Carol Larson - textile artist

I fully enjoyed 3-4 days of headache-free tranquility between the decision to conclude the TG Series and book and trying to update my website. It was fabulous.

This new state of stress caught me so by surprise. As part of the wrap up of the series, I decided to photograph the work and put it on my website, which I do for most every piece I create. I took a semester of Dreamweaver earlier this year and eventually put up a decent looking site and have challenged myself to regularly upload new images so as to maintain my skills and memory of same!

So yesterday I took 11 quilts to the basement, where I shoot them against a painted black wall. I took 76 images, which I sorted and tweaked down to 33. I regularly save one fullview, one detail and one high resolution. This took most of the afternoon and evening. I finally stopped to make dinner, and found the ahi to be spoiled, so we had brown rice (which was in the steamer while I was in PhotoShop) and scrambled eggs!

Last night I designed two of the new pages complete with images and when I tried to upload them, no go. The pages went fine, but the images did not. Actually one went fine, but not the other. So I futzed and fiddled, and could not make sense of it, but eventually gave up and went to watch Dateline trap child predators in my hometown.

About 2 am this day, as I lay awake pondering this, I thought AHA, somehow I must have messed with the file size of the photos. Yes, that was it! So I pried myself out of bed at 8 am and checked it out, and no, the files were all saved exactly the size they were supposed to be, and what all the other images on my site, already loaded are.

So, I started my troubleshooting process. I checked the hosting site and I have enough space, I updated my Dreamweaver software, I disabled the firewall, I googled the error message, I e-mailed Wave Wally, Nana Montgomery’s friend who bailed me out before, I restored Windows to last week. I applied bandaid after bandaid after bandaid. And nothing worked. I kept timing out on the upload.

Now, I am in a dilemma. I will go in and pull the latest additions thereby leaving a hole in the page. I will record all the info I need on the 11 quilts so when I can do something, I will already have that info. Then I can put them away. AWAY, which is a subject for another post…running out of room for storing the work!

I have a myriad of other tedious chores I can do, that have all cropped up since I turned the PC back on after the technology-fast.

And I can go swim, eat chocolate and maybe watch a chick Netflix. Life goes on…in Dreamweaver hell.

About two weeks ago, I resumed writing a book about my life experience of being shortened six inches. This took place when I was 17 and I had a lot of unexplored issues with regard to the decision, my family, and present time debilitation.

In conjunction, I had started a textile body of work on this subject. My original idea was to use the work to mentor young women (and men) on body image. While this was a very noble idea, in the end, I believe it was yet another attempt on my part to be seen, rather than an idea for which I was passionate.

I had started the writing earlier this year, then hit the wall, went on a cruise, my daughter came home, got caught up in her issues, remodeled, had foreign houseguests and then began again. I had become mired in the muck, feeling half-way in and half-way out; or possibly 7/8ths the way out, but having no compass for this journey, I really did not know where I was.

So the suggestion was made to write again, keep writing, get it all out, have it published with the illustrations being the textile work, travel the world, get famous and buy a villa in Italy when the Lifetime movie hit the airways. Well, not quite, but close.

I wrote continuously for days. I wrote 18-20 chapters in just 5 days. I accessed a lot of anger as I channeled the fearful 16 year old pre-surgery. Soon the teenager took over my thoughts, and I began to fully function as if I were in high school, short of going drinking and cruising the boulevard, with the kids next door on Friday night.

Quite frankly, I got too close to the edge. I began to lose my sanity. My head hurt all of the time, and I began to have unreal expectations of others. I had lost sight of all the spiritual development and growth I had completed since I was 16. I was just needy, needy, needy. It scared the hell out of me, but I could not figure out how to stop it.

So I stopped writing, turned off the computer for a week, had two bodywork appointments, including acupuncture, had lunch with a spirited friend, cried a lot, just got quiet and began to learn to trust myself again.

With so many advising me, I instead looked inward for the answers to what I actually wanted to do with the Tall Girl Series and the work that had manifested because of it. I envisioned going to that scared 16 year old, who was told this surgery was her idea and her decision, and brought her out of that awful house to live with me as an adult, in my home now. She joined the other children, me at 6 and 1. (Visual: old woman with many children under her skirt)

I came home from a bodywork appointment and immediately threw cloth on the wall to create directly from my soul. The piece was calling itself requiem. I was feeling anger as I used artcloth designed with Tallgirl imagery WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? printed on the cloth. The piece is large and went together in just hours.

Now, just days later, it is complete with bindings on two sides already. In the end, it became closure. I feel I have a few more archived Tall Girl pieces in me. And then I will lay it to rest.

I have finished. The book remains where I stopped. It will rest on the shelf until I feel ready to deal with it. I have made the following decisions based on my intuitive, and finally I feel at peace.

