the last day of the semester today! i want to go to old town and drink bell's beer and walk home looking at the stars--like i could do in my first mfa.

we had four hours of critiques today, then steve-the-wonderful came to visit me and we went to birmingham (the town of all things rich and unsullied by war) and ate dinner and shopped at (italics please) anthropologie. steve bought me a shirt because he shrunk a nice sweater of mine in the dryer last week. this shirt is really one of the most beautiful shirts i've ever seen, just black but it's sewn sort of crooked as if the pattern wasn't clear on how to sew it. that sad beauty. then our end-of-the-year party in my department, eating chips and m+m's and playing loud metallica or something and jaya with her candle circle having a happening and jasmine talking up bellingham, telling steve how he's one of those logger men there, and all of us having not showered or slept right for days and exhausted and a little tipsy with teeth-staining wine. an easy sense of comaraderie that has been hard-won and hard-kept with all of our semester, our toronto and critiques and movement and stasis and fear and drunkenness and calm and scurry. i looked back the other night on what i've written in my blog so far, and there's a line i can see, a place i was and a place i've come to with all these circle spiralling around inside of it. it starts to make sense when i turn around, a little bit.

i don't know if i'll be writing over break (until january 9), so happy holidays, everyone. mistletoe, mistletoe, peace.

miracle

it feels like a miracle, but my critique went really well today. ann from the painting department came, and she brought the talk to another level--spoke about simulacra and copies of copies, and put into words what i've been doing in ways that i couldn't articulate. really, almost nothing bad was said. almost no criticism. if someone did hesitate about a detail, someone else would defend it. too strange. i had them end the critique ten minutes early, it just felt too good i didn't want it to last any longer. so i felt like people really liked my work, all my worrying was for naught, and i learned a ton about what i'm doing by what others perceived and how they articulated it. it couldn't get any better than that. i felt undeserving of all the kindness, and sure right after the critique that the next critique is going to be a killer because i was spared this time. my brain and its workings. i think so often that the logic of the universe follows my crazy logic, when it doesn't all the time. sometimes i'm just lucky, and today i felt very lucky. why did nobody speak about my work when i was drawing it? why did they wait until critique to say anything? and for some, the trompe l'oeil effect was so powerful that people were talking about the clips as if they were really there and others had to correct them. wow, weird. and then i came home and steve had a dozen longstemmed red roses for me because he knew i had gone through a stressful time. i can't feel any luckier, it seems to me. so whoever was thinking good thoughts for me today, thank you.

after james (detail)

a rainbow at 7:30 in the morning

all this rain, and this morning a rainbow because of it, coming right out of the trucks and the guardrail.

i installed my work today in the crit room and then took slides. it took about six hours. i reached a point where i sort of liked it so i ran out of the studio and bought a shirt at the gap. who knows, the owl says, who knows. last night i went to bed with a terrible headache after working on christmas presents for hours. i slept past my alarm after i woke for a minute with the same headache, woke at 7 and ran out of the house. nancy came into the crit room today and her thoughts were good ones, not terrible, no pent-up virtual slashing of my drawings like i feared. it calmed me; we'll see tomorrow..

i feel like i keep posting the same image again and again with like one tiny little thing different. sorry. and the little difference is so tiny in the photo that you can barely tell there's any change at all.

critique's on wednesday, so i have to install tomorrow. nervous. of all the people who have come in my studio, not one person has commented on what i've been working on. nothing. silence. my project could have failed big time and i can't tell yet. it could be all my own enjoyment and the viewer is left bored or confused. critiques are a time for everyone to say all the things they don't like and to forget to mention the things they do like, so i can't wait. it was never like that in poetry critiques. people in poetry critiques just spoke about how the poem affected them, how it might work better, what was working and what wasn't working and why. it seemed like a more compassionate experience, and i never felt i was being attacked. people are certainly attacked in art critiques.

approaching a time of uncertainty, i look at my work and just feel tired and unsure. i can't hear my drawings right now, so now's a time to stop. i'll just install tomorrow and get on with my life and maybe wear sunglasses and earplugs to my critique.

new images and my dog

i got to work more than i anticipated today. just a lecture with paul pfeiffer, this cool artist who even came to my studio afterwards and had an impromptu critique/inspiration session. he was so great in my studio--it felt like he really understood what i was doing. he seemed passionate and smart and really open to listen to anything out of the ordinary. i found myself articulating my projects to him better than i ever have before.

plus it wasn't a bad drawing day. i felt i learned something about compositionless compositions, about how a wall filled with things has enough air to breathe but has its own boundaries that give the work a home. or a paper that functions as a wall filled with things. and i felt i understood something about my drawings and how they can function alongside each other, and how line and color can work together, and especially about paper and how it puckers and pulls with water--or especially this certain paper i'm using. a drawing on paper equals much more than drawing plus paper. ink and paper interact.

oregon

i've been too sad about the man from san francisco who died when he was out in the snowy wilderness off of a highway with his family.

in truth, i couldn't render my drawings because he died. the amount of sorrow i felt did not work well with my careful rendering. so i drew instead today on different paper--which began because i left my important gray ink at home and so couldn't work on my renderings anyway. i'm glad i left it at home. it pushed me into a new/old direction, a more true place, i felt today. i like how the transparent paper puckers by the wetness of the shadows. it was a frustrating day, in truth. i hate to feel i've found something and then to feel i haven't. it seems to happen a lot. i guess that's normal.

we had 3 hours of critiques today, and many of them involved work taking a new direction. i know i'm not alone. it was a good day, full of production. i'm done with the covey tapes. i listened to 13 in one week. that's like 13 hours of driving i'll have you know.

