"The N Train" 

“The best thing we ever did, outside of having children, was moving to Wisconsin,” I said last Tuesday as we sat in our son Joshua’s living room in New York. What if we’d taken a different path out of Manhattan 42 years ago, what if Adolph had chosen to teach at Skidmore in Saratoga Springs instead of at UWM? What if, what if, no way of knowing, and it doesn’t matter.
 
We loved living in NYC with its great museums, galleries galore, theater, dance, concerts, poetry venues, parks, public transit, sidewalks perfect for people watchers like me. I’ve spent countless days of my life drawing in Macys, Gimbels, and Central Park, in coffeehouses, buses, and subways. In fact I did a new series of “N” train and “M3” bus drawings this past week.

"More N Train" 

We loved NY but didn’t want to raise our children there. Soot coated our freshly-washed dishes if we left the kitchen window open. Snow drifts were not white. I had to walk thirteen blocks with three babies in a stroller to get to Washington Square Park. I had to trudge with a giant laundry bag and three babies to go to the laundromat, had to pile grocery bags with the kids when shopping. People pushed through crowds on the sidewalks; cars, trucks, buses, and taxis sped through the traffic-filled streets.

"The Third Avenue Bus" 

Small-scale Shorewood seems perfect for people like me. We came home from NY last Thursday, then went to the vegetarian potluck at the Urban Ecology Center and a WAVE benefit at the house next door. Friday: a sustainability committee meeting and the Fitness Center; since then I’ve taken a granddaughter to the Nutcracker, hung out with friends at Schwartz Bookstore, gone to Walgreens, Pick & Save, Beans & Barley, Whole Foods, to the ear doctor with Adolph, had dinner at our kids’ houses, gone to a salon discussion on feminism, and almost every trip was on foot or by bus.

Friends here often mention how lucky they feel to live in Shorewood, where so much is so close at hand, easily accessible without a car, and where there are so many interesting and thoughtful people. American mores have gone askew, more money more power bigger cars houses egos. Maybe life’s meant to be smaller and simpler: more salons where people sit around and discuss issues that matter, more salons and less saloons, more urban farms and gardens and less agribusiness, more creative games and less computer games, more bikes and less cars, more thought about values and less vacant worship of things.
 

Ideas are like amoebas, shape changing with input. And that's how the Shorewood Conservation Committee’s Reusable Bag Campaign developed.

The Conservation Committee was divided into three subcommittees, and I was on the Sustainability Subcommittee. One issue we decided to tackle was toxins in the environment. I had long ago bought educational door-hangers to put on the doorknobs of neighbors who use lawn pesticides. I never did it though. So I suggested we make our own lawn-care door-hangers to distribute in the village.

Someone else suggested we make them two-sided, one side for safe lawn care outdoors, the other for safe cleaning methods indoors. We then all agreed that the door-hanger would be in the shape of a house. And that was our plan when I went to visit our son in New York last December.

When I returned a week later, subcommittee members had met again and instead of mere door-hangers, they planned to distribute reusable shopping bags to every household in Shorewood.  Our inside-outside door-hanger would be an insert in the bags. And subcommittee members were already checking out manufacturers, costs, materials, and possible delivery dates.

Of course we also had to design the bags and figure out how to pay for them and how to distribute them. Many more issues cropped up, with countless meetings and Emails, discussions and disagreements. 

The corner of this project that I know most intimately is the design of the bags. The artwork was my responsibility. I was working with Tammy Bockhorst, who was in charge of putting it all together, an endless project that required new software and extended learning curves.

At first everyone wanted a logo. Someone directed me to show Shorewood between a lake and a river, and she drew ripples to illustrate what to do. Since no one disagreed, I assumed that was my first assignment, and I wasn’t too happy about it! For a few weeks I played around with the idea in my wordrawing style, though someone else had told me not to include writing. Well, I always knew I’m not a logo-type.

Finally Tammy pointed out that that was just one person's suggestion, and I could do whatever I wanted. I decided leaves would make a good logo. So with Tammy's help, we modified an old drawing of mine of mulberry leaves as a prototype.
I figured it wouldn’t be a final logo since mulberries aren't native to Wisconsin. Actually I just researched that on google, and red mulberries with lobed leaves ARE native. However they’re considered invasive.

In any event, we needed a drawing for one side of the bag, and we settled on non-invasive native plants. Since it was winter, and no native plants were in bloom, I drew from photos in catalogues and online. After I'd done a series of flowers,

Tammy mentioned that maybe men wouldn't carry a bag with flowers on it. So I went back to leaves, the leaves of native plants.

The plant I liked most was prairie smoke, which I knew I could never capture with a pen. One day I decided to give it a shot, did a quick drawing, emailed it to Tammy, and that's what ended up on the bag.

The bags finally arrived in Shorewood in June. It turned into a community project: dozens of volunteers collated inserts (our own inserts and twelve from our sponsors), stuffed the collated inserts into 6900 bags, and then delivered them in the pouring rain. And we even had international publicity!
 

As a painter, poet, performer, dancer, my creativity usually begins with getting into the flow. My hands become my eyes and put down the image, my feet listen to the music and decide the moves, the dream part of my brain tells me what to write. It’s basically losing the self to find the self. I have decades of flow behind me; I don’t know what I’ve got ahead!

I’ll have the opportunity to discuss my thoughts on creativity in a presentation at Danceworks, 1661 N Water Street, on Friday, October 17, at 7:30 PM. I’ll also have some of my latest artwork, and some of my oldest artwork, on exhibit there from October 10 to January 8, opening reception October 17, 6:00 to 8:30 PM. Below are a few of the recent drawings I'll include in the show, and some comments about them.

Why do I draw dancers? I'm not a dancer, I just love to dance, even if I make an absolute fool of myself, love to move to music, letting my feet guide me, love feeling energized and free. So when I draw dancers, I'm feeling the movement and energy. And freedom. 

My pen drawings of dancers were done at Danceworks and at UWM performances. In the dark.

I'm a people-person, love to watch, to draw and paint them and to write about their relationships to each other and to the world around them. That's one of the reasons I could sit on the #15 bus all day and not get bored. When I lived in New York, I'd sometimes take the A train to the end of the line and back, drawing what was going on around me.  The two drawings below I did in Milwaukee buses.

And then there are dogs. I've done dozens, no, hundreds, of drawings of dogs. Whenever I visit New York, I try to spend time in Central Park, which swarms with relationships, lovers, parents, nannies, children, dogs, trees, pigeons, and I sit on a bench and draw it all. Like the one below, which I did in Central Park last spring.