Mixed Breed 4 - Uncomfortable Colors

For whatever reason, this piece is out of my comfort zone. I love the circles and dots, but all the bright colors kind of make me uneasy.

Mixed Breed 4
© Natalie Schorr 2023

I am interested in why I create pieces that I am ultimately uneasy with. Is it that the piece didn’t turn out as planned? That can’t be it since I’m not much of a planner. I have a vague idea where I’m going, but not exactly a plan and I more often than not I end up somewhere else in the process.

Since I love circles and dots, it would seem like I’d love this one, but no. I think it has to do with the colors.

I freely admit to being drawn to blues and greens; that’s my comfort zone. Reds and oranges are OK in small amounts, but I have trouble being in a red room for very long as it makes me really uneasy.

This piece has lots of reds and oranges, so much so that I ended up toning down the aura with a variety of purples, which made me feel somewhat less uncomfortable. I think it’s good to venture out from my comfort zone and explore, as it allows me to grow in certain ways. I’ll try not to run back to the safety of blues and greens too quickly.

Mixed Breed 3 - Multiple Identities

Mixed Breed 3
© Natalie Schorr 2023

I’m kind of fond of this piece, maybe because it feels like all the different identities come together in a really cohesive way even as the body seems to be a tumbling cascade of blocks and flowers.

The head, blocks, flowers, and one of the hands is from a library of linocuts I have made over the years that I use again and again. It makes the pieces feel related even though each part is an individual print and inherently unique.

Sort of like all of us.

Her aura is blue. I don’t consciously see auras, but I do use them in a great deal of my work so the possibility exists that I’m aware of them on an unconscious level. They seem to be expanding in my recent work, whereas they were very slight and color shifting in my earlier pieces, so maybe there’s something there.

Or not. Hard to say.

In any case, she seems confident and at peace with her many identities, as we all should be.

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.

Nest Egg - an Analog Collage

Nest Egg
© Natalie Schorr 2022

I really struggled with this piece. It’s actually been hanging around the studio for a long time in a bunch of pieces which came and went, replaced by others as time went on. It kind of came together when I found the hair, which gave off a very nest-like vibe.

I feel like my children would have only a vague notion of the concept of a nest egg. When I was growing up there were 2 sort of schools of thought. One was to build up your savings account for retirement which was the “nest egg,” and the other was to make a bunch of investments, which was dangerous and foolish according to the nest egg people. Of course the nest egg never kept up with the cost of living, so in the end that was pretty much a bomb, while investments were kind of hit and miss, all of which is to say there’s no security in tomorrow so good luck with that.

Anyway, here she is. Her traditional saved nest egg on her head with some other eggy breasts investing in herself because you never know what will happen next.

Monetize Your Digital Camera With Microstocks

Monetize Your Digital Camera With Microstocks

Let me tell you the story of how a "mature" woman with no photography background makes money taking pictures…

So, I have found making a living, hmmm, shall we say, challenging, since my divorce. I have been doing all my normal stuff, and getting all my normal results, which isn’t exactly going to cut it. I also lost my little side hustle teaching English online to children in China when the Chinese government decided that I and about 40,000 other online teachers from the US and Canada were too subversive to teach their kids.

OK. I’ve been called worse.

I had been rolling around in my mind for a few years the idea that writing an ebook or two, or maybe even writing a course, might help my bottom line, and so finally I got over whatever it was that was holding me back and I got something written.

It’s kind of awkward, really. I think that sometimes it’s hard for women, especially older women, to feel like they have anything to say, not to mention the fact that putting oneself out there is nothing short of terrifying, but carrying a negative income month after month is kind of terrifying too, so I need to shake things up a bit, and my art isn’t selling so I need to come up with something.

I started writing a course, but it was getting kind of drawn out with developing all the screen shots and PowerPoints and voiceovers, etc., so I pivoted and took only the first, most important part, and turned it into an ebook which was much easier to accomplish and get out into the world. Today, I published it and it’s ready to go.

There is so much to do to get something launched. Stories and landing pages and Facebook pages and Instagram posts and blah, blah, blah… it’s endless. Writing a blog post is only one part of it all. I hope you will follow the link on the top of the page and let me know what you think.

Of course, you can also help a starving artist by buying the book. Or some art. I’d really appreciate it.