nearing the end

i've begun work on my master's statement, and my blog is the largest chunk of it. i wasn't sure until yesterday if i would make it a part of my statement. i think this week this blog will end and i will begin a new one.

i started to blog simply to help my fellow classmates keep track of me, but they didn't visit. instead, friends and family from far away visited. and probably i was the most frequent visitor to my own blog--i found myself needing it to understand what i had accomplished in a day and a week and to better understand my work, its themes, my feelings on it, and what it looked like in the remove of an online photographic documentation. what i thought would be a more personal account of my studio life became a mix of private and public--i never could fully write as if no one were watching, and yet i wrote to no one in particular.

while the writing in my blogger isn't literary and the images aren't professional, the account is to me, overall, fascinating. in the spirit of Anne Truitt's "Daybook," it takes the mystery out of the role of the artist--and i'm not one for mystery. i think it shows the ups and downs inherent in any artist's days, and it allowed me to see the depths of doubt and despair into which i could fall and the sudden turns toward inspiration. charting that mountain chain, it gave me peace about the future as i was entering despair and gave me a reality check if i felt at my apex.

another reason to include the blog in my master's statement is because the form of the blog became a theme inside my work: daily accounting of the wabi-sabi in one life. how to make personal details that are of importance to only you be important to other people, too? how desperately i need to document the relatively insignificant details of my life--and what a contemporary scrapbooking/blogging/myspacing/youtubing impulse that is. what a persona we all make for ourselves and how true to the flesh can it be?

and so, for better or worse, this blog, raw as it is, will be copied and pasted onto archival paper and bound--then placed in the basement of the library for no one to have to read.