Break Time

16x20 acrylic on canvas

Even when you enjoy your career, there are periods of stress, doubt, fatigue.  In the midst of the gloomiest days, I confess to sometimes wishing I could push a magic eject button and catapult away from my circumstances, go back to a simpler time when the world seemed like a huge white gesso canvas, waiting for shapes and colors to be applied. An existence filled with unlimited possibilities, and a never-ending series of new experiences.

As I worked on this latest portrait, featuring my cousin Rose May and two friends from the old neighborhood, I realized I’d finally found my magic button. It’s located inside the bottles of acrylic paint, hiding inside the decrepit photo albums and scrap books. 

The kids in this portrait are at a forest preserve, hot and sweaty from running around and laughing, now resting comfortably (ouch) on croquet mallets.  An adult has convinced them to stop, at least long enough to snap a photograph and preserve the moment.  And thirty years later, I have a transformational experience committing it to canvas.  It makes me feel happy.

I don’t want to stop.  I want to run around and laugh forever.  I’m going to dip into my acrylic, thumb through my albums, leaf through the scrap books and push the magic button for eternity.

My job is just my job.  These paintings are my life.

Living Room, July 1982

16x20 acrylic on canvas

This is Brooke, Muffy and Buffy. Well, actually, it’s just Vicky, Joyce and Marie, and we are the coolest of cool Preppy posers in the entire western hemisphere.  We worshipped the whole upper crust-East Coast thing, but were hopelessly mired near the bottom half of Chicago’s West Side blue collar barrel.  This didn’t prevent us from vigorously going through the motions, though. All three of us went to Kroch’s and Brentano’s at the Oak Park Mall and purchased Lisa Birnbach’s seminal work, The Official Preppy Handbook.  It was a parody, of course, but we followed its words as if Moses himself had dragged the sacred text down from Mt. Sinai. Marie and I would save up our allowance (mostly bags of coins), and take the Chicago Avenue bus downtown to Saks Fifth Avenue on Michigan Avenue to purchase Izod Lacoste shirts.  They cost about $26.00 at the time and when we were short money, we’d run over to my mom’s office at the Rehab Institute of Chicago to beg for funds. At one point, we got to know the salesman’s name at Saks (Bill) because we had to carefully lay all of our change out on the countertop to count it. In this painting, we are in the middle of a sweltering hot July afternoon, but sporting jeans and (in my case) a button down top!  Marie used to calculate the value of her church wardrobe, during the homily at St. Angela…from her pearl earrings, Lacoste shirt, Lacoste belt, Lacoste Chinos, Swatch Watch, argyle socks and Sperry topsiders.  She realized this stuff, um, La-Cost La-Mucho!  Amen. She’d probably deny everything, as she’s grown into one of the greenest, most frugal friends I know.  Marie frequents resale shops and eats vegetables grown in a community garden and eschews the television and all that. Vicky has gone through many fashion styles as well.  She moved out to southern California before high school and went hardcore 80’s punk, with the Mohawk and whole shebang.  Now, she’s a rather stylish mom, with a normal hairdo…similar to that in this painting. At our 25th grade school reunion last Summer, Vicky came bearing an old copy of the Official Preppy Handbook, which she’d picked up second-hand, and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect.  My Preppy faith had wavered a bit in recent years, during a personal crisis of upper-crusty-ness, but now I’m back.  Bill, if you’re out there, man, get ready.  I’m coming to Saks with a plastic bag full of quarters.

What Size Are You Now?

