Fertility Utility - A Tradwife Exploration

Fertility Utility
© Natalie Schorr 2023

I’m kind of fascinated by the whole #tradwife idea on Instagram. It’s a lot of dressing in 1950s clothes, taking care of your man and homeschooling a passel of children barefoot while feeding chickens and milking the occasional cow that you just happen to have in your backyard.

And praying. There’s a lot of praying going on there which makes sense as you would need all the help you could get in this situation.

I lived this reality for a bit, substituting goats for the cow and guineas for the chickens, but otherwise that was about how it was. OK, not the clothes. That was more bra-less in sweats, but I was born during the Eisenhour administration, so it was more of a hippie vibe.

Anyway, on to this gal here. She looks like she’s ready for the kids with her fertile egg and cling peach breasts. And a salmon mousse halo seemed to be exactly what she needed here. Mousses and congealed salads of all sorts are very 1950s - 60s. From my memories of church pot lucks, they are best left in the past, too.

To all the #tradwives out there, I hope you find fulfillment in whatever you choose to do. For real.

Mixed Breed 2 - a Taste of Old Cuba

Mixed Breed 2
© Natalie Schorr 2023

I can’t quite explain ( what a surprise) why this piece feels like old Cuba to me. Vaguely romantic, shabby, spicy, and chic all come together for me. You may have another idea.

I’m good with that.

I’ve never been to Cuba, nor have I done a very comprehensive dive into Cuban food, but what I’ve seen and tasted has been wonderful and complex, a blending of Spanish, African, and Caribbean flavors cooked long and slow.

That’s kind of what I wanted here. Exotic, spicy, and unhurried, both woman and dog. A tangy mixture of identities.

Ode to Joy - New Work for a New Year

Ode to Joy
© Natalie Schorr 2023

I find this piece to be a little step in a different direction. And it’s got a lot of red, which always makes me a bit uncomfortable. Joy, however, is great.

I used to shy away from joy growing up. Any time I expressed anything resembling joy, my mother would quickly suck it away. I think she associated joy with sin, among other things, so if I was in any way joyful or even just happy, then it was a sure sign I was doing something incredibly wrong. No matter.

Now, 62 years later, I simply don’t share anything with her. No joys, no sorrows. And definitely no art. I think she likes that better anyway.

So in this new year, I am allowing myself a little joy, a lot of happiness, and more art because I can, and I don’t care what people think.

My Eyes Are Up Here

My Eyes Are Up Here
© Natalie Schorr 2022

This is just a fun little piece. Certainly most women my age had this happen to them a million times before it became taboo for a man to look anywhere lower than your nose.

My friend and I laugh about it often. When I catch him looking he’ll suddenly say, “Hey, my eyes are up here.”

I don’t really mind the traditional gender-based division of labor. I don’t mind when he says I should go “rattle around some pots and pans” because I know when it’s time to clean up he’ll tell me to “go sit down and look pretty.”

There’s something familiar and comforting about being with someone raised in the same sort of family at the same time and place in history. And he’s so sweet I really don’t care where he looks.

Mixed Breed - a New Series

Mixed Breed 1
© Natalie Schorr 2022

Like most artists, I have a day job. I started working last August at a nearby university, and it’s been an eye opening experience. To say that higher ed has changed since I finished my MFA in 1986 would be an understatement at best.

While it was always the case for me, as a theatre major, to be around people with different identities, now we have to take classes and seminars and lunch-and-learns about how to recognize, celebrate, address, and pronoun everybody. Seems like if we were just respectful and embraced each other’s differences that would be good, but now it seems no matter what anyone does, they can be called out for offending someone somehow.

Some days it’s exhausting.

But I do like the concept that we all have multiple identities, and that no one (except maybe my mother) fits exactly into a neatly labeled box. It kind of relieves me of a nagging sense of failure for not fitting a particularly prescribed list of socially acceptable attributes, which change over time and experience anyway.

So this series, Mixed Breeds, isn’t about dogs. It’s about people, and how we each show up in the world in all out identities. It’s a concept that far easier for me than when to use which pronouns.

Old World Charm - A Mixed Media Collage

Old World Charm
© Natalie Schorr 2022

I am ending the year with not a lot of visible work, but that’s OK.

Having gotten a divorce after 27 years of marriage has left me a little discombobulated, and has resulted in a few moves. Moving easily sucks a year out of your life. But at last I am settled in a home that I love, in a neighborhood I love. It’s an older home, full of projects that have sucked up a lot of time and money, but here I am, happy to be in all its forms.

Old World Charm reminds me of when I was a little girl. A friend’s mother was helping us with a social studies project. She had gone to a travel agent and brought us a bunch of pamphlets and brochures about travel to Europe. I could not get enough of them. To me, Europe must be full of old marble busts, street vendors with buckets of flowers, and rich people in real leather boots surrounded by antiquities. It all seemed so dreamy and wonderful. I figured it out later on, but I still appreciate the fantasy.

Listening to the Cosmos

© Natalie Schorr, 2021

I visited the Very Large Array a couple of years ago, and this kind of captures the idea. I have not heard much from the cosmos myself. God is very quiet sometimes but maybe that’s because I drone on and on and have put Him to sleep.

It’s possible.

Despite God’s not so unusual silence, I must say my life has been remarkably blessed of late. Kindness and gentleness are bewitching, and I’m drawn like a bee to a blossom. While my own nimbus is probably about as distorted as this one, I still manage to keep it up around my head.

Life is good and getting better every day.

Read more at Listening to the Cosmos.

Head in the Clouds

© Natalie Schorr, 2021

Yellow again. Crazy!

I started this piece because I had kind of connected with this photo of some clouds, but it wasn’t big enough, so I trotted down to Ed McKay’s Used Books and picked up a book on clouds, so you may see more of them.

I’m kind of a “head in the clouds” these days anyway. Who knew after so much trauma over the past year that I would see my life turn around so remarkably? I’m in a really great place, and it’s amazing. OK, back to reality.

This piece has linocuts as well as commercially printed stuff. colored pencil, and dots of course. I still need them, but feeling safer every day so maybe someday I won’t need them so much.

You can read more about this piece - Head in the Clouds - and like almost everything else, it’s for sale so don’t hesitate to ask about that.

Can't Take My Eyes Off of You

© Natalie Schorr, 2021

I had a good time with this piece, which I did in honor of a friend. And of course, there’s Frankie Valli, so what’s not to love?

This piece features a lot of eyes, and with the abundance of green and blue eye shadow, it will probably not surprise you that they are of a 1960’s ilk. The whole piece has a sort of retro vibe with its array of aqua and green tints mixed with a yellow ochre.

Besides the printmade pieces and the 60’s eyes, there are shoes from a book about shoes, a hand from an anatomy book, and lettering taken, oddly enough, from a couple of hip hop magazines. You can read more about it on its gallery page.

Remind Me of My Freedom

© Natalie Schorr, 2021

Freedom is a mysterious thing. So easily taken for granted. This piece is related to the previous one, Curiously Confined. I think I need to be reminded that I have always been free, despite feeling otherwise for so long.

Being free is also really frightening; so many opportunities. But things are changing in my life these days - for the better I might add - and that’s helping me move forward.

I wrote about this piece, and how I used to trim just the right wing of each of my guineas, which caused them to be off balance and unable to fly.

Trimming guinea wings is not for the faint of heart. They resist this process.

I think I need to give more consideration to the whole interconnectedness of freedom and balance. To be continued.