This Blaze, one of the post-Smithsonian masks, do you recognize him from the sketches I posted yesterday? I had intended to do the whole figure, I still might, but I was too taken with the masks at that point. By March, when classes were over, I did my internship on Sundays as well as having 3 part-time jobs. One was at the Tribeca gallery I would later work more days at, but first I had a big solo show of my own to prepare for. Which meant, since I had no money, I needed to frame 60 pieces by hand in less than 2 months - when all I really wanted to do was paint.

Here are a couple of pages from the sketchbook I kept during my internship. Perhaps you recognize something in them. Take a look at the two figures at the bottom of the right hand side image, you'll see them again; although I have a fondness for the cluster of little round heads in the lower entry. Especially the one who looks like he has on a pinwheel hat, although I believe those were feathers in the original object. They were dolls, I don't remember which tribe, but there was something resembling love in all of them.

This was the last painting I did while at Pace; I was learning to scan slides and printed out the image of Dharma Bum, which I posted a few weeks ago, and thought it'd make a nice gouache. Right after this, two months into the classes, we started our internships. Our schedule was mornings in school and afternoons at our internship, but because my unemployment had run out, I also worked at the holiday craft fair in Grand Central Station. If I wasn't at Pace or the Smithsonian, that's where I was. From Thanksgiving until Christmas, I didn't have a single day off, and then continued my seven days a week routine until February to catch up on the time I owed the museum. Which was fine, I enjoyed sitting at my greeter's desk and looking at Native American art books. 

Two versions of the same angel, done the same weekend. Tiny, especially Flame, which is postcard size, I did them toward the end of the classroom sessions when some of the other students started to open up about their experiences in the towers on 9/11. Being in the crowded smoky stairwells rushing down dozens of flights, or caught in the billowing clouds of debris once they were out and thinking they were safe; not my story to tell but it was worse than you or I could ever imagine.

Little Pinkie, at 5" x 7", is even smaller than yesterday's post, and now in North Carolina. Also done while at Pace, I used it in my Power Point final exam project. I still have the presentation on the disk I made in class, and later transfered to my Mac. It had a sound track that no longer works, I used opera and whales songs primarily, as well as 12 images of my paintings. Aced the final, and opened the door to lots of conversations with my curious classmates about my theory on angels.

After the art group disbanded, I was accepted into the program at Pace University for people who'd lost their jobs because of 9/11. It was a stretch to include me, but my being treated for PTSD and the murky meltdown that led to my unemployment made me eligible. It met Monday through Friday from 8 to 5, just like a job, and we worked our butts off. Most of my classmates were in the towers that morning, or were on their way in and watched it like I did. We weren't allowed to discuss the event without one of the therapists who came twice a week for what were supposed to group sessions. Since the sessions were voluntary, only a handful of us showed up. Those who needed it most couldn't handle it. Too tired during the week, I did a series of very tiny paintings, like the 6" x 8" piece above, little Goldie, on my days off.

Luma, done for a friend who died during the PTSD tapes, the last of the men I knew with AIDS, repeats Cassandra, only with wings. I was in a program for artists who were impacted by 9/11 by then. Some of them lost everything, home, studio, art, equipment.  They were, a year and a half later, still paralyzed by their losses and unable to participate, or benefit, from the group. The rest of us, the witnesses, organized an exhibit and tried bring them along. Holding us back, the show didn't happen, they resented us for wanting to move on. A painful failure; although I sold a painting to a member who had had a gallery that was destroyed, he moved back to South America soon after the group ended.

The most stately of the angels, Caruso was painted while listening to the entire set of PTSD tapes which go from the plane flying over my house, through the events you all watched on TV, on to the day I spent handing out water on the West Side Highway, and then the funeral for my fireman friend at St. Patrick's when Fifth Avenue was closed down from 42nd Street to Central Park. They continue as things escalate at the store as well as the business trips that required scary air travel, until the first anniversary spun into a workplace freakshow. I needed those tapes to piece it together, to understand how one thing led to another.

One of my favorites, Circe, this hung in my bedroom reflecting in my mirror for over a year; I love the pearly lavender against the hot coppery background. It was done during the period of listening to hours of my PTSD tapes as the angels became more regal, more commanding, more in control. I find it interesting how the paintings I prefer are usually not the ones that are best received, perhaps it has to do with how I felt when I was creating them rather than how they actually turned out.

Garuda Again, that's actually the title, this was done on a piece of wood I found in the street. While I was in PTSD therapy, I made quite a bit of artwork. Part of that therapy was every day I had to listen to a tape of the week before's session. Not the Hellos and Good Byes, but the meat of my 9/11 experience. She made me put it in chronological order, which it wasn't until then, it was all this scary jumble of  images, and through this process, I learned to manage them. Listening to the tapes over and over also poked a hole in the big fear bubble; eventually I had seven hours of these tapes and found listening to the entire collection while I was painting to be both enlightening as well as empowering. 

