Homeward Bound

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Dedicated to Cindy Johnson, dear friend, neighbor and fellow deep thinker and feeler. Travel well; keep sending us signs from the other side.

 

I had not one but two newsletter essays come to me as I was in LA and now I cannot remember either one of them. Such is the fallacy of my mind that continues to need to learn the lesson of writing down any good idea, or else be reminded that it will indeed float away to someone more ready for it. I also made this assumption that I would want to write while I was captive on the plane. I kidded myself I’d be able to knock out an essay in no time on my way home. This has proved to be both true and perhaps not as pleasurable as I’d hoped. Was it the two in the air that put me into the space of not quite wanting to bare my soul for my faithful readers? Or could it be the hangover of violation I felt after my Diva Cup (TM) was x-rayed when I went through security at LAX? My TSA-precheck “random” screening forced me into the hands-up salute in the digital imaging machine, my loose mesh sweatshirt encouraged the hands-on pat down. It’s the sort of thing that makes me marvel at the indignities one will endure to simply get home. And home is what I was desperately craving after eight full days away. I missed the constant chatter of Vaimo’s work stories. I felt the strong pull of my studio calling me to my unfinished canvases. I longed for the deadpan looks from the goats as they chew their cuds; mouths rotating in a circular motion as they simply observe without judgment.

To be gazed upon without judgment is such a beautiful feeling. To be seen and not judged for how you’re showing up, what a gift. Traveling has meant, I’ve been around so many people that now I just want the Erhard hills and the goats. If you’ve ever lived with goats the looks they give is something like this: unassuming with an air of just enough disinterest to mark it as authentic curiosity without malice. The most intense their looks get is if they think you’re coming home from the grocery store. Then they’re not just chewing in the distance with their wide-set eyes, they’re running quickly to see if they can get their head into your bag before you cart it inside. A race against the hunger and stubbornness of a goat will seriously put the fire in your step. I’m thinking a lot about what I would run toward to check out like that. Candy? Tequila? A muskrat sighting? A much anticipated book arriving on the new release table at my favorite independent bookstore? Only one of these options really rings parallel to the goats charging, the one about a muskrat - because it’s the only one that takes place at our collective home space. The rest, require me to leave. Perhaps the more apt analogy would be the UPS deliveries at the end of our driveway. Balms of commerce magically arriving to our rural outpost.

It’s my first night back at the ChicFinn after being away for the longest period of time in 2022. So much has changed in the nine days since I left and returned. A couple of hours into slumber, I’m awoken by the frogs wailing because I haven’t acclimated to their strong chorus of trills and nocturnal mating calls. Nine days ago, the frogs and toads were not yet in this phase of their nightly hookups. As I try my deep breathing exercises to get back to sleep, I marvel at how frogsong is one of the choices on my white noise sunrise alarm clock. I would never pick this as a soothing background for relaxing. I find their chatter tonight particularly annoying because I swear it’s the rave of the century out there and all members of the 14 species of frogs and toads of Minnesota have arrived to this party honoring June’s imminent arrival. I want to yell from my window “last call!” But of course this is an all night meet up that only the sun cresting the horizon can end. How impossible to be me, when just a month ago during this time winter still had her grip on us, and all I wanted was for the lake to thaw. Now I miss the truly deadened, soft, quiet, that feet of snow brings.

I’m realizing however that I would prefer the noisy frogs anytime over a TSA pat down. Once an adventurer who never really wanted to stay home, it’s all I want to do now. Covid has made me feel socially anxious and has triggered the worst parts of me- paranoia and suspicion and a deep lack of trust of others. My blood pressure soars when people get too close to me. I’ve grown way too used to my space in all the ways of that word. My space as in the undisturbed views of nature that bring me calm. My space as in my personal bubble. My space as in the home that Vaimo and I tend to with care and love and gratitude alongside cursing the typical home ownership challenges, and fretting about repairs. (A piece of siding recently blew off in a storm and we lost some shingles!) I’m not immune from also taking our house and home for granted when obsessed with my work. Perhaps, I’ve just transformed into someone I never thought I’d know. The kind of extrovert who takes comfort in the company of trees instead of mass throngs of people. Is this aging? Or the result of pandemic life? The trauma response of shutting down instead of engaging? Or a little bit of all of it?

I’m struggling because I know that to paint one has to also live. And I wonder how much of that living requires the hero to leave home so as to be able to return. There are lessons to experience beyond the confines of one’s home, though I also recognize that the lessons of homespaces are often devalued. Seen as less important than the knowledge one can collect from beyond its walls. I’ve always loved Gloria Analdúa’s quote that challenges the binary of home vs. journey:

To separate from my culture (as from my family) I had to feel competent enough on the outside and secure enough inside to live life on my own. Yet in leaving home I did not lose touch with my origins because lo mexicano is in my system. I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry ‘home’ on my back.

What does it look like to center the home as space for learning and living? How do we carry home, the physical space and the broader psychological framework of its impact with us? How do we craft spaces for refuge for others as opposed to pretty structures meant to keep others out? How can I be the same me in my home as I am outside of it? I felt at home in brief moments while I was away. The gratitude and contentment of the home of a best friend. Beyond BFF’s comfy daybed I found the thrill of standing in front of Octavia Butler’s handwriting in her notebook at the Huntington Library, knowing this experience is something I could not replicate while staying put at the ChicFinn. Sharing that encounter with my Hermana also could not have happened from home, even from the Octavia Butler suite we’ve cultivated downstairs. And now I have the sentiments of that moment to share with all of you here. Informed by my physical journeying by car, lyft, plane, BFF’s car, and my legs. Is it surprising to anyone that I felt at home in the library? The one surrounded by botanical gardens and two art galleries?

