Portrait: Brendan

Brendan Dean Mullen

I've gotten to the painting point with this portrait of Brendan where I need to stop futzing with it. There are still some places where it is, uh, weird, but it's closer.  If I don't put it aside for a time, it will get much weirder, so best to let it be for a bit.    

The process of examining a face closely and translating it into paint brings a whole new understanding in a way I can't yet verbalize.  Whatever the words might be when they come, the creative process is comforting.

Brendan

"Amazing tradition. They throw a great party for you on the one day they know you can't come." 

- Michael in The Big Chill

Brendan Dean Mullen
(b. April 29, 1969 - d. April 9, 2013)

Brendan Dean Mullen passed away on April 9, 2013, hours after being taken off life support. He had spent several days in a coma following attempting suicide. His memorial service was held today in Arlington, Virginia.

Monday, April 29th, would have been his 44th birthday. He is survived by his two sons, mother, two brothers, other relatives, and a host of friends.

***

I knew Brendan only briefly, meeting him through a mutual friend at a Virginia bar in 2010. Our connection evolved into a sporadic friendship. Out of the blue, he would call up, and I'd subsequently find myself listening to music at Wolf Trap, or at the Sculpture Garden downtown, or sitting in my living room playing with paints or bits of wire, making odd objects, or dancing myself silly in some bar having had one or two too many beers. Because of Brendan, I saw the Spleen installation on H St. It was an afternoon with Brendan when I made Wilhelmina out of wire and glass.

Brendan grinning in beads

Spending time with Brendan was an adventure, and usually an unexpected one. He collected information on art processes, eccentric artist documentaries, worked on his own paintings and antenna boxes and metal sculptures, but he also loved nature, from snowstorms to waterfalls and his mother's beloved dog Guinness. He remains the only man that has ever shown me his worm farm. ("Is that some sort of euphemism?" a friend once asked me. No. He had a plastic file folder box full of soil and very happy worms squiggling about). Brendan was interested in everything, and would happily quiz you on what you knew,and zoom off on several different directions at once with it. Most of our conversations revolved around art. He viewed me as an artist well before I did, simply because at that bar when we met, I picked up the sidewalk chalk and drew.

2010, the year we met, wasn't a good one for me, and was difficult for Brendan as well. Custody issues left him distraught, ill at ease with the unavoidably adversarial nature of divorce. He was a gentle soul.

I never met his sons, but I know how much he adored them, taking them out for Five Guys burgers and hearing about their days in school and at swim practice. He missed them as he got to spend less and less time with them. And he knew how troubled they were by the changes in the family. He once wrote, with unusual and somber directness, about "realizing the hurt of the two black holes in my heart where I'm missing John and Daniel."

I do know that while we seldom chatted in depth about tough issues, we talked about my depression issues enough for him to offer to make me a light box. He wanted to help. He was that kind of person that, when you had problems, he wanted to help. I failed to recognize just how much he knew about the issue of depression, fooled by that toothy grin.

The last email exchange I had with him, after longer and longer gaps in our chats, was in 2011, and had as its subject "you ok?" I'd gotten a phone message from him, and followed up. He replied, "Thanks for the feedback about not sounding good. I guess hate getting msgs with subject 'You OK?' Hate is a strong word I don't like to use; and I do very appreciate the feedback. Guess I didn't need someone to tell me I was in a bit of a funk. But it is absolutely something I'd rather keep to myself."

From there, it appears that we spoke, and he was trundling off to yoga classes, and feeling better. I don't remember the conversation.

What I can't stand is that I never followed up again. I never reached out, even though I knew that he was having a difficult time, and I knew from my own wrestles with depression, that it doesn't just - poof! - disappear once you had a few good moments. Like cancer, it can come back, often stronger and nastier.  And Brendan's tendency to cover it up, to save others from any gloom and keep it to himself, worried me.

But I did nothing, and let the friendship drift further.

Very preliminary (& askew & inaccurate)
sketch of Brendan. Will likely do
something more abstract for a painting. 

I spoke to him once more after that, shortly before I moved away from DC, when he called to tell me our mutual friend, with whom I'd had a huge falling out some time before, was pregnant. She's the mother of a lovely child now. Brendan, I suspect, would be pleased to know that, however tenuously, we seek to bury old bad feelings between us, as she was the person, remembering our friendship, that reached out to let me of know about his death. He didn't like fighting, and he was fond of both of us. He was always ready to celebrate the good in life and make peace. Or so it seemed to me during the time I knew him.

Since his death, almost every comment I have read about Brendan talks about his enthusiasm, his big grin, his sense of adventure, his warmth. I don't know what happened in the years that followed our last conversation, what changed that his enthusiasm for life failed to quell darker thoughts, nor if that change was abrupt or a gradual seeping away. I knew him as someone always looking for the good, expressing that enthusiasm.

