Last weekend at my studio/gallery, multiple people asked me why I fill up every fraction of space on the surfaces I paint. This is a question I am frequently asked and which I even ask myself. I paint what comes out of me, dictated by some unconscious drive to say something with art that I have had since my earliest conscious memory. My memory may be conscious, but my painting is not. I love negative space. I respect and appreciate negative space. I enjoy the aesthetics of negative space. But . . . I don’t know how to do negative space. Or rather, negative space is not what comes out of me. When I paint, every corner, nook and cranny, weave and whorl get covered with paint. And then more paint and then perhaps some additional materials. And then maybe I’ll throw some words into the mix with some writing scribbled on top of the paint and other stuff.

I have one possible answer to the question that I offer. Unconsciously, I am compelled to fill up every space as an act of reparation. A repair job that never quite gets the job done. I am trying to fill the holes in my life. Trying to close the gap. In the moment when I am painting, when my hand is wrapped around that long-handled brush sweeping fiercely across the canvas, everything is right in my world. Or, I am attempting to make everything right. I am performing the miraculous. I am rewriting history. Turning back the clock. Resurrecting all that is missing inside me and sealing it tight into paint, not leaving any room for it to leak out. All the missing/stolen/erased/killed people, places, and things that left holes in my life are momentarily fixed and found inside the paint. My paintings are fix-it jobs.

Then I stop painting, and . . . the holes are still there. So, I start a new painting . . .

People also ask me why I don’t stop and just let the painting be but instead I keep reworking it, changing it (sometimes with no trace of its previous self). That unconscious place inside me is apparently at odds with itself. It wasn’t to find what’s missing and lock it in place, but it doesn’t want my paintings to be fixed into one thing. I am continually driven to rework and reinvent my art and am never settled with it being settled.

My answer? Maybe I don’t want things to come to an end, don’t want them to be finite. I don’t the lost parts I found to be just one thing and only one thing. Perhaps I change the paintings as a way of averting being defined by my history. I paint my history, yet I don’t want to be solely defined by that history, so I keep changing the paintings. I don’t want my identity to be solely defined by my history. I

Then again, maybe I change them in another act of replacing what was lost. Maybe I am giving the paintings what was taken from me when I lost in my childhood. Fear, danger, ever-present dread, terror, and persistent threat darkened every corner of my childhood and erased the places where glitter and sparkly magic should have shined. With that erasure, I lost my childhood, my body. I lost me. Maybe I am finding me and giving her some glitter now, hoping it’s not too late.

In many ways, I have always used art to try fix the unfixable in my life. In one of my current series PAPER DOLLS (and many other creations I’ve concocted), I am replacing the irreplaceable, but this is in no way a conscious act. I only figured it out after the fact, and I am just guessing at the answer.

These paintings aren’t just reworked with paint. They ‘ve been given the extra special edition treatment. I’ve added stuff upon stuff upon stuff to the paint. Many of my paintings from the last 40 years or so have extra stuff –old photographs, jewelry, hardware, words, doll parts, clock parts, silverware, watches, ribbon, sequins, broken mirror, buttons, safety pins, glitter, gemstones, razor blades, aluminum foil. The list of “stuff” is long and vast, and the possibilities for more “stuff” are infinite. PAPER DOLLS have
pretty stuff” (glitter, colored lights, glass beads, silver charms) with an edge of danger (sharp nails, bolts, screws, and wire). I think that unconsciously, I am giving myself the pretty glitter I never got to experience as a girl while at the same time acknowledging my history and giving myself a layer of protection, so the “pretty” doesn’t get harmed. Of course, the deformity of the women/girls is pretty obvious . . .

People also ask me why I paint people. Yes, my paintings are figurative. But in many ways, the people are just a surface for me to indulge my love of excessive color and patterns. My paintings are as much about the interplay of color, shape, and pattern as they are about the humans. Colliding patterns and colors excite me and make me happy. They light up my world. And the more they are piled on top of each other and create explosive collisions, the happier I am. Don’t limit me! I like collision in my art and in my clothes. One of my favorite things to wear is my vintage “psychotic squirrel” men’s button-down shirt paired with vintage men’s green plaid pants. Why would anyone want to wear only one pattern when you could wear 25?

