Now that the craft fair is over and I’ve recuperated physically and regrouped mentally, I’ve been adding a bit of metallic color with the charcoal pieces I’m reworking. #11, above is the first one I finished and I am much happier with it now. In the meantime, I am also reworking paintings from last summer’s solo show by using what I’ve learned about negative space and black while doing the charcoal pieces. Oskar, below, used to have a vivid purple background but now has one that is a mix of dark blues and browns that passes for black but isn’t. This is all part of the necessary growth and exploration of making art, each phase leads to and informs the next. Yes, they are still birds, my spirit animals, my talismans, but there is a definite advancement even though the earliest ones were quite, dare I say it, brilliant too. Brilliant is a word Paul, my fiancé, uses. Our relationship is based on our appreciation of each other’s artwork. We’ve been Facebook friends for at least fifteen years but it developed into a romance in 2023. At the time I was intimidated by him and his career even though I was more prolific and visible on social media. Almost a mentor, he guided me as I built both my website and craft fair business as well as a solid body of original paintings. He has brought a gravity and stature to my work, and he’s patient with me if he feels I’m headed in a wrong direction. He tells me, of course, but patiently, especially when I disagree with him. Although once I catch up with what he has been suggesting, I see it too. You’d have to ask him how I’ve influenced his work, but to my eye there’s a bounce and joy that wasn’t there before. It’s a win-win situation, he has given me confidence and I have brought light into the gloom and despair of what is currently our world. How will the Venezuela nightmare impact our plans? Will the UK have me with my American passport? Will whatever I ship there arrive or get blown out of the water? What about flying? I know I’m not getting on a plane or going through an airport again until things calm down. But will they calm down? I keep thinking about people who were separated during WWII and could only connect with letters that took months to arrive. At least we have Zoom and WhatsApp, for now. Onward.

There are two reworked charcoal pieces since my last post, the black cockatoo above and the vulterine below. Both are now denser, darker, perhaps gloomier reflections of the wary mood that is so common in America these days, including my own. Yes, yes I have a very nice, safe place to live and I’m out of the financial hole I was in before the craft fair began. And yes, I have a studio with plenty of art supplies, and I’ll soon have the time to create. I’m also healthy and have a fiancé who loves me unconditionally. There are a couple more craft fairs coming up plus a few group shows I plan to be in, and I’m waiting for dates of my solo exhibition this spring at The Commons. I’ve also noticed an uptick in my social media numbers and there are some new subscribers and followers here on Substack. I’m happily out of greeting cards plus most of the small giclees, and although none of the originals have sold yet, I know they will at the upcoming indoor fairs. There is plenty to do to continue my momentum but I intend to spend today on my sofa recuperating from being in a shack on the beach in the brutal ocean cold of a Cape Cod winter by doing a bit of online shopping. I need new snow boots, but one can never have too many black sweaters. I suppose I could always dive into writing grant proposals or research potential galleries, but I feel a new cashmere turtleneck is calling me. So short and sweet this week, and Happy New Year - Onward.

Still in the craft fair vortex, but I reworked #12, the Emu above, which is now denser and darker than before. I am also off the wait list and get to keep the booth I’ve been using until the fair is over at the end of the month. This means I can leave everything there in the big plastic bin my next booth neighbor has loaned me instead of schlepping it home on Sundays. I’m completely out of bird cards and several of the limited edition giclees, so I took in some collage pieces and smaller originals on paper, including a few charcoal studies, last weekend. We were quite busy Saturday but it snowed enough overnight to make Sunday a treacherous mess and for The Canteen to cancel the fair for the day. They did offer to let some of us set up in the tent behind the restaurant that they use for additional space, and I went in because it’s only a ten minute walk there and it didn’t look too bad from my window. The snow, which continued all day, and the wind however were relentless, and the tent wasn’t much warmer than being outside. I left at three and a hot shower thawed me out, although I had to take a nap afterwards because being that cold for that long is exhausting. Experiencing the gerry-rigged tent reminded me how from the time I graduated from college until I moved into my first official Provincetown apartment almost forty years later, none of the places I lived had proper bathrooms. Generally it was toilets in water closets and a shower or tub in the kitchen, but I did spend two years in an Ozark shack with an outhouse and a half mile walk to a well for water. Which meant plenty of opportunities to practice my MacGyver skills with a staple gun, duct tape and plastic tarps or bedsheets. All this along with the terrible news out of LA has me thinking of my friend Marsha from my Ozark times who was murdered by her schizophrenic son. I wrote about her in my May 16th post but it’s the son, fresh out of the psych ward and later also murdered once he was in prison, who is in my thoughts today. He was a beautiful child, a happy baby. Such a waste, so much tragedy. The human animal is truly confounding.

No new birds this week because I’ve fallen into the craft fair vortex, and I’m happy to report all my bills are paid now. I’m waitlisted for this weekend although we are expecting snow. So I might get in and maybe not do any business. We’ll see. I opted for this artist life - the be broke and in debt until you sell something big and pay it all off only to be broke again life - when I decided not to take a tourist season job after the gallery where I worked for ten years closed last fall. Getting that grant in March was enough to cover the lost salary, however gallivanting back and forth to the UK several times this year, plus copays on three eye surgeries didn’t help. But I have no regrets, except for the being broke part, the rest feels like freedom. And a true sense of self.

In the meantime, my craft fair inventory has shrunk considerably, which was the plan, and I’ve been figuring out what to add to the line to fill it out. I’ve already packed some of the charcoal studies and smaller paintings on paper from my 2024 show at The Commons, but that doesn’t cover the lack of cards that used to be my bread and butter. So I’ll introduce a number of my collages since I have a dozen or so cards of Communion, the piece above, to add to the mix. I do however have linocut tools and plates on hand as well as appropriate paper and envelopes, so who knows, I may be printing birds, albeit little ones, sooner than I thought. Ah the dilemma of being an artist with too many balls in the air. PS - Santa says Hello. Onward.

