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Babywearing Wednesday

For the first time since we started the actual painting section of the project, Julia and I were at the Miffal on the same day.

When I came in through the back door, I almost knocked over her paints, as she was expanding and developing the rudimentary washes and patterns I had sketched out on the door.




Not wanting to bother her--or to ruin our process by getting involved in her choices--I went to work on the large walls. I am still haunted by the video clip of Claire's visit, so I began by inserting painting some of the quotes i had jotted down on to the wall. I used white paint, so the words play a game of hide and seek, visible mostly by their texture rather than their color:

"This was never a house"

"This was always a school"

"They didn't want us to come back"




High up, near Anne Dytche's butterflies: "He left us. He went to God."

And beneath Clair in her wedding dress: "I was young, I was really young."




As I waited for the paint to dry, I received a call from the babysitter that the baby was crying non stop, and i had to come get here.

I returned twenty minutes later with the baby on my back, feeling very discouraged. This was already the sixth babysitter I had tried for my high strung Corona baby, and she had seemed by far the best. Calm. Unfazed. If even she couldn't calm my crazy little girl, there seemed little hope of ever finding help with childcare.

But with that undertow of desperation, I couldn't stop either. In my head, it seemed that if I gave up on this day of work, I was giving up on the project as a whole.

So, unable to focus, unable to stop, I went into erasing and rubbing out: softening the harsh brushstrokes of the pattern I had inserted at the last moment of the previous session; rubbing in the pastel with water to get a color and texture that was closer to Nomi's fresco-like effect.



Soon, baby calmed down and so did I. As I felt her weight settle on my back as she drifted off to sleep, my destructive energy faded.

Now I had to deal with the mess. I had rubbed away and faded Julia's pastel drawing of Claire's visit to the point of amorphousness.

I brought out the pastels, and used a still from the video of Clair's visit as a reference. I chose a frame where Claire is pointing, to create a visual link between the two sides of the wall--almost like the old Claire is pointing at her former self.

I also enlarged Claire's face, so that it would be the same size as her face as a bride.

While I had gone too far in watering down the pastel, I did feel that the watered down effect worked better with the other works in the room, so I kept working into the pastel with a wet paintbrush and rag.






Baby slept; and I got a good two hours of work all together.

I left happy with the way things were looking--the two sides of the mural felt more interrelated, with the pastel acting as a frame, and the two Claires, old an young, looking towards each other.

I also felt more hopeful now that I had seen that if all else fails, I still can manage to work, even without childcare.

Next week, I hope to be able to soften and water down the other pastel piece.





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