On competition and Sports … disorganized but thoughtful thoughts from an Unexpected Artist

Last Saturday, I had been working all day on a large-scale oil painting. It was the kind of piece that gets me very excited because it involves several layers of paint and the use of different tools (two kinds of brushes, a palette knife, paper towels, my fingers, and a printing roller) and different blended colors and I don’t know where it is even going. Because I paint from my mind and not from photos (or looking outside), my oil paintings can pivot in different directions throughout the painting process, particularly my abstract sea/sky horizon landscapes. 

I had just worked in a series of thin and delicate lines and the studio was starting to get a little stifling with all the oil paints. So I took a break to do some serious Easter egg dyeing. When I was in my twenties, I was a little bit of a crazy person about Easter eggs. I needed between twenty and twenty-five Easter eggs for my own personal use and then the rest of my family could do what they wanted with other Easter eggs. I’ve mellowed in my thirties, but tonight it seemed like the time to raise my game and create a bit of a competition where my followers on Instagram could decide which egg was the best. What I loved about the competition was how seriously people took it. I got messages like “it’s insane to me that anyone would choose anything besides Egg 1. It’s clearly the best one and it’s killing me that it’s losing. WHAT ARE PEOPLE THINKING?” and “Are you RIGGING the votes? Egg four should be destroying the competition??” and “Personally I feel like number six has no business being there. It’s an outlier. How in god’s name is it in even in the running?”

It’s fun to take non-serious things seriously. This world is becoming increasingly serious. We have climate change to think about, and artificial intelligence and genetic manipulation of embryos and whether robots will take over the world. It’s an intense and scary time for many people, including me. So when you can get fired up about whether one Easter egg is dyed better than another Easter egg it feels like a safe thing to get riled up about. When I was a kid my older brother used to create all these little competitions for us – usually involving throwing and hitting things. Scraps of crumpled paper into a trashcan, tennis balls against a street sign, rocks against a tree. Elaborate scoring and calculation methods. Everything felt so important then – I guess that’s what it is like to be a kid. And when I lost, which I invariably did because my brother was five years older and has insane hand-eye coordination, I experienced, let’s call them temporary dark times. One time we played ping-pong and after an epic battle, I beat him 27 – 25 (the game is to 21 but you have to win by two so it went into OT). My brother casually tossed his paddle in the air with his left hand and caught it with his right hand and then said “Nice work. Now beat me righty”. I was so incensed, because I thought I had finally beaten him legitimately, that I chased him around our barn trying to tackle him and beat him up with my paddle. Somehow his 6 foot 4 frame eluded me. I still remember that rage and indignation in my adolescent body. If you ever want to read the most brilliant and funny piece that captures childhood and meaningless (but really the most meaningful ever) competition, read Simon Rich’s 'The Foosball Championship of the Whole Entire Universe' in the New Yorker.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/09/the-ultimate-foosball-championship

That’s all for now. Expect fairly frequent posts by Ella. She’s working on a novel, teaching herself quantum mechanics, and thinking about applying to PhD programs in sociology, so it’s a busy time for her. But she’ll make time for you guys.

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