Subjective

Several years ago I began a painting (shown below) in a Sarah Shrift's oil painting class at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center. After finishing the painting at home, I entered it in the student show. It was rejected. Some month's later I entered the same (unaltered) painting in a professional show and it won an award.

"Pick"
20" x 20" oil on canvas

It is all subjective, Dear Ones. When we do anything creative, some people will hate it, some will love it. So, what do we do with those opinions?


If someone else loves it, does that make it good? If someone else hates it should we cover it with gesso, sand it down, or put it out to the curb for the trash collectors? I think we have to use our own judgement. 


The agent rejected my book. It was a nice rejection—for a REJECTION. She enjoyed my voice and the story. She wished me well in placing it with someone else and reminded me that her opinion was subjective.

Years ago, back in the stone age, when I wrote something that got rejected, I'd address a new envelope, and immediately send it out to someone else.

Sometimes we know, or at least believe, that what we’ve done is good. Leave it as is. Submit it somewhere else. 

But sometimes there is doubt. Look at it again. It’s easier with a painting. It’s visibly right there in front of your face. With a book—58,000 words—it’s harder to know. But the truth is, I do know. The book needs more work, more thought, more time. 

Okay, so back to the laptop, which is much easier than etching in stone.

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Hands

I sit in the sun coming in the window looking at my hands. They are really old. There are brown spots and dry, tiny waves of creases on the backs of my hands.  If the skin was any shade of green they could be part of a scaly lizard. 

I always thought my long fingers must be from my father’s side. He was tall, therefore it seemed a reasonable conclusion. But then one night I was sitting on the couch next to Nan, my grandmother (Mom's Mom). I held her hand in mine. It was warm, soft and made me feel happy. I looked at our hands together. I held hers up to mine, palm to palm. We matched exactly. 

She had some arthritis. Her index fingers were twisted like cork screws. This made the index nails twist toward the long finger (The FU finger) almost facing the palm. If her nails were sharper she could have opened a bottle of wine. 

My hands looked old (I thought) when I was only forty. Thin skinned. If the hands were arranged in a downward position all the veins filled up. The backs of my hands appeared to be wriggling with earthworms right beneath the surface. I’d raise my hands up in the air and the veins disappeared. Wave those hands in the air. Hallelujah. People think you're nuts if you walk around with your hands up in the air all the time, and your fingers go numb after a while. 

I worked at a advertising studio in the Renaissance Center in Detroit in the eighties. One night many of us were working late. One of the illustrators needed to illustrate a woman's hands. I was the only female in the place, so Mike came into my room and asked if I'd model my hands for him. I said, "Sure". Then he checked out my big hands, looked totally distressed and said, "I'll check Joe's hands".

Oh, well, I never had modeling ambitions anyway.

*****

But know this: I have magnificent hands. They do things. Most important, they feed me. I really like that. They can pick a white hair off a black sweater with no problem. They type. They squeeze the cheeks of my husband when I want to give him big smashing kisses. They can hold a paint brush and move it wherever I want it to go. They are wonderful tools. I should learn sign language, then they could talk.

Name Game

In 1975 when I was getting divorced, my lawyer asked if I wanted to go back to my maiden name. Ahh, well, no. I actually felt closer to my almost ex-husband than my father. But that's another story.

The divorce was final in the summer of 1976. Just weeks afterward, I was in the Ann Arbor Art Fair. The sign on my booth had my ex-husband's last name. People came in the booth, saw the name and asked if I was German. 

Now, there's nothing wrong with being German. I just don't have any. I was a fraud. I was mislabeled. My father's family was all Norwegian. My mother's ancestors were Mayflower English and coal-mining Scots. No German.

Then and there I decided I needed a new name. 

There is a great deal to be said about timing. Right around that time there was an article in the paper on "how to legally change your name". A month earlier or a month later, I would have missed it. There wasn't Google back then.

So what name did I want? My maiden name began with a C. My married name began with an S. By getting married I had moved myself to the back of the line. I needed an A name.

Also around that time I read artist Judy Chicago's autobiography, "Through the Flower". Judy Chicago had renamed herself after a city. A city! The feminist me liked that. No patriarch or even matriarch name for me. A City. 

Which city was easy. I was born in Ann Arbor. I had decided to change my name during the Ann Arbor Art Fair. I would be Lynn Arbor. I was also throwing out my first name, which I won't repeat here. If I liked the name I would have kept it. Besides I was always called Lynn.

The first people I wanted to discuss this with were my children. I told them they could change their names too, or hyphenate. They both wanted to keep their names as they were. My daughter (13 then) was fine with my name change. My son (12) said, "But if you change your name and get famous, then no one will believe you're my mother." 

So I kept my kids last name as my middle name. Now it looks like my maiden name is German. Wasn't that part of the point of changing it? But, hey, you do things for your kids.

Ferdinand Hampson, the owner of Habatat Gallery, wasn't thrilled. What do clients think of an artist with a new name? But I was just starting out, so I convinced him that no one knew who I was anyway.

The biggest hurdle was my grandmother. I sat in the den at my grandmother's house with her and my mother. My mother was always a bit of a rebel, so she thought it was a fine idea. My grandmother was upset. 

"Why not take a family name." she said.

My mother laughed.  My mother had a point. I didn't want to be Lynn Dick, even though I loved a lot of Dicks in my life. It just wasn't what I was looking for.

"How about Kerwin?" Mom said. She did this to torment my grandmother. Kerwin was my step-fathers name. He was Irish and Catholic. This was actually worse than being black, Jewish or Asian to my grandmother.

At that, my grandmother was fine with Arbor.

But then she said, "But who will you be related too?" Which set my mother and I into a fit of laughing. My grandmother, a good sport, laughed too.

So I went to count, paid $35, filled out papers, stood in front of a judge, raised my right hand, and swore that I wasn't changing my name for any fraudulent reasons.

The only problem with my name is that sometimes people think my first name is Ann. But I can live with that.

If you want to change your name in Michigan here's a link.
http://courts.michigan.gov/scao/selfhelp/family/nc_help.htm

The Website is Up and Running!

Well, my website is finally done. Nine months. I could have had a baby. It's been like learning a foreign language, good, I suppose, for my brain. The last couple months I've been compulsive about it. Dreaming in code, yet still not completely understanding it. Doing minimal cleaning, cooking. No painting. Some gardening (a great tension reliever). Comments to myself during this process have been,"huh?", "oh, wow," but most often the big "f" bomb. I swore a lot more when I was doing graphic design years ago, now I remember why. The site has a couple small gliches that I'll be fixing.

Now maybe I'll think about paint again. This morning I cleaned my studio. Could be a sign...

Here's the address of my website:
http://www.lynnarbor.com