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George Leaves the Lights ON – the importance of being earnest about conservation: The Princess quits talking to boys who fall from gabled roofs under the pretense or future tense of being King . . . and other stories of mayhem, magic, mischief, and malcontents Coming 2023 |
Some of the delicious color names in my Kolorwacks crayons
Why at least 42 different colors?It’s my homage to two things I love: I learned baseball and the genre called sci-fi from my beautiful genius aeronautical engineer father.
What's in a name?While I was musing on a name, one night I had a dream. My dreams have been known to speak to me. This one told me to look at foreign dictionaries. I’ve recorded my dreams since 1976. They’ve trained me to remember them or to write them down in night’s middle hours. Sometimes a word or two is all I need to trigger me back to the entire dream. “Look in foreign dictionaries.” I researched the usual suspects: French [rien]; Italian [niente]; Spanish [nada]; German [nichts]. Next was Portuguese, and Polish. The latter held the talisman. Kolorowac: use crayons. I dropped the third O and added a hard K and a sibilant S to the end of the word, and a crayon name was born. The name hadn’t been trademarked so I trademarked Kolorwacks™. I don't know where I'm goingWhen I lived in Santa Monica, CA – I almost surrendered my creativity. Again. It was fortunate for me at the time that the apartment buildings were close together. My neighbors and I could, when the curtains were open, see into each other’s lives. It was my custom, on Saturday nights, to listen to A Prairie Home Companion. I love stories – telling my own and listening to others. Everyone has a story inside, longing to have a voice. I sat down to my beautiful round teak kitchen table. I was at an impasse. I was dissatisfied with whatever I was working on. My hands were paused over what I had just unhappily created, poised to tear it to shreds – when I heard a voice outside, coming from my neighbor Carmen’s second story window. “Barbara, you’ve inspired me to take out my art materials.” I pulled my hands away from the crater of destroying my own work. Timing. Observant Neighbors. A Benevolent Universe. I kept the art I had almost destroyed. I kept it for a good many years after. Until one day, I knew I didn’t need to hold onto that night any longer – that reminder that I had almost taken a hand to destroy my creative impulses, just as my mother had done when I was a girl. I can move dripped wax with my breathCrafting crayons by dripping wax is my Zen Meditation. I lose track of time. I solve the niggling and not so niggling problems in my life and sometimes, it extends to the sphere of the world. Sometimes I have epiphanies and have to pause the fire torch to weep. And it is weeping, not crying. I love when this happens. It tells me that my world is in a state of balance. That I have connected a stray dot, woven in or taken out a loose thread, let go of something that no longer serves. It’s at times like these when I remember my father. Two things about him: How he created a refuge in the cellar. There he worked, in that same Zen space with the Zen clock, constructing his model airplanes, along with his model trains and creating the landscape, the train stations, the bridges and the tunnels over which and through which his trains would traverse. The model airplanes he flew in a field near the local airport. Second, my father was an aeronautical engineer, and he designed the system of weights and balances in the weather satellites of the 1960’s. So the space I inhabit, ancestrally, lineage-wise, is his, and those who went before him – his father, a mason, and my mother’s father, also a mason. I used to sit in the dirt when my father and his father built a concrete structure – the old and weathered hands of my grandfather, cement on his trowel as it slapped the wet mixture [whose ratio had to be just right – and this fascinated me – how do you know how much water to add?] – onto the cinderblock, as he filled in the spaces between, and then evened out the excess – slow and steady; the excess never fell onto the ground for he quickly trimmed it and re-allocated it to the top of the cinderblock. I was fascinated with the plumb lines of string suspended from a row of cinderblocks, and especially with the “spirit” or bubble level that measured whether it was level. These small tools mesmerized me into that Zen space, as I watched how my father made sure that the beautiful yellow bubble was perfectly centered. And neither he nor my grandfather ever yelled at me when I fiddled with the bubble level to watch the center move. I could have watched it for hours as it cast its spell over my wondering eyes. So I find it fascinating – born, bred, and buttered in a construction lineage, that I’m mesmerized by the unpredictability and beauty of wax, my life balanced in a different medium than the concrete of my mason grandfather. How I turned lead into colored waxWhen I was a girl and created art, my mother made me walk it out to the