New art!

I’ve discovered I can get out of creative dry spells if I can come up with multiple reasons to do a particular project. I generally only seem to be able to rationalize away one at a time….

The reasons for doing this one were several. First off, I was getting frustrated with the social justice theme – it was starting to feel propaganda-ish to me, which was a sign I’d gotten too deep and needed to back off until I could see the glowing heart of it again. So I wanted to do something that was just plain pretty.

But that felt frivolous (I know, I know… issues…. I’m working on them.) – I still wanted a reason, something in particular I was trying to accomplish. So I decided to do a portrait of a woman of color, in continuation of my efforts detailed here and here. Finally, I decided to also use it as an opportunity to experiment with some new techniques.

She doesn’t really have a title. The file name is “Shadowed”, but that’s more of a descriptor than an attribution of deeper meaning. If I had to ascribe meaning to her, it’s a reflection of the uproar over women in hijab, and an effort to show a strong, happy, confident woman who’s wearing a head covering because she wants to. (In other words, shame on you, France.) But I haven’t gotten all that to distill into a nice little title, yet. Thanks to reader Kate, her title is now What She Wants You to See.

The new techniques in question are dry-brushing on the fabric and some new pens – nothing all that drastic, but I like the effects.

When we went in for the conference with the director, I was already pretty sure that it was going to end with us withdrawing my son Aiden from Glen Montessori School. Tensions had been increasing over his behavior and toilet issues all summer, and the stress was starting to affect not just us, but him. The question in my mind was just who was going to fire who first, and how nasty they were going to be about refunding the tuition for the upcoming year. Although I was pretty angry at how the school had been treating us, I was prepared to frame the issue as an incompatibility of approach and try to part ways peacefully. I was looking into other childcare options, and already had an appointment with another preschool later that day.

What I wasn’t expecting was for them to twist the issues and lie to my face. They claimed that Aiden was having multiple accidents every day when I hadn’t taken home any dirty clothes for a week and a half. They claimed that the head teacher did not say the dangerous and ignorant thing my mother and I both clearly heard her say. They flat-out ignored me when I pointed out that this gross level of miscommunication was something that would have to be fixed before we could address any of Aiden’s issues in a productive way. It became increasingly clear that I could not trust these people.

I did not raise my voice. I did not call anyone names or throw things, as much as I wanted to. When I finally couldn’t take any more, I said “We’re done here. I’m taking Aiden, we’re going home.” And I walked out of that office.

They then, apparently, turned to my husband and tried to make the whole thing out to be my fault. (Which, if you know us at all, was exactly the wrong thing to do.) He got a promise of a full refund out of them and told me that the director seemed shocked – like she’d never had anybody walk out on her before.

Within 24 hours, Aiden was enrolled at a new preschool. Smaller, farther away, less diverse, but independently owned and run by people who were willing to work with us rather than fit us into their unbending policy book. The old school did actually follow through on their promise to refund the tuition, which is the only reason I’m not blasting negative reviews all over the internet.

Lessons (re)learned?

Trust your gut. I’d been getting uneasy feelings, mixed messages, etc. from that place for months, but was ignoring them because I was so desperate for childcare and Aiden still seemed happy.

Document. Especially given the mixed messages above, I should have been tracking what was happening. Then I would have had data to back up my assertion that Aiden had been steadily improving his potty usage all summer, why was this suddenly a problem now? It wouldn’t have changed the outcome, but maybe it would have given me more confidence, enabled me to act more decisively.

Not all Montessori schools are equal. There’s no central certification that grants you license to use the name, and just because you have an open classroom and all the right toys doesn’t mean you actually understand that child-centered means you adjust to their needs, not the other way around.

I really am a pretty damn good parent. Maybe I could have figured things out earlier, but as soon as it was incontrovertibly obvious there was a problem, and that it was affecting Aiden negatively, I got him out of there. He’s obviously happier at the new place, further vindicating my actions. Confrontation is not something I’ve ever been good at, but when it’s my kid’s welfare at stake I not only hold my own but come out on top. I WILL NOT BE BULLIED.

So this morning was the grand opening of a brand new Apple Store at Ross Park Mall, which is about ten minutes from our house. The whole family being devotees of the Great Fruit, we trooped out there early this morning to get in line.

17th in line, 90 minutes to go until opening. Feeling my back starting to twinge, I sat down on the floor. A minute or two later, mall security guards came over and told me I had to stand. Even when we explained that I had a back injury and couldn’t stand for very long, they cited “safety issues” and said again, I had to stand. Since I didn’t feel like getting into an argument (and possibly getting all three of us kicked out), Aiden and I left.

