It is always an overwhelming experience

My parents are the kind of people that have never turned away a chance at adventure... though perhaps in some way it finds them and they are really not given a true choice.

My semi-estranged father (and I say semi-estranged because I just have not figured him out yet and he is like a stranger to me) had arranged another bullfight for himself and his bullfight friends.

This is how I grew up, from when I was born until about 1979. Bullfights. Or something bullfight related. Every. damn. weekend. Especially so when we had the bullfight stock bull ranch.

At some point in those years, my mother stopped going to them and I can't imagine my dad taking kids with him... but I can't recall not going having that exposure (maybe it was when we would go to the ranch?).

So, it is hard to get past something that is so in your face, to me bullfighting just was.. I mean, didn't your dad love it too? Really, I just thought it was something all dad's liked. Though it was in that way that it was not a surprise that other dad's didn't, but I just figured they had a different all consuming passion.

So, we flash forward to my father getting back into it around 2000, I was just married and had actually not been aware that my half-sibling hadn't grown up the same way. My dad must have been miserable (though he was living in England). but somehow he starts up, and then gets divorced, moves in Spain and ends up in Northern California. Northern California has a huge Portuguese community and many of them have ranches where they raise bulls for their festivals (allowed per the California constitution) and so he starts and to me, it is like he never even stopped. As a matter of fact when he was talking and let us know that he had not bull-fought from 1980 to 2000, I was a little shocked.

In 1998, my dad gave me money for my birthday with the direct instruction to buy an abono for the Bullfight Festival in Ecuador. I did, with the caveat of buying better seats when his favorite bullfighter was there. That was in pre-blog era and I should write about that some day I suppose.

Anyway, I got to see him around 2006 when Squink was just over a year old and we go to a part to practice using the cape.

Then we get to late in 2008 when Squink is about 3, and I see him back in a ring again.

And then, in 2012, I get in to a ring.

So, now we are at 2014 and my (full) brother and I take our kids to see dad fight and to take them to a "professional" fight.

The fact is, this is never easy on me.  I have had to find a way to wrap my head around it. I have rituals that I have developed from my youth (I always look at the bulls eyes as it dies).

It is so hard to write about all the crazy emotions that are involved in an experience like this. I don't even know where to start when I bring those in to teh equation.

I suppose I should start by just telling folks who have the gumption to read something on this theme what it is that happened. Though I imagine it might become a multi-part series... which is a positive as it keeps me pretending to "write good".

Friday night - Schatzy and I get home from work, load up the car and in his ever so awesome self he begins the long haul road trip drive to San Diego where we are meeting my dad, my uncle, and my brother and his kids (who are also doing the commute from Phoenix). Most of the planning gets done on our drive out there, what time we need to get together, what time we want to leave, how to check in, that kind of stuff.

Saturday means a 11:00 am departure to head towards Tecate, Mexico.

I have yet to upload the shots from my camera, but here are some from my phone.

Here is where we ended up on Saturday.

Painted With Feeling - 18/40

My entire life I felt like the ugly duckling... it probably began in Ecuador as I started hitting growth spurts much faster than my peers and as suck entered an awkward faze much earlier than my fellow classmates... that and my brown hair, freckles and pale skin were not like the warm coffee tones of my Latin classmates and the towheaded that made up of my Germanic classmates. I was somewhere in the middle, and the middle is not a fun place when you are growing up in a culture where women are more objects.

So it was as a huge [insert F expletive here] surprise when I was 17 and I was asked to pose for a series of photographs.

My aunt, Anne Coe, was dating and had been living with a fellow artist, Bill Schenck. I had just finished a stint of living with them as a means to escape the big city high school and be a part of a smaller community. I loved that experience on so many levels. On one side, I got to get closer to my aunt who I don't recall being completely horrified by my raging hormones and lack of any semblance to being a normal human (what teen is though?). She showed a maternal streak for me that can still evoke a choked up feeling when I recall some of her gestures. Her boyfriend was a wild man and taught me many things. Billy had a love for old movies and I was tasked with cataloging his shockingly large collection of VHS tapes (probably to keep me out of his hair). I also had a rather intense conversation with him about life, music and other stuff one night on a long drive from Phoenix to their place in Apache Junction, it was a conversation that profoundly altered my world view.  As I was wrapping up my stint with them, having managed to survive the experience, still somewhat in their good graces, he asked me to go on a photo shoot and pose for some photographs. I was skeptical, and asked my aunt what it was about. She said that he thought I had a great Native American touch to my profile, and a wonderfully Indian nose. So, I thanked my Cherokee and Delaware ancestors and told him that I would and we went up on a nearby hilltop, and he wrapped me and some other folks in blankets and had us pose with some amazing pottery. And it took all afternoon, and it was hot and boring. But, hey, it was an experience.

Up until maybe 15 years ago the whole thing had come up only twice. The first time was maybe a month after the photo shoot and my aunt found out he hadn't paid me for the time. She was pretty livid about it and got him to give me a check for $35. Hey, I was 17 and $35 was good weekend money.

The second was when I was told that Leaning Tree had used one of the paintings for a greeting card.

Then we fast forward to just around the time I met my husband and we were planning to get married (considering that I met him in February and married him in June of the same year it was not a big gap in time) I went on a road trip with my mom and aunt from Missouri to Arizona. We stopped and stayed with Billy for a few days at his fabulous ranch in Santa Fe, It was here that I learned that those photographs had actually been turned in to paintings and even a series of photographs.

So, shortly after we returned Billy had an opening and I finally got to see them up close and personal like. It was for his photographs but totally out of my price range. Then Billy had another opening, a retrospective, and I walked in and there I was huge as life against a wall! I had never seen the paintings in person before. I was blown away. I think I was for sale for a magnificently hefty sum.

I was stunned. After growing up and visiting museums all over the world, I was immortalized in paint. Which meant that I had to be more than the ugly duckling I perceived my self to be.

The painting of me that is my favorite

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.” 
~ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

What I saw today, it starts on page 73, I am on the lower right of 76

A video about Billy

A little more about Billy, with a few of the paintings I appear in

this was something santa brought me

Tags: macbook

it is too much fun!

Facebook deleted one of my photos

This one...

Photo taken by Krista Boggs

because

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Just putting it out there.


Tags: breastfeeding

Strawberry season for inanimate objects

Strawberry season for inanimate objects, originally uploaded by Blair Necessities.

I built myself a white box / light box, and tried out a few shots... I thought this one a bit clever.

Here is what my handmade white box / light box looks like.. I have no idea if I did it right, I think I may have to put something on top but I am not sure I need to during the day! Will try later and experiment by adding tissue paper over the top when I actually use the clamp light I have.