Thinking about these things jogged a memory from the trenches, something I hadn’t thought about in many years. When I was a little girl, my number one prize possession was my collection of handmade paper dolls and fashions. I made my own paper dolls and meticulously created their fashions. Since I grew up in the 60s and early 70s in San Francisco, I was inspired by the fashion of the time. I’d say Jimi Hendrix was probably my biggest influence. I would love to have Jimi Hendrix’s closet and everything in it. Please.

My paper doll collection lived in a cigar box under my bed. I spent hundreds of hours working on it. I worked on those dolls and their fabulous fashions from the time I was about seven until I was twelve – five years, nearly half my life at the time.

The fashions were anything but simple. Each individual piece was hand-created: belts, blouses, skirts, earrings, boots, dresses, pants, tights, hats, etc. Every single piece had to be placed on the doll with all the other individual pieces with little hand cut folding tabs. It was a painstaking process, but the possibilities were infinite.

When I was a kid, I could do not right. Wrong became a state of being, and that state meant that I spent a lot of time in my bedroom “on restriction” for the various infractions of my wrongness. The only good thing that came out of a childhood spent largely on restriction is my love of art and music. My AM/FM radio, portable record player, 45 collection, and various colored pencils, pens, and paper helped me survive my childhood. And I created paper dolls to keep me company, in all their fabulous paisley polka-dotted floral plaid psychedelic plaid splendor.

Sadly, I can’t show you my original paper dolls, but their memory is making an appearance at FACE TO FACE PROJECT. The paintings are still “in progress” (though they look complete), but then again, they always will be unless they “go travelling” or get adopted to a good home.
Here is a jumbled mix-up of pieces of songs and the paintings:

FACE TO FACE PROJECT was booming this past weekend. I'm wiped out from talking to so many people about my art! This painting got a lot of attention so I am making it the Painting of the Month for April. It's called I AM MY OWN DISCO, acrylic on canvas, 36x48 inches. I am making a video to go with the painting that will run in one of the street facing windows. I am wondering if any of you are interested in asking me any questions about the painting. I can include them and my answers in video. You could ask them here, or you could DM me. It might be cool to see them here. I love that kind of thing. So please, ask me about I AM MY OWN DISCO! Thank you for helping.
With kind wishes for the best for all of you,
Kim

Hello, I am back, after a few setbacks, one of which was getting COVID when I drove out to the Rez to help T'O friends and family get to the voting polls. It was worth it! Now they feel that their vote counts. It wasn't just about getting them to THIS election. Hopefully, now they will participate in future elections also. Speaking of COVID, I found this song on my phone recorder last night. I completely forgot recording it. I recorded it right when I got COVID. You can hear it in my voice. I just made it up as I went along, but I thought it came out pretty good for a girl who can neither play guitar nor sing and who had COVID and who just made it up with no idea what she was doing. I'll try to pop in here more often. I am managing a lot right now with my studio and gallery. I'll tell you more soon. I hope you are all well. I'd love to hear from you. For those of you with my phone number, please get in touch. I have isolated way way way too long.

I made a video of the watercolor paintings my daughter Sky Nicolini has on exhibit at FACE TO FACE PROJECT as part of Art During Quarantine. Sky had just made it to France to study art abroad when COVID hit. She never made it to the Louvre or to many places. When she came home she spent her time painting ballet dancers and hiking Pima Canyon and painting en plein air. Limbs of dancers and limbs of trees combine to create the place where Sky found solace. She painted the watercolors April - May 2020. June 9, 2020 Pima Canyon caught fire as part of the Bighorn Fire, and Sky's beloved canyon, that she had been hiking since she was two, burnt to ash. These paintings are what remain of the canyon she knew and loved.

Half-Hearted
Kim Nicolini from Liars and Tryers
It was 112 in the shade the day the day Half-Hearted lost her dreams in a Circle K parking lot on the outskirts of Tombstone. Standing in the dying sun, she watched them blow across a field of dead grass and ride out of town on a wave of hot wind. One last piece of one last dream snagged on a barbed wire fence. Hanging on. Hanging. Til the wind picked up speed and took that dream too.