Brendan once asked me in an email, again, trying to help me with my struggles, "When you belly breathe deeply do you visualize breathing in goldenhealing yellow bright and breathe out the bad blackness?  Sometimes I do." So as I sit and wonder what happened to extinguish his light, wishing I had listened more and said more when he was still here to speak and listen, I will also try to breathe out the blackness.

Brendan also noted: "I don't tell anyone what to do or feel or think, but if you watch Pink Panther Strikes Again I bet you would laugh." He was a man that loved to laugh - just look at that grin.    

New Abstract: Spring

Spring
20 x 24
acrylic on canvas

New abstract, tentatively titled Spring.

Reminds me a bit of the ee cummings poem, [in Just-]: "when the world is puddle-wonderful."

Complete poem available here.

Long-necked

Long-necked, red-lipsticked woman.  

It has been way, way too long since I've done anything arty (besides photography), a complication stemming from moving, travel and a lack of self-control given access to cable TV.

I finally dug out a sketch book yesterday and played around with colored pencils.  I discovered I don't really know how to make good use of colored pencils, since they aren't all that amenable to blending.  But it felt good to draw and play with color in any case.

No idea who this is - imaginary woman from my head.  Her eyes are crooked and too large, and her neck probably longer than most found in nature (hey, Modigliani does it - why not?).  She lacks much attention to lighting or detail.

Still, I find something appealing about her cartoon-y self.  And any movement toward art is better than none.

Nomadic Month

Seagulls lining up on
St. Pete Beach, FL

For a variety of expected and unexpected reasons, I've been traveling a great deal over the last month.

Cemetery in McNeal, Arizona

First I journeyed from my former home in New Mexico to St. Pete, Florida.

Once returned to NM, I packed up and drove up to Portland, Oregon, stopping over in McNeal, Arizona and Klamath Falls, OR.

Flowers blooming in Portland, Oregon

From Portland, OR, I flew the friendly skies out to Portland, Maine.

I've seen weather fluctuating from 8 inches of snow to balmy sea breezes and 75 degrees, and zipped up and down from sea level to snowy mountain passes.  

In flight

Through all of this, I've kept my camera stashed in my purse, and managed to make good use of it here and there.

Sunset from car window,
Portland, Oregon

(I've also taken quite a few dreadful photos, rambling around rest stops to stretch my legs or sitting in doctor's offices blessed with surprisingly nice water views, and other places when I needed to pause for a moment. I'll keep those masses of less successful photos to myself.)

Hwy 97 north of Klamath Falls, OR

Lovely shots or not, I find focusing on images relaxing, a quick and easy way to tune down the incessant whirring of my sometimes overactive mind.  

After a month, I can tell you: this country is very large, and gorgeous in a myriad of ways.

I presume at some point I will be more clear on what season it is and what time zone applies to me.  We'll see.

Long Guns and Tall Tales

As I’ve said before, I tend to avoid political conversations in a public forum.  I don’t know if it is a product of my age, or a true change in the civility level of national discussion, but the nastiness and name-calling tends to leave me impotent with anger, hardly a productive frame of mind. 

However, as a writer, I do use writing as a means of organizing my thoughts, even when I don’t anticipate those thoughts launching forth into the world.  Sporadically, for around three decades, I've kept journals and ruminated on various topics, largely personal, but occasionally with political aromas.

The gun debate, particularly in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, left me, like everyone else, dismayed. I turned to writing to review my perspective, to see just how my opinions grew to be. 

The result, Long Guns & Tall Tales, somewhat meandering and definitely personalized, ended up being shared with a couple of friends, and then passed on to B2L2.  I wasn't the only writer turning to words to try to work out opinions on guns, so B2L2 put together a theme issue on the topic.

Click here to read the piece: Long Guns & Tall Tales

Here on Artful Mistakes, I'll continue on with my usual artier topics shortly.   

Spirals

Top of the spiral staircase
Dali Museum
St. Petersburg, FL

Beach Walk

beach chairs, St. Pete Beach, FL

The modern miracle of travel means that I started the day in New Mexico, drove to Texas in pre-dawn dark under a blanket of stars to doze on a plane, and was walking on a beach in Florida by the time the breeze began to kick up in the late afternoon.

Toes in the sand, I watched the pelicans swoop over the water as they hunted for dinner and reveled in the wind currents.  Returning to the ocean, any ocean, with our bodies made of so much saltwater, is always a homecoming.

Pelican in flight

Welcome to Playland

Many people feel this way in El Paso.  

Sometimes you have to wonder what people are thinking.

For instance: who decided on the dying steer as part of the play area at the Outlet Shoppes of El Paso?

Did his or her kids run up saying, "Yes, yes! I want to crawl all over the plastic despairing remains of an animal! Make one look sad and sick, please, oh please!"?

