a year at cranbrook

honeyblogmoon

2007-07-18T05:06:00.000-04:00

off-topic of cranbrook, which is far away: stefano and i have some photographs of our in-progress honeymoon at honeyblogmoon.blogspot.com

2007-06-28T17:38:00.000-04:00

2007-04-27T17:47:00.000-04:00

i've decided that this will be the end of this blog. don't worry, i'll start another one! i can't wait to start another one. i will post with the new blog address when i make one.

in the meantime, thank you so much to anyone who has visited--just to know i have a reader has at times felt like the diference between quitting in loneliness or going on because someone cares--sometimes only one person cares, the reader, when i feel lost.

i would love to know who is reading this blog--if you haven't made yourself known, feel free to email me: courtneymandryk@hotmail.com.

love,
courtney.

nearing the end

2007-04-25T08:03:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-04-23T11:42:00.000-04:00

some pictures (compliments of my parents):

dorky pic of me and steve
my dad looking at my drawings
someone else looking at my drawings
people talking in front of someone else's drawings
katie hinton's majestic installation

2007-04-22T21:09:00.000-04:00

i can't find the cord that connects my camera to my computer, and though i see cords all around me, they're all so specific. why? why can't we have one cord that connects everything to everything? what's the use of all these different heads and tails?

but the point is the gallery opening was a huge high. i didn't feel my feet hurt until much too late, so lit i felt. it made me want to have more shows, just to get this feeling again. i doubt humans a little too much sometimes, and last night they came through. people looked at my work and came back to look at it again. they put their glasses on and toured the wall more thoroughly than even i did. they were complimentary to each other and to my face. and it was just so fun to get dressed up and drink wine and eat cheese and celebrate. it felt authentic. it's hard to tell when i'm in that high space if compliments are real or not, but they felt real, which is all i care at the moment. and there were a thousand people there, so it was loud and overwhelming and hot, and a lot of the people were artists who were more interesting to look at than the art and standing in front of the art anyway. time disappeared. and everyone drank too much and spoke so freely. i tend to enter big events like this and get caught up in the beauty of the moment and then the next day regret this or that, but this morning no regrets.

i was busy and steve was downtown last week and decided to buy me some dresses i could try on (yes, it's true, he's that good), and the one we chose was this greenish dress i wore last night with a brown necklace. the color is chamomile, and that word fits the color perfectly. i look like i should spout italian when i put it on, but no, only english. nevermind, i'll wear it in italy as soon as i graduate and fly there and never come back and have babies there who grow up speaking italian in lavender fields.

2007-04-19T21:24:00.000-04:00

my dream day. i woke late, went on a walk with s. and dear moby and moby played for so long that any other dog would have been sleeping all day. then i walked downtown to s's office and worked on editing the manuscript until 5 nonstop, which for some reason is what makes me happy, especially compared to installing artwork, which i'm learning i dislike--having to be such a perfectionist about details like levels and rulers that i don't care about, vs. being a perfectionist about commas, which for some reason i find (usually) interesting. then walked home, went to trader joe's to buy $250 worth of food, then to a fancy restaurant with s. for a quick and delicious pasta dinner.

the door i painted yesterday is not the perfect color, but i fixed it a little today and now, even though it's not perfect, i love it so much more than before. we're really getting this house in order, amazingly, week by week. it costs like $5 to paint a door but oh what a difference it makes. now to paint the other door tonight, and fold laundry, and hang artwork in my house for my parents to see, and finish the veil.

things at school are winding down. i feel like i've been posting so many pics of this series of drawings that it feels useless to post one of the drawing in its entirety in the museum space, but if i get a good picture tomorrow then i'll do that. i really want to post pictures of other peoples' work, which to me is often more interesting than mine. i'll do that probably tomorrow. the opening's on saturday--900 art people in one museum and a lot of high heels and wine, i can't wait.

2007-04-18T21:46:00.000-04:00

awoke with that bad feeling of despair. this isn't a diary, so i won't mention the tears. sorry pillow. i'm sure most of it is that feeling that everything is winding up and i still haven't written a master's statement or found wedding shoes. the end so near and no evidence except for a frantic heart. and a girl under my care who i don't know how to snap into upstanding citizenship. someday, someday. this is becoming my obfuscated journal. someone needs a diary for her birthday instead of this.

okay, i printed and cut and folded these drawings of mine that are folded up to only be my name and then unfold to be a long, thin drawing. a business card, sort of, except somehow one dollar a piece. for the show on saturday. my parents are coming! today i bought a pink sweater. which perhaps i will wear. and right now i am painting my front door. awaking with despair and going to sleep with a painted front door. that can't be such a bad day. and the veil cut and the lace cut and pinned to it, and tonight i'll watch a movie as i sew the two together until sleep.

done!

2007-04-17T17:36:00.000-04:00

i'm done installing the show. peace on earth. two days now to do whatever else i need to do--sew a wedding veil, clean the sorry house, make business cards for the show, find fancy shoes. please let me find fancy shoes for cheap.

2007-04-16T21:03:00.000-04:00

my day was wasted, how about yours?
not wasted, but not artistically productive or useful in any way other than buying a table and lamp and having a great visit with linda gregerson, one of my very favorite poets. and reading her book of poems all morning. which made me want to get off my art butt and write for real.
s and i have made a vow to go out to eat every night this week. i know, our life sounds hard right now. aren't i in the final stressful stages of grad school?

so windy today i feared all the cats outside would blow away.

2007-04-12T22:11:00.000-04:00

i have no photos because i didn't make anything new, but! today! was! the! first! day! of! the! grad! show! installation! i woke so excited i couldn't stay in bed. it really did feel like i was young and it was a holiday. i drove to school and worked all day as hard as i could until the museum closed and i drove home. i painted a square of white the exact-ish color of the paper i'll be using, which meant marking the wall with blue paint-tape, using a level to make a perfectly perfect large rectangle. i do believe that my work will fit really well in the space i've been given. and some professional photographer is going to shoot slides of my work in a couple of weeks, which delights me because i'm so bad at it and it's an important part of this art thing.

and i cut archival rag board for the backs of the drawings and got half-way done attaching them to the backs of the drawings before i called it a night to get home to my new segment of my family. and to see christine, a friend who i will miss too much when she leaves. all my friends are leaving. and then i will leave my friends, too. this crazy world where no one stays fixed. blogs are so important, i do believe that.

- also: i sort of love this one artist, and i really like her website: www.clarinabezzola.com
once i update my website (soon, i promise, once i graduate!), i want to have as many crazy categories as she has.

2007-04-11T23:07:00.000-04:00

what will go on my wall in the museum beside my art:

title:
“Why Seek Ye the Living”

statement:
from the essay “On Drawing” by Jean Fisher, The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act

“The daughter of the Corinthian potter Butades is in love with a shepherd who is about to embark on a journey. Desperate to keep hold of him in his absence, at night, in the flickering light of a lamp, she draws the silhouette of his shadow on the wall. And this, it was said, is the origin of drawing… As with Orpheus’s surrender of Eurydice to the underworld, the poem, drawing, or song can only emerge, it seems, through the absence or sacrifice of the loved one.

“In this tale, strictly speaking, what generates the drawing is not loss itself but the girl’s anticipation of loss, captured in the movement of turning away that unites blindness to memory. But her act is not memory as Proustian recollection, but as giving to memory in the act of making: a gift of memory where the act of making is simultaneously an act of memorizing.”

