The Belgian Beer Bottle Bridge Part 1

Where to begin?

My last post, “What Monkey Doesn’t Know”, seemed to have sparked a few ideas in a couple of friends far away. One of those friends, Peter Howson from my high school days in long ago Waterloo, Belgium, tossed out an idea to accompany a serious hobby of his, and all of a sudden we have 8 beer bottle label illustrations on our hands:  8 illustrations of 8 different animals that frequent the gentle, level lands of Belgium. Because of the length of this project, I’ve decided to break it down into two published articles, so stay tuned for Part 2 sometime soon.

I have gone from painting massive canvases to tiny squares of rice paper, and quite like the change for now.  Black and white never gets boring for me, and although I grind my own ink and use Chinese brushes and paper, the overall affect of these is one of grisaille, a monochrome painting technique once common throughout both Belgium and France, and therefore suitable for my friend’s bottles of home-brewed Belgian beers. Unfortunately, hops make me froth like a mad dog and bloat like a boudain noir, so I have long since given up on beer.  I think that is enough said on this topic, but one day I am going to have to risk the discomfort and special effects in order to taste my friend’s creations.

Naturally I had to do a little research while I found accurate examples of these beasties.  So, next to each piece I’ve done a little write-up of curious facts about the animals themselves, or about interesting associations/experiences I have with them or received while working on them.

1. European Little Owl: This little thing I see very frequently here in the Anatolian steppes surrounding Ankara, Turkey.  It ranges from western Europe to Northern Africa and then all the way through to Far Eastern Asia.  Quite a spread for such a little guy. 

 

2. Red Deer.  Not a little guy at all…he’s massive.  This deer has a similar range of habitat to the European Little Owl….Northern Africa, Western Europe, and Central Asia/Middle East.  It does not extend as far east as the owl though.

 

3.  Common Ring-Necked Pheasant….This one was a surprise, as I could not think of a more quintessentially European bird.  I instantly conjure up game wardens and larders and old Flemish masters painting dead and trussed birds.  However, the only time I have ever eaten pheasant was in a hotel featuring French food in Shanghai in 1980… and there is the clue, really, because all of the many gorgeous and flamboyant varieties of this creature originally come from all through the Far East, much like the peacock, and were imported into Europe as game birds.  There is even one species that has inspired me to work in it’s tail feather pattern into an art deco design piece….but that’s for later:)

 

4. Raven: Oh be still my heart, I do love me some raven….great for ink upon ink, I don’t think I can get enough.  I will definitely have to come back to this subject.  Totally suited for my comparatively recent roots in the Pacific Northwest too….trickster, shape shifter, and teller of tales.  Ravens are not quite the same as crows, but despite having gone through all the research I don’t think that I will ever be able to visually distinguish them.  A curious association I have with this creature is dinner time.  When we lived in Rangoon, Burma ( late 70’s) we always knew when it was time to go home and get fed, because the sky grew dark with crows returning to roost at promptly 5 o’clock every afternoon….the streets sour and slick and steamy with their waste, and shortly thereafter washed away in monsoon.  What a time travel memory that is for me…

 

5. Mr. Fox.  So much grief over the fox. Once, when I was an art student in high school, I tried to draw one of my brothers.  I was so mad at him that everything I drew was hideous and awkward.  Then he fell asleep, and as his expression relaxed, so did the sharpness of my pen, so to speak, and he became once again my brother on the pages of my art journal.  It was a beautiful series, actually. This is what happened with Mr. Fox here, because some of the intrinsic qualities of this elusive and evasive animal were reminding me of a recent situation where I’d been slighted in a bewildering manner and I was mad.  So fox here looked like a train wreck roughly 7 times before he got to this stage.

6. Angry Badger. So very unexpected, this one… and one of the reasons I started this blog; to document those curious slips in time and space, those synchronicities in life,  that seem to pop up at odd moments. It’s dark and required some honesty from me, so skip it if you like your stories to have impersonal, concrete plots, experiences you can identify with, and a nicely wrapped conclusion. Go ahead and wait for the publishing of Part 2, which includes Mr. Boar, he’s kinda cool and comes with a laugh.

Friend Peter says to me: “ I really like the idea of having an angry badger on the label, like this one;”- and I get a link to an article about a disgruntled beast being forced from his burrow in a Scottish castle. So I think, well, this might work better with a Belgian castle, it being for a Belgian beer, and I start searching images. I’m looking at one, in fact I’ve taken screen shots and have pretty much settled on it, when a wave of nausea and depression wash over me. I’m shaking.  I am overcome with existentially traumatic middle-aged flashbacks of, yes, wait for it…. PROM.

