#treesandempathy

[emotionalpackrat]

hey guys.. my url has changed

I have changed from treesandempathy to emotional-packrat, mainly to divert my ex from reading the content here so now I can speak my mind and phew sigh of relief ok go

[fab-fem]

So my boyfriend was at a party, and played spin the bottle and kissed two girls, I accused him of cheating and broke up with him, but people keep saying it wasn't cheating and I over-reacted? Is it cheating if he was playing a game?

Your relationship is about you and your personal happiness. If him kissing other girls made you feel uncomfortable, it is entirely within your right to assert yourself and your beliefs and end the relationship. Nobody can tell you what you should or shouldn't be okay with in a relationship. Dont feel guilty for acting on your own emotions and convictions (which are totally valid).

-Reed

 You were fully in your right to break up with him. He did not take your feelings into consideration when he decided to play this game. It's not over-reacting to breakup with someone who is not respecting your feelings within the relationship.

-Kat

[fab-fem]

I Painted this two years ago to serve as a friendly reminder that if I ever find myself in a tower, I can climb down my own hair and save myself

slash leg hair is pretty rad

xoxo -Reed

[fab-fem]

I was shy as a kid. Some would say painfully odd in my selective silence. When I did talk, I was asking people to read my my haikus about springtime or desperately trying to convince classmates to play pretend with me in the woodsy part of the playground, as opposed to opting for the cooler, and frankly more age appropriate, option of soccer. My mom tried to get me into lacrosse, but I spent the time on the sidelines, daydreaming while absent-mindedly braiding together blades of grass. Making up poem verses, going over them in my head so when I got home i could write them down on scrap paper. I felt awkward, different, even stunted. I daydreamed about magical, fictitious places instead of watching MTV. I never read Twilight. Instead, I was reading poems of the 1800’s that I didn't even fully understand but I loved the sound of it. Art started in elementary school out of a desperate ploy to have an identifier besides “the strange girl”. And thus I was born first as “the girl who could draw puppies, flowers, and Spongebob really well on her folders”. Art also gave me something I had wanted forever, a reason for people to talk to me. Art gave me worth when I couldn't find my own.

In the fall of my junior year was the first time I went to the hospital. And contrary to what I have been telling people the past two years, it was not for stomach problems, I was sent to, yes, a mental hospital, to deal with the intense feeling of depression and anxiety. It wasn't shutter island, but it wasn't exactly the land of milk and honey either. It was something between hell and heaven, a kind of purgatory where all you could do was sit and think amidst the white walls. I have always been too good at thinking, which landed me there in the first place, so to counteract a whirring brain I talked to people. I talked to anybody I could find, staff, patients, and the cleaning woman, Mercedes. I talked to my roommates as they came and went , I talked to the man that brought our lunches. And soon, in a kind of way that has become common in my life, talking turned to drawing.

Over junior and the first half of senior year, I was admitted four times, each time for about three to four weeks. But these are the hospital related numbers that matter. The most important number is fourteen, the number of portraits I drew during my times there.

A Hospital is a place of concretes, sterile walls that stand to stare you down with the sheer power of their blankness, pink pills you can hold in your hand and iron-clad windows so harsh and severe in their message, so absolute in their strength. But from the background sprung the memories of the complex; people, characters you imagine you would find in some strange Vonnegut short story. Their ailments varied, but their plight and their character never ceased to fascinate me. They wore their disorders like jewels around their necks, unapologetic and frighteningly beautiful. And so, between groups and activities I would rush to a pencil and a blank page picking a new patient every few days to draw. I believe these are the most important pieces of my career thus far because with them came a sense of understanding. It didn't feel right keeping the sketches so I gave to the patients, pressing them in folded triangles into their hands upon their release. I liked to pretend they were a good luck talisman, wishing health and happiness upon the receiver wherever they went. I think they deserved the work. Pick, draw, gift complete. The product was a collaborative, half the content was what you couldn't see. Art requires a humility, an understanding that the subject is an artist as well. I still see those pale-Prozac faces in my dreams. They line up like the phases of the moon, all strung along that same holy thread like a rosary of my own. It was their voice that guided my hand, the sound of their laughter that traced along each curve, their erratic and often strange behavior embellishing every contour. It was then that I realized art is a dialogue, a language spoken between two things, a language of understanding, empathy and acceptance. A bridge of lead that led me into the arms, and into the heart, of another. Draw, cry, smile, understand, repeat.