2007-04-10T22:14:00.000-04:00

these days before the final installation are slow. i want to be moving on, to be making more drawings. it's good to focus on this one series, but i want to be making another series at the same time. i'm bored, even. but i go home and want only to watch movies, go on walks, and drink a little wine while i check my boring celebrity websites. how productive. i am obsessed with being productive. on saturday i went to a writing workshop and we had to write many lists of words, and one of the lists was about things that you're obsessed with on a daily basis, related to art or not. forward-movement was mine. and doing good in the world. i'm obsessed with character. the ben franklin idea of character. not surface, but practice. ben franklin wouldn't sit around drinking wine and watching movies, now would he?

i felt much more clear today about what the order of my drawings should be. strong enough feelings about it that i feel confident it's the way it needs to be. a book doesn't mean bound, or with words. what does a book mean? i love the idea of pushing the idea of the book. maybe the best form for many pages of images is that they're on the wall, even if it is a book. to get to see them all at once and consecutively both. so they can reference wall and page both.

i want my drawings to be more, but i love what they are right now, most of them anyway. i want to make a box for them and keep them on my table. or three boxes, always three faces up at the same time.

adventure: while slicing ragboard with a BRAND NEW exacto blade, so, so sharp, so sharp, i pushed so hard and the ruler slipped and off is hanging the diagonal tip of my thumb. lots of gushing blood and skin flapping, but no stitches. i didn't look at it, though, i didn't want to see if i needed stiches or not. i didn't want the drama, i just wanted to get to work. bloody thumb means difficulty working on my drawings because blood is not acid-free and could damage the paper, etc. but i held it above my heart for an hour and then for a little more and now the bleeding has stopped though the pain has subsided mostly but still is there. silly exact, silly ruler, silly my thumb in the way.

i will say right here a thought that consumes me and that is the elephant in the blog-room: it is very, very hard to be a parent-figure to a certain parent-needer, willful with dangerous and fretful undertones. will she find the right way despite so many signs in her actions that point otherwise? god i hope so. what have i done right or wrong? that is all i will say about that.

2007-04-09T20:34:00.000-04:00

a good studio day today. i've been trying to judge what my future will hold by what i feel increases energy. drawing pins: no way. drawing dead things: yes! babies: yes! editing the manuscript: yes yes!

trying to figure out composition. how do these components best fit together when in my head they belong in a book-box? they need to relate to the wall. i like how they feel like bookshelves. but sometimes when one edge meets another edge, they don't have a strong conversation. separate each one from the other by an inch or less? or only show two drawings in the series? or have them flying around the wall, not in any real order? i'm taking suggestions.

2007-04-06T23:27:00.000-04:00

now i'm trying to think of if i should frame them or not, or encase them in plexi or something. but if i were having a show in p.s.1 i wouldn't do that, it's just this craft school and being in a museum space that makes me question white page. if it were in someone's house, it would be framed, yes, but in a contemporary non-craft gallery it wouldn't. so interesting how its framing changes depending on the space. the form of the project doesn't require a frame--in fact, i want it to blend into the wall, be the wall, and so no frame at all would be best for it.

remember: beware of beauty. it is powerful and can lure you in, but also it can kee things safe. don't stop just because it's beautiful. push past beauty. that's where the meat is. if a relationship feels quaint and pretty, it's not real. if i focus only on the proper emotions, i'll perish. push past all that to the real beauty. i'm not saying have a lot of fights, i'm just talking about a depth that sometimes pretty beauty stops before it gets to touch.

it's harder to remember that, because it's fun to just draw a beautiful drawing, and my parents are coming all the way from pennsylvania to see this show and i want them to like what i made, and they'll like the drawings of the flowers, so. this is where i falter and fail, because i always try too hard to please people. my gift and my downfall.

i drove home tonight through paradise lost. every quarter-mile was a different adventure. cars off the road everywhere. in april. why salt roads in april. april ice isn't as bad as december ice, is it? not enough cop cars in town to handle all the cars off the road. the roads so shiny, greasy-looking. usually i feel like i have too much to do left in life to die, but i wasn't sure this time. artwork almost done, manuscript pretty polished, i've found the man i want to marry. i had the kids' easter candy in the car with me, they'd still be able to eat it on easter morning even if i died. but wait! i still need to know what my birth-kids will look like! i need to see their faces! and when i do, i need to protect them until they're old enough to protect themselves! i lived.

2007-04-05T16:44:00.000-04:00

2007-04-04T20:43:00.000-04:00

'i thought i was over having to worry about you driving in the snow,' emilee said, since it was blustery and snowing today. i thought i was the only one who worried about driving in the snow.

i'm tired of writing that i wasn't feeling well, but i wasn't, and had a good sleep after weeks of too-little sleep, but got to school too late to feel good about myself, so i worked all day as non-stop as i could, and now i feel i know more now where my work is going.

i don't feel all light and happiness, i don't feel in love with it, i'm scared how bored i get sometimes when i'm drawing it, but i love it, i love making tiny drawings that eventually fill a large space, and i love the nothing-ness of the drawings. no more hitting-over-the-head with a dead dog, which i love to draw, but there's something more subtle about this that i like for now.

2007-04-03T22:35:00.000-04:00

today was the day to make up for the mis-cutting of the invitations. back into the print-media studios, this time much more efficiently. it was fun, even. and the invitations look much better.

but a day essentially wasted, considering that the grad show installation starts in a week and a day. eight days to get my drawings to a point where i feel ready to put them up and start thinking about their best form of installation. i have a feeling april will pass a little too quickly.

i feel i have nothing to say. a useless and unproductive stress is overpowering everything. the details of the wedding feel enormous when in fact they aren't, right? right?

tomorrow i need to get back to this american life and drawing pins in the studio, and then soon my life will fall into place again.

congrats, cwas, on meeting the deadline!!

2007-04-02T22:14:00.000-04:00

not posting on friday?! lo siento.

s. was given the job of cutting the wedding invitations, but alas, he used the circular saw and cut them too close, and i cried so hard i confess, so hard, i was so tired, all the work i'd put into them and he cut them too late in the process, procrastinated a little too long for us to get our brains around the whole process, and throughout the house you could hear something that sounded like boohoohooooooackackgackaaaaahuhuhoooooooboohoohooooooooo. and then he said he'd print them again. just like that. the invitations will go out a few days late, but it's better than a bad job. and let's say he felt terribly, and let's say i learned the value of pushing so hard for unconditional love. but also, no energy to post on blogger, no way.

and then early saturday morning we drove to pennsylvania and on sunday i had a bridal shower, which is the photograph with the pink bow and the blurry gift.

and back today, so boy i better get to work. lots of work to do, jack would always say when he was obsessed with bob the builder.

2007-03-29T22:28:00.000-04:00

all of interest i can think of to say

1. drawing took a long time. i like them, but it was one of those days where one day just felt like one verrrry long day (not like seven days in one like sometimes happens in the studio when groundbreaking stuff is happening). i just drew these capguns again and again. it's fun to draw when the paper is small because if i mess up, i mess up and i didn't lose my whole drawing. but still mostly i was just so bored. thank goodness, thank goodness, for this american life. i choose not to put quotations around that title, or put it into italics or whatever a radio show would be.

2. s. and i had a typical but relatively rare bicker moment on the phone, and then he called me back nearly immediately to apologize and said that he was sorry he was cranky and i didn't deserve it. who on this wide green/brown/white earth is that kind and good? it wasn't like a big fight, just a little something i can't even remember. but still he called.

3. the waiter last night at the restaurant ended the evening by saying 'it has been a pleasure to serve you.' who says that? who has ever heard that said to them by a waiter? i got shy.

4. my new beautiful car tells me how many miles my gas tank has left until i run out of gas. this is the gift that makes me just that much more peaceful as i drive.

5. i can't wait until i graduate.

6. i read 'the disappearance' by genvieve jurgenson (sp? sp!) and her tone is so haunting, it makes me want to think in the rhythm that she thinks. god i can't wait to start seriously writing again once i graduate.

