I have to say there was a lot of support getting to the podium. Marianne arranged a bunch of phone and in person meetings where all the participants could hash out ideas and get them in order. It started with making long lists of ‘I used to and now I’s and them whittled from there. About a dozen women participated and we all told each other our stories. It was kind of amazing what started to come up. I started the project thinking I didn’t have much to tell. I’ve had the odd adventure or two, but between feeling like there was an awful lot I wanted to keep private and feeling like maybe if I did not have a triumphal message to relate, I wasn’t sure what I was going to tell.

After a bit of meandering I realized that the story I wanted to tell WAS about meandering! I have had a lot of different jobs throughout my career and lived in a lot of places. After landing in a place where I could no longer hop away when the going got tough, I finally had to face some demons. And while the odd demon pops up on a pretty regular basis, I can honestly say I am at least in place where I am ready to face it down rather than pack my bags and find another new beginning.

So that was the story I told, in a nutshell. I practiced a lot to feel comfortable speaking in front of an audience. I have to admit I was a bit nervous as my turn approached, but when I got up there, I felt alright. Not awesome, but good enough. There’s that line from the Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall- I’ll know my song well before I start singing. I was thinking of that, to a less epic extent.

I wasn’t surprised I got through it ok, but what surprised me was how many women came up to me afterwards and told me that their stories were very similar and they could totally relate. That was super cool, finding out how not alone I am in this.

Years ago I watched Martha Stewart decorate a Barbie birthday cake on her show. She had a little girl there to help her and they each had their own cakes to decorate. I watched Martha hover and micromanage the child as she exuberantly threw handfuls of sprinkles on her cake, ignoring the tasteful restraint Martha was trying to impose. Let me just say, I laughed.

And let me just say also, that that laugh came back to bite me in the butt.

Mena had her 5th birthday party a week or so ago- flower theme, flower cake requested. I almost bought a shaped cake pan but decided I didn’t want to own it after the event, so I used Illustrator to figure out the pattern I needed to turn a 9″ cake into 5 petals. Email me if you want the pattern. I used this  canned colored frosting that I swear glows in the dark. Mena of course was so excited but the frosting part proved to be too tedious for her. I gave her the sprinkles and thought I’d let her go to town.

What emerged from some dark place in my psyche was the ghost of Martha Stewart.

I had to bite my tongue and sit on my hands as I watched my delighted 5 year old throw caution to the wind and toss handfuls of the stuff willy-nilly over the surface of my beautifully frosted cake. I know. This is crazy. It’s her cake and it’s being presented to a bunch of sugar-crazed five year olds. Still I had to admit the control freak I had laughed at was rising in me. Ouch. Hello deep dark truthful mirror- where’ve you been?

Flower Birthday cake

But I wanted to share this at least. I was at the post office, loading up on stamps for thank you cards, and I bought a few sheets of these-

USPS Modern Art postage stamps

Gorgeous, right? I bought some to use and a sheet to save. I am not a stamp collector per se, but really lovely ones feel like tiny pieces of art and I do tend to hoard them. Acquiring these reminded me of a bit of long ago history of my own career. Believe it or not, I too have designed postage stamp art. I dug them up and present them to you forthwith:

I did these back in 1996, the year of the Jerusalem 3000 anniversary celebration. It was a few years before I moved there (that was 2000 and I stayed 2 years) but I’d lived there and visited before and knew the city pretty well. I loved the building all piled one on top of the other into the hillsides of the city, the ancient stone gates, the intense colors the light there engenders. I haven’t specifically depicted Jerusalem in any of my ketubah work yet- some private commissions I think had some of this imagery- but I am looking at this work and thinking… Might be time to revisit this?

Postage Stamp Art by Rachel Deitsch, circa 1996

Postage Stamps of Jerusalem Scenes by Rachel Deitsch circa 1996

Collector’s Stamp of Jerusalam 300 Celebration, 1996. Artwork by ketubah artist Rachel Deitsch

Cecil and Rachel- immortalized in wire

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.

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

Larchmont Temple rededication artwork- Rachel Deitsch

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…

Poetica Screen by Rachel Deitsch, from about a million years ago. I still love it.

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.

This version was close but didn’t hang together. It got kind of a meh response which told me to push further.I went further after getting merely ok responses until I hit on the layout that gave me that ‘aha’ feeling and raves from the committee. At last!  I printed the invitations up with the same awesome printer I use for ketubahs and art prints on some heavy textured paper and the result was a nice, substantial-feeling invitation.

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.