And A Merry Fucking Christmas To You, Too!

Same shit, different holiday

By DEB SAINE

Dec. 23, 2018

im2insaine@mac.com

The mailman left a small package sitting on my front porch yesterday, the handwriting on the address label as familiar to me as my own.

But instead of feeling excitement, I felt dread. And instead of thinking, "Oh, I can't wait to see what it is," I wondered if I should bother opening it or simply toss it into the trash and be done with it. It's a familiar game I play of "to open or not to open" similar to plucking flower petals and asking if, "she loves me, she loves me not."

Rarely — if ever — does anything I receive in the mail from the sibling bring a smile to my face. His dispatches tend to be more like a gut punch or a face slap. In the past, depending on my mood, I've either immediately scrawled the edict, "Return to Sender" on the front of the toxic envelope and included a big, black arrow pointing to the sender's address and left it for the mailman to take it away or taken the unopened correspondence and tossed it directly into a trash can without giving it a second thought.

Unfortunately, curiosity sometimes gets the better of me and yesterday was one of those. I decided to go with the "open" option. After I saw what was inside the package, I gave myself a mental swift kick in the ass followed by a stern talking to that included a loud "told you so!" and a repetition of this quote of Maya Angelou's: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time!"

And believe me, I know all too well what kind of sibling my older - and only - brother has been for the entirety of my life. After his 70th birthday came and went this past July, I, at the age of 58, officially ended my decades-old quest of winning him over. I accepted once and for all that he isn't worth my time primarily because I've never been worthy of his.

I knew right away what his "gift" was which wasn't a gift from him at all. It had been gifted to him by the same person who'd already given me a similar gift the night before.

Several months ago, the house where I'd grown up was destroyed in a fire. I hadn't been inside since the day Mom and I moved out and into an apartment. I was 12 and my parents had divorced. The sibling, who hadn't lived full-time at that house for several years, had gotten married the previous fall and moved out of state with his bride.

So the house my father had built was sold and went on to be owned by a number of different families over the years and its exterior changed to reflect the tastes of its various inhabitants. When the house burned, it was occupied by the mother-in-law of a former high school class- and teammate who has remained a friend through the years.

She thought it would be nice for the sibling and I to each have something from our former house that was no more. She had retrieved pieces of wood from the burned-out structure and had them made into picture frames. The framed photograph she gave to me was a black-and-white taken of Mom and me standing on the front porch. I was probably 8 or 9 and wearing a straw hat that Huckleberry Finn would have coveted.

The photograph she had chosen to give the sibling was a colored one snapped during a long-ago Christmas when I was around 3 or 4 and he was 14 or 15. We were both laying on our stomachs, elbows propped up and chin in our hands, underneath a tree filled with ornaments, big colored lights and icicles, lots and lots of icicles. That very photograph has been on display for years in a frame placed on a living room bookshelf that holds all my Christmas-themed books. It's always represented a bittersweet memory.

And now, I have two of those photographs, one framed in green plastic and the other in wood from the house that is no more.

Of course, because my delusional sibling always has believed himself to be a wise man who possesses insight into the life of a sister he knows nothing relevant about and also fancies himself to be a writer of the same caliber as one of Christ's apostles, I knew the "gift" would include one of his missives.

Again, I asked myself to do or not to do, or, in this instance, to read or not to read. The minute I glanced at his salutation, "Aunt Debbie," I barely skimmed the scribbles that followed because he'd purposely chosen to open the brief note with a greeting he knows irritates me to no end.

Even though he hadn't written much, he'd written enough. I took the already crumpled, re-purposed sheet of copy paper he'd written on and put it on top of some article he'd included about "maintaining one's purpose" and then ripped all the pages top to bottom and side to side before dropping all the shredded pieces into the box he'd used to re-purpose the framed photograph of the two siblings who basically grew up as the only child of a couple of people who divorced a few years later.

Me and my late, great Great Aunt Evie!

Up, Up And Away For My Beautiful Friend Joan

My friend Joan Brugh (r) took that photo of me (l) ages ago prior
to the only ride I've taken in a hot air balloon.