An Elephant's Memory of Blizzards

Whenever the blue cloud untangles itself from the red sky, we will continue to pray for you—in our invisible ship, our invisible
fortress—

for the divine discourse of the soul,

for the end of the in between,

and for the windows to open unto an unentangled sky of white clouds free-floating against the insane blue—

and embrace each other like mighty humans.

-- Neil de la Flor, excerpt, "Prayer for a Blue Cloud," An Elephant's Memory of Blizzards




Neil de la Flor has a new poetry collection out: An Elephant's Memory of Blizzards.  His second solo collection is being published by Marsh Hawk Press.

You should go buy it.  Right now.

Neil's hat, Almost Dorothy &
Floyd the dashboard frog

Note that net proceeds from the first 30 books sold will benefit The Center for Positive Connections where de la Flor is on the Board of Directors. TCPC provides HIV prevention and health education, social and emotional support, mental health counseling, holistic health treatments for those living with (and affected by) HIV/AIDS in South Florida.

For information on buying the book, and getting your very own signed copy, see:
http://almostdorothy.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/an-elephants-memory-of-blizzards-by-neil-de-la-flor/.

Snow Day!

Snow, yucca, well-house & hacienda. 

Gorgeous and unusual snow arrived here, leading to a complete halt of anything productive. I opted to stomp around in the snow with the also delighted dogs.

Since it is virtually always sunny here, I follow the weather less and less, and so the snow came as a complete surprise.

Not much will blowtorch me out from under the comforters in the early morning, but a window clouded with blowing snow is one of them.

Change invigorates the soul.  And leads to a great many photographs.  

Visual Journal

"Dinnertime?"

My mother gave me a sketch-a-day notebook for Christmas, which I tested out today.

I hope to use it at least semi-regularly for quick sketching (any practice helps) as well as keeping track of any other odds and ends that further my creative work.

Leo is in favor of art, as long as it doesn't interfere with the dinner hour.

Happy New Year!

Changeable

Changeable
acrylic on canvas
30" x 48"

New work I've been playing with...it has morphed in various ways, including number of arms, wing size, color schemes, and a lot of messing around with drippy, watery paints. I'm not sure that I consider it done, but I think I'll let it rest for a while at least.

At one point, the canvas looked like this:





And way, way before that, it looked like this:

The original sketch painting was based off a photo from unsuccessful huckleberry picking years ago in Oregon. I could never get proportions and faces to look anything more than cartoonish, and once I had erased many things many, many times, I eventually lurched into more abstract worlds.

You never know how a painting will evolve (or I don't, anyway - which is possibly a problem, as well as an advantage).

Antlered Cat

"Merry Christmas.  Now get me out of these antlers."

Before/After

Dug around in my closet yesterday and decided to renovate an old painting to add in shading. This led to lots of other changes.  None of it was a quick process, given that I'm still training my eyes to see the effect of light, and translate shape onto the canvas more effectively, but the changes in the overall impact of the painting ended up being substantial.

Bite Wounds, before and after changes.  

Recent Work, "Sunned" and "Ophelia"

Sunned
acrylic on canvas
16" x 20"

Ophelia
acrylic on canvas panel
12" x 24"

Penguin Love

Skate Park Penguin

Tiny graffiti at the Las Cruces skate park includes one penguin. I'm not sure if the artist was making a visual reference to DK penguin longboards, or maybe just thought, "hey, penguins are cute, and this skate park needs one right here."

In other random news, I learned a new meaning for an old word. The metal edging at the skate park is called "coping."

Fort Selden

Old covered wagon with the ruins of Fort Selden behind it 

In the interest of doing something new - anything new - I played a little GPS roulette and ended up at Fort Selden in Radium Springs, NM last weekend.  It's a quiet place, and I was the only person in the small museum besides the ranger despite the fact that state monuments are free for New Mexico residents on Sundays.

From the museum, I learned that the fort housed infantry and cavalry, including Buffalo Soldiers; that the officers' wives often described the place as dusty and unattractive; that Douglas MacArthur, the WWII general, spent a couple of years at Fort Selden in his childhood and sported a longish blond hair that made me mistake him as a girl in the photo; that in the 25 years that Fort Selden was active (1865-1890), more soldiers were killed by fellow soldiers than with run-ins with Apaches in the area; and that the soldiers had a particularly monotonous diet, among other odds and ends.  The museum painted a fairly grim picture of boredom, dust and disease -- hardly a desert paradise.

The Joy of an Overcast Day

View from Lover's Lane on the way to the Hacienda (visible far right) at dusk. 

Clouds all day here today, a rarity in the land of perpetual sunshine, and one worth celebrating given the wonder that they add to the sky.  My art groove remains semi-stalled, with limited writing and painting, but the sky would not let me neglect taking some moody autumn photos.

New Mexico Fall