7. we got our spots in the museum where our gradshow work will go, and my spot is so huge, like 13 feet wide by 14 feet tall. a near perfect square of hugeness. what will i put in it? my little pins take so long to draw, i started to feel like it was useless to draw them all so carefully, but still i did. each. tiny. little. pin. and. its. shadow. and. its. other. multiple. shadows.

2007-03-28T21:54:00.000-04:00

for the dog-lovers, another moby picture. yes, so honourable in his expression. i've heard this before and now i've seen it for myself in my dog: when i go to take a picture, he knows somehow that he should pose.

more closeups of drawings i've been doing lately. i love to draw them. i love to be exact with them and then to spill ink everywhere. i love to just draw pins and their shadows again and again. the shadows are beautiful and conceptually rigorous to me. i want to draw almost nothing else. except for string and dead flowers. i confess i'm getting tired of drawing cap guns shells, though i love to see them when they're done (like exercise).

i'm literally dreaming about my wedding veil now. i can see it. i'll have to sew it in the car on the way to the bridal shower in pennsylvania this weekend.

our one year engagement anniversary tonight! we walked down to the restaurant we went to a year ago. with the girl this time, who gladly came along and sat by the fireplace with us and we all ate seafood. blissful minus a do-your-math-homework-duh speech. another couple were getting engaged tonight, but we seemed happier. and last year he asked me on the way up to the bookstore, and the ring was so shiny i really couldn't do anything but leap around.

2007-03-27T21:06:00.000-04:00

first day in the studio, and it was good to be around art-people energy and to be in my studio full of very good light (though not as good shadows as the chandelier) and to really see my drawings all pinned on the wall. i want more darkness, more tragedy, more complication, but inherently i feel that i know what and why i'm moving in this direction. jane said today that i must have moved away from the large paper because i was scared of it, but really i don't think it was fear. it was an issue of composition and of showing the shifting of time and the inherent tragedy of decomposition and accumulation's inability to fix. the components become characters that show up, disappear, show up again. i'm moving through time, and that feels to me like a poem and i know better how to manipulate it.

2007-03-26T22:23:00.000-04:00

i started to feel really present today, thank goodness. i thought i had strep, and then the next day i could swallow and all the pain got squeezed into my sinuses, and today just a little pain and otherwise i'm fine. emilee in my department had a sore throat, too, and had to go to er because she got dehydrated from not swallowing. i still am not craving a lot of interesting foods, and i still have no desire for coffee after about two hundred straight days of drinking it. funny how the virus began with a sense of just general despair, because that's what s. is going through right now. now it's my turn to see how empathetic i really i am, i suppose, though i hope his isn't an illness at all and he can do all the busy stuff he needs to get done by the end of the week.

i worked on my dress all day in preparation for seeing a professional wedding gown seamstress at 5pm this evening. she tucked in the sides a little bit to make it fit better and straightened the hem where it was crooked, and suddenly there i was in my wedding dress, my real wedding dress, and it looked perfect to be. though she wasn't as enthusiastic--she said it was nice and i did a good job, but she didn't understand why i didn't want a fancier gown. i don't understand, either. i just don't. i think the one i made is fancy enough--simple, elegant, and mine. i hope i can stay as proud of it so i feel okay that day. on saturday i show it to my mother, and if she gives the gentle, sad look that lets me known she's unhappy and doesn't want to tell me, well perhaps i'll cave.

then all night i've been drawing. my face is stinging and i can't find the energy to search for the camera and photograph the drawings, but i think i'm sticking with this format for the grad show. splices of paper, the rejects of paper, all pinned to cover the wall. fragments of time and how the fragments change, disappear, wither, hold. pins and their shadows marking time and its passing.

tomorrow i go to the studio for the first time in a while. i'm not looking forward to it, not wholly. i love my quiet house, my time with my dog, drawing underneath my chandelier, weaving the parts of my life together as much as i can.

2007-03-23T21:47:00.000-04:00

sick again today. i'm not sure if it's just b/c i'm on spring break and so i don't have to go to any classes and so can allow myself to be sick, but i've really indulged this time to just let my body rest. not that i haven't been doing a lot, but i spend my time in the house so that i can take a nap when i need to. i never take naps! i just get overcome with exhaustion walking up the stairs. i'm beginning to think i may have strep since i've had a fever and i've been swallowing with a lot of pain for five days. and i haven't wanted to eat anything, which is rare. except, for some reason, for mashed potatoes and french fries. just warm, soothing, soft, uncomplicated foods.

in the meantime, i've been drawing pins and their shadows. drawing them as if they are shelves or oddly shaped books. too long to be a real book, but still somehow more about language than drawing. i love that long strip. it's the reject strip at the end of a real drawing. i love that size. i don't know how to fill it. it's a shelf full of the objects we don't know what to do with, and then throw away some and some stay, and then throw away some and some stay.

then i bought linda gregerson's book of poems yesterday after attending paisley rekdal's poetry reading at shaman drum. and what are the chances (what are the chances?!?!), but on the cover of her new book of poems is a reproduction of nails and their shadows. she's been the most influential poet in my life, and so clearly i am astonished and dumbfounded and don't know what to make of this coincidence. what should i make of it? it was so odd to see my drawings on her book cover accidentally.

cwas, i wrote below about your ginger prescription, and i have to reiterate that that's the only thing that has kept me up and about. thank goodness for ginger for my aching throat and feverish body! everytime i sip it, it startles me back into the world. and no tears today! almost none, actually. pretty close to none. i must be getting better. how to see a doctor about strep throat without health insurance? that is the question.

2007-03-22T18:13:00.000-04:00

2007-03-21T22:36:00.000-04:00

pins as a way to hold onto fragile things / butterfly pins. drawing as a way to hold onto what is possibly lost.

but i'm not good at drawing pins, i like to draw string more.

just tried to talk to s. about it and ended up crying. poor sick me, poor unsick boyfriend trying to deal with poor sick me. soon i will draw the most astonishing drawing in the world, and just in time for the degree show.

2007-03-21T20:17:00.000-04:00

blogger would not let me upload an image again!

sick again today, but a little better. i feel sort of against taking any medicine that reduces fevers because of an article my brother gave me that says that fevers are necessary to burn bacterias and viruses, that they exist for a reason and we can't just cover them up just to be happy. i am not one to avoid suffering if i am meant to feel it, so here i am, spending another two hours in bed this afternoon. ginger, though, i will take. thank you, cwas! i have not tried the ginger/peppercorn mixture, but i will be sure to. i had two huge cups of ginger mixed with honey and lemon, hot, and it made me feel much better both times. and it is true that i should not have had a milkshake if some of the flu was in my chest and head. why do i do this? a throwback to being little and how my dad would bring me a milkshake when i was home sick from school. so rare, and so good of him to leave his busy job just to see me either unresponse and not hungry in bed or seemingly well jumping on the couch watching tv. no dairy today!

i woke late, worked on this little drawing, which was fun to do in an experimental way and not with the stiffness of a huge, expensive piece of paper. i don't think it's beautiful, but i'm working on it. it's really amazing how i don't draw as well when i'm sick. i can understand not writing as well, not thinking clearly enough to put words beside each other in groundbreaking breathtaking ways, but i should be able to draw a dressmaker pin!

then a meeting for two hours, then arguing an overdraft fee. (to no avail so that i said, okay i'll take my money to another bank, and they gave me hundreds of dollars in cash without checking my license to see if i am who i said i am or anything. wierd.) then off to school to draw, but instead i took my big drawing paper home because everyone was in spring break mode and chatty which was wonderful but my throat was starting to turn into dressmaker pins, so i left with my paper, ready to walk and then draw, but when i walked in the door i felt so sick that i fell into bed and fell asleep until now. i am very lucky to be sick over spring break, and to have a wonderful fiance who comes right to me in bed and asks what he can do, if i need soup, can he buy me anything at the store, do i want him to take my temperature, etc. not cooing, not out of control as much as all that sounds, just gentle and empathetic right when i need him to be.