By DEB SAINE

Sept. 6, 2018

im2insaine@mac.com

Man (or woman) makes plans and the gods laugh, right?

Well, the plan for this post had been to tell you the story about my friendship with Joan Brugh. She died at the age of 44 in March 1991. The cause? A recurrence of breast cancer. She was an amazing person and we had shared a love of hot air balloons, racquetball and laughter.

But right now, I'm exhausted. It's been a particularly long day, I've got a headache and I just don't have it in me emotionally to write that story. So for now, I'm going to share the slideshow I'd already pieced together and dedicate it to the memory of a true friend who continues to be missed all these years later.

I'll save our story for another day ... unless, of course, the gods once again have other plans ... 

Sunny Days Filled With Sunflowers

Watercolor by Deb Saine

By  DEB SAINE

Sept. 5, 2018

im2insaine@mac.com

Among the dream subjects I've wanted to photograph over the years, the top two had been hot air balloons and sunflowers. 

The photographs in this slide show were taken a couple of years ago near my hometown of Peru, IN. It was July of 2015, I believe, when a friend posted a couple of shots on Facebook that she'd taken in a local field of sunflowers that had grown in instead of the usual crops of either soybeans or corn. 

I messaged her as soon as I saw her post to find out exactly where she'd taken her photos. As soon as she gave me two locations, I grabbed my two digital 35 mm cameras and headed for my SUV. The trip to Peru took about 20 minutes.

As soon as I saw the first field, I was ecstatic. I think I spent at least an hour wandering that field and snapping away before going to take more photographs at the second field. I can't tell you how thrilled I was after I got home and uploaded all the shots. Among the many upsides of having digital cameras the number of photographs I can take without worrying about what shots turned out and how much film I may have wasted.

You can see for yourself what the outcome of my photo op with one of Mother Nature's greatest gifts:

With Books, 'You Can Learn How To Do Anything'

And these aren't even all the titles!

By DEB SAINE

Sept. 4, 2018
im2insaine@mac.com

 I laughed out loud the other day while I was listening to Tara Roskell's January podcast interview with art journalist Megan Jeffery after the topic turned to research.

"Once you start researching something you're passionate about," Jeffery said, "it's like, 'And now, I must research many things about this.'"

The Connecticut-based illustrator was speaking with Roskell for an episode of @KickInTheCreatives. And the reason I laughed about what Jeffery said was because I do the same thing. You could say I'm something of a research addict.

Mom is the primary reason I became a relentless researcher. She believed to her very core that if you could read, you could learn how to do anything, including laundry. I was 12 or 13 and we were living in an apartment with a communal washer and dryer.

When I said that I had "absolutely no idea" how to "do a load of laundry," she didn't hesitate to say "just read the back of the box of detergent and it'll tell you how." I already was an avid reader with a healthy appetite for ordering too many titles from Scholastic Books and the Literary Guild's book-of-the-month club for kids. After she gave me that bit of advice, it became part of my argument with her whenever I begged her to buy me yet another book.

"Mom," I'd say, "you were the one who said reading could teach me how to do anything!"

I also was a natural. My reading and vocabulary scores on achievement tests in elementary school were consistently in the upper 90th percentile as was my ability to comprehend reference materials. As a senior, I was fortunate to have been a student of my high school's best English teacher. It was under his instructions that I learned how to use the library and its resources to dig deep into a subject.

Mom's philosophy and Mr. Fox's tutelage about research have proven to be invaluable throughout my life from helping me with writing essays and theme papers in college to researching topics for interviews and writing feature articles as a reporter.

I'm naturally curious and I love to learn how to do new things. I think I died and went to heaven when Google and Amazon became regular parts of my life. With Google, it was like I was on a never-ending scavenger hunt with clues popping up in real time that sent me places around the globe in search of information.

Add being bipolar and a bibliophile to the mixture of research addiction and natural curiosity and there you have it: owning more art books than I truly need. Like Jeffery's, once I become passionate about something, I must research many things about that topic whether it's how to draw or create an art journal, make a sculpture using recyclables or delving into the use of watercolors or acrylics or colored pencils. I do the same when I find out about a new artist whose work I like.