trash because she viewed it as “dirty.” It wasn’t that I was creating pornography at a single-digit age; it was my mother’s demons, and my mother’s jealousies. Thus – it didn’t take too many walks to the curb to realize that my creativity was in peril. And it wasn’t only my art; my words were also in jeopardy: when my mother found my diary, she read it out loud in front of me. The red of the shame on my cheeks taught me why red was a primary color. Consequently, I neither drew nor wrote any more while I lived under my mother’s roof. Callings come from deep and callings come from afar When I was in my 40’s, the name of Winslow, Arizona came in a dream. I had no idea what was in Winslow – but at the time, I had started my study of shamanism, and so I found a class in Arizona; on the way, I stopped at Winslow. There I discovered, to my open-mouthed amazement and wonder [is there any other kind?] a crater, created from a meteor that fell to Earth 49,000 years ago; it is one mile wide, 570 feet deep, and it is believed that life came to Earth in this place. [For movie aficionados, the final scene of the movie Starman, a 1984 American romance science fiction film, was inside the Winslow crater.] After encountering the crater, I stumbled upon the striated rocks of The Painted Desert. There I saw a raven open its beak to drink the rain. There, the markings on the rocks were unlike anything I had ever seen – me, a kid who was born, bred, and buttered always within an hour of the sea. The Painted Desert is where the idea for a multi-colored crayon was born; that, and it was Einstein’s birthday, and it was raining – so the forces of raven, water, earth, and air, coupled with the fire of my imagination [and Uncle Albert, of course] conspired to inspire me, and midwifed the KW. My experience and sense of that desert is that it is magical, numinous, mysterious, and still holds many ghosts. In the years that followed, I experimented until I had created what I wanted. I exorcised the trash-walking demons of my mother. I took back my creative soul in stages, much as a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly. When I first started to play with crayon crafting, I could feel my mother in the room, admonishing me about a) what I was doing, and b) how I was dripping the colors of the wax. “You can’t put that color with that color!” I remember saying out loud to her that she had to leave the room. Or at the very least, stand in the doorway. I had to repeat myself many times. Even at that distance, I could still feel her gaze until I became aware that I wasn’t aware of her anymore and her voice gradually went silent. My advice when you choose to practice alchemy to change your life: don’t expect the stealing of any part of your soul to happen overnight. Roots travel deep, and those roots are sometimes tangled. And it’s not just the judgment of another person. It’s what’s been worn down and eroded in you over the years that needs tending, and attention. So as well as being a retriever of parts of your stolen soul, you also become a well-heeled and seasoned gardener in the field of your dreams. It has been a journey – for this self-taught and curious-natured poet – that perpetually amazes, delights, and enlightens me. The wax, because of its fluid nature, continues – thank my graceful stars – to teach, and to deliver epiphanies. Inspiration (noun): to breathe life into and thus bring one into alignment An autodidact by nature – driven by curiosityI encourage you to play in the sandbox and discover what the KW is capable of. I’ve been doing fairs and markets for over 10 years. When I introduce people to the KW I say: Would you like to take a crayon for a test drive? Kids’ eyes pop because I’ve mixed two disparate things – driving a car and handling a crayon. About half the adults who come to my table say they have no artistic talent, at which point I show them what the crayon can do. What I communicate to people is that everyone is creative and artistic. It takes an artist to raise a good kid, to capably fix a car, to make a nurturing meal. Let that child who maybe didn’t get enough crayons or art materials when growing up out of that story and create a new story. I know about this because I was one of those kids – whenever I created art my mother made me walk it out to the trash – so this has been a journey to reclaim what was taken from my childhood. Kids? They have showed me a few ways to use this crayon that I hadn’t dreamed of or considered. Trust that kid. Park your left brain for a while and engage your right, or creative hemisphere. Adopt Beginner’s Mind. In the nearly quarter-century I’ve been experimenting with wax, I’ve learned that the ‘kidling’ inside remembers the feeling of being unfettered by rules and regs about what’s possible. In my book, kids are the bees’ knees, and larger kids who retain that wonder are members of the same hive. I’ve created an art tool that creates the art. I should know because I have two left feet when it comes to art. Between the sound of flame as it touches the wax, I can hear the grass grow. |