I will not finish, nor publish the book on my surgery. I never have wanted notoriety for my body. I am not just some girl who was shortened. This is my personal story and not fodder for entertainment.

I will not use my story to mentor others, except through my artwork.

If I am to achieve fame, I want it to be for the artwork I create. My work speaks directly from my soul, without my person being a visual aid. I do plan to utilize some of the already developed TG textile work in future exhibits.

This entire process has brought me enormous clarity on a number of issues. I plan to spend a lot less time on the computer and more in the studio. Nine hours after I turned off the computer, inspiration infused my bloodstream. I am returning to yoga for the sanity it brings me. I am having a 59th birthday makeover!

So, if you are waiting for that book from me, stop waiting! I may still have another book in me but to publish the excavation of this old rotted story is simply not going to happen. I am moving on…

Today I had a wonderful day! I drove to the city, in record time. There was no stopped traffic this Saturday. It does seem weekends are the best driving times in the entire Bay Area.

I attended my mentor, Marion’s lecture on Afro-American quilts for the Textile Arts Council, at the new DeYoung Museum. She was delightful, and informative and cool as a cucumber despite a myriad of technical AV problems. They were certainly not her fault, but one would think a fine institution like a museum with brand new-state-of the-art equipment could have an employee who knew the mechanics of it all.

After that I drove the short distance over to the National AIDS Memorial Grove to see two friends who were working there today for their monthly volunteer gig. After seeing the gardens and having a chance to visit a bit, my book came up. Well, actually I brought it up.

I have been writing nearly every day for 3 to 4 hours at a stretch. After that much time, my eyes hurt and my butt hurts so I get up from the chair and go do something else.

I mentioned that surely when this is published, my sisters will never speak to me again; and further I will probably be disowned. This fear is what has kept me silent for over 40 years. I no longer possess this fear but am quite aware of the potential for this reality to occur.

That is when my friend asked me…do you feel good about yourself when you spend time with these people? No, I responded. He knows all too well, as he is estranged from his mother and sister. He knows, as I do, that I am doing the right thing for me, and even though there is nothing there now, the idea of there being nothing there indefinitely is definitely unnerving.

It was then and there that we decided that they, the two friends would become my brothers. I will always have kin who loves me, and who really gets what that means. It doesn’t mean only loving you when you behave to their expectations. It means always.

My therapist thinks the family is all going to rally ’round. I doubt it. I was told twenty years ago to drop it or be disowned. We all get along famously when we do what we are told…even if we are nearly 60. We are not happy but we are obedient, and after all, isn’t that is the most important thing?…obedience!

Today I took a partial day off from the writing and went to San Francisco to see both the new DeYoung Museum and the Gees Bend quilt exhibit. Although I had planned to go Saturday, an old friend called and asked me to go with her today. So I said sure, thinking a day as a passenger would give me some good meditative knitting time, and rest my eyes from computer eyestrain.

She called last night and asked if we were still on? I said yes and then she informed me that I needed to drive as she was tired of driving. She lives 3 hours north and was tired from her drive down, two days prior. I nearly cancelled. I did not relish making this drive twice this week. I could just go Saturday with my original plan. But I stuck to my guns and went along with it. This seems to be my pattern with this old “friend.”

I have known this woman for over 30 years. My husband has always said she is a user and manipulator. I have always given her the benefit of the doubt, overlooked her crass behavior because she is a kindred spirit, yada, yada, yada.

I used to feel that long term friendships were not meant to end. But in reality, the value of some is purely historical. If there is nothing there to make us want to linger over coffee, with this person, why postpone the inevitable? Put the dog out of its misery.

Today was the last straw. For years, I have asked this “friend” not to gossip to me about a former ally. And yet she continues to do it. I have laid my boundary and she just steps on over it and does what she wants. Today, she said something that was so incredibly unnecessary and extremely hurtful, that it ruined my afternoon.

Who does that? Who says such hurtful things to “friends?” None of mine. She has just been fired. My husband was right…it just took me longer to see it. I got hung up on her potential, when in reality it was my own potential being mirrored back to me. It only took me 32 years to see it. Better late than not at all.

Today I went for a psychological tune-up because I have been experiencing a lot of procrastination, anxiety and guilt (who me?!) around doing this Tall Girl body of work. Several of my peers had suggested maybe I should not be doing the work, at all. I feel the time is right and yet I am mired in doubt, procrastination and anxiety, over it.

I have a list of great ideas for the art work and yet I cannot seem to start. So instead I have been doing lots of abstract work for exhibits.

She advised me to return to writing the book. That is where I started on this path. Write the book and have the artwork be the illustrations. When the book is completed, the work will come pop-pop-pop! To do the artwork first and then write the story is like going into surgery with no idea of how to close.

