway, than when I don't stick to them. Breaking my own rules makes me feel like I failed myself. Like I've let myself down.

And yet ...

As much as I thrive on (who am I kidding, I barely survive on them) rules of my own making, I seem to also understand deep down that sometimes it is OK to stop frantically stacking the sandbags. Sometimes it is OK to look up, and out, to notice the view, to appreciate the sea because of its persistent beauty rather than fearing it because of its potential danger.

Except for the overriding rule that I must post a face a day, this blog is pretty much a rules-free zone.

Even though this is mostly a photography project, and even though most of the images I post are photographs, they don't have to be. Not technically.

There are no rules on what I can or can't use to make faces for this blog.

Anything goes.

Hell. Everything goes.

So today I gave my camera a day off and spent a morning shoving my head under the scanner lid.

Who says taking a photo requires a camera?
Who says a camera requires a lens?
Who says you can't face plant on the smooth cool glass of an office machine and let the blindingly bright light wand inch back and forth, search your face and render its ghostly image?

It felt a little bit like breaking the rules.
And it felt pretty good.

Gettin' my glow on

“Whatever you are physically...male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy --

all those things matter less than what your heart contains. 

If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior. 

All those other things, they are the glass that contains the lamp, but you are the light inside.”

-- Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

 

Self portrait 6-3-13

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. 

No matter how fast light travels, 

it finds the darkness has always got there first, 

and is waiting for it.”

-- Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man  

“But you can't stay in the dark for so long. 

Something inside of you starts to fade 

and you become like a starving person, crazy-hungry for light.”

-- Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

Runaway

“Will you teach me how to paint?”
“Just paint.”
“I’m not any good.”
“Do it for therapy. You can go to art school later.” 

--Benjamin Alire Saenz,  
Last Night I Sang to the Monster

 

Hypnos (or Sleep) 6-2-13

"Every portrait that is painted with feeling
is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."

-- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.”

-- Albert Camus

When I was a kid and I was having a difficult day, I'd put Neil Diamond's "12 Greatest Hits" album on my sky-blue flip-top portable record player, sit on the floor in my bedroom and draw.

Mostly I drew faces. I copied the album cover portrait of Neil Diamond -- the fluffy long hair one of him in the suede jacket and the chest hair-revealing unbuttoned white shirt with the gi-normous lapels.

This one.

I knew all of the words to all 12 of the songs: Sweet Caroline, Brother Loves Traveling Salvation Show, Shiloh, Holly Holy, Brooklyn Roads, Cracklin' Rosie, Play Me, Done Too Soon, Stones, Song Sung Blue, Soolaimon, I Am ... I Said.

Aw geez.

I forgot all about "I Am ... I Said."

I am, I said
To no one there
And no one heard at all
Not even the chair
I am, I cried
I am, said I
And I am lost, and I can't even say why
Leavin' me lonely still

It was a kind of sacred space there on the floor of my room with my back against my bed and my feet against the wall, drawing pad balanced across my knees, door closed, music on ... I could just check out for a while until I felt better.

Making art still serves that function for me. Although my current musical obsession is the movie soundtrack from The Great Gatsby, I still have a sacred space I can escape to, a room that is filled with materials and media to busy my hands and my heart while diverting my mind. It's like escaping without having to go anywhere.

Like Twyla Tharp famously said, "Art is the only way to run away without leaving home."   

So, today's face.

With sincerest apologies and respect to all of the real painters out there ...
Please  pardon me for trespassing and leaving my sloppy fingerprints all over your territory.

True confession: I am not a painter. I am a hack and I know it.
Even though I have painted pictures my whole life long, I never learned to paint. 

Never learned how to do it right, anyway.
Nevertheless, I do like to play with the medium sometimes.

I do it in secret and don't show my paintings to anybody. 

Drawings? Sometimes.
Paintings? Never.

Usually everything I paint ends up in the trash can rather than on the wall. 

But since this is the only face I made today -- and since this project is about the process and not the final product -- I am putting on my big-girl panties and sharing it.

And in the spirit of full disclosure and true confessions ... I finger-painted it.
No actual paintbrushes were harmed in the rendering of this portrait. Just a couple of pencils, my bare hands and a few squirts of acrylic paint.

I don't really consider this portrait of Hypnos/Somnus (the Greek/Roman god of sleep) a painting ... it is more of a sketch, really. A sketch rendered in paint. Can that be a thing? It began as a frustrated pencil drawing, and just as I was about to crumple it up I decided to paint over it instead and this is what I got.

I can't say I love this piece, but I made it, and making it helped me to make it through a difficult day.

I have to admit, it was pretty darned therapeutic.
Messy, but therapeutic.

But then again, the best therapy usually is the messiest therapy, isn't it? 

Naked Barbies in mustaches!

“Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. 

In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, 

and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, 

while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.” 

-- Virginia Woolf

Naked Barbies in mustaches 6-1-13

“I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man. 

I've just done what I damn well wanted to, and I've made enough money to support myself, 

and ain't afraid of being alone.” 

-- Katharine Hepburn 

"The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood 

that she must become something other than herself, 

deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others.”

-- Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions 

In today's edition of Helpful Advice from an Exhausted Insomniac's Addled, Sleep-Deprived Brain ...

Sometimes you've gotta do what you've gotta do just to keep breathing.

If gluing silicone mustaches on naked thrift store Barbies helps to get you through a day without totally losing your shit, then for fuck's sake, please glue silicone mustaches on naked thrift store Barbies.

Because the way I see it, gluing silicone mustaches on naked thrift store Barbies doesn't hurt anybody. It might keep you from hurting yourself. And it's fun for the Barbies!

Here at A Face A Day, that's what we call a "win-win-win".

So if you feel like you might be about to lose your shit, STOP!
Be a win-win-winner, like me, and glue silicone mustaches on naked thrift store Barbies instead!

Next time on Helpful Advice from an Exhausted Insomniac's Addled, Sleep-Deprived Brain, I'll discuss some burning insomniac questions, like "Who the fuck is going to eat all of these cookies?" and "3 a.m. Dilemma: Ironing or pumping iron?"