Painting – Page 5 – Stephanie Sicore

It’s oddly unseasonal.

We have strawberries growing in a pot beside the front door.

Chas has diligently plucked each one before it has blushed. But he missed one. I stole it and now it’s rotting on my studio tabletop. Maybe he’ll find it tomorrow when he raids the studio behind my back. He hasn’t done that in a while and there’s a whole pile of pillageable organized disorder, ripe for rape.

The other day, I found stabs and streaks from a dollmaking needle in a lovely unmarked portion of one of my paintings that I’d set out to cure. Chas was experimenting with intaglio. On top of my painting. So you can imagine my inner conflict, the inner art teacher catfighting the inner artist. Ack! Headache.

Sharing a studio is more intuitive to me than, say, deadbolting the door when I leave the room. I can’t bring myself to exclude them from that space any more than I can keep them out of the kitchen. There are certain illicit corners of the studio (you know, the cadmiums and cobalts, the guerilla art shelf with all the spray paint cans) that they will one day access through rite of passage, but for now are safe beyond reach. But we spend a few minutes each week together, putting things back in their own homes.

Growing up as a parent has helped me to learn to leggo my ego. If you’re a parent, wouldn’t you aggree?

In bed last night, the four of us baking like cornish hens between layers of flannel, we listened with sleepy ears to our quiet neighborhood as it came alive in hoots and hollers. Midnight lasted fifteen minutes, with laughter and cheers, firecrackers and booms resounding through the wooded foothills. But we lay there, in the dark, and I think I was the only one still awake, smirking at the ceiling in the dark. I started thinking about last year, when we were toasting the new year with packed bags, drunk at Polly and Evan’s, shooting bottle rockets in the middle of the road. When you have friends, you have a party. But last night, all of our resolutions to stay up, to record music and toast the new year quietly slipped out the back door. I think our livers are tired; they need a post-holiday holiday now.

I started painting over the break. The electric griddle in the studio is crowded with tin canfuls of colored wax, paintbrushes sprouting upwards like last year’s seedheads, fertile impetus to behold. I love the heady honey smell, the warmth of the medium. I can sit there at my desk, waiting for a painting to cure, and watch Damon through the glass wall as he plays guitar in the living room. He is recording an album of songs. The first thing in the morning, he gives Ford a lesson. Our house is a creative brew these days.

To myself I think, would I feel so fruitful in another life without my family, our children running circles around us? The frenetic spirit the kid’s provide the house weaves like rubber band through the fiber of my being, breaking the casts of old ideals and sprouting hopes that they will grow into creative young men without a clear path before them, save for strong conviction, brave heart and sensitive soul.

And what of resolutions for the new year?
Art, every day.
And this.

Cheers to you and your families, that you may find the time every day to feed your soul. I wish that for everyone, not just this year but forever.

Category: Painting

Strawberries in January

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Cheers!