Walrus....

Ew, I wish they didn't have stupid music playing, but I think this is pretty incredible.  Look at that walrus bod!!

Family Guiding and New Years!

Here's my January article for familyguiding.com!


A Toast to Being Human

New Year’s Eve was always my favorite holiday. No presents to worry about, no high-pressured feasts to prepare—just champagne and good company.  Of course, the one thing that always seemed to impede on my fun was the question of the new years resolution.

Bringing that kind of pressure into my favorite flippant holiday really bummed me out.  To me, resolutions seemed fake and the timing, forced.  How do you contemplate a new beginning when nothing “new” has actually happened?  How do you declare a new principle on one day out of the year when life’s events aren’t timed by the calendar?  Do we make resolutions just as a way to kill time until spring?  Or, to help with small-talk at New Years Eve parties?  Does anyone actually follow through with this?

I sit here with the clock ticking behind me and facts about mammals looping in my head.

The length of a mammal’s life corresponds almost equally to its size and heart rate.   All mammals live for about the same biological length of time.  All mammals breathe about 200 million times in their lifetime.   The year is almost over, I have so many things to do, there’s not enough time.

A mouse, with its heart pumping fast to keep its little body replenished with blood, only lives for around two human years.   A humpback whale (massive body, slow heart) can live 50-100 years.   Both breath about 200 million times throughout their life, just one breathes fast, the other slow.   But, two years or eighty, we can assume that both animals live very full lives on their own biological time.  The slow, aching, 30 minute song of a humpback whale could equate to our memorization of a minute long commercial jingle, or a mouse’s memorization of a very quick set of squeaks.  The lifespan of a creature is only accurately measurable by that creature alone.

Humans are different, though.  Considering our size, we take more breaths, develop much slower, and experience far more throughout our lives than most other mammals.  We stretch our breath to fill almost a century, small bodies living at our own tempo, constructing our lives at the pace of our own personalized biological clock.

The tension of life compresses me until I feel half my size, a portion of my age.  As my mind skims through the unfinished paintings, unconnected facts, and patchy ideas of animal imagery in my head, I squeeze my eyelids in effort to slow my thoughts.  Like the shifting prisms of a kaleidoscope, my brain shuffles through ideas and imagery, colors and composition.

I hear the clock again, and think of all the things I didn’t accomplish this year–not painting fast enough, not writing fast enough, not calling friends often enough, not eating healthy enough.  The New Years resolution, in all its oversimplified, whimsical glory, may be exactly what I need to shake off some of the negative, burdening thoughts and clear my mind to be at peace with the past.

So, this year, I’m giving myself the selfish privilege of developing on my own clock and letting others do the same.  We can run, jump, and play, contemplate, create, and stress−we’re blessed with these little agile bodies that endure lives the length of whales. Molding and bending through phases, we have the time and mental capacity to explore our brains and souls as our lives gracefully tick on.  Feeling off track?  That’s ok, there’s actually time to get back on.  Seems like college was just yesterday?  You lucky human and your incredibly memory, chill out.

The pressure’s off.  It’s time to take advantage of the amazing, slow, long, and malleable lives that we were born with. Pour some champagne and make a toast−we’re all human.

Sculpture

I try to blend art, nature, and science and am sometimes slightly successful.  But this, this, is the real deal. 

I've been thinking a lot about sculpture lately--how I would sculpt, what materials I would use--and it's tricky for me.   Like my paintings, I would want my 3D work to have a deeper narrative that's not always apparent at first.

This ant colony "sculpture" is exactly what I want my 3D art to be.  It's a product of interdisciplinary exploration.  It's abstracted, but upon closer examination, completely honest.  It's beautiful, but terrifying in reality.  And, just like my paintings, it highlights the spirit of discovery.

So, now that I'm thoroughly inspired, time to think of my own sculptural work.  My brain twists and strains for stability in such a boundless medium.

Thanks again familyguiding.com !

This month topic for www.familyguiding.com was "Gratitude for Grandparents".  Luckily for me, as a contributor for their arts page, my grandmother was a painter, and a very good one.

Around the age of 50, when she began her undergrad education, she picked up painting and loved it.  Now, my parents house is filled with Ruth Papin paintings that show the 30 year transition from realistic still-life vases, to thick impressionistic sun-lit gardens, and finally, lively, raw abstract paintings opening up fluctuating emotion as it is translated through oil paint.  Toward the end, the image mattered less than the act.