The books pictured here are the ones
I used for creating the drawings I've included
that were done sometime between 2010-2012

And on a side-note, I ordered two of the three books Jeffery mentions during her interview: the Kindle version of "Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice" and a used paperback edition of "Year of the Doodle" by Dawn Sokol.

Here are a few creations I learned how to do using various books and/or web sites:

A Pinterest pin led me
to an artist's web site
where I found step-by-step instructions.

These art journal pages were
created using prompts from a
web site challenge I stumbled across
a few years ago. 

I used a book titled, "Draw Lab,"
to create the three drawings posted above.

"Drawing With Imagination"
(see above and below)

"Drawing What You See"
(above and below)

And then the next five were inspired
using books about cartooning and caricatures, circa 2010-2012.

    

When Words Fail, Art Can Pick Up The Slack

"It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing
incessantly, that one fine day you discover, to your
surprise, that you have rendered something in its true color."
-Dutch-French Painter Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)

By DEB SAINE

Sept. 3, 2018

im2insaine@mac.com

I'm not sure exactly how old I was — nine, maybe 10 — when Mom asked me if I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. After I told her I wanted to be a writer, she laughed and said, "Oh, Debbie, you'll never make any money."  

She'd been right about that the same way she would be right about so many other things over the decades to come. But what she failed to understand then was that being a writer was what would make me feel whole, make me feel complete. Writing was something I did well and that would eventually give my life a sense of purpose.

Two years after that conversation, life threw me what felt like nine-innings worth of curve balls. My parents divorced, Mom and I moved out of the neighborhood and into a two-bedroom apartment and I started junior high as a seventh-grader.

As if adjusting to life in a new home, a new neighborhood swarming with mostly retirees and a new school environment weren't difficult enough, I also had to deal with the man I fluctuated between referring to as The Sperm Donor and Big Daddy Dirt Pile. To my classmates, he was Mr. Saine, the vice principal. To me, he was a physically and emotionally abusive alcoholic that I wanted nothing to do with.

That also became the same year I learned what a valuable tool writing could be in helping me to survive. One of my teachers realized how much I was struggling and threw me a lifeline by suggesting journaling as a way to work through what was going on inside my head and my heart and just maybe help me to make sense of what was happening around me.

I also fell in love with creating art that year. Art class was a requirement and it proved to be a subject that allowed me to get lost in whatever I was making without having to think or worry about anything else.

Fast forward to 1988, 10 years after graduating high school and picking up college degrees in English and journalism, and my life centered around words. There were no paints, no drawing pencils, no blank sheets of paper begging to be covered in colors. I had started working at a small-town daily newspaper about 15 miles west of where I'd grown up and life became all about the writing.

I loved my job. Eventually I moved from writing obits and filing clips to writing features and turning out a weekly column. I was good at what I did. But I couldn't have picked a worse profession. The newspaper industry back then was fast-paced and deadline-oriented. I was a recovering alcoholic who eventually was diagnosed with manic-depression.

Getting up and going to work became more and more difficult. The stress was taking its toll and exacerbating my mental illness. Almost 18 years after my hiring, I was fired. And I was devastated. Who was I if not a reporter? What was I if not a writer?

Depression took hold and pushed me into a deep, dark hole that would swallow me up for about four years. Writing no longer provided any solace and so I stopped putting pen to paper as well as sitting in front of a blank computer screen and clacking away on a keyboard forming sentences.

At some point, I remembered how easy it was to get so absorbed in creating something with my hands that my brain would shut up and leave me alone. Drawing has never drained me emotionally the way that writing can.

Somewhere among my gazillion books was one titled "Draw Squad" by Mark Kistler. The target audience? Three- to eight-year olds. The goal? To teach kids how to draw using challenges that were right up my alley: fun and imaginative and nowhere near realistic. Kistler, a cartoonist, illustrator and art educator, knows how to relate to kids.

And so that's what I did. I worked my way through Kistler's book and filled sketchbook after sketchbook with the challenges. Here are a few of them that I've held onto: