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On My Legacy

Recently, I had the misfortune of subjecting myself to cruel examination, from a harsh unenlightened perspective, in the office of a sub-par therapist, psychologist, PHD.  I was looking for help, feeling a little overwhelmed… nothing major, just the mechanics of life with cancer, being a mother, artist, person… finding my way. It can be a challenge, since each person’s path is a mystery, to be discovered, defined in the process of unfolding.

Her job is to council individuals facing cancer.  Mine is to keep my spirits up and stay focused on living and loving life.  At least, that is how I see it.  I know that I’ve undergone a multitude of surgeries, treatments, procedures.  Yet, as a matter of policy, I don’t anticipate the pain, not in the treatments, or the many hospital visits.  I simply go where I must, do what is required, guided by my husband’s scientific understanding and the doctors he selects to manage my care.  I don’t complain. I don’t explain my condition to others.  I don’t make a big deal about my health status.  I don’t invite others to savor misery. I don’t worry about it.  I don’t give into the thought that this surgery or the next might kill me.

Sure, I have symptoms.  My life has changed.  I’m a different person than I was six years ago when treatment started and I was not in the advanced treatment that I am in now.  Yet, I’m still me… a person with optimism enough for a village, for myself, and the future of my children.  I believe I will live a long life.  Yet, looking at my medical records, current treatment, and the general prognosis for those in similar situation the Shrink suddenly asked me, toward the end of the “session,” no less; “So… being that your medical records and condition are what they are, indicating that you don’t have long to live, what do you plan your legacy to be?”

I blinked.  “Everyday, I take care of my children, share my values with them, feed them my knowings and cherish that they are.  That is my legacy.”  Besides, I went on, gaining steam, “I am planning on being a grandmother.  I have never seriously considered that I would die, soon.  I’m always engaged in what I am doing and sure it isn’t always easy but, what life is?”

This was not good enough for her, “I thought that is what you would say.”  She said, dismissing my words, clearly dissatisfied with my determination to stay focused on living, loving, and enjoying my life as it is.  “But, I mean, don’t you think about death and what you want your life to stand for?”  I thought I had made it clear, or that I make it clear with my actions that my life is a statement of appreciation.  I’m grateful for every moment, everyday.  Sure, there is pain. Suffering?  Not so much.  The pain comes and goes.  Accupuncture helps.  My husband’s love goes a long way to making everyday bliss.  I’m aware that without him, it really wouldn’t be so easy.  I’ve got these great kids, a home, and time.  Yes, time, that mysterious good which others never have enough of… I’m rich in it because I’m focused on love.  Loving my books.  Loving my home, children, marriage, and life.  When you are thus focused, days slow down and you make the most of this precious resource, doing more in a day than others dream of.

Moreover,  “I’m an artist.” I told her, “I’ve made hundreds of paintings, hundreds more drawings, books full of them.”  I went on.  ” I write everyday.  Even if I don’t publish everyday. I’m active.”  What more legacy could one wish for?  I capped it with my personal truth. “I rarely entertain fear.  I don’t sit done with fear and caress it, milk it.  I don’t look for comfort in lingering on what is inevitable.  I accept death, but I’m not planning on kicking the bucket just yet. I see myself living well into my eighties.”  I reminded her, what I told her before, that when the doctor originally told me that I had cancer, I saw myself, “an old woman, wrinkled and wearing huge sunglass, bangles to my elbows, and a loud knit dress, at an art opening, immersed in the  world of creatives, culture.”

In recent years, I’ve come to value my relationships, friendships, and art world connections with more gusto.  I’ve experienced that maxim, “live everyday as though it were your last.”  I’m doing that in that each day I’m invested in those the individuals which enrich my day-to-day, those friends that care to contribute to my actual well being by sharing of themselves, their discoveries, passions, and secrets.  I’m content in the present, even if my life doesn’t impress the inexperienced, young, and insensitive therapist. (I suspect that after a few months of seeing me regularly, she was simply bored, and not finding me to be the typical patient, oozing sadness over what can not be controlled, she wanted to prompt me to emote to the tune she prefers to hear over and over again, one in which she gets the pleasure of comforting a distraught person, not one simply in the middle of living a good life.)

The session was over, time to talk done.  I wanted to go on and tell her about my books.  I’ve actively collected many a book in the last year, bringing together, and unpacking my library from college years and ensuring that the children don’t have to go far for a good read. Our bookshelves are packed with literature (from Achebe/Allende to Zola) and history.  Asian studies. Anthropology.  British literature. German language.  Spanish.  Learn Guitar.  Piano.  Relationship and self-help books.  Etiquette.  Crafts and Fine Art manuals. Poetry.  Theater. I’ve bought books on all the subjects that interest me and that represent who I am, for them, thereby creating a portrait of ideas, inviting them to converse with me, perhaps, when I am no more.  Today, I’m a person that reads and writes and lives.  Now.  I’ll worry about death, when it happens, until then I’m ultra-busy learning, loving, and getting on with the business of life.

Feet up in the Desert
With these boots I may kick the bucket, but first I’ve got a list a mile on long!
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A Naive Artist on The Fine Art of Believing

Usually, I manage to skip over obstacles.  Cancer, advanced cancer, intensive treatment: NO Problem! Just POP on a cute wig and keep going, show up, flirt with the doctors, look at all the pretty machines.  Be NICE to the nurses.  Enjoy all the attention!

You want my blood? Ok, here you go.

May, I have a Champagne, oysters after my treatment?  Great!  All is well.