It was her eighth birthday as she watched the sun sink behind the mountains, an Icee in her hand and a 12 pack of Bud at her feet.

Her arm waved to the dust, saying “Goodbye” or “come back.” Her mother didn’t see her youngest daughter standing alone in the almost dark. She’d forgotten all about her as she he kept her foot on the gas and kept on driving. Half-Hearted dropped her arm, watched her mother disappear into the dissolving red glow of her Mazda’s taillights. She waited and watched the double yellow line dissolve into one. Into none.

She dropped her Icee, clenched her fists tight and never stopped.

Holding onto what was gone and would never come back. Holding onto what never was. Holding on so hard that she got arthritis in her knuckles by the time she turned ten.

Demolition of dreams.

******
Half-Hearted’s twin sister lived for twelve days before the angels sighed and took her to heaven. Twelve days with her heart resting on her chest like a smile twisted out of plastic tubing and tiny arteries. Twelve days before the plastic angels would spin their last orbit round the mobile above her incubator. Twelve days before the angels packed up their wings and headed to the next child, and Half-Hearted packed up what was left of her heart and just left.

Her twin sister never knew sunshine or rain. Never saw the strangely dark clouds hanging over Tucson the November day she died. The only sky she would know was a piece of cloud reflected in her mother’s eye, pupil black as night and dripping meth and tears.

When her sister died, words died with her. Silence fell with dust dropping from the ceiling fan onto pink balloons, deflating in their confusion.

“IT’S A GIRL!” “Get well soon.” “CONGRATULATIONS!” “OUR CONDOLENCES.”

Maybe Half-Hearted’s problem wasn’t no heart. Maybe her problem was stuffing two hearts into one – her dead sister’s and her own. The load was so great her heart became a pressure cooker in her chest. Bulging. Pulsing. Until the pressure was too much, and two hearts became none.

Now Half-Hearted has an empty hole where a heart should’ve been but wasn’t, where love should’ve been but never would be. An aching hole that a band-aid should’ve fixed but couldn’t. A hole that would never be more than a hole.

Half-Hearted says she’s always felt like only half a person, like half of her is missing. She lived her childhood in Limbo, her family so caught up in their grief over the dead twin, they forgot about the living one. Birthdays were reminders of what they lost instead of celebrations for the living baby girl they had. No birthday cakes for Half-Hearted. No birthday parties or birthday dresses. Just another spin around the sun, living her life as a shadow of a shadow.

Demolition of hope.

Maybe her heart was tangled up in the blanket covering her boyfriend’s dead body after being tossed from his car like a ragdoll during a high-speed chase with Border Patrol. She clung to that blanket as if it were her heart. Buried her face in it to smell the love she lost. She refused to wash it. Day and night, night and day, she lived wrapped inside that blanket. Soaked with beer, blood, tears, cigarette burns, and love sweat from a hundred desert night fucks in the backseat. She slept wrapped inside the blanket, weaving present with past, until she had to get up to give birth to the baby her boyfriend left her with.

Or maybe she really lost her heart when she was six months pregnant and her mother began feeding her Meth with a side of Cheerios for breakfast because Half-Hearted was “a lazy cow” sleeping all the time with that baby in her belly and her dead boyfriend wrapped around her body. Perhaps her heart slipped out the window with her first exhale from the glass pipe her mother passed to her with a torch and a smile carved from elephant tusks.

Half-hearted’s lost in the story she’s been telling me when she jolts back to the present. We’re sitting in a slump cement block house off Estrella. A Raiders flag separates her reality from the world outside. She’s getting evicted today and has nowhere to go, but she’s still half back in yesterday with her ragdoll boyfriend and her twin sister’s heart. She closes her eyes, rubs her cheek against the tattered threads of a blanket that no longer exists, wraps her shoulders in dreams unraveled. Dreams that smell of High Karate and motor oil.

Demolition of Love
She slips back. Maybe it wasn’t the twin, the ragdoll, or the Circle K parking lot. Maybe Half-Hearted lost her heart the morning she did “a little errand” for her husband after packing the kids’ lunches and sending them off to school.

Half-Hearted was helping him with a little job, an easy job, a border job. One of those jobs at the border where you can earn ten grand in an hour. Money that is surely needed for a family of six living in South Tucson.

