Princess Series #1

A few weeks ago, I completed two princess paintings: Porcelain Princess & Punky Princess. I will soon post them on my etsy site.





With her fingers tightly clutched, Porcelain Princess is focusing on one of the most important activities of her day. She is painted in acrylic on a 12x16-inch stretched canvas. There are multicolored jewels glued into her crown & the side border is painted a dark purple. Typical of my paintings, I’ve used gold acrylic paint to form a bumpy frame on the edge of the canvas. The title and my symbol (a genie bottle with a smoky fist) are written in fabric paint on the lower right edge of the painting.





Punky Princess is painted in acrylic on a 12x16-inch stretched canvas. There are clear jewels glued onto her crown. She dons a leather jacket as she thrashes to rock music in a discotheque. Her perfect hair is undone in a wild mess & she flashes, as Wikepedia calls it, the “sign of the horn”. Patches of light glow in the background. The side border is painted green, and, typical of my paintings, I’ve used gold acrylic paint to form a bumpy frame. The entire painting is protected with a water-based acrylic glaze.

Loneliness

Recently, a college friend watched Me, You & Everyone We Know with my recommendation, & she loved it. It discussed a topic that she has been dealing with recently: loneliness.

Robby and I discussed this last night. How bad can loneliness get? He was never lonely much; he has always been extremely sociable & surrounds himself by people constantly. He said that he used to pull out a list of friends' phone numbers & call them one by one. I have been lonelier in my life longer than Robby has. I was very productive when I was single & alone. Sure, I spent hours in cafes sewing, drawing, and reading, but I went through my biggest changes when I was single. I wrote in a diary, letters, poetry...I was immensely creative when I was alone. But, Robby countered, you didn't have anyone to share your ideas with. True.

I think back to reading What Was She Thinking? by Zoe Heller (it was made into a fantastic film called Notes on a Scandal). The narrator, a 60-some-year-old acrid spinster teacher, talks about loneliness in one chapter. She asserts that married people will never know the feeling of being lonely & single for decades. Their experience of loneliness was a 6 months they were single between boyfriends. But she knows loneliness very well, coming home to an empty flat, brushing up against a stranger & feeling a tinge in the groin...What is it like to be lonely & single for your entire life?

Then Robby & I began talking about the loneliness one feels when one is in a large group. Is it better to be lonely alone or lonely in a large group, say, at a big party? I would prefer being lonely alone. I don't like being around people when there is nothing to say, and I am especially awkward when everyone looks like they are having fun, and I am not. I enjoy being productive when I am alone, but I don't like coming home to a silent apartment with no one to talk to or have dinner. Being married is wonderful. We don't feel the need to chat all the time, and we can spend the entire day at home working without talking to each other. That's okay with us. No need to feel self-conscious, no need to impress. We like each other at our sloppiest, & that's the best thing about marriage so far.