somebody write me. it's lonely in this student-art world.

covey mania

really absolutely nothing to report. very boring. four hours of critiques, two hours of driving, feeling a little under the weather, no time to work on my drawing (spent the morning finishing dumb details on the r.p.), and tomorrow no time, either, probably--three hours of critique tomorrow plus critical studies lecture in detroit (i hate driving into detroit during school because that means four hours of driving at least in one day).

i've been listening to stephen r. covey's "the 7 habits of highly effective people" during my drives, which leaves me feeling all empowered and inspired in a sort of single-faceted but extremely helpful way. then i brush up against reality in school and at home and feel disillusioned but slowly seeing how being a better person really does make people respond better (or something dumb like that, but very true still). it's difficult to talk about him aloud because it sounds cheesy, but really just listening for two hours a day to self-affirmation tapes is not a bad thing to do. i actually have been craving my drives lately. i can't wait to sit in the car and have kindness and encouragement wash over me. i nominated stephen r. covey to be our guest speaker at our graduation, but i doubt anyone else will vote for him. so a quick summary, then, whoo hoo!

habit 1: be proactive
habit 2: begin with the end in mind (uh, hard to do for artists)
habit 3: put first things first
habit 4: think win-win (enter every agreement really believing that both sides can end up satisfied)
habit 5: seek first to understand, then to be understood
habit 6: synergize (one plus one should equal two million)
habit 7: sharpen the saw (take time out to be rejuvenated)

yes!

blogger

i had my meeting with jane today, and we talked about the idea of blogging, about visual blogging as what i do in my studio, and how what matters about my work is not so much the individual objects and the story they tell but rather their feeling, the fact that they're everday things and they are collected, that they're in my space and touch the light that i see daily.

i was so nervous for the meeting, and i think it was because i cared so deeply about what i was doing, i was afraid of hearing it wasn't good because it would break my heart. it's heartbreaking to care that much, which is a good thing. i should care more often.

(all of this in the pic is a drawing, except for the ultra-white thing in the upper left corner is actually a piece of paper on the paper. but i've drawn all the objects on the paper, and i've drawn all the pins, all the clips, and all the shadows.)

trompe l'oeil

so here is what i did this weekend and today. don't worry, i won't show you my research paper.

i feel like it's the first time in a while i have a strong connection to something i'm doing. i draw so tensely, feeling at times quaint and at times innovative, at times peaceful but mostly stressed and worried. i love the trick, the mix of spontaneity of its making and the carefulness of re-drawing it. i love the humor of drawing paper on paper. and the abstraction of drawing objects much further from their reality. i'm not sure if the final affect i want is trompe l'oeil. it's fun to do, but i am not the world's best draftsman, i'm just pretty good at it. i don't think i want to be a painter, just a drawer. still, i love it right now, getting to use colors for specific affects.

plus this afternoon i got to see anne carson perform her hour-long essay on pronouns with a dance film behind it. it was beautiful and strange and gave me courage to make, because i will never make like she does, could never comfortably push as far as she does in the way that she does, so she gives me courage to at least push a little further.

s. says that the days i'm bored my blog is boring, or the days i'm just struggling and hating my work it's no fun to read. and not that anyone reads this blog, but i'm sorry if i bore people. the whole point of this blog was a chance for people in the studio to get a better sense of me b/c i feel a little bit hard to keep track of. but the funny thing is that no one, or almost no one ever, in the studio checks my blog to see what i'm up to. so then they'll come to my studio and i feel like my blog is like my back-up that keeps me legit, but no one ever checks my back-up and so i'm not really legit. or something. so anyway the point was to express my boredom and my enlightenment, my happiness and my depression, all of it, to give an accurate account. but if someone's been waiting all day to see what i write and all i write is that my studio work sucks, well that's not so fun. so apologies if that has happened to anyone.

i woke up a little dazed from a big meal and party last night, then drove into school and drew for five hours straight, then drove home to be with jack and order pizza and watch garfield's christmas and draw a bath with water from the stove because the hot water for some reason in the spigots was gone. and now here to work a little on my research paper (heretofore known as r.p. so that i no longer have to write that dreaded word----this may be the very last actual r.p. i ever write!) because jack is sleeping and s. is watching a movie and the dog is pacing.

the drawing went okay. i love to do it, but sometimes i feel quaint, and you may know that i hate that feeling. and when people come into my studio and they don't seem as excited about what i'm doing as i feel (and how can they, they're not as invested in it), i get sad and feel exhausted and want to cry. which happened twice today. amazing how much the world can change when someone walks in your studio and, really thinking only of themselves and not really present, they say something small that gets expanded two hundred times its original size and my world starts to wobble.

that's all the exciting news i have to say. no post tomorrow b/c it's sunday. i've been writing almost every monday-through-friday, but on saturdays i sort of miss checking in, but sundays are usually too busy to think to blog. until monday then.

i wrote the rough draft of my research paper

okay boring post.
i craved to go into school today, but the roads threatened to be bad and i was feeling terrible (why could my face not smile) and so sad in bed all day (all day, well, minus a walk in the woods in the morning, holding onto trees to get up hills) and wrote my research paper. really, i'm almost done. i wrote the whole first draft. when in history has that ever happened that a rough draft comes out on the first try (well, twenty pages of notes later, but the first real streamlined try). it was wonderful, and the essay formed as i was writing it, and maybe it's terrible but it's not really that bad and all i really need is a rough draft. so i'll go into school tomorrow and draw draw draw. thank goodness for days like today!