Safety issues, my reasonably shapely ass.

For those not versed in disability issues: this sort of thing is illegal. ILLEGAL. If I cannot stand in line because of a disability, they are required to make reasonable accomodations. If they were that dead set against having me sit on the floor, they could have brought me a folding chair; but they are not allowed to kick someone out of line for being disabled.

I might add that not only were there no benches on line, there were no benches anywhere in sight. Sure, I could have brought a folding chair, if I’d known ahead of time, but honestly, carrying the chair would have been almost as difficult as standing in line! The point is, if they’re offering an opportunity, experience, whatever to the public, they’re required to allow people with disabilities access without placing extra burdens upon them to do so. I don’t care if it makes their crowd control more difficult.

I should make it very clear that this was not in any way Apple’s fault – their authority stopped at the store doors. When Andrei told the store manager what had happened, he got a profuse apology, extra tshirts for me and Aiden, and they also had a discussion with the security guards and the mall service people. So yay for Apple. And maybe the mall will do things differently next time. But I’m not holding my breath.

The last few days I’ve been working on digitally tweaking one of my pieces from last year to prep it for print. This graphic line style of mine is one I’ve played with for about fifteen years, but I’ve only been intensively practicing and improving it for the last year and a half or so – so to get my older stuff up to snuff takes a lot of erasing. Finger smudges, old pencil marks, uncertain lines. The piece in question looks great at smaller sizes, but to put it up on RedBubble it needs to be clean enough that that little pencil smudge doesn’t glare at you from across the room at poster size.

Erase, erase, erase. It’s meditative or frustrating, depending on my mood, and I have to make sure I don’t do too much of it at a time or my arms cramp up. Much more RSI-inducing than pen-and-paper work.

I’ve got another piece in my head, but I honestly don’t want to do it, because it’s another rape culture piece and those are depressing. I’m depressed enough these days. My physical limitations are getting to me again (not that they don’t always, but there are cycles within cycles). Few to no comments here, practically no sales, even after all the people I had begging me to make prints available again…. depressing. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, out there somewhere. Just gotta keep moving.

I’m seeing a lot of jubilation in the feminist blogosphere that the long-running comic strip Cathy is coming to an end, and sneers about how damaging and insulting the strip was to women.

I’m not sure any of these people actually lived through the eighties, or at least they’ve forgotten what it was like for women*.

I was born in 1977, so I don’t remember the eighties that well, but it was when I got the bulk of my primary ideas about womanhood and femininity. And my mother adored Cathy, so I got to hear plenty about why she connected with the strip so strongly.

The second wave of feminism was about having it all: job, family, love, fun, and to carry it all off looking flawless and confident**. As most of us realize now, that was completely unrealistic. It may have allowed women into the workforce, but at a terrible cost. Women were no longer allowed to be human, to have frailties or flaws. If one hair was out of place, or one speck of dust collected in the house, they were a failure as a feminist and as a woman.

Image transcript: “Diary of a healthy lifestyle. 1. Cleansed my healthy skin. 2. Brushed my healthy hair. 3. Ate my healthy breakfast. 4. Power-walked my healthy feet, healthy nails, healthy gums, healthy major muscle groups and healthy attitude to the car. 5. Drove car to coffee shop. Bought and ate a chocolate chip croissant. The hype can get me out the door, but it can’t get me through the day.”

That is what Cathy was about. Pointing out the absurdities of the expectations placed on women. Normalizing, through exaggeration, the internal cost of trying to meet them. Telling women all over the country that yes, this is ridiculous, and when you don’t meet those expectations you’re not alone. Women weren’t laughing at Cathy because she was making a fool of herself; they were laughing with her because they recognized themselves in her, and that made it okay, made the sinking, horrifying feeling of perpetual and inevitable failure more bearable.

Men always seemed to hate Cathy, because it wasn’t about them. It wasn’t talking to them, it wasn’t framed to make them understand. It was for and about women, and in the eighties that damn well was radical.

From today’s point of view, is Cathy damaging to women? Possibly. We’ve had a hell of a backlash against true gender equality, constructing women as silly, flighty, frivolous, and neurotic far more explicitly than they were thirty years ago. The recognition that “having it all” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be is no longer profound, nor is there such a dearth of social support that recognizes that (hurray for the Internet!). In this context, and given that the strip really hasn’t had a new joke in twenty years, yeah, it’s probably well past time for it to die. But don’t say that it was never worth anything, because that’s not true.

*White, cis, middle-class, abled women, at least.