Odd, I thought I deleted this image after I posted it last night to see how it looked, but it was still here in the morning so I must be meant to tell you about it. Fairly flat, with its mother of pearl button eyes and mouth, it is a forerunner to the later papier mache sculptures. Done in the first few weeks after losing my job, I drew the original sketch during a seminar that was part of a two day convention for artists who were affected by 9/11. This program was an important turning point in my life, it led to a sixteen week course of Post Traumatic Stress therapy, and then later, to the program at Pace University that my internship at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian was a big piece of.

Calliope was the next of the metallic squares, although it took a couple of months for me to paint it. After the 1st anniversary of 9/11, my Post Traumatic Stress kicked in, as did the craziness at my job. I could bore you with that drama, but suffice to say by December, I was unemployed and painting full time. Like now, I had no money but was very creative. 

This is Cassandra, the first painting I did after my hiatus following 9/11. I started it watching, or rather, listening to the 1st anniversary name-reading ceremony of the disaster while the helicopters over my house filmed the event as it was broadcasted back to me on live TV. It took several sessions to finish, this work is time-consuming, and was the beginning of the small squares and metallic under-painting. All that's yellow is mixed with gold, as is the coppery blue background. 

Also technically not an angel; he falls more into the Trickster god category, which, according to Joseph Campbell, is archetypal. The original project that these 9/11 collages evolved from was a mail-art exhibit in Berlin about the Pied Piper. This was the piece I did for that event, it made me cry; I couldn't help myself, I had to do more of them.

Technically not an angel, Anita Ekberg's character in La Dolce Vita was more of a goddess and her performance was an iconic statement that fell under the umbrella of archetype, as far I'm concerned. This is my favorite of the 9/11 collages, I used tiny copies of it as a business card for a while. I know exactly how she feels; but more than that, I loved those two buildings as if they were human. Or, perhaps, even divine. Brand new when I first moved to Manhattan, they were my beacons, my Stonehenge, the Great Pyramids; and now they're gone.

The worst over, I made a harrowing run across Houston, filled with EMT vehicles doing 90, to the ATM, where I heard about the Pentagon, and then back to my corner deli, where I bought 3 pints of blueberries. And cookies, lots of cookies. Once home, I didn't leave until Thursday, when, on a quest to find surgical masks, the air, the air, I joined two women with a grocery cart full of bottled water who were headed to the West Side Highway to hand it out to the rescue workers on their way to Ground Zero. At first there were maybe a dozen of us, but by the end of the day, there were hundreds of people on either side of the highway cheering; I saw myself on the national news that evening. On my way home, as I passed a firehouse that lost 13 members, I came across the first of the street shrines that were everywhere by the end of the week. 

During those minutes between the first and second collapse, it seemed oddly silent, although there was a constant shriek of sirens and the sky was full of throbbing helicopters, none of the people watching spoke. Neither did the workers, many of them now covered in the famous grey dirt, as they finally began to hurry passed us like water through rocks in a stream. Someone said the second building was tilting, but I was at the wrong angle to see it. What I saw was it begin to pancake, its spiky antenna hovering in the air as the floors crashed around it and then a big hideous cloud rolling down and out and then up. Eventually the antenna spike fell, and I realized I was weeping while others around me screamed. A very different visual, down at street level, as the sky filled with smoke, to what I would later watch, over and over, on my TV.

When I reached the store, West Broadway was full of people. Watchers, like me, and the workers who'd left against the directions they'd been given. You can walk from there to Soho in 20 minutes, 15 if you hurry. Most of them were not in a rush, it was more like a trance, as they ignored what was going on behind them. The rest of us were riveted. 

I stood in the doorway and yelled at my boss, who was yelling on the phone with the owner who was at home and refusing to turn on her television. The first building fell. It did a weird twisting motion before it came down, I couldn't get my head around what I was looking at. And then it was just gone, in a huge puff of smoke, and all bets were off.

When the first plane flew over my house, I was writing in my journal with a parrot on my shoulder, the sound was so formidable I didn't understand what I was hearing. I heard the impact, 3/4's of a mile away, and I thought two trucks had crashed on Houston Street, half a block from me. People were screaming and I looked out the window to see a crowd already gathered who were pointing south. My radio said something about a plane crash, I turned on the TV but there was no reception, so I threw on some clothes and went outside to see the first building on fire. I went back upstairs and quickly got ready for work, which was around the corner on West Broadway. By the time I was back outside, the second building was also on fire, a term, on fire, which does not begin to cover what it looked like. It was obvious from where I stood, that the top half of the second building would fall down.

I suppose it's time to stop tap dancing around 9/11. But before we dive in, I want to introduce you to the medium I was most involved with until I picked up the brush again on the first anniversary. I'd done collage for many years, as far back as college, when I hit a snag with my painting. The one above is not 9/11 related but it does include two of the three major elements. A figure, usually an angel, and an astronomy image. These were cut and pasted by hand, I like the mess and the involvement. So, be forewarned, tomorrow I'll be taking you down to Ground Zero.