The job wasn’t quite what Half-Hearted expected. Half-Hearted ran a load across the border alright, but it wasn’t the big one. She drove across the border with 3 kilos of pot one loaded in her hubcaps, but she never saw ten grand, but she did find Border Patrol waiting for her, and she did see the inside of a federal prison cell while her old man made it across with a hundred pounds of 100 kilos of pot. Or was it 50 pounds of heroin. I don’t remember. Point is that the love of her life – the second one, not the blanket and Border Patrol one – set her up to take the fall, so he could run free with the big take and let her do hard time for the small one.

She lost her kids and 3.5 years of her life watching her dreams slip away through a tiny, cracked glass window wrapped in razor wire. The mountain in the distance was the Keeper of Lost Dreams. One day she would climb that mountain, and she would unwind her dreams from their tangled nest of blood and injustice.

Half-Hearted was tight with the woman in the next cell. They braided each other’s hair to pass time or count time. Doesn’t matter. Inside, they’re one and the same. One day the girl couldn’t get out of bed, said her stomach hurt. Half-hearted watched her mountain and listened to the young woman in the next cell cry. The crying got worse. “Help me!” echoed off cement walls. The woman was suffering from some kind of mysterious internal bleeding. Half-Hearted lost time. All she knew were cries for help and the Mountain she couldn’t reach. Then the crying stopped.

Half-Hearted passed the empty cell on the way to the dining hall. She wouldn’t be braiding hair that night. Or the next one. Back at the window, her heart lay in the dirt behind the Mountain, baking in the June heat like a desert valentine.

Half-hearted says her sister has always been with her, talks to her, and sings to her, says her sister’s songs got her through prison.
When I asked her how she makes it through each day, she said, “I lost everything, Kim. I got nothing to lose.”

Demolition of everything.

Six months later, she was reunited with her kids when her first born, the son of the ragdoll boyfriend, was murdered in an aimless street prank. Stabbed in the back and left to die.

Half-Hearted learned that she did have something left to lose.

At the funeral, her family wouldn’t sit with her or speak to her. She visits the grave on her own and grows a garden for him in a small patch of dirt in front of her tiny cement block duplex That garden is all she has now. It’s what she’s got to lose.

Half-Hearted says her sister’s still talking to her, still singing her lullabies. Sometimes I think Half-Hearted is her sister and that maybe she’s already dead.

Or maybe she never had a heart. Maybe her mother replaced it with a rock wrapped it in razor blades before she was born.

I want to believe Half-Hearted does have a heart, and the world broke it, broke her. But maybe sometimes people are just born broken. It’s hard to tell. The chicken or the egg.

DOWNLOAD AS PDF HERE.

Last night I went to visit my friend Marsha at her bar The M&M Saloon which has been closed since March. Last night was the first night Marsha re-opened. Marsha's seen some very hard times this past year (and the past 62 years of her life). During the Year of the Quarantine, she nearly lost her business and her home. Having to "sofa dive" was challenging enough, but she also lost the men she loves -- one to literal death and another to death by The System.

But I'm not here to share Marsha's hardships with you. Those are hers, and she bears them admirably because, well, she's tough. Hard lives make hard working women, who often appear to just be be hard. But under that hard, there's a hell of a lot of soft. We carry our soft like the most treasured secret in all the universes. We were born bearing the responsibility of protecting our soft place in a world where there was no one to keep us safe and where everyone seemed to want a piece of our innocence. They were not gentle or kind in their taking.

Marsha and I are both hard-soft/soft-hard women. Marsha has produced amazing creations during the quarantine. Her bar shines with the glimmer of protection she has been creating for herself. I am making a film about Marsha's Magical Creations and will share when done.

After I left the M&M last night, I felt the weight of history tug at my heartstrings and at my gut. I pulled up a chair in the gravel parking lot and had a talk with the traffic and the moon. This "song" is what came out of me. The inspiration it came from Marsha's comment when I asked her, "You have a good support system, right?" She laughed. Shook her head. Told me about her new dog.