16x20 acrylic on canvas

This is me, surrounded by the paparazzi, at my 8th grade graduation.  We’re on the red carpet, in front of the church, after the glamorous ceremony and mass, taking pictures with all the other celebrities: Sister Mary; the teachers, priests and families.
    Since you’re probably dying to know: My dress is from Madigans, which was located in the Winston Plaza strip mall in Melrose Park, in the shadows of a race track and some honky-tonk joints.  This was where we bought all of our finery, special gowns, party gear, fresh off the rack.  Thankfully, Madigans has long since gone out of business.  Sometimes, when the gettin’ was good in the old Dino household, we’d venture downtown to Lord & Taylor at Water Tower Place, or hit the Marshall Field’s at the Oak Park mall, to find whatever was in vogue at the time.  This was an era when nylons, silver flats, and Gloria Vanderbilt’s ass-chokin’ jeans represented the pinnacle of high fashion.
    Auntie Evelyn is in this shot, peppering me with questions, as if she were working for TMZ.  She wants to know what dress size I am, ask about my weight.  This is how it begins with most women, family and friends torturing us about our physical shortcomings.  This is the sort of psychological water-boarding which penetrates our souls, stays with us forever.
    This past summer, we had our 25th class reunion.  A bunch of survivors from the old neighborhood, reunited for an unforgettable night of cocktails and truckloads of Italian food.  As I munched Calamari Fritti and Rigatoni del Pastore, Auntie Evelyn was still there in the back of mind, asking me what dress size I wore, how much I weighed.  Do we ever graduate and move on from our own insidious obsessions?

Raquel

 

This is my dear friend, Raquel, at the start of a sun-splashed Chicago day last June.  It turned into a marathon affair, beginning with 10am wine in the lobby of the swanky Palmer House hotel, snacks in Grant Park, photos in front of the Art Institute lions.  There were cab rides and more glasses of wine and Starbucks products.  There was Navy Pier and a high-speed, laughter-filled boat ride on Lake Michigan.  There was a nice dinner in an ethnic restaurant where many bottles of pinot and shots of Grey Goose were consumed.  There was a buzzy, warm, post-dinner stroll through the greatest downtown in America, then more cocktails with Rica, Vicky, Vlady, John and Jeff.  There was a late-night, drunken wrestling match between our loser husbands in the lounge of a Five Star hotel.  There was a menacing security guard, and some awkward apologies, and a near arrest.  Then more pinot grigio and shots of vodka.  And after Raquel and Eddie went home, there was another dinner at another Chicago landmark, and by this time we were well into the next day, eighteen hours after our first toast.  Vlady, the youngest of the bunch, suggested we go dancing.

Happy Birthday Raquel!  Here’s to more unforgettable days!  (We’ll leave the husbands at home)

Float

11x14 acrylic on canvas

If it wasn’t for the old, moldering photo albums and scrapbooks compiled by my dear mother, most memories of the first fifteen years of my life would be completely lost to the ether.  And perhaps that would be okay, you know?  There’s a lot of stuff I’d just as soon forget.  Like my perpetual shyness, or when I ran away from kindergarten my first day of school, or that I used to enjoy (barf) the J. Geils Band.

And then there are other things, little still photographs of anonymous moments, five-second mini-movies, sounds and smells and emotions which I can’t seem to forget, but can’t really remember, either.

This parade, on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, is one of those amnesia clips tacked inside my grey matter.  Why am I on this Filipino-themed float?  Who are those other kids?  What’s the occasion?  Wazzup with the whole Filipino-nurse obsession?  What year is this?

1981, I think.

For the life of me, I can’t zone in on too many other details.

Except one.

As we sputtered past the main grandstand, I looked up and saw Jane Byrne, Chicago’s first (and so far, only) female Mayor.  She waved at me and smiled, and I waved back at her, and our Filipino-themed float kept sputtering past.

I’ve never forgotten that.

