No. 73 - House of Pain, House of Love
...but mostly House of Love
Welcome to the latest issue of Feed the Monster, a monthly art journal for the creative and imperfect. Come as you are.
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Yes, yes I know, I keep mentioning how we’ve gone through a tough eighteen months and I haven’t had the time or bandwidth to attend to my creative life or to Feed the Monster, bla bla bla. NO-ONE CARES. I mean, sure, my friends care—but subscribers just want their newsletter, they want to be entertained or edified. They don’t want sob stories or excuses. So I’ll just mention it one more time—forgive!—in order to explain the title of this post.
In this post I’m going to show you some home-made greeting cards with maniacal heart faces—cards that spent a couple of years displayed on our credenza in an ever-growing display—so naturally the title House of Love came to mind. Then I thought of all the shite we’ve been through lately and thought to myself, House of Pain.
Hence.
The.
Title.
I imagine most homes can boast the same. Love. Pain. Sweet times. Torturous times. Is it just me? I don’t think so. Anyhoo. Get ready for some love.
HOUSE OF LOVE
When our daughter Chloe was little, she at some point started calling her father “Fazza” and me “Mah-Jah”. We think she may have picked it up from her friend Dylan, but can’t be sure. As the years went by, it somehow developed that whenever I’d leave a note for Chloe on the kitchen counter, I’d draw a big heart with a face on it, always with a massive toothy smile and big eyes with long eyelashes. Usually it’d have two nostrils in place of an actual nose, and there’d often be rays emanating from it. Below the heart I’d write my message, then sign it in this descending fashion:
LOVE!
FROM!
MAH!
JAH!
XOX
OX
X
I still do this in cards to Chloe. I would also often draw these heart faces in greeting cards to other loved ones and friends, leading me to remark one time, “why do my cards always look like a 12-year old wrote them?”
WELL, WHY DO YOU THINK?
Anyhoo, one day a few years back, my husband David gave me a taste of my own medicine and made a birthday card for me with his own version of the heart face on the front. And so it began.
His version always has a body, which is a nice touch. More than a nice touch, actually: it’s next-level. The cartoon-style eyes are different from the ones I’d been drawing on my heart-faces, and I immediately started emulating his approach. It was clearly superior.
I also appropriated his pig-nose.
And now allow me to present cards made by Chloe for her Fazza. Aside from working as a software consultant and being a talented dancer and musician, the scamp can also draw. It’s sickening, really.
Good-bye from the House of Love! (and pain. Lest we forget the pain.)
ALSO, THIS STUFF:
I’ve been doing a lot of work lately toward the journaling workshop I’m creating, and to that end I did trial runs of the material with three people kind enough to donate their time:
Thursday - my daughter Chloe Lampman
Friday - my friend Jill Margo of The Creative Good
Saturday - my husband David P. Smith
It was a lot. It was super interesting and they gave me tons of valuable feedback, but it apparently overwhelmed me. I didn’t initially recognize it as such. But after a couple of days of first feeling very frustrated, and then feeling unaccountably drowsy when I tried to work on it, I stopped. I realized I needed to step back and return to it when I’d digested what was being made clear to me.
On the face of it, the workshop is 95% ready to go. The structure is there, the content is there, the exercises are there. Hallelujah, it exists! But my approach needs to take into account the fact that some of the exercises could potentially be “triggering” for some, or lead them into dark waters. This is valuable information! Nothing major needs to change: I just have to let people know that it’s up to them how deep they want to go during a 2-hour workshop.
It’s just a journaling workshop… don’t take it so seriously, Betty-Ann. Okay, maybe that’s true. But not everyone is accustomed to delving below the surface, plus things are not so easy-breezy for a lot of folk these days. These are mighty good things to keep in mind. Yes, “just a journaling workshop”, but I feel a responsibility to not make it slap-dash. It needs to be as good as it can be, in accordance with my present ability.
SO SAYETH I
And yes, I was planning to announce a date for the workshop in this Feed the Monster post. But, hahahahahaha, God LAUGHS at my plans, ha, haha, hahahahaha! Laughs and LAUGHS! Hahahahahaha! And not in a fun way. In a CRUEL way. Damn you, God!
(Definitely going to smite me now)
My chosen words for 2024 are rest and healing… of course because I badly need those things at the moment. Yet, at the same time I feel a growing push to grab my life by the ballz and scramble my way out of this shit-storm of a time we’ve had. Can one do both? Rest and heal and squeeze balls? STAY TUNED!
SOME STUFF:
Clear Shadows: Japanese silhouette portraits from 1867
The designer Alison Lloyd’s London home
Austin Kleon: The Demons Hate Fresh Air
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Listen to my interview with Sheryl MacKay on CBC’s NxNW here (starts ten minutes in). It’s all about Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir, an art exhibit about my mother’s Lewy Body dementia and my relationship with her
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The heart cards are amazing! It’s the teeth that get me. 😁
I fricking love this heart card tradition. Deranged hearts can still feel fuzzy wuzzy!