That's the thing about us so-called "strong women." People are often under the impression that being who we are is all the support system we need and that we will be just fine. The reality is that "strong women" who have survived hard lives also often live lonely lives, even when surrounded by people. The horrors we have survived have turned us into myths more than people. People are drawn to us, but they also "draw" us, write their stories on us, or write the stories they see in movies or read in books onto us.: the strong women survivors.

But while they are defining who we are, they don't know our favorite color or what makes us cry; they don't know where we grew up or went to school, they don't know the name of our childhood pet or what we like to eat for breakfast, and the list goes on. They don't know who we are. They know what they want us to be and what they have made us be. But they don't know us.

We live lives in which we are surrounded by people, but remain mostly alone. Social distancing has existed for us since we were in the womb.

When hard times hit us now, the perception is that we are some kind of warrior high priestess of hell who can survive anything. Except we can't. We are old. We are tired. We have exceeded the limit of Hells We Survive. Our expiration date is expired. We carry hearts heavy with all the things that have broken inside them. We no longer have mindless youth to shore up our immortality or our bodies. We are our support system, but it's buckling at the knees.

These are the things I was feeling when I walked past the Cyclone pinball machine and out the door of the M&M last night, though I couldn't have told you I was thinking them if you asked. I sorted my heart out in the parking lot with my ukulele, and I shot out this little song off the cuff.

I cleaned up the sound a little. Other than that, the song exists word-for-word, breath-for-breath how it came out of me in the moment. Not a word of it was in my head until it came out of my mouth while I sat on an old office chair in a gravel parking lot at midnight, listening to my heart beat between the sounds of tires rolling down Old Benson Highway and the traffic signal changing from green to red.

Here you are paying witness to some (as in there are more) of Tosca’s Many Faces of Sorrow.

My kiddo left for Utah three days ago to visit a friend, and all four Fur Sharks are beyond despondent missing her.

White Cat (a.k.a. Tosca) has been hit particularly hard by Bean’s absence. She is visibly sad as she spends her days and nights awaiting Sky’s return.

Every hour or two, she slumps to the front door where she sits and stares longingly waiting for kiddo's return. Her eyes plead with the door. She watches for a turning of the knob or any human rustlings that would indicate Sky is going to step through and squeeze Tosca’s favorite rubber chicken. Oh, how White Cat longs for her rubber chicken’s ear-piercing squawk.

Morning, Tosca sits on the chair by Bean’s sofa in the family room and stares at the empty spot waiting for her favorite human to return.

Afternoon, she sits on the floor at the foot of kiddo’s bed, head dropped, paw comforting her aching heart, and she waits for Sky to return.

Evening, she plops in front of the TV in the living room and looks mournfully at Bean’s empty purple chair, waiting for Sky to return.

Nights, she repeats front door at backdoor just in case Bean comes in that way instead.

Middle of the night, she comes to my bed and wakes me with a god awful rustling, scratching ruckus as she digs a tunnel in the covers and burrows next to my leg under the blankets where she lay like a white furry lump, waiting for Bean to return.

Bean doesn’t return, but Punka inevitably steps on White Cat, startles, jumps straight up in the air with a primal, ferocious hiss, and crashes down on me with claws extended.

Night ends. Morning comes. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.

There you have it. Tosca’s Mournful Schedule of Despair. Somehow my squeezing of the rubber chicken doesn’t cut the mustard for White Cat.

Poor sad kitty!

Well, I have language now. I have been peeling back the layers that had buried my voice and have discovered that not only did I not lose it, but it's alive and better than ever. I am ignited with a load of inspiration and things I want to say with words. I have the fire burning in my heart and in my head to write write write.

Language now comes to me through the eyes, ears, and heart of a person who has survived a thousand Hells but in the survival has also shed a thousand demons. Through the darkness, I gained light.

But now I am experiencing a different kind of Lost.

I have found language, but my words fall into silence. I was hanging by a thread in Limbo for two years. In that time, I barricaded myself inside such depths of isolation that I have no one left to talk to with the language I have re-discovered. No one to share my words.

So I will write them.

