Painting Flight, Cooking Matzoh Balls

 Hello and welcome to almost the weekend...Thursday!  and Passover prep day!!!

"Above This" - today's painting!

Updates...
Amyoes.com  just dropped off its 6th newsletter in everyone's inbox today, so please go to my site and sign up if you haven't already!  You can read the 6th newsletter as well as the other ones so far in the archive at this link on my site.

Much work is being done on the Arts Immersion Salon I will be featured in on May 31st.  I'm so excited to contribute in every medium - my theatre, writing, art, and even my culinary offerings!  I am writing up some recipes I created when I was unable to eat and ironically obsessed with food.  You don't realize until you are unable to enjoy it how essential food is to feeling human on this earth.  This is one of the recipes I'm featuring in the salon.

Seven Layer Bars

And this was my writing for that day (Which is all in the 2011 section of this blog)  
“Day 55, Day 56, keep holding on, keep staying strong...
This is so hard.  I am so hungry that I have to physically restrain myself from eating food.  Every minute feels like hours. Every day seems to get harder.  I can't cook one more meal or create one more painting...yet somehow I do.”

  Feeling the cold sensations of the frosting, the hot touch of the baking pan –these are the feelings of aliveness I craved.    

Anyway, I'm very excited that this immersive exhibit, all about trauma, resilience and the power of the human spirit, is going to feature how creativity in every aspect enabled me to survive.  Get your tickets now!

In The Studio...
So, we all know that i am definitely going through my spackling phase right now - I love this stuff!

I've also been getting crafty with the idea of a series.  This was the last series I made out of the spackle...

 So, continuing on a similar theme, I finished the rest of my Spackle tub in this series today!

Panel by panel, rubbing the spackle onto the canvas is just so therapeutic - and it is such a forgiving medium.

You can't see what I'm going for yet...but it's a girl flying above the city lights - I didn't really know what I was going for either until I started to see shapes evolve - sort of like looking up at clouds on a summer day and daydreaming about what animals they are...

Slowly but surely, filling in all the little crevices, using every last drop of paint I could get my hands on - I love using the entire spectrum and playing around with shading, layering...

Bit by bit, I filled out the entire background...took quite a while though!

And a background is done!

Then I started filling in everything else with lots of different color tones, embossing powder and glitter of course :)
And a girl flying above the city was cre
But something was lacking...so I needed to add my signature tear, of course...
And a few other things - so I added a broken heart, some other embellishments, and the words "above" and "this"

And last but not least...

Passover!!!!

Lots of cooking, preparing and prep-work going on!

We are busy creating tri-colored matzoh balls for the soup...

 
 The green matzoh balls are flabored with spinach!  It's a great recipe and your can change up the colors based on what spices you use.

And this is a great and funny song about Passover by William Finn - a composer that I absolutely love, and who is also a dear friend and mentor of mine...

(I actually performed my one-woman show at his cabaret theatre as well!)

Anyway, I promised yesterday I would share a bit more of my old journaling from the hospital about my connection to passover, so hear I go...

"The energy is locked inside of me and I want to release it.  I need an escape from the moment, and that’s what Passover is about too – an escape out of slavery – so maybe symbolically this Passover I need to get all of my rage out, which will liberate me from my past.  The Exodus was not passive – it was the first time the Jews took an active role in moving their legs and escaping slavery.  The Jews said we aren’t going to do this anymore, and Moses led them through the desert, and they walked and walked out of slavery, mosses led them right out of slavery, they basically put their hands on their hips and actively decided to leave the situation.  Every Passover by reading the hagadah, remembering the Jews were repressed, abused, and then how they walked out to freedom, it makes us feel like next year we are going to be in Jerusalem, next year we are going to be free.  And Passover is about telling the story every year – just like I feel it is so important to tell my story. 

 

The story is told every single year by Jews all over the universe in every language – the same story told again and again and again.  Once we were slaves and now we are free – that’s the theme of the story – kind of like the hero’s journey.  The odyssey of Passover is no different from Odysseus or Dante through the inferno.  And maybe that is why I’ve felt such a connection to Moses."

Today, may we all take a active role in freeing ourselves from whatever holds us back.  

See you tomorrow :)