Lola

11×14 acrylic on canvas

I’ll try to keep this one short, sweet and buttery.   That’s Lola Ambrocia in the painting, using a couple kids as human blankets, sitting in Lolo’s Lazy Boy, happy.  Perhaps twenty percent of her life was spent in a position similar to this one, with the gaggle of youngsters clinging to her for dear life.  In this instance, it’s my little sister and cousin Eli.  Thirty, forty years earlier, it would have been one of her own children (including my father), the ten or twelve or thirteen little ones she gave birth to back in the Philippines. The other 80% of her life was spent in the kitchen, cooking.  For breakfast, it was Bob Evans sausage, sliced thin and fried to a delicious crisp, with fried rice and bacon.  She lived upstairs from us, in our two-flat on the west side of Chicago.  After school, there was always fried chicken, spaghetti and chili, all made in the same soup pot. God forbid you said no to food in our house, as Lola would take it personally and mutter something in Tagalog which, loosely translated, meant “Who asked you?” To keep peace, you had to eat.  For a late afternoon snack (or merienda, a Filipino term inherited from our former Spanish occupiers), she’d butter bread, sprinkle a ton of sugar on top, and flip it in the toaster oven.  She was also famous for some other haute cuisine recipes; Buddig ham on buttered toast, and buttered Sara Lee pound cake toasted in the oven.  I think at one point, she may have just given us a fresh stick of butter, and told us to shut up and eat it. She bought most of the groceries at the local Jewel; or if she needed to visit the clinic on the north side, we’d stop at Butera.  I remember waiting patiently in line with her, as she counted food stamps to buy our food.  I will always remember her wearing coral colored lipstick, and powder dabbed on from her brown, tortoise shell compact.  She always- always- wore earrings. She’s long gone now, but I think a lot of us in the family (including the two now-grown rug rats in this portrait) still cling to her in spirit.  She was our Lola.  We miss her.

Valley Girl

11x14 acrylic on canvas

This is my sister, Ding.  I know, I know…that’s a sound, not a name.  Ding.  It’s onomatopoeia.  Her real name is Maria Diana, named after the Virgin Mother AND Diana Prince of Wonder Woman fame.  She was born in the late 70s, when those two women had super high Q Ratings. Today her friends and husband call her Diana; but within our intimate family circle (to those both young and old), she was and always will be… Ding. Or these days, “Auntie Ding.”  And yes, yes: Her nickname is the noise we’d associate with getting a correct answer on one of those long gone, cheesy 1970s game shows. ********************** “What’s the state capital of California?” “Sacramento.” DING (applause) “That’s 25 points and you’re now in the lead, Diana!!” ********************** Ding is my only sibling, eight years younger than me.  What happens with younger siblings is usually one of two things.  Either every event, birthdays or whatever, is the Biggest Event in the History of the Planet.  Or, their stuff just sort of gets lost in the shuffle.  I’d say her touchstone moments have been spilled equally amongst the two different buckets.  One year she’s been the Belle of the Ball, the next year somebody’s sneaking out to Baskin Robins to get a last minute ice cream cake, or stuffing a couple twenties into a white envelope and scribbling her name on the outside.  That’s sort of how life was in our house. ********************** We weren’t world travelers by any stretch of the imagination, but because Ding was born during the summer, her birthdays have often occurred while we were on the road.  One year (when she was very, very young) it was the mosquito-infested jungles of the Philippines; then years later, she blew out her candles inside a cramped hotel room in mosquito-infested Florida.  This painting is of a very special birthday, when she turned Sweet Sixteen, when we happened to be cruising around the greater, mosquito-less Los Angeles area. Most of her sixteenth birthday was spent at a funeral somewhere in the valley.  No, this wasn’t planned, but none of the most memorable things ever were, right?  A family friend had died from AIDS.  He was only a casual acquaintance of ours, but out of respect to our California relatives, we spent the afternoon in church, weeping, singing hymns and reciting prayers with all the rest.  There was an outdoor reception afterward, with traditional Filipino food, in the parking lot of an apartment complex. ********************** Believe it or not, there was some other fun stuff on Ding’s Sweet Sixteenth.  Before the funeral, we did a speed tour of Griffith Park, raced thru Beverly Hills and ripped around Hollywood, in what amounted to an LA-Tourist Gang-Bang approach to sight-seeing.  We’d actually stopped at the Griffith Observatory on top of the hill, as well, to get a better look at the sun-soaked smog and take some candid photographs. By the end of the day, after Beverly Hills, Hollywood and AIDS, we dropped some of the more exhausted family members off at home.  Uncle Johnny remembered it was Ding’s birthday, and insisted we keep pushing the celebration, as if the parking lot kainan (food party, Anglo friends) wasn’t enough.  Five of us (Uncle J., Lolo Aquilino, Ding, me, my husband), piled into somebody’s car and hit a Mexican Restaurant somewhere in the city. There was all the usual vittles: yellow rice, ground beef, cheese, tortillas, lettuce, tomatoes.  There were margaritas.  Cerveza.  Ding probably knocked down a Shirley Temple or two.  There was a “Three Amigos” tribute band, kicking some traditional mariachi favorites. After all this stuff, there was a scoop of fried ice cream, garnished with whipped topping and one solitary candle.  The five of us sang, and a sombrero was produced.  Photos were taken.  Fifteen years later there is this painting.