I am writing these words on the heels of making my first “Art A Day.” Not that I have a shortage of art that I have produced, but unlike previous artwork that I created in the 21st century, my new art is mostly focused on large scale paintings that I work on for extended periods of time. They have multiple incarnations that I have documented but haven't shared. I am just now starting to focus on finishing the series and will begin to write about them individually and collectively Because my new work is large scale and I immerse myself in them for days, weeks, and months, the paintings have also served as my retreat – the place where I have isolated myself from everyone I know.

I am finding my way out. As I rediscover my voice, I need to use it as I always have to try and shed light on darkness, find hope in the seemingly hopeless, and to bring color and life to a world that seems to grow darker with each day. I will try to find answers to riddles with no names and to put into language the things we feel but can’t find the words to say. Most importantly, I will make people laugh at the ridiculous absurdity of the human and animal world (of course humans are animals and denying it causes all kinds of chaos and hell).

To help keep my voice alive before it slips into silence again I made a pledge (though I hate making pledges, resolutions, and promises to myself only to later beat myself up for not doing them) to do a Writing A Day and Art A Day to share.

I have no idea what form either writing or art will take or if they will be joined. It will be a daily surprise.

Sometimes it will be boring and/or tedious (such as the words written above). Other times, it will be Art & Writing Lite (e.g. my first Art A Day). and will lift my spirits with something fun that resides in light instead of darkness, something that makes me and others smile, something that just is what it is on the surface and is not layered with dense riddles of historic and personal meaning.
So, I offer you Art of the Day. My first creation could be classified Fur Shark.

Huzzah.

My daughter named the silvery glittery mischievous Bengal after Lúthien, Tinúviel, a character from JRR Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. Tolkien’s Luthien is a beautiful young elf maiden whose life is claimed by tragic love. Our Luthien is a tiny Silver Bengal. She was the runt of her litter but the giant in personality. She is loyal as loyal could ever be. She is supremely protective of my daughter Bean and of me. She herds people and cats and likes everyone to be accounted for.

Her nose is giant – nearly as big as her feet! Perhaps that’s why she enjoys sniffing dirty feet (and armpits).

She only weighs seven pounds, but her voice is as loud as Brass Band and she likes to use it.

She also likes to sniff rotten cheese. This may be because she often smells like cheese which is where Cheese Butt, one of her many nicknames, came from.
Her silver fur is blessed with Bengal Glitter which twinkles and sparkles with magic when seen in the right light. Like Tolkien’s character, Luth does have “light of stars . . . in her hair.”

The leaves were long, the grass was green,
The hemlock-umbels tall and fair,
And in the glade a light was seen
Of stars in shadow shimmering.
Tinuviel was dancing there
To music of a pipe unseen,
And light of stars was in her hair,
And in her raiment glimmering
  *Excerpt from the poem “Lúthien, Tinúviel” written by JRR Tolkien, December 1929, for the character in his book The Silmarillion

Some say the name Luthien means LOVE, derived from the Old English word Lufien. We love her immensely, and her love most certainly shines with its magic glimmer in our home. On that note, I choose Love as her newest nickname, a fine elevation from Booger Butt.

I can feel that the broken pieces of myself are starting to adhere. It has been a nightmare. I never knew I could survive all I had survived and find myself over half a century into this life with everything I had, everything I'd known, everything I'd worked so hard for unraveled, lost, gone, and I was gone with it. But one thing that has not been gone is art. Good lord I have made so so so much art these past two years. Yeah, it's been almost two years since I found my mom dead in a lake of every ounce of blood in her body. And I lost my mind. And then bad after bad after bad happened. And I have been clinging to life. Clinging. Barely holding on by a threadbare thread. And then fucking COVID comes along. Just when things were beginning to look better. Kiddo had made it to France to study. We were healing. Everything was going to be okay, and then . . . she was forced to come home, and we are holed up here on quarantine. I was writijng my therapist today to thank her for all she has done for me. No one else on the planet has been able to make progress with me, but she has. I sent her some of the videos I've made during quarantine, and I had no idea there are so many of them. Here are the ones I sent her, in case you want to know what my head is like these days.