Here's the article from www.familyguiding.com :

Arts – Memories of Grandma at 70 Miles Per Hour

Last month, I embarked on a 10-day long road trip from Washington D.C. to Tahoe, California. My sister and her fiance were moving from East to West coast, and my boyfriend and I decided that helping to drive was a great excuse to escape the horizonless confines of New York City.

Moving 70 miles an hour across the country, my eyes tried to absorb every geographic change, from the dead and heavy 100 degree plains, to the commanding puffed chest of the rockies. We felt the mass of being circled by the earths edge, and the vulnerability of seeing canyon walls pinch the clouds above our car.

On the third day of our trip, my grandmother passed away. She, my mother, and I all paint and I have, and still use, some of her art supplies. I’ve learned about her through seeing the tools she used to interpret the world. Lots of blue and green paint, stiff wide brushes, and a thickening medium. I oddly feel like an extension of her work by using the materials she used. Growing up with her paintings on the wall, I knew that our personalities were different, that we didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but we somehow possessed the same hobby −the same love of color and nature.

Do we all see the world the same? We definitely don’t recount the world the same. Does my body become euphoric when I see bright green because I’m from a city where concrete grey is the dominant shade? Or, is it something inherent in the mechanics of my vision and mind? Am I like my grandmother more than I like to think I am?

Scrape away the generational gap, forget the petty judgements that last beyond rough holiday dinners, and family members offer us answers to questions about our being that even close friends can’t. I wonder now if she painted like I paint, if her methods were like mine, and if she would see and feel the same impact from a certain pale green succulent in Utah that I did. And then, if she’d start to mimic it in her art like I have.

With air beating against my ears, the desert that is so absent from my daily life and thoughts, became all too present after the first hundred long, empty miles. And, driving toward a city at night shining like christmas lights tangled on the horizon, my sister and I shared stories. We share a family, we share a history, and we share DNA−that importance can’t be understated. The people that you can learn the most from, and who can learn the most from you, are family members. Open up, be forgiving, and listen hard−you’re closer than you might realize.

The Dung Beetle

I’ve always liked exploring the bizarre hard wiring of insects.  Their tiny brains have had millions of years to perfect survival in its most efficient and direct ways.  Non-individualistic and mechanical, their pattern of “eat and procreate” can be both mundane and beautiful.  That’s why, when I heard the news that dung beetles navigate by using the Milky Way Galaxy, there was no question that I had to paint it.

The poo pile--a competitive, thriving, and temporary ecosystem.  The creatures that depend on it are always in search, and willing to fight, for a share of steaming leftover nutrients.  And, mandible deep in shit, the Dung Beetle emerges as a creature beautifully evolved for the sole purpose of scavenging and transporting fresh feces.  

In a rush to escape the chaotic fight for food, they sculpt their ball of dung and roll it away with focus and accuracy, standing upside down and backwards and heading straight toward their den.  We now know that their four sets of eyes are watching both the ground and sky--sun in the day, and the rough glow of the Milky Way Galaxy at night--allowing them the ability to travel straight, with intention and precision.  Scientists tried manipulating their location, swiveling them around, and adjusting their surroundings, but it was only after putting the Dung Beetle in a planetarium and altering the fake night sky that the Milky Way was recognized as their compass.

Watch the awesome Dung Beetle Ted Talk here.

So, why should we be impressed?  No other animal that we know of uses the Milky Way specifically as its compass, but there are plenty of crazy animal navigation stories involving everything from magnetic fields to highly tuned memorization abilities.  The difference for me though, is that insects often get overlooked. 

Unfortunately, most of us have a hard time relating to alien exoskeletal mini-beings. If it's not cute and cuddly, it probably won't get much love from the general public.  So, in these occasional moments where we discover that an insect does something that seems loaded with intent and human-like rationale, we’re blown away.  Our own biases toward the stupidest things like "poop" and "beetles" are exposed and our eyes open to the vast spectrum of perfectly relatable and fascinating intelligence contained in all sizes of brains and in varying degrees of "cute" animals.

