Lisa Telling Kattenbraker
Lisa:
Recently I have been moving a lot - relocating with my family: Down the road, across the country. I keep hoping to look down one day and find my home on my shoe. Nonetheless, my kids encourage me to bring snacks and to remember that this is all a great adventure…even when the cat poops in the car and our house decides that the time has come to shift off its posts. We do a lot of drawing in our little family unit… I adore my children so much (and believe them to possess the utmost artistic talent) and they are graciously sharing their drawings. I put them in my own picture drawings. They make me smile. Quite possibly, they are my home.
We just moved again, this time to Olympia, WA with the 2 children and artist husband and cat. We moved 2 years ago from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. And now twice since then. Nestled nicely in the northwest, we may be content...maybe.
I travel, we travel, we go to art shows, we make stuff, I pretend to be a normal little family and try to keep the place relatively clean. The kids are 5 and 7, I live in a kid house. On bad days I want to clean this kid house and not step on legos. On good days I think that this chaos reigns supreme, and why the heck not? Our little family is thriving in this vein. The in between reality of it is that most of the time this is tricky...working from home (mooooom! stella hit me!), supporting ourselves with our art, trying to maintain an element of business savvy, remembering that drum lessons are on Monday, and did Maia do his homework? and we are out of cat food, and there's broken glass on the studio floor. Aren't we all juggling our millions of things? But really, I couldn't have it any other way. And yes, it is chaos, and yes I do like it here.
The process of batik is, in many ways, a contrast to my daily life. It's slow going, its meditative. I'm drawn to that process part of it...the journey. I still use the electric frying pan that was given to me over 15 years ago by a high school art teacher. I still use some of my first brushes and tjanting tools. The process and the tools hold history, and time stops while i'm in the midst of it.