Alanna Risse

Forest Fire #1
5″ x 7″
Oil on Canvas

I spent some good quality time with my studio this weekend. I worked on 6 more small paintings and even added a layer to a larger one that I previously thought might have been doomed to destruction. I finished 2 of the 6. I am really enjoying working small. I can work fast and I like how some paintings just come out in one shot, while others demand more layers. It feels so good to be back in the studio. I think I started believing I was an impostor. What a terrible feeling that was. I am thinking about watercolors and pens. Maybe tonight or sometime this week I’ll spend some time playing around on paper.

These little paintings continue on the theme of tiny disasters or tiny catastrophes. All the imagery is gathered from photos off google and flickr. They are all about small or not so small events that when added together start looking like a slow trickle towards an apocalyptic end.

Flood #1
10″ x 10″
Oil on Canvas

I’m still on a quest to find some sort of art related social life. I don’t know any artists in Portland and I feel sad going to openings by myself. I did go anyway to both First Thursday and First Friday. I had kind of hit a wall of frustration Thursday day so my eyes were all dry and bloodshot from crying. I walked around to a bunch of galleries anyway and tried to have a good time. I always feel shy and awkward around strangers. Tom came with me Friday and it was so fun exploring Portland with him. We drove around to 4 different places. Seems like a big bummer that all the First Friday galleries are so far from each other. I also am having trouble finding a single place to see a list of all participating galleries for First Thursday. Maybe it doesn’t exist? Ditto for First Thursday. I think people just assume everyone knows where to go? I’m new here, I have no idea what I’m doing, help! help! Grass Hut was my favorite First Friday visit. It’s my second time there and I had so much fun looking at everything I forgot to take pictures. I also loved finally getting to see Good Gallery because I think they are a fine bunch. They have themed shows that I’d love to get involved in. The next one is a self portrait themed show. Maybe I can get my act together. I hate my body so much right now that I’m not sure I can handle even thinking about a self portrait right now.. even a more conceptual, non-literal one. Yeah, that’s how bad it is. Low self esteem and loneliness are eating me alive. I have to do something about this.

So in my quest to get an effing life I signed up for three art classes. One has been canceled due to low enrollment and a second is under threat of being canceled. I really want/need the second class. It’s a drawing workshop called “drawing water from an empty well” at OCAC with Nicole Gibbs and I think it’s going to be a whole bunch of fun if it’s not canceled. It’s on July 18th and 19th if you are interested. The third class is probably one that I don’t need. It’s a blogging class. I wanted to take it because I was in a desperately lonely mood when I went to the PNCA website to look for classes. But besides the loneliness factor, I’m hoping it’ll give me 5 weeks to really work on my blog and website, and finally make a site I can be proud of. For years and years, I just get by. I’d like to have a beautiful website but I never devote any time to it other than a few minutes of posts here and there. So here I am, finally devoting time. When blogs were few, I had pretty great traffic, but it’s waned over the last few years. It’s finally started picking up again thanks to Twitter and probably thanks to Mississippi. I want to take some time and do it right for once. I also made an appointment to check out the PNCA MFA program.

After our last First Friday at the Red “e”, we wound up having beers at the Saraveza which has got to be one of the coolest pubs in Portland.

We’ve been practicing recall at dog parks in hopes that someday Mississippi can be off leash without fences. She’s getting much better at it. She even went running after someone else who had whistled on the other side of the dog park. She thought it was my whistle and was all confused when she got there and I was no where to be found. She saw us waving and burned tanbark running back to us at full speed. She seems to stay a little closer to us now when we do loops around the park. Of course the amount of distractions definitely play a part. If it’s just us three in the park, she stays pretty close. If there are other dogs, she’ll stray for longer and farther. Looking back at 3 months ago, I feel pretty proud that she is where she is now. We used to have to just wait for her to get worn out before we could catch her and get a leash on her.

We are having less luck with “drop it.” She likes to grab things and play keep away. She grabs very bad things, stuff that she knows will make our blood boil. The other day, she grabbed a piece of wood that used to be attached to the house. When she presented it to me and I didn’t get upset, she went and found something worse. She still doesn’t seem to understand that when she steals stuff, fun gets taken away from her. This weekend she stole my bell pepper plant, one that I had grown from seed. It had a nice little bell pepper growing on it too. She steals trash out of the waste basket in our room, she steals socks, shoes, mail, anything within her reach basically. This weekend at the dog park, someone had dropped a plastic bag on the ground. She went for it and refused to give it up. I tried sweet talking, I tried to get her to sit, and I tried to just flat out grab her. She is too fast for us. she chewed and swallowed it. That ended doggy park fun for the day. I don’t really know what to do except trying to do treat exchanges for things. She is a real brat when it comes to this keep away stuff. Treats often don’t work because sometimes she is hell bent on keeping whatever it is she’s got. She does it for attention and I’m sure it also has something to do with her wanting us to know she’s the empress of the house. I start a new class next Wednesday. Maybe they can help us with our keep away problem.

We’ve noticed that lately Mississippi barks way less at other dogs when we are in the car. Our ears thank her. She unfortunately found a cat in our backyard on Friday so now every time we let her out, she runs silently around the backyard tried to catch that pesky cat. After she’s checked out the scene, she’s all worked up and the random barking begins. It makes it very hard to let her out in the morning. Sometimes if she has to go, I’ll put her on leash to take her out back. Hopefully the cat has learned to stay out of our yard and Mississippi will eventually calm down.

I know I shouldn’t have bought fireworks with a new dog at home. I guess I’m a bad person. I half thought we’d go to some parking lot somewhere to set them off. But our neighbors wanted to have some fun in the driveway. So I don’t know, we just went for it. I figured if Mississippi was too scared, we could stop. To our amazement, she really didn’t care about the fireworks. I think she spent some time in the basement but when we came in to check on her, she cheerily came running up the stairs to say hi. She was her normal sweet self. After we were done with our own fireworks show, we hung out in the backyard with her. She hung out on the grass, happily chewing on her stick as bottle rockets flew overhead from the next street over. She didn’t even flinch. What a weirdo. It surprised us because she goes nuts over remote controlled planes. Go figure.

And just for fun… a stroller pushing pug: