My Romance

April 12th, 2013

One day, when we know each other much better and I am perhaps a little drunk, I will show you my own ketubah. It’s a total shoemaker’s kids going barefoot situation. It’s what happens when you are up too many nights in a row preparing in a panic for your wedding that you are planning yourself. When you’ve lost the original sketch for the design and go way off the deep end with tendrils and details. When you just have zero perspective. Five years later it’s still too soon.

But this is a story I like- how Cecil and I met:

It was a dark and foggy night- no, seriously it was. I was at my studio late and realized I had better get some food now or else that was it for the night. The complex has a bar/restaurant that stops serving at 9 so out across the parking lot I went. Lit by the street lamp, someone approached from the opposite end of the parking lot.  I noted the long legs and the loping stride. I might even have said hmm to myself. At the bar we both ordered and started chatting. The Brewery, where I worked, is like a small village. It’s very intimate and generally pretty friendly.  Our initial conversation was not particularly memorable except we were both grinning like fools. It was two days before Thanksgiving and I was experimenting with the traditional meal. I was hosting an open house/buffet with a friend instead of sitting down to eat. (it was a nice party, but I never repeated it). I invited this handsome stranger to stop by if he was in the neighborhood and gave him my number and address.

I didn’t really expect him to show up, but he did. And he closed the party down. He told me later that as soon as he walked into my place he felt like he lived there and should be playing the role of host. It flipped him out so much he hunkered in a corner for a bit. I remember walking through a room and him reaching out and pulling me onto his lap. There was so much familiarity already I stayed.

Two days later he sent me an email describing a dream he’d had. He was doing a graphic design layout on an invitation and it was our two names- Deitsch and Schmidt. Neither of us noticed it before, but in him dream he realized that the last three letters of my name are the first three of his- Deitschmidt! Now, aside from the cool coincidence, that was quite a risk, telling a dream after a first date that was essentially a prediction of our wedding invitation.  That pretty much broke all the rules of cool detachment in protecting your tender underbelly in early relationship wisdom. It was so open and charming, I was a goner right then and there.

And of course that was our wedding invitation.

 

Love equals love

April 10th, 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I get asked on a pretty regular basis if I do same sex ketubahs. The answer is- of course, with pleasure! I have been making them since I hung my shingle, over 10 years ago. It’s about love and commitment and families and for me that’s enough. I honestly don’t see the argument that someone else’s marriage could affect my marriage in any way. Howcould adding to the sum total of happiness in the world damage us?

 

E. E. Cummings (1894 – 1962)

Humanity I Love You

 

Humanity i love you

because you would rather black the boots of

success than enquire whose soul dangles from his

watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

 

parties and because you

unflinchingly applaud all

songs containing the words country home and

mother when sung at the old howard

 

Humanity i love you because

when you’re hard up you pawn your

intelligence to buy a drink and when

you’re flush pride keeps

 

you from the pawn shop and

because you are continually committing

nuisances but more

especially in your own house

 

Humanity i love you because you

are perpetually putting the secret of

life in your pants and forgetting

it’s there and sitting down

 

on it

and because you are

forever making poems in the lap

of death Humanity

 

i hate you

Echoes and reflections

April 7th, 2013

 

I had forgotten about this. Back in my NY days, when I was just starting out as a ketubah artist, I got a really cool commission. I can’t remember how they found me, but I do remember some really nice women from the Larchmont, NY Temple hired me to create a fairly large painting for their synagogue’s anniversary. They had a quote they wanted to use and after that they let me run wild. You can see it’s reminiscent of the Beloved design in that is incorporates an abstracted menorah and uses the quote as a background framework. It also has shades of this ketubah, Traditions. At the time I was also still making steel furniture, and was using text as a construction element. (This piece below is from a gazillion years ago, but got a nice amount of attention in the design press at the time. That was cool.)  Anyway.

I like the colors on this one and am less crazy about the heavy-handed bottom strip. It’s nice to look at old work and have a little more perspective. There are many thing I look at and cringe, so it’s refreshing when I can see with fresh eyes and appreciate that I haven’t been just sitting around eating bonbons for the past 40-mumble years.

Makes me kind of want to get that old welding mask out of the garage though…

Wine without Whine

April 5th, 2013

My daughter is in her second and final year of preschool at B’nai Simcha in Arcadia. This year she is in the Coyote class, which jibes with the slightly feral nature of 4-5 year olds.  She’s lucked into a really nice group of kids, mostly girls.  Last year she was a Dinosaur- no idea about that name’s origin, and there are two younger classes, the Frogs and the Poohs. I am puzzled at calling the non-potty-trained wee ones Poohs, but I think it’s more about Winnie. It’s a very sweet school and we are happy to drive the 40 miles a day required between drop-off and pick-up.

For some reason I cannot understand, I was elected to the school board this year as a member at large. Basically it means I can pick and choose what I contribute and that always means art and design work. I am most comfortable behind my desk and will do any amount of layout and drawing to avoid making calls for donations or whatever else the really productive members of the board do.

In February the school had their annual fundraising event and made it a wine-tasting/silent auction party at a private home. It was called Wine without Whine, meaning leave the kids at home and get shnockered. Awesome.  I jumped in to do the invite and I thought I’d share the evolution of the design here.

Since it was wine tasting, I thought I’d emphasize that. ‘Mommies love wine’ is a cliche for a reason. Wine bottles and glasses are beautiful objects, so I started there. First I played around in Illustrator, drawing glass and bottle shapes, fiddling with transparencies. I ended up with something that felt too seventies in palette and line.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So I went another route. I grabbed my paintbrush and made very quick one stroke paintings of bottles. I did about 20 of them to end up with 5 I liked then scanned them in. I also used a wine glass to create a ‘stain’ letter O that I scanned in as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then I moved over to Photoshop and played with a few versions before I got what I wanted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The evening was really lovely. I had donated some prints which set off a very gratifying bidding war, and we drunkenly bought a bike for Mena. We had some laughs with the other parents, mostly at the expense of our kids, and did some good for the school.

 

 

 

My Sister’s Ketubah

April 1st, 2013

It’s the wee hours back here in Mayberry. We returned yesterday from Miami Beach and still wrapped in cozy memories of all the cousins, sister and grandparent time we’ve had.  While I was there I revisited one of my first ketubahs and thought I would share the romantic story of its owners with you.
My sister lives in Miami now after years in Brooklyn. It didn’t occur to me until we were down there that in a way she’s come full circle, living there. H has been married for 17 years to the love of her life, Z.  I have always been happy to say I was there at the beginning. It started this way:
In the winter of 1994 I was living in NYC with two of my sisters in an apartment on the west side of Manhattan.  H was in college still but didn’t care for her dorm and stayed on our couch so often that she eventually just migrated there permanently. When I noticed one day that all of her things were piled in our living room she casually mentioned that yes, she’d moved in with us. Oh. She was and is lovely company so it just made the place happier and we were glad to have her. That winter was snowy and cold and we’d had enough so we got ourselves a drive-away car- it’s a deal where you drive someone else’s car to where they need it. It was a cheap way to get down to Miami, where our grandparents stayed for the winter and were willing to put us up for a few days. There was  the sketchy car owner and his creepy admonishments not to look in the trunk and adventures along the way and we arrived five days later tired, not terribly clean and looking for some fun. My grandmother insisted on covering the bed with a towel before allowing us to nap on it, we were so gross. The one sister who drove with us got right on a plane back to NY, leaving me and H to entertain ourselves. We borrowed our grandfathers car and trolled the strip to look around. We had not gotten too far when H said- I know that guy! It was a cute boy with bright red hair I’d never seen before. It turned out he was the brother of one of her high school friends  and coincidentally was there with someone I knew from childhood. Small world! We stopped and chatted and ended up at Wolfies, a Miami Beach institution where Lou and I caught up and talked and H and the boy sat mutely staring at each other. What was wrong with her? I barely noticed, even when we continued with the boys to the beach and the two of them lagged behind. It wasn’t until we were back home in NY that it finally dawned on me that this boy was special and something had happened that night. They were instantly a couple and H was crazy in love (still is).

H is the 4th sister of our 5 but was the first to marry and about a year after that night she did. Both families are enormous and the wedding was packed with relatives.  It was a huge and delirious and exciting event and we partied to the wee hours. I had just begun to play with creating ketubahs and I put special care into making hers. The design references the old city of Jerusalem, where both had spent time, and is hand painted and meticulously detailed. What I like about it and why it’s so resonant with me even after all these years is that it has a very loose, lively bright painting as a base and then has an intricate, highly detailed overlying structure.  I wish I could say I intended that metaphor all along, but that wouldn’t be true.
This week as I looked at the framed ketubah on the living room wall of her beautiful home in Miami, it occurred to me that it’s a true reflection of her life as she’s built it in the years since I painted it. Energetic, bright and colorful, with a structure and pulls it all together beautifully. She’s my little sister but in so many ways has been a mentor and model for me my whole adult life.

Another Green World

March 25th, 2013

I have referred to our neighborhood as Mayberry before and that is certainly true- of an evening we are out front, kids running from yard to yard or zipping by on their bikes and scooters. Being a former New York apartment dweller, I didn’t think this sort of street existed except on tv.  The twist to the Mayberry model here is that while the openness and neighborliness of the street definitely harks back to fifties America, the specific neighbors we’ve lucked into are waaay cooler. As sheer dumb luck would have it, we ended up right smack in the middle of a community of artists, writers and scientists and just generally awesome folk.
I’ve been looking around my house lately, appreciating what a damned pleasant place it is to live in, and I’d like to start sharing a few salient features.  In regards to both nice neighbors and our pleasant home, I’d like to present one of the prized features of the house- our in-progress Dave Muller mural. Dave is our next door neighbor. He’s a lovely, modest, generous man with an equally fabulous wife, Ann, an artist and writer, and two delightful daughters who are worshiped as minor deities by my own daughter.  This image derives from a larger mural Dave painted in the Dallas Cowboys Stadium. Here’s an interview the NY Times

did with him about that. The image is called ‘Another Green World’, from a Brian Eno album. Dave often uses music and record albums as inspiration for his work. In case it’s not clear, the painting is an orb of clover.  There are lots of different greens in it and every once in a while, Dave will come by with a cup of green paint and fill in a little more of the globe.  I love the teeming mass of green and the humor and serenity of this painting. I kind of hope it never really gets finished.
In the corner above the window is a little stuffed bird and actual nest we installed there about four years ago. I made a bunch of the birds intending to make a mobile over Mena’s crib and never got around to assembling it.