​I recently came across an old painting I did in my early twenties.  It was my mother, in fact, who reminded me of its existence, probably because she saw an echo of that little piece in my current work. I have no memory of what I was thinking when I painted it.  I want to call it La taberna de los espíritus, one of those old nineteenth century Madrid taverns inhabited by the ghosts of those who once frequented it.  The barkeep is a phantom, as is the woman burning in the backroom.  Is that a black dove above her head?  A cross?  The bikini-clad women on the calendar, the soccer team up on the wall, the black and white linoleum floor, all of it brings back the Spain of my teenage years.  I still have a weakness for checkerboard floors, and for taverns, though now wolves and cats and lively skeletons crowd my public houses.  They seem a lot more sly and self-assured than those ghosts of yesteryear. 

​A month ago I found a large canvas sitting on a street corner.  It was covered in black paint so thick I hesitated, wondering how much the texture would limit what I could do with it.  In the end I paid homage to my neighborhood, a vibrant kaleidoscope of cultures that to me seems full of possibility.  In the center, the affectionately called “warm brothers”, the chimneys of the local power station that every night, like a castle in a psychedelic fairy tale,  glow purple and red until the clock strikes midnight.

When a writer pitches a novel to a literary agent, they are often asked between which books their novel would sit on a bookstore shelf.  At first glance, this is an annoying question, since it seems driven by market considerations. And writers who let the market influence their own writing may not give themselves the chance to develop a unique and independent voice.  Nevertheless, it does seem as important for the writer as it is for the artist to know we don’t exist in a vacuum, that we are in constant dialogue with others before and around us.  
These days, one artist I always return to for inspiration is Gaylen Hansen, in whose inner landscapes I feel most at home.  Modesty aside, I guess that if my art were a book, at this point in my life I would want it to be shelved between Hansen’s Kernal paintings and the exuberant palette of Niki de Saint Phalle’s early work, and in the immediate vicinity of Roy de Forest, Marc Chagall and Henri Rousseau.  Olga Costa  wouldn’t be far away either.  All of these artists are, or have been, concerned with storytelling as well as with illustrating emotions. Their work conveys a childlike sense of wonder at the world that is playful even as it deals with somber issues.   Take for example Gaylen Hansen’s visions of the fears and anxieties that can plague us at night: a wave crashes over the terrified insomniac in The Wave (1999), or giant dark buffalo jump over a person in a tiny bed in Three Buffalo (2000).  The buffalo are outlined in black, while the prone figure is indistinct, blurry in a fragile-looking bed.  Is he counting buffalo instead of sheep?  Or have the sheep turned into a herd of stampeding buffalo in a mockery of the insomniac’s attempt to calm the mind?  The painting makes me smile even as I cringe, as do so many of Hansen’s visions.  I’ve spent hours staring at his paintings, enchanted by his sensitive use of color, analyzing the contrast between his loose, painterly style and his bold use of line, intrigued by the sometimes frenzied, sometimes distressed expression of the animals that people his canvasses.  Magpies, dogs, wolves, horses, cats, salmon and assorted insects interact with each other and with the lone human.  When caught in a joyful dance, their smile has a frantic quality that makes you wonder about the strain behind all the fun. Hansen’s alter ego, the Kernal, a character not unlike Don Quijote, appears to be on a quest to explore the natural world: he goes fishing for salmon larger than him, rides through landscapes of wolf-head boulders, dances with cats or engages in a staring contest with a unicorn goat. Like with Don Quijote, we know that his encounters have both a funny, joyful side and a tragic one, and we want to hear the full story.  
Ultimately, that’s why I paint: to tell a story.  But rather than painting a scene in a story, I want to illustrate the emotion behind it. Illustrator Katherine Dunn says that illustration “not only tells a story, it can create an answer to your own internal mysteries.”  Maybe that’s why I want my art to sit next to Gaylen Hansen’s on that proverbial bookshelf.  He seems to paint out of a need to grapple with strong emotions, to seek answers to maybe unanswerable questions, and uses relatable, almost archetypal characters to do so.  

If you haven't seen Gaylen Hansen's work, take a look using the link below and let me know what you think: https://www.lindahodgesgallery.com/gaylen-hansen

​Now, back to the studio. 