So I have started in. Actually, I had already written several chapters, so right now I am editing and sorting, moving and filing, organizational stuff.

This of course is going to shoot my theory that I spend too much time on the computer! Going down to the appt, I thought I should start a log of just how much time I do spend on the computer, sort of like a food diary. I might be shocked. Well, now I have a darn good excuse to ride this keyboard.

Giddy-up!

For the past few weeks I have been entertaining the thought of going to an art gallery reception in Colorado, at the end of the month. My work was juried into this prestigious venue in this little podunk town near the New Mexico border.

First, I asked my adult daughter to go along, for a ‘girls’ weekend but she has been unable to commit, so I decided to go alone. I decided to fly (and test my terrorist standing) to Albuquerque a few days early and bask in la vida loca in Santa Fe. Since cruising to Mexico in the spring, I have been home since. I am so ready to get out of Dodge!

Now, I am a Santa Fe junkie. I have been there 9 times. My most recent trip was last fall, when I discovered I was on the terrorist watch list, at the end of an already difficult week with a very challenging traveling companion. A solo trip there now could exorcise those demons from this wonderful spiritual environment, that embraces me every time I return.

I spent most of this week, searching the Internet for that one great travel deal that everyone is seeking. It does not exist! Actually the airfare was quite reasonable, but the car rental was outrageous. It would be cheaper to fly into Denver, rent a car there and drive the 7 hours to Santa Fe!

I reasoned if I spent only two nights in Santa Fe, then I could stay in a 5 star hotel. I need not feel deprivation by staying in a budget motel on my self-indulgant trip. And then I would stay two nights in the podunk-ville B & B, but then I would have to drive 5 hours to get back to Albuquerque to fly home. Or I could stay yet another night near the airport, but that would be depressing, especially after the 5-star hotel! This was truly becoming an exercise in insanity.

By weeks end, I still had not come to any conclusion, except that I don’t ever want to feel financially strapped when I go to NM. Because once I am there in either the 5 star hotel or the budget motel, I am going to want to shop a bit, for my Navajo rug or silver jewelry collection, which were started before I stopped taking up space! I am going to want to eat more of that fabulous cuisine!

No, Santa Fe is not my idea of a budget vacation. The only times I have been there and not spent money were when I was in class all day with David Walker and Ruth McDowell. My husband was skiing and I was in class. We spent something like $200 in a week in Santa Fe. We spend more than that at home!

Today, I was reminded of the Mendocino Art Center. I perused their brochure and found TWO classes I would love to take this fall. I can drive to Mendocino in two hours, in my own car that I own, take an art class, stay in a B & B for 2-3 nights and STILL have enough Santa Fe trip expense money, to take more classes.

What a fabulous idea….besides I can wait until a really big trip, like the Mediterranean cruise for my 60th to find out if I am still on the list. That will give the gov’t another year to find my file.

I am doing a marvelous job of doing absolutely nothing. Near as I can remember I have been doing this for about two weeks. I really don’t feel badly about it. There is a small semblance of guilt about it, but since I no longer do guilt, I pay it no mind. And besides when I do work, I am prolific, so now I am resting!!!

For at least 10 days-2 weeks I have thought each day I would get into the studio and get some work done. In reality, I have slept in, read through a stack of accumulated periodicals and mail, gone to exercise, taken myself out to lunch, gone to the movies, watched DVDs from Netflix, read and written an excessive amount of e-mail, eaten when hungry and passed through the studio from time to time, to open or close the window.

One night this week, I actually stayed for 90 mins, accompanied by my fav Andrea Bocelli vocalizing full blast on the boom box. Awesome passion filled my veins as I was in the zone, in the studio for those 90 mins. When I looked up it was nearly 11 pm, so I stopped. Why, I don’t know; I obviously am in a different time zone than most.

It is obvious to me that all this distraction has two root causes. One is the post-summer remodeling and subsequent European visitors chaos. The other is the restlessness brought on by working through a major psychological clot in my path.

A year ago, next month, I decided to embark on a body of work, of which I am advised not to speak! Unfortunately, I have much to say. I am trying to channel that into the work, and so from time to time I do. In between, it comes out in the strangest of places. And oftentimes I feel as if I have lapsed back into that place in time, 40 years ago. It is both unnerving and disturbing; kind of like being in a time machine. The rest of the time I process and fidget.

I never have liked the transitional time in the growth process. The time when we are processing, culling and sorting in our minds, heart and soul. It is hard work! This one has been exceptionally challenging. In the end it is worth it. A beautiful valley between the mountain ranges, a respite until the next growth spurt in the process and so it goes.

I am working really hard at dissecting this challenge, finding what works for me and tossing out what doesn’t. I may appear to be distracted, but really I am quite hard at work.