2007-03-20T20:24:00.000-04:00

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

sick today. actually, for real. headache, sore throat, blah blah, barf, blah blah. slept in the afternoon. got myself a milkshake for my throat, poor me. and chicken soup.

it makes me think maybe _that's_ why i've been feeling so depressed about my state of being in the world lately. maybe that's why i've been feeling listless and unenergized, maybe i've been under the weather. oh! that makes sense.

because i started fearing yesterday that life after grad school will be endless and bleak and i won't know how to fill my time and no please no don't make me get a 9-5 job, not if i don't want it, and don't make me try to control screaming 8-year-olds in an elementary school art class, please no. please don't make me graduate and all the hopes of the great things i might make be only hopes. and other such existential crises that left me unable to lick envelopes for the wedding, unable to sew the hemline of the wedding dress, unable to draw one more dressmaker pin and its shadow.

and this new paper i bought, it's expensive and beautiful but it comes in a roll and it won't uncoil and everytime i try, it hits me in the head and push pins go flying and it gets bent and ruined. which is what happened so much today that with my sore throat etc. and the danger of push pins i ended up in actual tears every five minutes or so. and you can't cry when you're not allowed to have a studio door to cover you, and people kept shuffling down the studio hall and i wanted no one to bother me and really my drawing was pretty horrible today, so i left. i drove home whimpering, fell asleep with my beautiful dog sleeping next to me, and here i am, feeling glad to be doing nothing and for once not feeling bad about it. and indulging in a milkshake and for once not feeling bad about that, either.

2007-03-19T20:08:00.000-04:00

success!
s. and i letterpressed all day today, from 10 until 5, and after an hour of stress and fears of it not working, it started to go smoothly and now the invitations look more beautiful than i could have ever imagined! i'm really amazed at the level of embossing and how beautiful black ink can be against off-white paper. i could have letterpressed anything and just the gorgeous paper and the ink cleanly pushing into the paper is today what i live for.

but exhausting work, wow. those print-media people work hard. on my feet all day on a concrete floor, back and forth back and forth putting down paper, pushing a press, picking paper up, inking, inspecting, careful work. i've spent the night in that state of general dullness. when will this pass? it has hit me so suddenly, this feeling like i want to do absolutely nothing, i really have to believe it will leave as quickly.

now i want a roller press. i suddenly see my future.

2007-03-17T21:50:00.000-04:00

apologies for not posting on friday like usual. i came home and felt not a drip of enthusiasm for anything. not eating, not staring at stupid celebrity websites, not blog-posting, not sewing, not even movie-watching, not even drinking. not even sleeping. i wanted to do nothing. not even nothing. i just felt like i'd been pushing past what i could handle, and there was even an absence of nothing left. i watched half of a very sad, very unredeeming, depressing movie. nightmares. bad sleep. awoke disconnected. but slowly, through cleaning and walking and being too mean and snappy and having to tame myself, i feel back. not inspired to do anything per se, but at least not vacant of even vacancy. what do other people do when they feel that way? it passed. but the saturday was much wasted, alas. i once heard a story of a mother who sighed absentemindedly to her son that another day was wasted and nothing was done and he said in all his earnestness that no, she did a lot today, she found his lego man under his bed. that is heroic. did i do anything heroic today, even in the eyes of my dog? i suppose in the eyes of my dog, yes.

and then hemmed the chiffon of the wedding dress. on friday i drew a dead hamster pinned with dressmaker pins. ah, optimism, happiness. i was just trying to talk about everyday loss, but try to explain that to my mother.

2007-03-15T21:21:00.000-04:00

finally i can upload photographs!

my first full day in the studio in a while. it felt good, especially the last couple of hours, but also it was excruciatingly boring. i didn't know how to move around the studio, how to stay still, how to draw for many hours in a row, how to listen to this american life in headphones that squish my ears to my head so compactly that they ache every half an hour. it was good, though. i'm learning that i'm really a drawer (as in i draw), and now that isn't enough of a thing to be. the question is now _what_ i draw. loss. drawing as a way to hold loss. collections as a way to contain loss, for a while. pins. pinning them all down for dear life. string. stringing them into compositions, stringing them together, making string fences.

difficult to tell in photographs, but everything here is drawn except for the paint jars and the paint box and calligraphy pen.

the copper plates come tomorrow for letterpressing, and on monday we letterpress! this weekend we cut paper 200 times.

setback

2007-03-14T21:23:00.000-04:00

[blogger still won't let me upload photographs]

a setback today on the manuscript front. the agent said that s. needs to go through one more revision of his sections. but not like cropping photographs, more like turning photographs into drawings. big revisions. a lot of time and thought and feeling. so it looks like we won't have much of a chance of hearing word by the wedding like we had hoped. i am confident that all this is for the greatest good and perhaps shopping a manuscript in the final stages of wedding planning would have been a lot to deal with. still, a setback that left steve taking a nap. he's back up, though, and ready to do revisions starting monday. just after he helps me cut paper for the wedding invitations.

meetings all day today, no time in the studio. but itching to get back in. i'm learning something about thread and pins and how they connect these mini stories.

2007-03-13T19:41:00.000-04:00

[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.

2007-03-12T14:47:00.000-04:00

copper plates not yet made. drawings still in progress. envelopes not fully addressed. but my hand muscles hurt from working on them every possible minute yesterday. and on saturday i drew the envelope lining and had it printed on nice paper and cut into the shape of an envelope to be slid in and pasted along the rooftop of the envelope as soon as i've addressed them all. tonight i'll keep addressing. there is the real fear, too, that my drawings will not be able to be made into copper plates--the lines too thin, my photoshop files not black-and-white enough, etc. bridge bridge bridge bridge.

i have to go back to why these drawings i've been drawing chose me in order to know how to tackle the (i think) final two drawings of the semester. i want to make two big drawings and i want them to be as meticulous and messy and strange and eloquent as possible. i want them to be in conversation with one another to relive the feeling of indecision that a drawing singly doesn't offer as well. similar or the same group of objects. a dress, a paper one, hard to tell what it is, but a dress to me. i want to not be able to identify almost any object i draw in these drawings. i want them to have lived enough that they are their own things, their own holy shapes loved enough to move past just being a nameable object. i want the line and color to speak of the essence of the objects.

i have to confront the fact that i'm collecting, but i'm not organizing. shuffle shuffle. the combinations, one next to another and then another next to another, they have their inherent meanings that i don't attempt to create or muffle. the drawings side-by-side will help show that no two objects are meant to be next to one another.

but gerhardt asked: if i were to string these in a necklace, which would come first, which drawing would come second? what is their hierarchy. men and their need for hierarchies? i don't want to organize them. they're each most important depending on the day or moment. they are their own blog. but in compositions, often the painter directs the eye. i don't really. color can do that. i can direct the idea to the most seemingly insignificant objects, then. i push against hierachy, it seems.

i will have white space, but clusters of groups of objects. i won't set many of them up as still lifes, i don't think, i will just draw them as they occur to me. really i want to make a whole drawing of mostly paper cap gun casings pinned to the wall.

i draw things into paper in order to collect them into my world. i pin them to see them, a messy order, and they're too fragile, i think, to be on the floor. i then draw the collection because i love the way it looks. they have become disassociated from their environment, extracted and put into my own abstract one. by how i draw, i will show my love for these paper objects. the paper itself becomes a material on which i draw, and the drawing on paper shows my attempts to draw it--the spills, coffee marks, that separate it from a wholly trompe l'oeuil affect, which is just a trick and so not for me. the pins keep it in the 3d/2d conversation and ground the paper drawings, give a sense of scale. just a few. just dress pins, not so many big black clips.

this time i will have more color and more variation of gradations in color. more blacks. i want it to feel as rich as a sally mann painting, but not black like drama. i think the shadows will be more expressive this time, though, richer.

right now i've slid the paper in between a board and a table to help it to straighten so that i can put it on my desk and begin drawing. i'm itching to draw all the cap guns and their shadows. to get into that meditative space again, to relax while not breathing as i draw tight little carpel tunnel drawings, to fall in love with line and color and this american life.

2007-03-09T22:17:00.000-05:00

what? you ask. i haven't posted a single artful thing for a week? no excuses. an early spring break. working 12 hours a day on wedding stuff. working, at least. i'm getting so good at calligraphy, i brag. here, i've uploaded an outtake for a wedding logo. logo, as if i'm creating a company.

art:
i've learned that paper can be a wall. that white space is okay. white space is needed for the composition of a wall on paper. and that i'm itching to use this expensive paper i bought. just as soon as i can focus, as soon as i've addressed all the envelopes and sent the drawings in to have copper plates made so that i can letterpress them. i'm doing this all myself because i want to, because i want to learn, because it all feels so related to me and my life and what i love to do with my hands, it's just not leading directly toward my thesis, you may have observed.

2007-03-08T23:53:00.001-05:00

wedding burning floral patterns into my eyes

2007-03-07T22:28:00.000-05:00

the problem with blogger is i can't hide. if i don't post, people know it.
i spent the morning at school and the afternoon and evening working on wedding stuff and working out. that's it. nothing creative. nothing pulitzer-prize winning. a bunch of crafty crap that makes me feel both like i'm cheapening my art and also really bad at graphic design and polishing my drawings into votives candle holders made of paper, etc. then i start having wild ideas of paper lights hanging from metal rods over people's chairs and then i should just go right to bed.
tomorrow i hope to finish the invitations and send them off to get copper plates made, and then i'll get back to drawing for fine art and not cheesy crafty crap. please.

2007-03-06T19:14:00.000-05:00

i hate writing on a day no progress has been made. but in fact, i feel most guilty on the day i do the most fibrous stuff--i worked on my wedding dress, again. so many hours put into it in just this week. all this finishing stuff takes the most time. all these details i have to get perfect. for instance, today i hemmed the bottom of my dress, which meant i measured it last night, then cut it a little bit below where the hem should be, then folded it up once and ironed it, then folded it up again and ironed it, then spent about three hours sewing the hemline by hand. and i love doing it. i just feel guilty because it's not helping me graduate. but also, i had a dream that the wedding dress was my final grad show piece, and i think that's true. it's my obsession, that's for sure.

i tried uploading a picture but my computer was so slow, so little room left on it now. after i graduate, i keep saying about everything extraneous. after i graduate i'll clean up my computer. chug-a-chug-a-chugh-a-chug-a.

2007-03-05T21:38:00.000-05:00

finally back to the studio today, though not for long. i seem to do better in my studio practice when i have bad critiques than good ones. my final reviews went so well that now i feel like i'm done. it feels very anti-climactic to now have to make a new piece and go through this all over again. the final reviews made a perfect ending--maybe they just need to re-name them something that doesn't have 'final' in its title.

so i've been attending to all i neglected for two weeks, like my family and wedding plans. i've spent many (fifteen?) hours on the dress in the past three days. it makes me want to sew for real, to really learn the craft of it. makes me want to graduate already and feel my creative hours are only mine and not with a school's copyright information in the lower corner of everything i think and do. this is how i feel as i finished my first mfa, so i know it's normal. i. can't. wait. to. graduate. to breathe again and not drive so much and do things like cook.

like yesterday i took my creativity which usually goes into drawing and instead worked on a wedding dress and made tomato-artichoke soup. relief! not fine art! yes!

i'm going to be in a exhibition about the mix of writing and art in mount clemens, michigan next week. whoo hoo! i'm excited about that, to get to show to the public all i've been doing. except also i have to read a long poem. oh.

i dreamt the wedding dress was my grad show piece. i think it might be. i think i might draw it, anyway. i want to draw it, i need to.

2007-03-02T19:10:00.000-05:00

yesterday steve and i worked on the manuscript until 3pm, then mailed it off for hopefully the last time before we shop it. though i don't like it right now since i've read it too many times and can't feel an ounce of surprise, i do feel we got it to a very refined form and i'm pleased with it.

today i worked on the wedding dress all day with steve's mom and we managed to miraculously make a seam that is actually a zipper. invisible zippers! i had no idea they could be so invisible. it took five hours to insert the zipper, but man it's worth it. so there's my dose of fiber today. tonight i'll work more on the wedding dress, and tomorrow, too.

i'm thinking that this blog could actually become a part of my thesis manuscript. it is an authentic record, both literary and visual, that tracks progress and transformation. that sounds like enough, and plus i want to sleep.

2007-02-28T22:30:00.000-05:00

i'm too exhausted to write anything of note, but i just wanted to record that final reviews went very well today. nothing that slit a quick incision into my skin and poured tarry scary words inside, nothing depressing. in fact, enlightening and encouraging. i'm learning, though, that good news often has some sort of bad news at its tail and all i can do is just keep working hard to fend off any scary bad news demons.
manuscript revision due tomorrow. better get my rest while i can. so tired driving home i kept seeing lights as streaks instead of brakes, my eyes unable to focus, but that sounds scarier than it felt, i just recognized i was looking at the world through tired streaky eyes and i drove on, singing along to any song i could find i knew the words to, skipping tracks until i did.
someone today explained my work as their ipod on shuffle. shuffle shuffle. shuffle. shuffle.

2007-02-27T19:24:00.000-05:00

done. studio turned into gallery space as much as possible. it looks pretty good, i must say, to have everything cleared out except for drawings. it makes the drawings look better than i thought they were.

and jane must have told everyone to be nice to one another today, because boy the compliments were flying. i wanted to stay all day just to hear them. alas, manuscript editing to do. ahoy!

2007-02-26T21:15:00.002-05:00

all i can see is that the dogs are drawn really differently.
but i'm learning something about skewed stereographs, seeing and mis-seeing, diyptychs and triptychs as a chance to discuss indecision, flexibility, and loss/change.

final reviews on wednesday, and i'm happy to say i have very little work to do tomorrow to prepare. i've made a lot of new work, jane commented on my focus and hard work, and it is sort of amazing to see all my drawings arranged in one space, how much room they take up and how very related they are to one another. so for now, optimism.

2007-02-26T21:15:00.001-05:00

all i can see is that the dogs are drawn really differently.
but i'm learning something about skewed stereographs, seeing and mis-seeing, dyptichs and tryptichs as a chance to discuss indecision, flexibility, and loss/change.

final reviews on wednesday, and i'm happy to say i have very little work to do tomorrow to prepare. i've made a lot of new work, jane commented on my focus and hard work, and it is sort of amazing to see all my drawings arranged in one space, how much room they take up and how very related they are to one another. so for now, optimism.

2007-02-26T21:15:00.000-05:00

2007-02-23T22:36:00.000-05:00

i'm getting close to finishing the large black-and-white drawing. i'm beginning to like it, though i want it to be messier, to hold more emotion, since it has the quirky contained emotion down pat.
i feel so insecure about my work right now that i better get off the computer before it becomes apparent to everyone that i'm in a weak spot. still, i like my drawings, i just don't know how to show them and i still have unresolved feelings about how to compose the components. it doesn't feel right to just say it's good enough just because there are cool ingredients--i want them to create a whole.

i realized today that i am drawing a stereograph. both sides need each other to reach a three-dimensional whole.