I'm guilty of the judgement, too. I don't think snakes are cute, I think kittens are cute. Therefore I care much more about kittens than snakes. But when you see a lack of funding or attention given to animals like snakes, sharks and spiders, or (maybe to a lesser degree) fish, frogs, and bees, you realize how harmful and pivotal these ridiculous discriminations can be.  If creating anthropomorphic view of an animal can mean the difference between extinction and survival, knowledge and dead air, then by all means go right ahead.

Maybe the Dung Beetle, with the galaxy reflecting on its wings and the earth moving tediously past, has not immediately given us life changing scientific answers through its navigational methods. But there are about 400,000 species of beetle in the world. If you allot equal importance to each of those 400,000, and were somehow given the funds, man-power and time study each bug, imagine the change in attitude from the resulting knowledge bank of bug facts. Imagine the respect and conservation efforts that could come from thinking of bugs like we think of mammals.  Different genus? Definitely. Less significant? No.


If only there were time to know each one personally.

Dung Beetle page from my notebook

Family Guiding article

Thank you www.familyguiding.com for inviting me to be a guest author for the month of September!  It was so exciting and such a new, fun experience for me, and I must say--I really enjoyed it!  Hopefully more opportunities like this will come my way...

Here's the link http://familyguiding.com/arts-embrace-your-evolution

And here's the article!  Hope you like it:

A few years ago, I started a painting about vampire bats. The end product looked like a psychedelic cartoon of pink gremlins in an apocalyptic candyland.  I very quickly despised everything about it and rolled it up to be banished under the couch, a gift to the dust, never to be seen again.

Some days, my work flows through me like casual conversation. I make the right decisions without distinctly deciding anything at all.  Then, there are the days, like with my vampire bats, when I look at my painting and see a complete stranger. Where an intricately laid thin line turns into a lightning strike fracturing my piece in two, or a beautifully textured wash, that took hours, dissolves into a flat aimless smear.  Or worse, when the meaning of my piece that seemed so thought-out does not come through at all, leaving a boring, random animal painting: vampire bats.

“Fire Ant Raft” Jackie Dorage, 16in x 20in Oil on Canvas

Wasted time, unaccomplished, distracted, unable, delusional, untalented, subpar—the negativity born from perceived “mistakes” can crumble the delicate momentum of the creative process.

When I come to these moments of frustration over my creative mistakes and I am reminded of Pandas—the bamboo-eating, cow-spotted, fat, fluffy, notoriously cute six-fingered bears. Yes, four fingers and two thumbs (one opposable like ours and one stagnant like other bears) for a total of six fingers.  This funny little Panda fact baffled scientists for a long time, until a comprehensive study on Panda anatomy was done only to find out that one of the thumbs was not a thumb at all, but an extension of the wrist bone that had grown to be so big and muscular that it acted and moved like an opposable thumb.

Our own sacred opposable thumb that we hold at such high esteem as a distinctive trait in our dominance, was recreated by a Panda’s wrist bone so it can eat bamboo faster. Why did the Panda not evolve to make the already existing thumb, opposable? Why not evolve another thumb bone altogether? While it may go against all logic, the wrist-thumb works. And in times when I look at my work and the self critic in me gets up in arms, I have to remember the many paths to finding a viable solution.

“Elephants” Jackie Dorage, oil on canvas 40x28in

It’s not “the best”, “the worst”, “right” or “wrong”; it’s a non-stop, improvised process that flows slowly with time, stretching, struggling, and twisting down a jury-rigged path.

You may see a mutation, but give it time, and it could lead to best thing you’ve ever created.

My anger over the vampire bat painting is over. Yes, it’s still rolled up, but it’s in my studio now and I occasionally take it out and look at it with admiration.  I think about it without a grimace on my face, considering each awkward brushstrokes as a step that bridges my past work to my current and future work. We’ll all experience deviations, mess-ups, break-ups, regrettable words, and embarrassing paintings. These bumps in our lives can be disgraced as unwanted mutations, unorthodox and shameful, or be highlighted and accepted as a new change, a chance to evolve and create something greater.

So, the next time you feel you’re dealt a bad hand, there is a choice: pass, fold, or make an opposable thumb.

THIS animal

I know little to nothing about this animal.  What I do know is that it's a type of porcupine found in the rain forests in and around Brazil, and it's kind of bizarre looking.  Also, it apparently loves bananas and makes child-like sounds when you poke it in the nose.

I don't usually post an animal for the sole purpose of commenting about how cute it is, but really, SO CUTE!  I mean, my god what is this?!?  i have no words!