so far...

painting last night, painting this morning. the sun's out and all the tourists must be off barbecuing somewhere because it is so unexpectedly peaceful outside. a beautiful day.

i'm at a pretty critical point in one of the maid portraits where i can see it finished in my mind and how beautiful these ladies will be if i just keep moving slowly and listen to what they're whispering. my sweetheart and i discuss them all the time. today we talked about my family history and my days spend scrubbing toilets and being sneered at and my days spent as a cocktail waitress and how when i brought this up once in a class discussion, the whole room went silent and the other students had a hard time looking me in the eye. it was a private school after all, how did i manage to infiltrate they're ranks? a great many of them had had maids and nannys and all that. their mother's never worked as bartenders or paid for groceries with food stamps. and i'm not saying i'm any better than anyone else. like a great many things, struggle is also relative. but history and experience isn't relative... it's just what we choose to record is what gets remembered and esteemed... what is normal... and my history was definitely not the norm at my alma mater. i made them a bit uncomfortable. and i wasn't the only one with that kind of background but we were definitely in the minority and apparently our stories weren't welcome. once, outside a class, a girl actually said to me, "i'm so tired of listening to everybody's fucking poverty rants". stunning, huh? she hadn't realized who she was talking to. i hadn't shared any stories with her at that point and she'd just ensured that i never would. never.

and the more i work on these paintings, the more i realize how unspoken these histories are when they're told by the people who have actually lived them. we want out poverty beautified- Dorthea Lang style. i love that photograph as much as anybody else, and the era it was taken in makes it okay i suppose, but sometimes it just seems a little like poaching, a little like imperialism, a little like "slumming it". and that's the other thing about this work- it's helping me figure out where to stand.