2007-02-22T22:49:00.000-05:00

i barged into my studio today and caught my drawings unaware and pinned them all up and moved them around and now there is sufficient chaos for now. this weird feeling we have like we'll all die at midnight of graduation. have to get everything resolved now. but we don't. i'm just trying to make. always hope, chance, movement either backward or forward. today tedious drawing, but i feel in it that its whole will not be tedious but full of energy and certain emotion, so i kept drawing until 8:30 and my wrist was throbbing.

but really most of the day i spent deep in the MOST satisfying revision of an essay. i've said this before, but i really know how to write and i know what it feels like when i've reached certain points. i'm not saying it's easy by any means, but it feels in my bones like i know what to do and i trust, i really trust, that the essay has a specific form and that i will find it, i just have to keep writing and trying. i got much closer to finding the form of an essay that i thought was fine but realized today was not an essay at all.

i'll say this in invisible ink: i know i'm not meant to be a gallery-showing artist. i'm meant to be an artist, i'm meant to write for sure, and i think my art will manifest itself in the quality of language that i use and in certain strange places like in drawings in books and in other places akin to anne carson's operas. which doesn't mean at all that i wasn't meant to get an mfa in art or that i won't draw all the time (because if i don't draw i really do rot), but my work is just not meant to be in galleries. i've known that from the beginning, but i know that for sure now. end of invisible ink.

2007-02-21T18:26:00.000-05:00

still black and white. something sad about it that i like, and a chance for more abstraction, as previously mentioned. not feeling very chatty now, i've been in critiques for four hours. ash wednesday now. a chance to give up, to be reminded of dust to dust. and to go to church at night is a calming feeling, the church so dark.

2007-02-20T18:40:00.000-05:00

black and white has a sadness to it. it has an abstraction and distance. and elegance. and sense of collection, of being precious and old.

2007-02-19T20:23:00.000-05:00

i liked my drawings better in my home studio than my school one, but it was good to put them up and try to let all my drawings overwhelm me. it helped me to see more what i'm trying to do. i felt small today, all my drawings seemed small and not brave enough.

thinking about placement based on love. patterns, arrangements kids make in the beach with seashells before they run away.

2007-02-16T20:52:00.000-05:00

it is pretty incredible that i've wanted so much for my life--to write a book, to get my 2nd mfa, to get married--and i got it all at once, all at the very same time. so my final review is february 28th and we're sending our 'final' revision to the agent on the 1st of march. and invitations go out the 2nd of april. and i graduate the 11th of may and get married the 2nd of june, and by that time we hope to hear about the manuscript's publication information. how can this be? how can all happen at once? there is nothing i wouldn't want, i want all of them pretty equally and none of them can be delayed. it's amazing to me how the universe works.

so today, though i have 12 days until my final review, i had to revise the manuscript. and what a sturdy revision it's becoming, i'm glad to say. it feels most itself, and i feel the most capable of understanding it and getting it tuned exactly right. i know exactly what the pacing should feel like and i can sense in every syllable and sentence and paragraph and essay when it's off and i can trust that i will know how to fix it, that if it doesn't come to me today and it will come to me soon and hopefully in time. i don't know how i can have so much trust and accuracy and perfectionism and growth inside my writing when i often feel like my art is just beginning. i thought an mfa would get my art further, and man it's gotten it so far for me, but not to the level my writing went to, or at least i don't think so today. bad drawing day. unhappy with my drawing. afraid because final reviews are so soon and i'm afraid i'm going to put up my work and not be able to defend it. starting to wonder if i can lie my way through to the end, if i can pretend that i'm confident enough that everyone will believe my lie and i can graduate. of course i am a terrible liar, and that's what has gotten me further, to keep pushing myself until i believe in what i'm doing. little moments, little cloud-breaks, just today was a good revision day and a bad drawing day, that's all. and just think, when i graduate, how the two genre will get to merge and i will feel most complete.

2007-02-15T22:07:00.000-05:00

i just wrote a post and it didn't show up. argh, i must have pushed the wrong button. sorry to whomever was eager to know about my day. i worked on editing the manuscript. that is not very visually exciting for blogger. feeling sick today, i'll go back to my cave now.

2007-02-14T19:51:00.000-05:00

our new head of the department is mark newport. big news! i think this should be good news for the future of fiber and cranbrook--he has a big following and a great ability to unite a group of people, and i think he gives good feedback on work in a positive and forward-moving way.

snow day today. s. and i walked in the woods through a foot of snow. it felt like using the stairclimb for an hour. there were points where he had to hold onto me so i wouldn't lag too far behind, but i was going as fast as i could. so beautiful though, if i could see through my aching lungs.

then drew all day, besides a luscious valentine's sushi dinner. i wanted to ask for sushi shaped in a heart, but alas, a dragon will do. i don't like the drawing, but i think it's going somewhere. i'm having fun drawing, at least, even if it's tediously slow in coming. every jar and bobby pin seems to take an hour. but i listened to this american life (as i often do as i draw), and the one i heard this time, 'Act V' (episode 218, august 2002), left me sobbing. our histories, what we can't undo, what we can't believe we could have done, how capable we are of change, and of disguise, and the power of language to do and undo and make right.

2007-02-13T15:14:00.000-05:00

the snow just started. i like feeling cooped sometimes.

i got to school early knowing i'd have to leave early b/c of the snow. then i was part of one of nancy's photo shoots again. it felt like a real event, like a moment that was meant to be captured. i felt serious and full of purpose and it was powerful.

my drawings are fine. i've really enjoyed making them--i'm drawing blindly, just drawing in a flurry, trying to draw as fast as i can before i doubt. but sick, also. glands so swollen that it feels like my ears won't pop. steve made me a hot toddy, which i must say was the most delightful drink and i drew for several more hours last night and went to sleep at peace and swirling in my drawings. i feel like i'm making portraits of a floor, making moments and then making the shifted moments. people's art is really coming together right now in the studio. we're rising to the occasion of the end of the year and really pushing through, making things greater than i knew we were. i took steve and austin and jack to the studio to see everyone's work and i was proud of us all. each cubicle was its own real world.

2007-02-12T19:12:00.000-05:00

drew last night and all day today, trying to draw the arrangement of things on the ground. patterns, chaos, stains, mess, a discovery hopefully of the viewer because the composition doesn't imply hierarchy. we'll see. i'm trying to do several of them at once so that i can have a series where each informs the other. we'll see. i hope i can force myself to stay on this track at least for the next two weeks until FINAL REVIEWS. ththhthhththththp.

2007-02-09T21:12:00.000-05:00

i feared i would have to listen again to all the things i did wrong in my art i showed for critique, but instead two people came to me and were the kindest and most generous i've ever seen them. they were forgiving and encouraging and had plenty of great ideas and insights. i feel so lucky.

four hours of critiques, then i rushed home to find moby had thrown upwhatever he'd eaten this morning. this first day i left him alone from 9 until 6 and he threw up, poor boy. i was hoping he would just sleep all day and not even notice how much time had passed, since i've read that dogs aren't supposed to notice time, but that's a lie.

nancy did a photoshoot with me and printed the pictures and showed them tonight in forum gallery. so strange to see myself dressed up like an icon, even if it's mostly me from behind or from my neck down.

i've spent the rest of the night compiling a stupid wedding registry. it's so boring and material, forgive me for sounding stereotypically anti-materialist.

s. comes home tomorrow, finally.