Kiddieland

11x14 acrylic on canvas

Serendipity. So, this is how this all works.  The compelling, never-before-told, “behind the scenes” story behind my art blog.  I go through scrap books and photo albums digging for ideas, looking for images to paint, memories which need dusting off.  I talk about stuff with my husband, re-hash my so-called life, and brainstorm the accompanying essay. If need be, we interview family and friends (or ignore everybody), then collaborate on the written piece. Then after a couple weeks of hemming and hawing and painting and writing these ideas take form.  I spill acrylic on the kitchen table and bark at my kids when I’m in the creative zone.  I become obsessed with a subject and work late into the evening, and finally- finally!- after enough pain and angst and hives, the work is scanned, edited, and posted on the blog.  It becomes part of our digital universe. And then comes the artistic, post-partum depression.  The human side.  I log on to the web and look at the electronic representation of my paintings, read the essays, and pray nobody stops by, because I’m never completely happy with how things turn out.  To overcome this, I slip into creative detox for a day or two, and then jump back into the process, starting from scratch, driving my poor husband and kids nuts. This latest post is no different from my previous works, born from the same Warholian, factory-like procedure.  But somehow, by accident, the timing is spot-on perfect this week. ********************** In this little vignette, my cousins and I are about to become the first Filipinos on the moon.  Well, not actually, but we’re on a spacecraft of some sort, at the Kiddieland theme park in a magical town called Melrose Park. This is during the Star Wars era, but our craft seems to be more Buck Rogers-vintage, something conceived in the early 1950s.  At any rate, with its greasy ball bearings and hydraulic pulley system, this little contraption is probably more space age than anything yet developed in the aeronautical laboratories back in Manila. ********************** As those of you from Chicago probably know, Kiddieland is closing its doors for good this weekend.  Founded in 1929, it was one of the oldest running amusement parks in the country and by Monday it will be no more.  It’ll be dismantled, the land sold to make way for more retail development, I presume.  Kiddieland wasn’t great, we’re not talking about Coney Island here, but it was fun.  It was ours.  Just 10 minutes from my neighborhood, it was a popular spot for birthday parties. I have good memories of being there. There’s been a lot of media concerning its demise, a lot of it poorly written and maudlin.  Trying to tap into the emptiness none of us will really feel when they close the gates for the last time.  If anything, I was more shocked the place was still in operation after all these years, what with the emergence of X-Box, PlayStation and Facebook.  It’s hard to capture people’s imagination. ********************** How this painting wound up on the blog this weekend is really one of those happy little accidents, where the subject matter and timing match up.  The blog itself is likewise a wonder of serendipity; where the urge to paint, walk through the mine fields of my past and share the whole mess have converged.  My gallery is electronic and international.  Buck Rogers wouldn’t believe the world we live in.

Tijuana Blues

16x22 acrylic on canvas

Exactly how we wound up in Tijuana is one of those details lost to time.  The whole family; mom, sister, my aunt and uncle.  My husband.  Me.  A couple cousins.  We’re in the Mexican border town, drinking beer at noon on a Wednesday. 

My husband thinks if Disney had hired the anti-Christ to design the ‘Mexico’ part of Epcot Center, it’d look like Tijuana; poor, seedy, filled with shops peddling alabaster drug paraphernalia, Aztec blankets manufactured in China, cheap silver jewelry.  Vendors taking photographs of families posed in front of donkeys painted like zebras.  Kids hawking Chiclets gum (owned by Cadbury, a British company) and roses shipped in from South America.  You can gamble away your dolares gringos on a crooked sport called Jai alai, whatever that is.  They also have hookers in Tijuana, from what I’ve seen in several grim documentaries.

