Forgetting to breathe

                So, I paint pictures, and this week my painting teacher didn’t like the way I was sitting there fussing over my painting. She told me I need to stand up while I work.  Stand up, and paint with my whole arm, on big canvases, with great big brushes.  Basically, I need to loosen up.

                I’ve been hearing that a lot lately, from different directions.

                I told her I was working on it.  I explained that my general style was tiny, miniature little pictures of flowers and such. The last few were 4x4 inches. I did them with tiny little brushes, size 10/0. I did them hunched over the dining room table. They are pretty constricted.

But, I told her, I had an epiphany a couple months ago. While looking at an exhibition at the Dana Gallery, in Missoula, Montana, of paintings of the modern American West, and I realized that most of the ones I liked were big. And they were loose, with lots of crazy brush strokes and bright flashes of primary color.  In short, they were the opposite of what I’d been painting.  So I went home and bought an easel.

“What did you use before that?” my painting teacher asked.

“I hunched over the dining room table,” I said.

She just stared at me. I told her the biggest painting I could remember doing was 9x14 inches.  Hadn't ever needed an easel. She was incredulous. She said the first painting she had done in her first class was 4 feet wide. So then she made me stand up while I worked on a huge (for me) still life, and she only let me use the largest brush I had, which was a size 8.  I had only bought it because it was on the required supply list for the class.  It was bigger than any I had ever used before.

(Top: my normal size 10/0 brush next to my new size 8 brush)

(Below: One of my typical tiny paintings next to my huge practice one)

But it felt so good! My back didn’t hurt! She had good music playing. Can you paint and dance at the same time? Ha! I can! It only took 50 years and getting cancer to find out.

Or there was the day, a couple weeks ago, when I went to the gym, and my trainer was watching me nearly explode over some weights.

 “Nicely done,” she said. “Only thing is, you stopped breathing.”

“I did?”

“You totally did. You have to breathe. It will be a lot easier if you don’t hold your breath.”

We have also had to step back from some of the heavier weights and put more time in on stretching, and loosening up my really tight back and my really tight hamstrings.

Then there was my guitar class the other day.  My left hand was so tense, my ring finger actually locked up and I would have to unlock it while moving from chord to chord. As you can imagine, this did not result in any sort of musical flow. My teacher, Jeff, had to think about the physics of what I was doing.  You have to straighten up your back, he said. You have to breathe. You may want to try some relaxation exercises.

He was trying to teach me a Rolling Stones song, and I was struggling over the introduction. I was trying to play all the eighth notes with my stiff little fingers. But then Jeff said basically that Keith Richards hadn’t been reading eighth notes when he played that. They weren’t spaced exactly.

“He was just feeling it.”

Just feeling it.

Have I tried that with my painting? Or am I trying too hard to make my painting look like a photograph. If a photograph is what I want, why don’t I just take a damn photograph and be done with it?

Just feel it. Remember to breathe. Big brush strokes.

I keep hearing this over and over. And if it applies physically, if I am that tense in my hands and back and neck, what about my spirit? Oy vey. What does this mean for various choices I am making? And what am I doing to my kids and other people around me?

And what has this got to do with cancer? A couple things. I was always a tense person, a worrier. My son, Matt, has an anxiety disorder.  Well, he comes by it naturally. They weren’t diagnosing people with all sorts of psychiatric disorders when I was a kid, but they probably should have been. In any case, I made it through middle school and high school on a steady diet of antacid pills. Often, I had trouble sleeping. I was wound pretty tight, as they say.

Now, take a person like that and give her Stage 3 breast cancer, and it doesn’t make her any less tense. Actually, it makes her extra-tense AND extra- impatient. If there is only so much time left, you don’t want to waste any of it. You are pretty much in a hurry. And you aren’t messing around, either. If you do something, it has to be right. If you’re doing a painting, every stroke has to be just so. You can see where this is headed. Your neck gets sore, and your hands ache, and you don’t like the painting when it’s done, anyway. You wish it were more like those big, loose, colorful ones you saw in Montana.

So, I’m working on it. Of course, all this will have implications I am only beginning to imagine. For art, for guitar. For career and relationships. For parenting. For religion. For sex, for all I know. It’s going to be interesting to find out. I could scare people. This could be fun. There could be Keith Richards in there, trying to get out, unevenly spaced but just feeling it.

 

One year, cancer free!

                It was one year ago yesterday that my radiation oncologist told me I am “cancer-free,” as far as anyone knows. I only know this because it turns out my daughter, Julia, started keeping a diary the day I was diagnosed. She has, so far, filled up a paper diary and part of a hard drive with it. I did not know that. It goes to show you that cancer affects everyone, not just the patient. Anyhow, she looked it up and congratulated me on my anniversary.

Different people celebrate their cancer survivorship on the anniversaries of different milestones. I think my big celebration will always be March 9, the day I was diagnosed. That day is etched in my mind as the day everything changed. On November 1, not much happened except I had finished radiation, on schedule, and had a quick meeting with the oncologist. I remember it more from being told I would never be “cured,” than from being told I was already “cancer-free.” I suspect Julia prefers the Nov. 1 date because she is at heart an optimist and she would rather celebrate a more-upbeat occasion.

                The start of November also means I need to announce the winner of my month-long contest on Facebook in which I asked people to submit photos of the most offensive pink ribbons they could locate during Pinktober. There were some doozies! It was hard to choose the winners. Some pink ribbons were more ugly, some were more obviously not going to raise any money for actual cancer-relief purposes, and some were on products more likely to cause cancer than to cure it. So I just settled on what I found personally the nastiest.

                I disqualified a couple of photos people sent me, because while they were pink and awful, I could not be sure the items depicted were real. Steve sent me a photo of a pink tank he found online. It was awful, but possibly Photoshopped. My son, Matt, also located an image of some cigarettes with pink ribbons on them, but again, I think someone created them just for the irony of it. Steve also found a photo of a truly offensive (but pink) AK-47, but instead of pink ribbons it had Hello Kitty logos. Not good enough!

                I disqualified two of the best entries on the grounds that they were mine, and since I am also the contest judge, that would have been a conflict of interest. But they were preposterous. One was the large, juicy-looking steaks Safeway was advertising with pink ribbon stickers all over them. The other one, also at Safeway, was Mike’s Hard (pink) Lemonade with pink ribbons all over it.  My doctors tell me that alcohol and extra fat are things that can actually cause breast cancer, so I think these pink ribbons were particularly questionable. But I can’t win my own contest, so the winners are:

 Third place goes to my daughter, Julia, who found a remarkably ugly car air-freshener in the shape of a lurid pink ribbon that looked more like a condom or something. I am sure it did not raise money for anything useful.  Second place goes to Kathy Bittinger, who found some pink Porta-pots of Awareness.  And, drumroll please, first place for the ugliest/least sensitive use of a pink ribbon goes to Kathleen Morrish, who found a horrible urn with a pink ribbon on it. Seriously. It’s depressing enough to have cancer, without having to imagine your bodily remains spending eternity in something like that! (Note to friends and family:  When I die, scatter my ashes on a mountain in Montana. Do not keep them on the mantle in an ugly urn with a pink ribbon on it!)

By the way, Kathleen’s prize is a coyote-ugly Tape Dispenser of Awareness. I believe 50 cents of the purchase price actually goes to a bonafide cancer charity, so it’s not entirely pointless, and if your tape needs dispensing, hey, look no further. But boy, it is ugly.