I paint a lot of scenes of home because I am obsessed with figuring all of this out. Maybe one day it will make sense. Maybe not. But for now, I’m painting inside and outside spaces and trying to create a visual language that accounts for the in-between, the liminal, the borderlands that blur boundaries linking the structures we build to keep us in, while trying to not slip into the inside-out/upside down realities that I paint. When I got home after telling Vaimo I’m never leaving again, she lovingly retorted that perhaps I just needed a better traveling companion next time. And it’s true, when I’m with her, I feel more at home wherever I am. Novel experiences feel way less scary with her by my side. My independent streak wants to run away from this reality. To retreat inside my paintings and never come out. Of course we return to the original paradox once again, to art is to live and to live is to art… can I do it alone or from only the space of my home? Don’t be silly darling, none of us exist in a vacuum. And if nothing else, we must keep living, the hardest task any of us have in front of us, especially for those “called home” too soon. Our friend Cindy would have cherished hearing about this trip, and the immersive thought provoking work of Barbara Kruger at LACMA, and the tacos I ate, and things I learned. I assumed she’d still be here when I returned. Alas, she journeyed onward to the unknown place to those of us still on this side. Instead, I send these words on the complexities of leaving and returning to my dear Cindy, a wonderful human blessed with the skills of making a home where I always felt at home. And with my comings and goings I trust that I too, am brave enough to walk the path she forged ahead of us, in hopes of creating that feeling of home for those who seek it, in all the languages I have available to share.

What I’m Reading

Brown Neon by Raquel Gutiérrez

I tweeted that placing my preorder for this book was so exciting because it was one of my most anticipated reads of 2022. So, imagine my thrill when my Bookshop order informed me it was shipping ahead of the official release date! In this collection of essays chronologically presented from 2015 to 2019 with some flashbacks to earlier times, Raquel Gutiérrez traces the revelations of their/her travels, love life, loss/grief, all sprinkled amongst clever art criticism ranging from the institutional structures that mediate our experiences of art, to land art, to the Latinx artists trying to subvert the systems that simultaneously consume us. Always fascinated by a good title, I wondered what Gutiérrez meant by Brown Neon, and I’d rather not spoil it for you. What I will say is that for those of us in the constellation of brown bodies each experience a version of the phenomenon in different ways and Gutiérrez’s exploration of what it represents for her/them calls us unite the mystical and wounded desert, the grime and sweat of a punk show, and the weight of identitarian labels on which we continue to push agains yet also remain hopeful of their possibilities. Who else is talking/writing/thinking about the weight of aesthetic possibilities of border wall construction from a queer Latinx perspective? Who else can ground the uneasy place in which queers of a certain age and class stratification find ourselves on the constant barbwire’s edge of cancellation? Who else can make magic of the desert reaching out toward us like the expand of brown sand dotted with cacti and sage brush reach us in our own uneasy geographies of this place we currently call the United States of America? This collection of essays found me in the time I needed it, maybe you too?

Artist Offerings

• Absolutely positively enjoyed this review of John Waters’ new book Liarmouth out now at your favorite independent bookstore near you!
• ​I am having so much fun playing Artle! No Wordle for me because it is too stressful for me but I live for the spinoffs.
• My Hermana and I recently had the experience of Sandy Rodriguez’s work at LACMA and I am struck by how the universe brought me to her work after I asked for Latinx examples of artists integrating maps into paintings. Her use of maps calls into question the fluid boundaries humans like to assign through handmade paper and artist-made natural pigments. I’ll never think of helicopters in the same way again. 

Creative Ritual

I had a completely magical and wonderful closing reception for my New York Mills Show on May 20th, good conversations and connections with friends new and beloved were had and will be cherished. A new friend wrote up this very awesome article about me and the show. I am mailing out Kitchen Saints this week to the folks who loaned them to me so they could be shown together. I also had the chance to send two of them home with their new patron and it was absolutely magical. I finished a small painting for my upcoming show. Received two rejections - one a grant application that was board approved yet not funded, and another gallery opportunity that didn’t select my work. (Yay) I’m up to 4/10 of my rejections goal and managed to take a full week of vacation away from my studio. Win win? My essay and a photograph of one of my paintings is in the newly released 2022 Field Journal for the Flint Hills Symphony. I will be in the author's tent signing copies on June 11th if all goes well! Lastly, here's your reminder, you can now listen to the audio version of the newsletter if you so choose - look for Art of KCF wherever you receive your pods (and I'll link to the episode at the top of each newsletter going forward!) Tiny Tequilas came back from the gallery and will be back up in the digital shop soon! I'll also be listing the remaining Kitchen Saints paintings. Follow me on Ko-Fi to get real time updates!

Questions to ponder

What does it look like to center the home as space for learning and living?
How do we carry home, the physical space and the broader psychological framework of its impact with us?
How do we craft spaces for refuge for others as opposed to pretty structures meant to keep others out?
How do you show up within and beyond your home?

Thanks for journeying with me. I hope, as always, that you take what you need and leave the rest for someone else, or for another time. 

-KCF
PS: Support this work by sharing with a friend or buying me a ko-fi. Special gratitude to those of you who make one time or monthly contributions, I appreciate you! You help keep this work free for all.