2007-02-08T17:24:00.000-05:00

not really feeling like going back to the studio today, i stayed home. i felt like drawing, just not seeing people. afraid that i would not be as graceful today as i bowed. critiques are vulnerables situations, yes. but in truth, really, not just optimistically, it wasn't so bad. there are wars going on. this was just an hour of a little humiliation. i feel like i have a bank account of good work set up that i don't feel my reputation or whatever is broken. and i see where everyone was coming from, and it will only help me to make my work stronger. i just hope i was as graceful in critiques as i'm making myself out to be. in what people wrote during my critique, which i read this morning, it was all pretty nice--thoughtful, not mean, not as harsh as it sounded in the air.

and really moby needed his lunch and i couldn't go to school and drive home to give him lunch and drive back, so today i slept in a little and then got to work on the manuscript and i've been working on it all day. i don't like it today, but i think it's the theme of my week. for instance, i woke up and drove to get coffee, but on the way i realized i was low on gas so stopped at the gas station. just as i pulled in, i ran out of gas. i had blocked someone in, but i was fifteen feet from a gas pump. i ran in and spoke to a man who didn't speak english, managed to get one of those red gas holders, fill it, race to my jeep and put gas in, start it up and move to a gas pump so that the woman i'd parked in could drive off. embarrassing, humiliating, ah, my week. bring it on. i haven't run out of gasoline for 11 years. optimistically: i'm lucky, aren't i, that i was so close to the gas station, and only one person was not amused.

just moby and me today, and the shadows in the snow (how i love those) and the twigs sticking out of the snow, still on the ground from the ice storm a few weeks ago. lonely still. without s. here, half my life is absent. it's not being alone so much as the space where he should be, that gap, that i feel so strongly. it makes for a longing and a funny feeling like something's off but i'm not sure what, then i remember. just having him in the next room as we work, not even talking all day at all, there's a peace in that.

2007-02-07T20:32:00.000-05:00

failure. everything that could go wrong did. it was possibly the worst critique i have ever witnessed. nothing good was said. barely a single single single thing. so much bad was sad, people seemed righteous in their offense that i could show such horrible art. amazing. it was really quite a spectacle.

i left feeling (after the humiliation of people looking me in the eye and telling me honestly they were sorry i had failed so deeply) optimism. steve likes to call it my optimistic summary. no matter what bad happens, i seem to always be capable of ending by saying 'so, i guess i'm really glad that...'

i guess i'm really glad that the critique went so horribly because:

1. i went from a perfect critique to a perfectly humiliating one. this must be the sign of something powerful that affects people greatly.

2. i now know the scope of critiques. i know about gang mentality, which i think happened in mine--not to say my work didn't deserve it, i just think a bandwagon of scorn went a'rollin'. to know all kinds of critiques means i can be a better teacher in the future.

3. to end with such a horrible critique--my last ever in my life, supposedly--means i'm really ready to get out of here. nostalgia won't get its grip on me yet.

4. this is the most important one: even more than my last critique where everyone raved, i LOVE my drawings. i feel an allegiance toward them. i feel proud of them. hearing everyone not talk about how beautiful they are AT ALL and only talk about the horrible form of putting them in tiles ont he floor, it made me realize how much i love my little drawings. i felt pity for them that no one loved them like i did. i felt tenderness and pride. my drawings. i need them more now than ever.

so there.

2007-02-07T08:20:00.000-05:00

2007-02-06T16:58:00.000-05:00

not done yet with the art, but moby swallowed some medicine of mine when i was driving and he was turning the back of my car into what looked like the paper shredder truck's contents. when a treat comes in a bag, i just give him the bag, trusting he will gnaw through it quickly and efficiently. i monitored him all morning--signs of extra hormones? vomiting? monthly angst? and he moaned a little all morning, but, being the gentle mother i am, it didn't occur to me to call the vet. he's fine now, running around outside with all the stuff he stole from the basement yesterday. uh, i hope steve didn't need those blocks of wood. steve? still i rushed home to make sure he was okay and it was a definite buckling of my knees as i saw him alive and rushed to greet him and feel his tongue abrading my ear.

i will finish drawing tonight, just as soon as i check obsessively all the websites i check everyday--people.com, justjared.com, celebrity-babies.com--there, i said it. in public, i said it. i check these websites e v e r y s i n g l e d a y, many times a day.

cwas, you always know how to say the right thing. how am i so lucky to have you as my friend? enjoy your travels!

photos (i think this is the right order):

1. tiles, large view
2. tiles, detial
3. jackie on sunday pancake morning
4. my nose scratch from the ice storm last week.

2007-02-05T21:23:00.000-05:00

steve brought my camera to chicago all this week. i'll update with photos when i take real slides, like on wednesday.

making floor tiles all day today. i think they look okay. i like the individual drawings, but still the whole piece is dumb. too segregated by squares. i wish i could draw on a slab of concrete. i'm not sure what i want the overall design to be.

feeling boring and lonely.

i was calling my dog's name

2007-02-02T23:00:00.000-05:00

2007-02-02T22:37:00.000-05:00

well went to nancy and said i'm having a crazy idea of putting my drawings on the ground and people can walk on them b/c they'll be tiles and she said, i think you should do it--i'm suprised you didn't think of it sooner. and while i am skeptical as always of cheesy ideas that involve craft and lots of dumb knowledge and not just the heart, the idea of walking on my drawings makes me feel so giddy in my martyrdom, a sort of sick humor. it's not looking like much right now, and maybe i won't go through with it, who knows these days, but why not throw caution to the wind and start a new art genre in the last weeks of school, why not.

2007-02-01T21:55:00.000-05:00

"i think you are preoccupied with loss"

drawing all day. floor tiles, sort of. i would like them to be real floor tiles. to step on them. a martyr.

2007-01-31T21:31:00.000-05:00

i can't quite get it in my head that the month can change but THE WEEK CAN STILL STAY THE SAME. why is this so difficult to understand this month? switching from january 31 to february 1 on a thursday?! whoa.

the girl got into big trouble last night and all night and all day today i feel out of breath with sadness that i've not been a good enough parent-figure to keep her on the side of the good knights. it's still in her, all that goodness, but shoo the scary eye makeup and the rebellion. ohhhhhhhhhhh.

presentation: check. paper: check.
ONE WEEK until my critique and no good work to show for it. one drawing today. no maternal energy left in me to photograph the poor drowned dog and show it to the one-to-no souls who read this. but promises of work tomorrow. all day stu-stu-studio.
instead, since i'm into jewelry, i'll post a photograph of the jeweled frog bracelet steve gave to me for christmas. it has magic powers.

jewelry i found inside the computer

2007-01-30T20:26:00.000-05:00

oh my goodness blogger it has been so long. weekend working on the presentation and the paper, then off to chicago on monday at 4, then back from chicago today (tuesday) at 2. presentation work, paper work. not a pretty thing to show. except this photo of a piece of jewelry i found online. i love it. the longing, the loss. i had two dreams about jewelry the past two nights. getting to hold it all in my hands. little silver pins and broaches with pearls, those contorted pearls.

everyone in the studio is in a tizzy about artist's statements, and maybe i should worry more, but mine just came out pretty much in one go, and i think it's because i've been writing about my work every weekday in the blog, putting words to what my eyes choose to want to see.

2007-01-26T22:23:00.000-05:00

not a good picture to upload.
i think i was sick last night--sick to my stomach all night, kept waking up with sharp stomach pains, and nightmares all night long of things i wish not to repeat (my brain does not belong to me).
then to school as quickly as i can and worked as long as i could until i had to come home for a dinner party. a dumb drawing. not one i like. tried to draw in perspective--tried to draw based on a photograph of one way to view the individual drawing-creatures. didn't turn out so well. but i realized through it that what i love is my drawings on the floor. and maybe that's what i need to do, to put my drawings on the floor. does this sound ridiculous? yes, probably. but they feel better there. a portrait of the floor, of where i put things. the ground is the place to put dead things. it makes a reason for the 22x30" paper--tiles, but cut to tile size. i get ahead of myself so quickly, i'll have to draw it to see how i really feel. because really i have a presentation on wednesday morning and there's no time then until thursday to consider all this, and my ideas and heart change/s so rapidly in this art world. a good dinner party, though. neighbors like us.

