Wednesday, May 28, 2014

"We all need to trust our imaginations more." – Tom Robbins 05.27.14

My feet. Photo: Lainey Dubinsky
Somewhere on YouTube my feet are dancing. The other day while setting up the studio and gallery I noticed a woman, an older woman, tracking me with her iPhone.

Having been making art in the public eye for over two years now, in some ways I'm oblivious to the cameras – but in other ways, always acutely aware. I'm a touch sensitive to 600mm lenses being leveled at my face without a request and doubly so when the photographer is trying to shoot someone else's children. And we're talking amateur photographers – not the pros who at least have some sense of protocol. These part-time paparazzi are always called out and asked to not to shoot children who are not theirs or my pores without asking. Even in public, a certain level of privacy is needed.

But this woman with the following iPhone was not being rude, just curious. And so I turned and asked her, "Are you shooting me?" 

"Your feet", she responded. "You have beautiful feet." 

And you know, this is just not the sort of things that most men spend any time thinking about. So I smiled the sheepish smile and did a little jig for her. Dare I say, I was flattered and my ego felt that for all the larger things I'd like to see some improvement in, at least my feet were up to par – to women well my senior at least:)

#iTOMB.Denise.05.27.14
And so the show goes on. Many are back who have painted before and many more still are finding us for the first time. This week the Children's Museum of the Arts in Tribeca will visit and we've also been asked by a group called Common Cents, the largest child philanthropy program in the United States, to help with an event next week – so things are growing, in a good way.

After a short stint on Tuesday and some threat of rain in the evening hours, I packed up the salon early to head for Barnes and Noble for a reading by Tom Robbins of his latest memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie – A true account of an imaginative life. 

Robbins has been a staple of my reading since his first novel in 1971, Another Roadside Attraction which brought the body of Jesus to a roadside stand in Washington state with an oddness of humor that seemed to be just the tonic for a terminally conservative world at the time. And Robbins has held nothing back since. He's 82 now and still funny as a whip.

The headline of this post, "We all need to trust our imaginations more" was thrown out, almost as an afterthought as he was leaving the stage – and related indirectly to a strain of Tibetan Buddhist thought called Crazy Wisdom – a process of spiritual discovery – to explore further and further without looking for an answer.

And I thought that maybe that was one of the things that we are all discovering with the #iThinkOutsideMyBox project. It's not just the paintings at all, but the roads we travel to make them.

Thanks Tom:)


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