Yet today I feel down.  I feel the weight of all the treatments, the waiting, the constant pricks and memories of nurses freaking out because I’ve no veins left for them to fill with poison.  Some might say, that I’ve no right to feel down.  I have a husband that loves me, great kids.  I’m not hard on the eyes.  I’ve got a home.  I’m not pan-handling on the Bowery.  Could I please just shut up and let others shine?

Prick Me!
Prick Me!

This morning, I was remembered how I fell for Hennessy Youngman.  Remember him?  The artist, Jayson Musson, created an alternate persona, an hip-hop urban art historian.  HY was so perfect.  So refreshing, finally someone like me, informed on art, yet with ghetto flair.  He wore funny hats, baseball caps, with Elmo or Spiderman Eyes.  That alone should have tipped me off to the fact that the Penn University MFA was spoofing his audience, playing with expectations, making a cunning statement about racial stereo typing.

Yet, at the end-of-the day I’m a girl from Washington Heights, a child of immigrants, who came to the United States convinced that they’d find a better life and they did.  I managed to attend and graduate from an Ivy league school with a degree in art history and just as incredibly I married and am married to Dr. Hartmuth Kolb, from Germany.  Yes, I’m lucky.  I’m lucky that six years after the initial diagnosis, losing my breasts, undergoing so many surgeries, metastasis to the brain, grand mal seizure, brain surgeries, heart surgery (to correct the birth defect that would have done me in, at birth, if I hadn’t been born 2.2 pounds, three months

premature.) the whole enchilada, and I’m still here.

Fact: it isn’t easy.  I’m a mother, taking care of children, making sure that they stay on-track with their studies and HAPPY.  I can’t afford to be morose.  I have to focus my energy on happiness, on love, on continuing to learn and laugh.  Hennessy Youngman, came to me at a time when I was very active on the edges of a fast moving and apparently amorphous art world.  I was going to Art Fairs, documenting the journeys, and participating in a quest to understand contemporary art, and get out of my art historical comfort zone.  I was painting, pushing to sell pieces, and participating in group exhibitions to whatever degree was possible.  In short, I became an emerging artist just as the cancer was threatening to call a lights out for me.

I’m convinced that most people seeing me, including my doctors, have a hard time reconciling the fact of how I look (young for my age) and my medical history.  I was pumped up by fuzzy ambition and desire to participate in this Art game.  I extended myself via on-line channels and come into communication with art critic, Jerry Saltz, on-line along with countless others.  I felt as though I’d found my tribe and was finally “Home,” among others passionately invested in the art field.

Low and behold, I felt entirely too comfortable and really had no guard up.  I was making a spectacle of myself and it was fun.  I met a number of very cool and some absolutely insane artists, because as you know, the two seem to be inextricably mixed, madness and creativity, I mean.  Moving quickly, I started to see behind the curtains of the art world, at one fair I attended a talk with the head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the head of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  At the same fair I briefly met, Jeffrey Deitch, and impertinently asked him if it was true he was, “leaving MoCa.”  He denied the rumor and then, “resigned,” about a month later.

I had a number of interactions with less than friendly art worlders that I’d have welcome as friends, but my bubbly brand of mushy ART LOVE is just too messy for some, too authentic, unschooled, unpolished and in other words, hopelessly: naive.

After medical drama, lunch at Shutters, with the Muse
After medical drama, lunch at Shutters, with the Muse
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NOW, Pull Yourself Together

img_1220_med
Part of “Australian Animals,” series by Frau Kolb, Acrylic on various (3×5″) panels,

Los Angeles, California September 2013

You are living, reading.  You clicked your way to this page, where you often visit, to see what Frau Kolb is up to.  What is she UP to now?  I understand your curiousity.   I am curious, too.

I write.  You read.  You probably write, too.  Do I read your blog?  Or is your blog only in your head?  Is it something you THINK about doing, writing and don’t do?

Well… writing is a practice.  You get better at it the more you do it.  And… well, I’m glad I can type FAST.  If I had to struggle with the mechanics of sentence structure and just getting the words down was a challenge this blog wouldn’t be slowly but surely gaining momentum.

I’ve had some set-backs, for a moment I was visualizing this more as a on-line zine, with guest writers, featured and focused on, and I was planning my role to be more a behind-the-scenes,  an administrative one.  I thought I’d pay to have a jazzy platform built and… and… But… it turns out that IF I’m not careful this page will end up being like everything else on-line soul-less and commercial… that first vision did not work out.  So…. here I am typing and sharing with you samples of what flows from my head to hands.

Recently, I’ve been working on this series of paintings, “Australian Animals.”  Above is one example and if you are interested you can look under “Zoom in with Frau Kolb,”  for more examples of my recent figurative painting(s), a series I am making with my daughter in mind.  I’m painting so that she will have an encyclopedic reference on what kinds of strokes, modes, methods I have mastered.  I used to be an abstract painter and I learned a lot about patterns and creating visual harmonies in that capacity.  Yet, for me there was something pattently false about painting in Clement Greenberg mode.

I’m glad that these attractive, unassuming, “Australian Animal,” puzzle pieces exist.  I plan on making at least eight hundred of them.  This is to be a full body of work.  I’ve heard from a few people that they want to BUY these.  I am not opposed to selling them, after they are all done, complete, and shown in a respectable gallery.   So… If you feel you MUST OWN well I might, maybe, well… whoever the dealer I allow to represent this work… WE SHALL SEE.  In the meantime, I welcome your compliments, donations (Champagne fund), and invitations to fascinating events.   I’m honored that you make time to read this simple blog and that you appreciate that words pile up hot one on top the other until a world of knowing is born.

Best regards,

Frau K.