This one is about a prostitute I saw one night walking the streets during quarantine. She was wearing Depends and was barely held together. I was so haunted by her image, and especially since probably no one else noticed her. I had to tell her story. The video incorporates mashups of Jelly Roll Girl and video footage I shot while driving around Tucson at night, which is very otheworldly during quarantine -- the only people out are cops and people off the grid.
For four months leading to the COVID quarantine, I was plagued by nighmares the likes of which I never had before. They were terrifying, all consuming, went on and on and on, and left me shaken during my waken hours. In the nightmare people were being sent into these tall dark towers surrounded by razor wire. Trump and his men were at the helm directing people toward their prisons. Once COVID outbreak was full force, the nightmares stopped. I dreamed the whole thing.

ONE MINUTE VIDEOS. A handful of one minute videos -- some beautiful, some funny, some . . . .

I've been very ill for quite some time now. Scary ill, though not COVID ill. Yesterday I saw that local Tucson musician Van Christian had posted a photo of some of his guitars on Facebook. One looked like the almost twin to my Telecaster which I haven't played in months. Seeing the photo, I was inspired to use what energy I could scrape from the bottom of the bottom, and I made up this song off the cuff -- one shot, no retakes -- with my Telecaster.

In a way this song is kind of a classic blues song, which makes sense since Van will have a song and video in the upcoming issue of FACE TO FACE MAGAZINE that I am producing, and his song -- Hard Times -- is most definitely a timeless blues song that speaks across time to that common ground so many of us share at one time or another -- Hard Times. Here's to solidarity through music even if we're not candy-coating what we have to say.

Also, enormous thanks to The Internet Archive (www.archive.org) and Rick and Megan Prelinger and the gizzillion hours of labor and love that they have poured into the Prelinger archives making archive video footage like that used in this video available at no cost to the general public. It's a helluva gift. Thank you so much Rick and Megan. I appreciate you so much.

TWILIGHT PIE
Kim Nicolini

blueberry blackberry sky
twilight pie

hey have you noticed
you forgot to breathe today
you forgot to see today

open your eyes
open your eyes

open your eyes now

take a big drink of that twilight sky
blueberry blackberry pie

are you drinking it down
does it taste real good

blueberry blackberry sky

trains are rolling by
carrying money to another place
that will never be yours

so what
so what

money is cheap
and money is a dead end

so what
so what

money can never buy
the twilight pie
blueberry blackberry sky

did you know
that chain link can grow
pink leaves

everything turns pink in a blink
of your eye
in the twilight sky

pink leaves on a chain link fence
pink leaves on a chain link fence

slow down slow down slow down slow down now
slow down slow down slow down slow down now

blueberry blackberry sky
twilight pie

money’s just a dead end
just eat the twilight sky

save room for seconds
and thirds
and fourths
and fifths

chow down
chow down

blueberry blackberry sky
with chain link pink

pink leaves on a chain link fence

blueberry blackberry sky
twilight pie

slow down slow down slow down slow down now

open your eyes now
open your eyes now

take a big drink
of that twilight sky

twilight pie

New Year's Eve 2019 I fell asleep early and dropped off the cliff of deep sleep. I entered a dream that I could not escape. It was terrifying. I was trying to cross the Bay Bridge to get into San Francisco, my birth home, but I couldn't get into the City. On the horizon dark towers were being built up, and people trying to cross the bridge were being sent to the towers. The dream/nightmare went on and on and on. I couldn't wake myself up out of it. When I finally did wake up, the nightmare was so unsettling that I told my family and my therapist about it. That was the first time I dreamed it. I began dreaming variations of these towers that sequestered people almost nightly. It is documented in my therapy notes from January until March when I had to stop seeing my therapist in person but who agreed that I had dreamed the pandemic. It is not the first time my dreams as foretold the future since I have been seeing her. I am known to have premonitions, but I could not understand what this one was about because there was no one I knew in it though in the first nightmare Trump was deciding who had to go to the towers and who didn't. I finally became afraid to go to sleep because of the nightmare. I now understand what I was foreseeing. We are in it. I can't possibly describe my nightmare, nor do I really want to, but I created four Flood Dives about it. This is the first one and the only one I will put to video. I feel that I can't move forward with sharing my art until I share my premonition. I will share the other three "songs" as MP3s or poems.

Here are the lyrics. Remember, these are not "prewritten". They are just what comes out of me when I sit down to play guitar. It's not poetry. It's not song writing. It's, well, flood diving.