I have painted and drawn since I was able to hold a pencil, and nothing has ever seemed to me as rife with promise and possibility as the blank canvas.  Art has been the constant in my life, even as I changed jobs and cities and passions.  Whenever I neglected to paint—during my years on tenure track at the university—I would have a recurring, and obvious, nightmare, in which I let a pet in my care die of starvation.  Even though finding time for painting while teaching at the university was always an issue, I never questioned my artistic practice.  Art created much-needed balance in my life; it gave me a desired identity beyond that of the stressed-out university professor.  In the past several years, however, art has gradually become my central pursuit, my way of being in the world.  The pet has turned into a large, ravenous creature, and it has started to ask me uncomfortable questions.  How conscious am I really of what I'm doing as an artist? Why bother with art when everything seems to be falling apart around us? What is my social and political responsibility?  Do I even have one?  What can I hope to achieve as an artist?  What does it mean to be an artist in a digitally enhanced world?  Who are the artists that shape, and have shaped, my vision?  And again: why paint at all?
In the coming weeks and months I’ll be using this blog to grapple with these questions, and, hopefully, to engage you, dear reader, in a conversation.  Now, back to the studio.  
 

​Germany is a secular country, despite the anachronistic church tax.  It is also a diverse country.  So when I prepared for my Preschool English sessions last week, I could safely assume that not everyone would be celebrating Christmas.  I chose a winter topic rather than a religious one. A lesson with an abridged version of Frosty the Snowman and a carefully controlled target practice involving Styrofoam snowballs and a pyramid of paper cup snowmen is a hit. We make snowmen greeting cards and only two kids want me to write Merry Christmas on their cards. When I ask them about the holidays, they tell me it will snow, which it almost certainly won’t, but I don’t tell them that, of course. Everyone is united in a fervent belief in snow. I wish them happy snowy holidays. 
Not unlike in the U.S., most people here wish each other “Schöne Feiertage” rather than “Frohe Weihnachten”. That said, Christmas traditions are alive and well, and for the local Christmas Market the medieval part of the city is cozy with beautifully decorated wooden booths selling everything from gingerbread to salmon baked on open fire pits. People stand huddled together close to the fire sipping mulled wine out of ceramic cups—no plastic anywhere in sight. The accent is on relaxed togetherness, on lighting up the darkness.  There are candles everywhere these days, even in shop windows.  Real candles.    
This morning, on my way for some last-minute shopping, I hear my favorite holiday greeting so far: “Ich wünsch’ dir was.”  I wish you something.  Something good. 

After my return to Europe last year I became an avid Facebook user, eager to keep in touch with friends I left behind, and also to help me document and cope with the challenges that came with the big move.  The first few months Facebook was a lifeline that initially served to console me, but eventually tethered me to my previous life so tightly I found it difficult to fully engage with my new surroundings.  I suspended my account only to return a month later, feeling I was missing out. Nothing had changed, which was both a relief and a disappointment.    A couple of months later my account was compromised and I suspended it once more.  Again I returned, caught in a seesaw of “not-with-you-not-without-you”.  
What has caused my definitive break with Facebook, however, isn’t fear about my data and the company’s cavalier conduct concerning user privacy.   Although it should have.  The reason my love affair with Facebook is finally over is  what I want to call the Flaschenpost-Effect.  Flaschenpost is German for message in a bottle.  No matter how important the events that shape us, when we turn them into social media posts, they become one-dimensional.   As Facebook-users, we are ourselves as flat as avatars. We “like” and “heart” each other’s posts, but when we see each other in person, we tend to make absolutely no reference to anything we saw or read on the other person’s timeline.  As if our virtual realities have nothing to do with us.  Online posts do not, as a rule, start conversations even if they may start revolutions.  Each one is a message in well-sealed bottle, bobbing up and down in a vast ocean of bottles.  We get glimpses of words and pictures through thick glass, but rarely take one out of the water to pry open the cork and pull out the rolled-up paper inside.  
I have to admit that my blog feels much the same to me these days.  Still, I place this missive in a bottle, and toss it into the vast, polluted sea.

