[blogger will not let me upload an image, i don't know why]

we had a visiting artist yesterday, and i feel like he threw me into an existential crisis. he pretty much said that any emotion i express through the quality of my drawing is purely a convention, it's a construct of emotion that culture gives to me. the emotion itself is not truly drawn. he pretty much questioned my whole love of drawing and wanted me instead to just frame the original deflated balloon and not the drawing of the drawing of it.

and as wrong as i felt he was about where my art might need to go, i still always seem to do better with negative than positive feedback, and so the past day and a half has been a frenzy of discovering how i can best articulate my visual and thematic purposes.

linda gregerson said once that sometimes when a word is wrong in a poem, it's not the you have to find the right word, it's that there is no right word--that there is something inherently fractured in the poem, and the one wrong word is actually showing the tiniest crack that will eventually split the poem in half. that's how i've felt about my questioning composition lately. it's not that i need to force a composition, it's that my ideas aren't clearly enough defined to allow for an organic composition that feels accurate.

so i began to think more today about loss, about collecting things that were otherwise goners, and about drawing as a way to preserve an object that could become potentially lost. that all feels so accurate and true and very important to me. but then how do i show that compositionally? i still don't know.

i spent some of today researching cabinets of curiosity, cabinets of wonder, those ways of collecting personal objects and categorizing them the way you wish, before science took over and created a place and name for everything under and including the sun. it feels like a blogger format, and even when i researched cabinets of curiosities in wikipedia, something about bloggers came up--they collect tidbits of random stuff important to them. i do. and in fact, when i graduate, i would like my new blog (i've decided this today) to be expressly a blog of curiosity, where i simply point to and collect things i find on the web and in my life that i find tremendous. a possibility.