I told myself I was the female George Catlin, the 1800’s painter who would travel around to different tribes and paint the Native Americans to preserve the culture. I read a story regarding the resistance he met from a particular tribe who believed that when they drew them their soul went into the painting. They believed the artist was sacred, even mythological, creating a duplicate of the inner self forever trapped on the page through witchcraft. I like to think Catlin and I have something in common, an urge to record things of importance. An urge to understand, question, record, repeat.  A passion that turns each brushstroke into a piece of someone. Filling the paint with the memories and sensations only you can understand. In this way perhaps the tribe was right, that the soul of the subject is a piece of the art, codependent on each other, a dance between image and meaning. However, what was not acknowledged was that with the subject’s soul lies also the soul of the artist, sisters in meaning and importance, lovers that share the same bed. I believe that Catlin did not only preserve the Native American culture in his paintings, but also his own soul and experience. In the same way I believe I left myself in those portraits of other patients. Yes, to me, the drawings signified the plight and behavior of others, but also served as a catalog for my pain and my struggle. What looks like a portrait to the naked eye is actually a drawing of two people,my own ‘los dos fridas’, two experiences impossibly tangled together. They were my coping mechanism through my agony, my feelings of apathy, isolation and despair. Thus, when I gave them away I felt a release, as if I was scrubbed raw from the inside and cleansed of my troubles by cataloging not only the face, but also the struggles of another. I stood on the cliff of my own desires and gave pieces of myself away until I was a vessel, waiting to be filled with the sacred water of experience.

What started out as simple portraits, became pieces over the weeks I drew. I incorporated symbols from their life, or things significant to me. Some I gave colored veins and others flowers springing from their cheeks, drawing became less about copying something down and more about expelling the feelings inside of me. In truth, it became more about healing, about meaning. When I returned to my home, I became obsessed with meaningful art. I stopped drawing from my hand and began to draw from something much deeper and more internal, primitive and guttural. I now draw from emotions, whether it be sadness, outrage or happiness. Every piece I draw is a self portrait in that it springs from a secret place in my breast, coming from a need to create. I utilize specific personal themes from my life, and often draw from my favorite works of literature such as Vonnegut, Charlotte Gilman and Sarah Jewette as reference points. I have become fascinated with memory, childhood, sexuality, the church, women in society and the tool of perception. This has paved my way to self discovery through installation and performance art. Just like those deceptively simple patient portraits, my pieces meanings are not always self evident. However, sometimes I take joy in this, there is something to be said for the secret and intimate relationship between creator and creation. My pieces are part of me, and just like my mind there are parts of each one that will never truly be revealed. That is the way I live my life, and that is how I like it. Discover, struggle, rejoice, repeat.

Through it all I keep coming back to Gibson’s words, “I love this life despite my clenched fist.” No artist can produce true art with a relaxed hand, in the same way that no viewer may appreciate it with a relaxed hand. Art is not static, it is charged and breathes to the same rhythm as all those that encounter it. I feel it cling to my lungs, wrap around my throat with each exhale. Gibson also once said “I wonder if Beethoven held his breath the first time his fingers touched the keys....We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.” My moment that pauses my breathe is when I create art. For a second I am a tool, the brush painting me as much as it paints the canvas. I don’t use the paint, we paint each other with things I never knew where inside of me. Suddenly there is something tangible woven with the intangible, emotions left on the paper amidst a cloud of charcoal, tears in the oil paint and laughter in the graphite. Art has healed me, reared me, and taught me. Just as Gibson says, “Forests may be gorgeous but there is nothing more alive than a tree that learns how to grow in a cemetery." I suppose Gibson captured why I have such a fondness for this series of portraits. They possess solitude, a purity in their observational importance, a record of my sadness and my triumph over my struggle with depression. They sprung from the darkest period in my life, a time when I wished I wasn't living it. My mind was my cemetery, having laid to rest my hope, dreams and ambition. It was these portraits that took root in my soul, disturbed the hollow graves of the happiness I craved. Although I sit here today with no physical remnants of my portraits, my cemetery has turned into a garden that took root when I put pencil to paper. For this, I am eternally grateful, for I don’t create art, art created me. Create, expel, express, repeat.

[fab-fem]

By Reed

[emotionalpackrat]

hey guys.. I have been super duper busy but the femme network is now accepting applications! just shoot me a message with a little blurb and wait to see if you can join a rad bunch of gals! If you have already sent me a blurb just send it again because it has probably been lost in the depths of my inbox