Today, tomato seeds are making their way into space in their own interstellar greenhouse.  The special satellite with its self-contained mini-ecosystem was built  by the German Aerospace Center, traveled to California, and was launched today in Los Angeles.  Tiny organisms produce the nutrients and oxygen necessary for the twelve seedlings to develop. While they won't be landing on the moon, I couldn't help but imagine them on its cold surface: tender leaves unfurling under the blue light of their interstellar orb, fruit red against the white and ancient moon dust while far away their sisters shiver on supermarket shelves.

Today fog covers my city in a thick cloak of winter, and my color pencils are candles of delight in the gloom.  I listen to Guy Béart's song "Il fait toujours beau quelque part," "The weather is always beautiful somewhere."  Which means the sky can clear up right here too, at any moment.  And it already has, on this little picture.
​

Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, was my neighborhood during my first year in the United States.  The family that hosted me for a few weeks before I moved into a house on South Linden Ave, welcomed me into their home with a warmth and generosity that made me love the country before I even knew it.   Squirrel Hill is the place where I learned to speak American English, where I handed out my first Halloween candies, and where I marveled at the deliciousness of sweet potato casserole with marshmallows and pecans, and turkey with cornbread stuffing during my first Thanksgiving dinner.  It’s where I developed a crush on Jim Morrison, smoked my first joint listening to Jefferson Airplane and to The Pretenders, and thought Jennifer Beals’ outfits in Flashdance were the height of fashion.  Squirrel Hill Café was where my roommates taught me to drink beer with vodka chaser, and where I learned to accept that I’d never be good at playing darts.   It’s where I first went contra-dancing and learned you could make music with two spoons.   If it hadn’t been for Squirrel Hill, it wouldn’t have taken me thirty-three years to return to Europe.  It lives on in a snow-globe deep inside my heart.  At a time like this I take it out and shake it and watch the snowflakes settle on its brick houses and tree-lined avenues to reassure myself that in spite of everything, there still is magic in this world.  

​Little did the wolf know what he started when he suggested to the small girl with the red hood—such a plump little morsel—she should take the longer path through the forest and pick some flowers for her ailing grandmother.   For a while the little girl did indeed think of her grandma as she picked one flower after the other, and tucked them into her basket between the cake and the bottle of wine.  But before long she’d forgotten all about her. There were so many paths in the forest, so many sunlit clearings to explore. When she finally did make it to her grandmother’s house, she barely recognized it. Overgrown by gnarled and twisted branches, it looked much smaller than she remembered.   The wolf was waiting up for her, and invited her in. The cake was long gone, of course, and the flowers wilted, but the bottle of wine had aged well, as good wine does.  Red Riding Hood was no longer little nor did red suit her, but she knew how to drink a wolf under the table.   

​Today I woke up to rain singing in the wide gutter right outside my garret window. I lay suspended between past and future, listening to water, and remembered this song I wrote on another rainy day, miles away and years ago.  “Je recommence,” I called it.  “Starting over.”   Like my younger self in the song, I got up, and made myself a cup of coffee, and opened the window to breathe in the cold morning air.  Autumn. Finally. 
 
Ce matin il pleut, et l’eau chante dans mon cœur,
de mon lit je vois le ciel bas vidé de couleur
j’écoute le bruit des voitures,
et je sens ma joie revenir,
et je sais qu’elle a disparu cette envie de mourir
Aujourd’hui je m’lève, je m’habille, je fais du café
je regarde l’eau bouillir dans le pot fêlé
et puis j’ouvre la fenêtre
et j’inspire de l’air glacé,
et je m’ dit alors, comme c’est bon, ce café au lait
La tristesse de hier s’envole, plus de drame, plus de romance,
je m’invente des paroles pour 
pour une histoire qui recommence 
Aujourd’hui je rebranche mon téléphone,
et je dit bonjour au voisin qui s’étonne
puis j’ouvre la porte de la maison
et je reste sous le seuil un moment
et mes pas sur la rue battent le rythme d’une vieille chanson. 