To briefly explain: I attended 4 middle schools. Two of those only lasted a few months each, while I was transitioning between moves. In the more permanent ones in Rangoon and Shanghai, I respectively had a class size of 11 and then, for more than two years, 2. This was in 1980.  There is only one other person in the world other than myself who knows what that was like, and she is the other 1 of 2. In her words, “ it was Flowers in the Attic, without the incest.”  My own grandmother, who turns 100 in a few months, was kind enough just this last summer to relate her observations of me at the time, when I came to visit during a home leave from Shanghai.  She said, “You kept looking out the car windows, and saying ‘Helllloooo children! Do you want to play?’ as I drove you from the airport to home.”  Now, objectively speaking, that is sad.  I must have been about 13.  I work with 13 year-olds now, and would refer any of them to the counselor if I saw them behaving like that. I personally would also like to point out similarities to The Diary of Anne Frank and The Gulag Archipelago as well … but while there are plenty of stories of labor camps; of extreme deprivation mind-bendingly juxtaposed with ridiculous opulence; of real ghosts; of women forced to hide pregnancies; bugs, bugs and bugs of the technical variety; of being pelted with stones and being licked through car windows and a couple of deaths, I do realize it could have been much worse in so many ways, especially when one considers poor Anne. But, you can imagine that what emerged from this experience was someone wholly unfit for any kind of high school life. Anywhere.

So, so, so.

Fast forward to Belgium, where I lived for 3 years after Shanghai and after a random, hopeless transition year in Virginia, and to the small Catholic school where I graduated from in Waterloo (yes, where Napolean did surrender, just like the ABBA song and as recorded by historians galore) just outside Brussels. I had a class size of 34.  11 or 12 of us were girls. And I was Sheldon. Kind of. I was 16 and 17 for my junior and senior proms. I might as well have been 9 and 10. I agreed, on both counts, to go with boys I had never even spoken to. No, neither of them was beer buddy Peter, he’s not part of this picture. Anyway, I have never in my life felt so extremely, acutely aware of my delayed social development as I felt on those nights. The kids I went with were nice and kind, but completely unaware of how excruciatingly painful everything was for me, or of how angry I was that they weren’t friends or in some way close to me. They simply didn’t know me at all. My rage at having to comply with social convention when I really just wanted to be comfortable had nothing to do with them, and I hope they know this now and feel better having some of my odd behavior explained, if this ever crosses their paths. In fact, in one case a teacher had lured me into the school parking lot and literally shoved me into the boy so that he could ask me out. I guess she thought that was cute, but we were both victims. That hapless boy didn’t know I was incapable of even making small talk, and one of his friends advised I could be a little kinder that prom night… I didn’t know how. It would have taken a lot more alcohol for me to even crack a grin.  I would have been much better off on a night out clubbing in my flourescent ice blue parachute jump suit, or better yet in jeans and sneakers, with friends I actually spoke with rather than trapped in a dress that wouldn’t allow me to dance freely and only, I felt, enhanced a false image that society and probably the boy in question wanted to see.

To make matters worse, a film crew occasionally followed me around for my senior year, because my school thought a few of us would be good publicity material. There are actually ancient promotional videos of this floating around somewhere.  So for that second prom the disparity between the misguided wholesome image people found in me – you’re allowed to say things like this when you’re now stout, matronly and crinkling- and my extreme internal pain/cultural dysphoria made me even more despondent and isolated. I felt I was an unwitting mistress of disguise, or maybe just altogether invisible.  I would have gone a very dark 80’s Goth had I not so recently been residing under a repressive regime that quite literally banned the donning of bright colors. They really did shoot women for being vain, or even just cheerful. My prom dress that year was purple.

So I was not once, but twice, left feeling very alone and overwhelmingly claustrophobic and objectified and abandoned in the same foyer of the same castle two years in a row-I think it could even be the same castle I have just chosen for the beer label given my reaction- surrounded by people having fun and having more than fun, becoming all engrossed in each other,  and feeding into an American dream that was not a dream that I had grown up with or wanted or understood or was in any way prepared for…And smiling, smiling away for cameras… when really, really, I wanted to snarl and growl just like this angry badger and retreat to what was appropriately my favorite bar at the time, The Coffin.   Instead there was no way out, and we were later driven to an after-party where I had no way home.  I’ve never been so glad to see the sun rise.

So many of my animals have taught me over the years, patiently, slowly, pointing out their truths and lessons, but this one just jumped right out of time, fearless and shocking, and bit me on my half-century old derriere. Vicious thing, it’s forced a catharsis. It’s me, I’m the effing badger…33 years ago in front of my castle and desperately wanting to retreat into my burrow.

So, here’s the first draft, which is obviously a personal reference and out of style with the rest, and it is followed by the piece that made it to the labels… a very angry badger indeed.

 

And now, merrier musings await in Part 2, coming sometime soon this summer.