We parked our car on the California side, and walked across a river to get there.  There’s a bridge, of course, and beneath it flowed a molten river of aluminum cans, fecal debris, discarded Firestone Tires, animal bones, and something which may or may not have been water.

My uncle was nervous about this day trip.  Sporting a cheap straw hat and dark Filipino complexion, he was worried about the border crossing.  The US guards pick up on this stuff right away; the fidgeting hands, darting eyes, stuttered speech.  He’s a doctor here in the states, but could have easily passed as an impoverished Jalisco farmer, or a wily caballero, trying to bluff his way into California on our way home.

That’s my husband and mother in the painting, at a roadside cafe.  Scott’s nursing a Corona, mom seems to be deep in thought, trying to recall the phone number of the U.S. Consulate, should we all get tossed in the Mexican slammer.

As if on cue, on the way home, my uncle DID in fact get pulled aside for additional questions by the good guys with guns.  Sweat beads quickly materialized on his forehead, but he passed their interrogation with flying colors (red, white, and blue) and made it back home with us safely.  Lest anyone be accused of racial profiling, my white-bred husband also got some extra-curricular razzing by the border control toughs.  He wore a poofy blonde Jewfro back in the day, and I suppose the guards just wanted to make sure he wasn’t smuggling a small family of illegals inside his hairdo.

I was going to touch on some parallels here, between Tijuana and Manila.  You know, talk about the Bermuda Triangle of bad government, no education and poverty; but I’m not going to do it.  I’m not going to ruin a perfectly good day.

Escape

11x14 acrylic on canvas

Our first home in Chicago was a 450-square foot studio apartment on Cornelia in the Lakeview neighborhood, near Wrigley Field.  Designed for one occupant, there were 7 of us (not including the rats and cockroaches) shoehorned into this space.  We lived “Hong Kong” style, as my mother puts it, tacking bed sheets to the ceiling to cordon off different living spaces for my aunts, uncles, and parents. 

We used the Chicago Daily News as window coverings, until enough money was earned to replace Mike Royko’s columns and sports sections with old mis-matched sheets from the Salvation Army.  Either way, after a few months the perpetually angry-sounding European landlord had had enough of us, but not the rats or cockroaches, and we were forced to relocate to a different- slightly larger- place on Magnolia.

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Turns out my father arrived here the day before I was born.

My Uncle Johnny and mother picked dad up at O’Hare and there was a small party to celebrate his arrival.  My mom ruined things (or spiced things up?) by going into labor during the festivities.  Uncle Johnny drove everybody to the hospital, and my father- jet-lagged, now unemployed, a young man in a new country less than 24 hours- was about to become a father for the first time.  He was overwhelmed, and it was really his brother who was the rock.  Uncle Johnny kept things together at the hospital, and was there with my family, in a hospital gown, present at my birth.

He’s been there ever since for me.  Because my father passed away when I was young, Uncle Johnny walked me down the aisle at my wedding.

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They didn’t have a crib or anything planned out back at the studio.  Life, by necessity, was unfolding hour-by-hour, as if it were an improvisational theatre piece.  Uncle Johnny found an old mattress in the alley and pulled it up to our second-floor apartment.  This is where my mother and I slept the first couple months.  They were doing the best they could, with very little money, and somehow, through laughter and love, and, um, garbage picking, persevered.

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This painting is of Uncle Johnny and me during a short getaway weekend to Wisconsin.  I’m maybe two and we’re sitting on a wooden table, enjoying each other’s company.  There’s an odd stack of blankets and bed sheets (probably the immigrant window “treatments,” yanked down for camping purposes) piled next to us.

The rest of family is either fishing, cooking, or sleeping.

To gas up the car, pack two tents, and hit the northern woods was a welcome escape from the rough everyday conditions we were accustomed to at the apartment.  There was a sense of freedom here, space; and we seem happy.