They Will Become by Heather Keith Freeman
14″x17″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

(Image description: A child’s face seen in profile, the shadow of an adult face behind. A light rises from behind the shadow as if it were a planet, highlighting words that say “When you “think of the children,” think of the adults they will become.”)

Here’s my newest piece, “They Will Become”, pictured at right.The meaning of this is (I hope) an obvious reference to the all-too-common conservative plea to “think of the children” as a cover for denying people information, choice, and control of their own destinies, and a way to avoid the question of what happens to these children once they’re grown, or even born!

Once a woman is forced to bear a child she can’t take care of or doesn’t want, then what of the child once it’s born? If the child is female, how can you fight for her to be born at the expense of her right to control her body once she’s grown?

Once children are denied accurate sex education, what of these same young adults once they acquire the power of human sexuality without the knowledge to wield it responsibly?

Once children with disabilities have grown out of their “sleeping angel” photo ops, what are their resources, where are their advocates then?

Don’t use children as your excuse, your cover story, your trophy with which to parade your agenda. Children. Are. People. How you treat them now will affect them once they’re grown, and they are neither more nor less deserving of your respect than adults.

Racism, Ageism, AND Cissexism in My Process!

As part of my ongoing efforts to depict more people of color in my work rather than default to white, I chose a source photograph of an East Asian girl. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts I think her race got kind of erased in this. I am fighting the combined ageism and racism of Western art education, which uses overwhelmingly white, abled, young adult models both in life and in photo books. Until I started deliberately depicting people of color, I didn’t even realize how limited I was by this. Many of my base assumptions, grounded in decades of practice, about the structure and shape and proportion of facial features, were thrown out the window by this model’s age and race. I think I managed to overcome the age factor – I think she realistically appears about six or seven – but I don’t think I succeeded with her race, and I’m disappointed about that. It represents a big hole in my skills, and I’ll continue working to rectify it. Edited to add: I’ve been told by a couple of people now that they do read the subject as East or Southeast Asian, even before reading my post on her; so it’s possible I’m just too close to the artwork to see it realistically. Regardless, my point stands: drawing people of color is something I have very little experience in, and need to practice.

I also had an interesting time choosing the wording. As originally conceived, the piece would have said “When you ‘think of the children’, think of the woman she will become.” I was slightly troubled by the mismatched grammar (plural “children” vs. singular “woman”) and by the focus on girls as if boys are not also victimized by disrespect and condescension, but managed to justify them. Then I realized that I was being cissexist by presuming that a child presenting as a girl would grow up to be a woman, and that was enough to push me to reword it. The result doesn’t have quite the ring or flow of the original, but it’s fairer and more true to my principles, which is a worthy tradeoff.

Fairy Burlesque Show #4 by Heather Keith Freeman
4″x6″, pen and ink on watercolor paper

Been a crazy week or so with kid/school drama, but all appears to have settled now and I’m back to focusing on art. Got a couple things to show you, which it looks like I’m going to break into a couple of posts thanks to the complexities of the subjects.

A couple of weeks ago I finished the Fairy Burlesque Show series! Here’s #4 to the right. I also, as promised, made a 4-up print for my RedBubble store.

Thanks to Everyday Kathy for her shout-out to this piece over at Everyday Bliss! Go check out her blog for more fairy artwork and little bits of everyday bliss.

The Fairy Burlesque Show was a fun little project. I’m done with these girls for now, but the format of the series worked out well, composing and telling the story behind it was fun, and I’ll keep the format in mind for future experiments, for sure. It’s a great affirmation that I do have the attention span to do series, which for a long time I was convinced I couldn’t do!

(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I’m talking about legal stuff to the best of my understanding, but don’t take what I say as any kind of authoritative take on the situation.)

Unless you’ve been completely unplugged for the last 24 hours, you know that yesterday Judge Walker, of the California Supreme Court, released the ruling in Perry vs Schwarzenegger declaring California’s Proposition 8, which defined marriage as being between a man and a woman, to be unconstitutional. (Here is the full text of the decision. It’s really quite compelling reading.) Most people expect the decision to be appealed all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, though there is apparently some doubt as to whether the proponents will have the legal standing to do so. (I heard this said a couple places but I can’t find a link to support it – anyone have more information?)

I’ve seen a number of expressions of frustration that the GLBT civil rights battle is so focused on same-sex marriage right now. Understandably so – even if gays and lesbians can get married, people of all LBTGQQI stripes can still be fired or denied housing in way too many places for their orientation, expression, or identity. Trans women are harassed, beaten, denied medical care, and murdered on a routine basis just for being who they are. On any scale, I think murder is a greater human rights violation than being denied the right to marry!