Missed a week - I actually had a post ready which got quickly outdated, so I’m starting fresh today. First of all, there are three birds - #32, the new Cardinal above, and two of the charcoal studies from September that I’ve reworked - #20, the Rooster and #17, the Falcon with the wonky head from the Storks And Such post. There are a couple more early studies I intend to do rather drastic things to, think silver painted backgrounds or cutting the bird out and adhering it to something else. But that’s what studies are for, to experiment with, to play with, since that’s also important in making art. I am still going to go as large as the limitations of my little studio allow, but the printing press at Funk and Schuster, which I’ve mentioned before and where I first thought about creating prints, can accommodate much bigger paper and may be the way to go.

One of the reasons this post is late is I had a booth at The Canteen’s Holiday Craft Fair in Provincetown for the three days after Thanksgiving. It’s outdoors, in fact it’s on the beach, and although I was in a semi-contained booth, I was actually standing on sand. It was fun, although wicked cold and we had to close early Sunday because of rain. I swapped the last two of my mugs for a quart of local honey from the beekeeper in the booth next to mine, made a few interesting connections that are promising, and sold enough to pay off my outstanding bills including the eye doctor and still have a little pocket money. And then The Canteen treated the vendors to a delicious dinner so we could get to know each other better. I’m at the top of the waiting list for a booth this weekend - fingers crossed. Onward.

Thursday was the first anniversary of the first of my three eye surgeries. I’m learning to live with the results and have stopped complaining about them, but that and the ever escalating chaos coming out of DC occupied my attention last week and made me late with the post. But I have three new birds. I’m happy with the two small pieces, #30, the Magpie inspired by the ones in our garden in Newcastle, and #29, the Vulterine below, but it’s #31, the Condor above, which is much larger, that is what I’ve been striving for. Paul says it’s the most Maureen McCarron of all the Maureen McCarrons he’s witnessed me create. It may not be as dramatic or expressive as some of the others, but it has a maturity that made me judge the previous work and eliminate half a dozen or so from my website. It has also inspired me to rethink only numbering them and to add their species to their titles. I now see the ones that got cut as studies, the work I did as I sussed out how to use the charcoal and to make the marks I wanted to achieve. I plan to do new versions of a couple of them - definitely the rooster, and maybe the frigate, which was the first drawing in the series. Adding white paint and mummy colored pastel to the mix was part of my learning process, but the Condor has neither of these. It’s just the charcoal, buffed, blended and aggressively erased.

I also plan to do a much larger white cockatoo with its crown feathers fully unfurled, but I’m not sure the paper I have is big enough for what I envision. Because that’s my goal. Much bigger birds, enormous birds, birds that truly grasp their godlike quality - but for that I need a lot more space than I currently have in Provincetown. Not to mention a place to store them and how to transport them once I move to the UK. This would require another grant or winning the lottery. So it remains a dream for the time being. Which reminds me of the dream Paul had when we first hooked up. In it, he was helping me hang a show because the work was huge and in ornate gilded frames, and way too heavy for me to handle. Back then, the birds were on tiny wood panels and I was adamant about not framing them. But I am always open to suggestions and within a couple months, I had switched to paper, which demands to be framed, and the work had doubled in size. Soon enough, it tripled. When I returned to wood panels, my minis were a thing of the past as I began the paintings that made up the show I had this summer. All of which were framed. Now I’m back to paper. Arches, my preferred brand, makes wide rolls, but maybe I should consider canvas although I don’t care for a surface with that much texture. Either way, gilded frames or not, I still need that big fat grant or to win the lottery. Best get cracking on that then, onward.

I haven’t had time to get any artwork done since I arrived home in Provincetown late Monday night, but I did do an owl, #28 above, on Saturday before I left. However, I took a lot of snapshots out the airplane windows I sat next to on the flights back. One is of the remnants from Hurricane Melissa as we flew through it on the way to Dublin from Newcastle, as well as the rain-lashed window of the Dublin to Boston plane as it was waiting to take off. Again, like the flights to the UK, I sat in window seats but this time I was next to emergency exits on both planes so I had lots of legroom and nobody smashing into me with the back of their seat. I shared the space with a young man named Trace who bore a startling resemblance to an old college friend of mine named Barry when he was young, and who had died while I was in the UK. Same long black curly hair, same glasses, and boho hippie clothes. When I showed Trace pictures of Barry from 50 years ago, it freaked him out, but it made me happy. It was as if Barry was sitting with me, not his young doppelganger.

Anyway, I’m back and have been very busy plowing through the bills and paperwork I had dreaded coming home to. I got a little refund from Expedia because I prepaid more for my tickets than what the trip finally cost, and a check arrived for my cut of the sale of the collage I did this summer for the PAAM 12x12 Benefit Auction, so that plus the Substack subscription I mentioned last week were enough to pay everything except the balance of what I owe my eye surgeon. So, if I eat frugally this month, I’ll be ok until December. Especially if I do well at the Holiday Craft Fair at the Canteen Thanksgiving weekend. I heard about another craft fair in town next month that I’ve applied to since the one I did last year has been cancelled.

Have I told you my favorite Buddhist parable about the woman and the tigers? Being chased by tigers, she climbs over the side of a cliff and is hanging from a vine only to see there are tigers down below her too. She also sees that a rat is chewing on her vine and that she will eventually fall. Then she notices a cluster of berries growing out of the cliff next to her. She plucks the berries and eats them. They are delicious. End of story - in other words, stay in the moment. Eat the berries. Onward.