Gollum, perhaps the most alarming of the post 9/11 pulp paintings, was almost a failure because the head did not bind to the background during pressing, so I had to take scissors to it. Although he is not as pretty as the rest of the series, he evokes that event, for me, more than the others do. It was gorgeous morning, it had rained the night before so the sky was intensely blue. And then there was the sulfur grey, not quite yellow, thundercloud of smoke shot with red from the raging fire. His face, agape and googly eyed, much like my face was that morning, says it all.

Sunshine and Pebbles, two more of the paper pulp paintings made the same day as Bojangles. Also done with the same stencil, obviously, they have very organic formats, the black background is not part of these pieces. It's an interesting process, you create the base sheet by dipping a screen into a vat of oatmeal-like pulp and shaking it out to fill the deckle frame to get a clean edge, which I choose not to use; I love the ragged borders. The other colors are applied with nozzled bottles filled with pigmented pulp, and then the water is pressed out, which binds the pulp into a single sheet of paper. It's extremely messy, and so appealing; there must be a way to do it at home, but I haven't figured it out yet.

This is Bojangles, I won an award for this piece as well. Money, in fact, a nice fat check, which is always exciting. It's a handmade paper pulp painting made with stencils and screens. There is a series of these, like the masks, you'll see a number of them; they were all done a few months after 9/11 when I couldn't bring myself to pick up a brush because I was too traumatized. I'd just finished one of the bright yellow angels on September 9th, and the next painting, started the following week and a grey figure edged in red against deep blue, was simply too reminiscent of what I saw from the street outside my house that horrible morning.  

So here's a 1995 snapshot of me in an outfit I made for a museum benefit that won the Best Handmade Costume Award. The dress was floor length and tie-dyed velvet; and the wings, which moved, were strapped on with a red satin ribbon. Each paper feather was cut and glued down, a process which took two days; and the inside, which you can't see of course, was copper foil covered with lacy rice paper. At the time I still painted abstracts, but clearly had angels on my mind.

Sometimes the angel is a ghost. As a Buddhist, I think of them as being basically the same thing; spirits, for lack of a better word, who observe and perhaps protect us. Or, depending on their mood, their unfinished business, annoy or upset us. Named for a departed friend, Sam I Am is definitely a ghost. The cloud-like color, the insubstantial, full of holes body; but then he's on a field of green, which indicates he's hopeful.

And two more, early masks, just for fun. Sort of a pair, siblings in fuschia, with their hair on fire. It's a good thing they have each other, since they don't really go with the rest of the series. Done in colored pencil, they led to my cutting the masks out because the pigment got smeared on the background, a happy accident and trade secret. 

I like doing this, posting these older pieces to the blog; seeing them again gives me great inspiration for the new paintings I'm creating, which I'll show you someday, I promise.

Two very early masks, done the same day, long before my internship at the Smithsonian. I was thinking about Africa and mud. Too small to wear, they were painted with gouache on black paper and cut out, eye sockets and mouth holes too, then mounted on black board. They both sold before I could frame them, to different people, out of the portfolio on the way to have slides made. There was a third one done during the same sitting, actually the first, that I keep for sentimental reasons that was not very successful. But good enough to get me started on these.

I like working on squares; once I started using them, it was impossible to go back to rectangles. Except for the masks, which need an oblong, the shape is a good gauge to where the piece falls in the series. This is Chanteuse, I think she's singing, and there's metallic paint in her golden color, another sign of when she was created. 2004,  part of my Iraq War protest collection; a Garuda girl, with her wings ablazing.

This is Garuda, does he look familiar? Peruse a few of my previous posts and he should. Although I wear a little gold Ganesh pendant around my neck, Garuda is my favorite of the Hindu-Buddhist gods. They are buddies, Garuda and Ganesh, some folk lore says they're kin. They are both removers of obstacles; Ganesh, the elephant-faced friendly one, does it with blessing and bliss, while Garuda with his bird beak and anger, blows in like a fiery tornado and wreaks havoc on his enemies. My hero. He also hates snakes and is usually seen with a dead one in his mouth.

And for some reason I don't understand, he always seems to have breasts. I have made several versions, like the one here which is titled Gaia, yes, a female name, painted for the first day of Spring and not really a Garuda girl at all. Well, maybe she is, don't tornados come with the turbulent end of Winter?

Archetype is a Jungian term championed by Joseph Campbell that refers to images that speak to all cultures in the same language. As I prepared to write my master's thesis on angels as archetypal images, before I dropped out during the meltdown over my mother's suicide, the most intriguing data I came across was the theory that angels were actually aliens. The fiery chariots, their wings and halos, were explained, along with giant earth paintings in South America and the wilds of Great Britain, by this concept. Smacks of Fox Mulder. I'll bet he knew who Carl Jung was.