But this is bigger than it seems.

Not only is this decision a big, substantive step in the direction of full equality, it establishes some important legal precedents that will be very, very hard to wipe away.

Walker ruled that gays and lesbians are a “suspect class”, as people of color are, suffering both widespread discrimination and having relatively little political power to remedy it. This means that any laws regarding them must pass a high standard of “strict scrutiny”, meaning there must be an overwhelmingly factual, undeniable reason for the law to exist. This directly supports any future efforts towards ENDA (the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, various versions of which have been stalled in Congress for over a decade now).

Since gays and lesbians have been ruled a suspect class, saying that trans people are not also a suspect class would be a ridiculous proposition, seeing as how they are discriminated against horribly not only by the straight mainstream but by the rest of the queer community.

Trans people are also directly benefited by this ruling, especially if (when, I hopehopehope) it goes national. Right now the laws in various states vary wildly as to whether a trans person is legally the gender they were assigned at birth or the gender with which they identify, and what they have to do to get their assigned-at-birth gender changed legally, if they can do it at all. This means that right now a trans woman, legally married to a cis man in her home state, may move to another state and have her marriage invalidated because the state doesn’t recognize her true gender and says her marriage is same-sex and therefore invalid.

Admittedly that’s a tip of the iceberg when it comes to the legal hell that trans people have to deal with, but it’s something, isn’t it? It seems to me that the progress of history is a long slow march of tiny steps peppered with larger leaps. The lack of more leaps doesn’t invalidate the tiny steps; in fact they could not happen without them.

Finally, same-sex marriage is symbolically very big. If two people can get married, that’s one step closer to them being legally and culturally perceived as just like anyone else. To the suburban, white, Christian morass of Middle America that drives the mainstream political narrative and thus holds much of the political power in this country, same-sex marriage makes “the Other” less strange, less frightening, more normal. Yes, they will then pass the demonization down to the next people in the chain. Yes, discrimination and hate will continue, just as people of color are still harassed and mistreated and brutalized. But today it is just that much harder to legally justify the hatred. Every little bit helps. It’s hard to remember that when you’re not the one getting the prize, but it does help.

The important thing to remember is that as big a victory as this is, the fight is not over yet, nor will it be if (when?) the Supreme Court upholds Walker’s decision. The fight will never be over, not so long as people seek to elevate themselves by marginalizing others. That does not mean we stop fighting, or that small victories mean nothing. Small victories remind us that progress can be made.

Onward!

In marriage equality discussions I am often placed in the awkward position of feeling that same-sex marriage does get me closer to polyamorous marriage, while feeling pressured to keep that quiet lest I give the other side more ammo for their “But if gays can get married than what next?!” arguments. In other words, my desires often get thrown under the bus for the “greater good”. It’s a wretched place to be in and I don’t think there is one right answer. Sometimes the forward motion is worth the sacrifice. Many times it’s not.

Today is your LAST chance to get my original artwork “Give Help, Not Blame” for as little as 26% of the retail price in the BARCC auction. As of this writing it’s going for $50 – were I to sell it outright, I would charge at least $200, so this is dirt cheap! The auction’s been extended a couple of times due to technical difficulties, but this is really truly it: the auction ends for good at 5pm EST!

Bid on my artwork here.

There are lots of other beautiful things there, too, some without any bids at all!

Auction winners, or people who just want to donate to a good cause, can make their donation online to the BARCC and email their receipt to Shira.

Support Shira. Support women. There is nothing normal, or natural, about rape. The support and outreach BARCC provides saves women’s lives. You can help.

First up, I point you to Shira’s annual auction of handmade jewelry, crafts, and artwork to benefit the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. My pen&ink of “Give Help, Not Blame” is in this auction; I may make prints in due course, but this is your chance to get the original dirt cheap!

This Saturday she will be blogging every half hour for 24 hours. Find out more about what she’s doing, and sponsor her!

Second, I have opened a RedBubble store, where you can get my work printed on a variety of products. All of you who begged me for prints of Not Yours, my pro-choice work, can now get one here in a variety of formats and price points. Half the proceeds from Not Yours will be donated to National Network of Abortion Funds, which helps women in need pay for their reproductive health care.

From the NNAF’s web page: “We believe that all women should have the right to decide whether and when to become a mother. Every woman should have the right to shape her own life and the right to care for herself and her family with dignity.”

I’ve also made one of my old favorites, Lifted by the Wind, available in both print and t-shirt form.

More to come; that’s what I’ve got so far. If you follow me on Facebook, new RedBubble items are posting to that feed. Haven’t figured out if I can do that automatically on Twitter yet.