BEAUTIFUL ANYWAY
Kim Nicolini

(I don’t know this place do you?)

(What kind of dream is this anyway?)

I knew it was morning
though I couldn’t find the light

I knew the sun’s been rising
but I was sinking low into night

daylight was outside
but I was under deep

I couldn’t find my way home
I couldn’t find my way home
even though I was there in my sleep

darkness fell on me
darkness fell all around
couldn’t find my footing
get my standing on the ground

and the towers building tall in the distance

they were growing dark
and I was scared
I could not wake myself up

and the towers kept
growing and growing and growing
and growing and growing

and the children were going inside them
and they couldn’t get out

what kind of dream is this anyway?
I shouted in my sleep
I could not get on my feet
I could not wake up to the light of day

and that was in December I’d say
and I dream it almost every night everyday
dark towers growing
like some kind of prisons for a plague

I was dreaming it every day
and I was afraid

til the day I woke up
and found
we’d all gone to the same place

if I could look past the barbed wire
if I could look past the mortar
if i could look past the men
pointing their fingers saying

who’s going to go where
under which lock
under which key
into which cell

if I could look past
maybe there’d be a world
that’s not for me

but it’s beautiful anyway

(I don’t know this place do you?)

but it’s beautiful anyway

The line is thick. The line is thin. It’s black. It’s blue. I get out my eraser and start rubbing. I want to leave the line. The line never leaves me. Three days of rubbing and my arm goes numb. The eraser falls through the hole in the paper where the line still shines through. I was born on the line. Believed I always kept one foot this side of the line. I was wrong. I’ve fallen to the other side many times until the time I didn’t come back. The line comes back. The line never leaves. The line is always there to remind me of what was or could have been.

A few beautiful) stills here. More coming soon in a minibook . . . . with more word paintings  to go with them . . . 

I began FACE TO FACE PROJECT as an art studio/gallery. As I began getting it together (which has been a ton of work, but fun, hard, all-consuming work), I have become totally immersed in the place in both designing it and creating new art. It is like it has become an extension of me, a kind of installation where it is the physical manifestation of my mind and spirit. I created this video as a tribute to the place that is saving my life and the sanctuary it is providing me.

Here are a couple of images I created for the video. You can see more HERE.

Here is a video of a little art and song I made the other night when I had a sudden realization that someone had crossed the line and that this time I wasn't going to let it go. In the past, I would let people cross so many lines that I was always tangled up in knots. Not anymore. Cross the line, and I will uncross it and close the door. I am emotionally the healthiest I have been in my whole life. It feels so good to break free from the prisons of control and abuse that kept me bound for decades. I am free.

PS: I just made the song up off the cuff and recorded it on my shitty cell phone recorder. It is what it is. I kinda like the cheap quality. It goes well with Cheap Ass Ballpoint Pen.

The video I threw together chop chop:

Hello. Happy new year and all that. This is one girl who's happy to put 2019 and the months preceding it behind. I am going to start by doing something I never do . . . selling some of my original art. I NEVER sell my original paintings and have regretted selling any that I have sold in the past because my paintings are so much an extension of me. But sometimes it's time to get rid of some of the past, so I am putting these four original paintings form "A Different Time" which were on exhibit at the Arizona History Museum up for sale. Make me an offer for any of them. You can contact me via messenger or via my gallery email at [email protected]. I'll be posting better photos in the near future. I most likely will be making selected original works for sale over the next year, but very selected. For now, it's these four. They are acrylic on canvas. You don't need to buy all four. They are for sale individually. Contact me if you are interested and stay tuned for more. I will be at my gallery this Saturday for First Saturday though the gallery is till a work in progress. Cheers. Stay tuned about more about the story behind these painting because they do have stories. You buy these, you get a chunk of Tucson's untold histories as well. Ciao.

I’ve been busy working on my new studio/gallery, painting, making other art, and making this video. I like the way it came out. It looks like something from the 80s (the decade I died and was brought back to life) that’s about the 60s and 70s (when i grew up). I went in deep and pulled this Flood Dive out the other night. This is just the first half! Once in a while one comes out that demands my immediate attention. This is one of those.