​At about the same time I was looking through the IKEA catalogue in an effort to recreate the home I left behind, nostalgically affixing feelings of belonging to a salad bowl, Alexander Gauland, leader of the German right wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD), blamed the ills of the homeland on the “Heimatlosigkeit”, the “homelandlessness” of the urban “elites”.
These “elites”, writes the university-educated lawyer and journalist, control the media and higher education, work for transnational companies and organizations like the UN, and set today's cultural and political trends. And, God forbid, since English is their lingua franca, they are all, at the very least, bilingual. 
So how does one reclaim the lost homeland, according to the AfD platform?  By closing the borders, arming so-called honest citizens, deporting all Germans who are Muslim, supporting the traditional family structure, and requiring mothers to be the sole caretakers of their children for the first three years of their lives. Home sweet home. 
At times like these, I seek solace in the words of the philosopher Ernst Bloch who in Principle of Hope also wrestled with the concept of “Heimat."  Exiled in the U.S. in 1938, he denounced the world of business that, “placed under the sign of swindle, … chokes any other human impulse” in its thirst for gain, degrading human beings and their home environment, both natural and urban.  For Bloch, “Heimat” was a future concept, a place we strive for, not a return to some past imagined in the interest of ideology.  
This new homeland that many of us are struggling to build, surely means loosing some of our local color.  It also means being comfortable with not understanding everything that the person next to me in the check-out line at IKEA is saying to his son.  He is probably discussing how to put together that IKEA table they are about to buy rather than plotting my displacement.  After all, all of us are at IKEA searching for “Heimat”, for that perfect bowl around which to gather our friends and family.   

Absence
 
Last night, in the process of making galettes, I reached for a bowl that wasn’t there.  I paused, hand in mid-air, uncertain about the country under my feet, until I remembered that this particular bowl stayed behind, in my previous life. It was a perfect ceramic bowl, the color of pale cream with a sage-green stripe around the rim. It had the right heft for making bread dough, the right depth for whipping up batter, the perfect size for serving salad for three on a farmhouse table.  An IKEA original, it looked Scandinavian and yet universal.  I never thought I would peruse an IKEA online catalogue to try and fill the absence I keep reaching for.  Unfortunately for me, they don’t carry that bowl anymore.  IKEA moved on, and maybe it’s time for me to do the same. 

 L’inconnue de la Seine
 
During a recent first aid workshop, the trainer handed me a rubber mask and instructed me to affix it to a dummy called Resusci-Anne before CPR practice.  Once I had the mask in place, I looked down at the female face with the peaceful half smile.
“She looks so friendly,” I said.  
The trainer explained the mask was in fact fashioned after the original cast of the face of a drowning victim, a young woman pulled out of the Seine near the Quai de Louvre in 1880. “L’inconnue de la Seine,” the Unknown of the Seine, as she came to be known, so intrigued one of the pathologists he had a mould cast of her face.  In the bohemian Paris of the early 1900s it became all the rage to have a copy of this mask on display, and, according to some researchers, later versions of the original mask erased all traces of death by drowning.  For several decades, the face of this nameless woman was an icon of female perfection, silent and sightless.  In the mid-fifties, Peter Safar, father of CPR, and toy maker Asmund S. Laerdal developed CPR-Annie using a copy of the original mask. 
I lowered my mouth to hers, joining my breath to those of all the millions of trainees before me, and tried to make her open her eyes and speak. 

​During a recent short-lived foray into shift work, I asked a co-worker how I was supposed to get in the half hour break I was entitled to, when there was really no time to take even a toilet break during the eight hour shift.  Her laconic reply: “Don’t you smoke?”  
Those three words taught me, as someone woefully unfamiliar with the toll of shift work on body and psyche, that the harried smokers outside of restaurants and bakeries aren’t as much addicts as they are escapees.  And I learned too, that as a non-smoker I had no good excuse for taking a break.  Sore feet are somehow harder to admit to than an addiction to cigarettes. 
I smoked for about a year, when I was a student, and I did so for the romance of it.  I was in love with my French boyfriend, with his dreams of flying and the blue smoke of his Gitanes.  I was in love with Latin American literature, and smoked sitting on the floor of our shared room, hammering out my Masters thesis on a typewriter. 
A few years ago I wrote a song I called “Through the smoke”, recorded it at Love Studios in Seattle, and then promptly forgot about it.  As I listen to it again now, I think I must then have felt that time slip away, a time when there was no such thing as too much wine, too much coffee or too many cigarettes.  When vice was romance and there were no consequences.  I’m profoundly grateful I got to live in that time. It doesn’t really seem that long ago. 
(Photo credit Hossam M. Omar)