SUNDAY ON THE COUCH WITH KATHERINE

Good Morning.  This is Katherine.  If I do not identify myself, it's Jim.  I know this is hard for everybody, but we taught forever together and raised kids together and slept together and have done everything together and we seem to blog and FaceBook together and it gets really confusing for some folks.   Today it's Katherine though.

"Good Morning" is my current favorite greeting, but I always hear it in my friend David's voice.  He is a native of Birmingham, Alabama.  He has a wonderful voice and accent.  It's delicious when he calls and out pops his version of "Good Morning." I wish you could hear him when I type this.

I just watched SUNDAY MORNING.  It is my favorite television show.  I learn so much.  Kevin Kline married Phoebe Cates (the swimming pool girl in FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH).  Is that cool or what?

The show always makes me think like an artist.  It's the suns.  Between each segment there is a different artistic rendition of the sun.  They are beautiful.  I love looking at the suns.

We have a large artistic sun hanging above (maybe over) our shower in our bedroom bath.  It was the final touch on my bathroom vision several years ago.

Jim was instrumental in making my artistic vision of the bathroom happen.  Jim retiled the shower in deep royal blue rectangular tiles with very white grout.  He tiled the floor with small white tiles, again with white grout.  Jim's handyman guru, Bud Simmons, advised against the white grout.  I ignored him--I was painting the bathroom.

The tile is wonderful.  Thank you sweetie.  I still like my white grout.  I especially like the part where you clean it.

I had Jim paint the walls gray.  I ordered super gigantic beach towels from Sundance (on sale for an amazing $18 per towel--an Olympic shopping coup for my side).  Two wildly striped towels hang from a very cool and heavy-duty towel rack that stores the extras above.   I put up a painting of a scientist holding a test tube by former student Shawnty Whitam who seems to be swimming in an ocean on the only wall with enough size for it.

Just above the toilet paper, there is a poster former student Lisa Woltkamp Kish gave us.  It's a collection of haikus that appeared on marquis's in NYC one year.  Jim asks me sometimes which is the best or my favorite.  I refuse to respond.  Each trip to the bathroom is a new experience and I see one in a whole new way.  What can I say?

Toilet paper is stored in a blue and white Chinese vase thing my mom gave me.  Works.  There is a giant stainless steel jack (you know--like the game of jacks) in the corner on the floor.  My AP students gave it to me the day I returned to class from cancer treatments.  I played jacks with students for years.  I love it.  It's heavy and lovely and full of wonder for me.

With all this, the bathroom was an unfinished painting.  Bud and Janet Simmons provided the solution when they invited us to spend time with them in Puerto Vallarta.  After a tour through the market by the river cut, I knew I needed a sun for my bathroom painting.

We looked at various places and returned to markets and I finally fell in love with our sun.  It is "Hedwig."  It is both male and female and I always connect it with the time Jim and I went to see Hedwig and the Angry Inch and were the only straight folks in the audience and at dinner afterwards a former student spotted us and walked up and said hello and announced he'd come out  before we could say howdy.  A memorable date.  Mostly--I loved Hedwig, the movie--very mythic about the sexes.  It is still something I love to watch.

Anyway, I fell for the lone bi-sexual sun we saw in a market stall and I didn't bargain enough to please Bud.  I didn't bargain at all.  I loved the sun.  The family running the stall where I bought my sun went to great lengths to tape it up in cardboard slabs so I could get it home. The sun is big.  It's pretty heavy.  It's gorgeous.  It's hard to explain how hard they worked so I could get my sun home.

Time passed and we headed home with my sun in hand.  This was our first trip to Mexico and we were leaving before Bud and Janet and we were on our own with minimal cash at that point.

I can't remember how many get-into-a-plane-and-back-home steps we had taken when we were required to go pay some folks to re-package our sun.  For reasons that were unclear, we needed to redo the amazing box structure the stall family had built around my sun.  We watched as airport officials carefully cut away the box on our sun and rewrapped it with cardboard from the same pile.  They must have known how much cash we had left--it took it all to pay them for their efforts.

Hedwig, my sun, once it made it back to Colorado, was the end of my bathroom painting.  I love my bathroom.

It was the suns on Sunday Morning that got me started.  I'm pretty frustrated that I have an artist's eye without the obsession needed to do some things I'd like.  Jim has written two books and I've seen obsession.  It's annoying, but it's impressive as hell.

I know I see many things through the eyes of George Seurat as Stephen Sondheim saw him in Sunday the Park with George.  It's one of the works of art that changed how I saw the world.  That's a lot for a musical comedy.

In the musical, George lists the words he thinks make art.  I used to know them by heart and now I know I'm missing several.

Here are George's words the ones I remember, and how I see them in my wee artistic world:

ORDER:  This is structure and pattern.  It is a simple as chronological order or as complicated as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  Some structure must illuminate parameters and then it is the artist's job to break those parameters.  There is an intentional ocean/water thing going on in my bathroom and my haiku poster and my jack sculpture break the rules.  Master the structure and then break it where it shows.  Knit a lace shawl, but it do it with a yarn no one else will.   That's what I'm playing with now. Knitting outside the lines.

LIGHT:  This is point of view.  I taught our kids to look at paintings by teaching them to look for where the light was coming from and that way they could think about point of view.  It was sheer intuition.  It works though.  I also want to take the word literally.  Art is light--like art is not heavy.  Ponderous things are sermons, not art.  My bathroom, my knitting--I hope I'm seeing things like a painter (sigh because I do not paint with any grace at all) and I hope there is a sense of humor in there somewhere.

COMPOSITION:  What is the object composed of? Color? Notes? Words? Yarn? Wood? What are the limits and possibilities?  I am collecting Mexican tiles for another bathroom.  I am beginning a composition.  In writing I think of this in terms of ideas and details and vocabulary and grammar and all those kinds of things.  I have always had a really hard time explaining this because it seems so obvious.  It's more than the medium--that's all the more I want to say about this.

DESIGN:  This is the purpose.  Why did the artist do this?  I wanted to enjoy hanging out in my bathroom and frankly there isn't a spot anywhere in the house that isn't covered in art and the bathroom was the only room left at that point.  Now I want to paint with yarn and I want to stretch boundaries with textures and colors.  My biggest frustration there is that my knitting skills have not yet caught up with what I can see in my head.  I never even got close in any other medium.

TENSION:  This is juxtaposition.  Two things stand next to each other that don't belong and it arrests the viewer and with luck the viewer emotes or thinks or reacts in some way the object has provoked.  Though ludicrous examples, I'm happy with how my bathroom and knitting hold up here.

HARMONY:  This is George's last word.  All of the elements must come together into something that is comfortable even if the composition or the subject or  the content of the art is not comfortable.  I need to really like entering my bathroom or wearing my knitted creation.  I need to feel more complete after reading the book or seeing the movie.

I'm done.  I'm tired.  We're headed to the art museum to see the Paris exhibit and a late lunch afterwards.  It seems fitting.