2007-01-25T19:41:00.000-05:00

walked a mile back and forth trying to re-organize the manuscript. brought it to school to spread it out on a huge print table--two, actually. it snaked around each one in chunks of chapters and sections, then i re-routed it all to a form that felt more truly itself, at least i think so today.

then drew the drawing above. a little boring, a little tame, but something about it is precious enough, and a lot of joy in drawing it. eyes hurt a little, staring so closely at little lines as i drew. peaceful, drawing all day on one piece of paper, sitting there listening to this american life. i've almost listened to two whole years of it by now.

2007-01-24T21:31:00.000-05:00

woke early to get to school, cleaned my studio to prepare for my meeting with jane and then typed up a list of questions. then 3 hours of riveting student presentations (totally passionate and relevant and insightful, so good to see us so involved in our own investigations). then my meeting with jane, which went so well. i _am_ invested in the collection. that is what i do. if it's not, i have to embrace what's true now and move through it to a new place, i can't just leap there. i really have found an identity in drawing, and a piece of land that feels steady that i can explore a little before i go reeling again. maybe i can hold this until the graduate show. i see now that i'm making things that i want to show to the world, and that i want to put in group shows and show in galleries that i care about. then from there i can show in more unique places, in books, solo shows in strange houses, slipping drawings in library books. the world is open. just start small, just little group shows and even coffee shops in ann arbor, anything to get a resume of shows and some recognition so that i can keep moving into the circle of influence. i began to see that i could carve a niche in the art world / in the world that has art in it. and that doesn't mean writing is separate, but it might. i can have both, do both, and maybe they'll come together and maybe they won't. i'm not sure yet, but the beautiful thing is i seem to love doing both and seem capable of doing both at the same time and they inform one another so i will be fine. i felt after meeting with jane that really i will be fine and that i'm in a good place. then i researched paper to buy (samples of paper, all these squares of different kinds of white and different textures, all becoming more different from one another the more i look at them), then i drove for THREE hours to get home. three hours. thank goodness i just got a book on tape at the library so i had something to help me not just start driving in the breakdown lane (which occurs to me frequently in traffic).

i'm beginning to see the end of the tunnel and it's not so bad. it's the first semester i didn't think about quitting in the beginning--i've come this far, only this one semester left. embracing it like this, i seem to be doing better than doubting it all the time. i seem to be embodying it more. and feeling nostalgia even, already.

(i wrote this yesterday but it wouldn't publish until now)

2007-01-23T21:56:00.000-05:00

i didn't go into the studio today because i decided that today was my kick-off day for really devoting myself to revising the structure of the manuscript. so while i cracked a cool (and way overdue at the library) book called "still life: objects of desire," i mostly just read the manuscript with all my feelers trying hard to stay alert. i got through the whole thing, just turned the last page three minutes ago. i wrote a new introduction draft, too, this morning, and did wedding planning with my mom, and woke at 6:30 to go for a walk in the woods. so, so peaceful in the morning just as the light is coming into the sky, when the sky is glowing almost imperceptibly and then a little more and then suddenly the day's lit but there was no sunrise to speak of. my eyes get so worked-up sometimes, the dark is good for me to stay internal for a little longer.

everyday i always hope i got more done, and today because i didn't really leave my house except to buy food at trader joe's, i feel unproductive, but really reading a whole book and writing an introduction and trying to stay aware the whole time is sort of tiring, and certainly three big cups of coffee and two glasses of wine and a lot of soy-crisps and wasabi rice-sticks later, i feel kind of wired and still hungry and junk-food-brained.

deep raspberry tulips beside me now, against a bright pink kitchen wall. colors! get me back to my inks! i miss drawing today. i want to keep being on a roll, keep feeling inspired, don't stop, fear of too many roads at once and of sudden fatigue.

2007-01-22T20:56:00.000-05:00

began the day with my drawings still inside their casing of paper. i cut them free. so much love i feel in drawing these sad things, and love i feel in letting them be their own object. then they looked too perfect, too careful, so i drowned them. in drowning them, they hardened to be real objects, to curl in on themselves like sad creatures. love in finding, love in drawing, love in freeing, testing love in drowning, and love in drawing again the drowned drawn things. the objects are my children that i tend and mis-tend, attend and unintentional dis-tend.

i loved drawing with all my might today, drawing as in painting on thick, luscious paper (not thin, fragile paper) to mark my aknowledgement of the things i love so much i hurt them in my confusion.

but then i cut them away from the paper in chunks, squares of paper around a drawing, and i wanted to make it an object again freed from the paper, but steve says i should let them be a still life with one another and i should draw them together. i don't want it to be only a catalogue of separate sheets. i think i would like a big drawing with all of them arranged in a certain although inexplicable way.

2007-01-20T16:49:00.000-05:00

2007-01-20T15:18:00.000-05:00

a fascination with death? or maybe more a recognition of my ineptitudes with tending. kiling all the plants i've ever owned. stiff around children. but loving all the same. tend/tending/attention. testing my love for things. love and tending. love past death. loving the things that are wabi-sabi, perfect in their imperfection.

how to show this structurally? thinking about different structures. not a collection, please no. the form of collection is boring. but a structure. doesn't have to be stiff, doesn't mean starched. just a feeling for where things go. are they arranged based on sense? color? shape? arranged the way rosie arranges her room? or all put in a drawn tub? arranged in the shadows of other things? arranged as a narrative? all just given away at the door like a door prize? hung to dry? each framed singly like little sad superheroes in a row? the objects or the drawings of the objects or the drawing with the objects together? how oh how can i love form so much in poetry and feel so confused about it with just visuals?

(when i get out of school, will i even put things on the wall? or will i make books? i want to just make books, but that doesn't seem brave enough right now. i want to make little movies that are shown so small you need a magnifying glass to see them. i want to make small drawings that fit into books and slip them in the pages of books at the local library.

dogs for free, spoons for free, please take one.

i want to hang paper chandeliers from the ceiling, all drowned, all hung, with paper dogs drowned and lying beneath them.

i think i've been thinking about work as something i should be able to sell lately, or work that's easy to install, because people talk to me about those qualities here--about making sure work is archival, acid-free, etc. but in the end those thoughts probably won't take me anywhere brave, so i should let them go in the service of bravery and idiosyncracy.

2007-01-19T20:18:00.000-05:00

drew all day and then the visiting artist said no, what i'm drawing in some parts is not thematically charged and in other parts is. yes! i trusted her. i agreed. no defenses. at peace with criticism. toward progress. just make what you love, she said. i think you're obsessed with death, she said. that's good, everyone dies. it's not weird. probe it. you draw best the dead nature, not the plastic things that are already flat. go with what your pen leads you to. blown out of the water. not sure what to do next. she saw right through me. you need to find a structure, a home for these parts, she said. how did she know? how did she see what i've been searching for for two years? how could she tell i was unhappy with the structure i had and with the wavering in my subject matter. just go at what i need to prod, would die without prodding. she made me want to be an artist my whole life.

comments!!!!
yes, politics and art do definitely have their juncture. there are moments where the news moves me, but it seems almost accidentally, like the clashing of the stringent writing with the trauma gives way. or the weird need to communicate so directly to an audience about something that is too big to say adequately makes a sorrow that i can feel. but books/videos/whatever whose main purpose is the heart and telling a story as idiosycratically as possible and then finding inside that incidentally a political act, i feel that.

i love the defense of art! it so often leaves me defenseless, not sure how to make it or what it is. hooray for believing in the quality of life and the need to move us all beyond just eating and sleeping (which is all i seem to do in art school anyway, or all i remember). still, there's a balance, isn't there? shouldn't i feel the privilege of going so far into my own thoughts and therefore reach far out? i don't know. i think i feel that every single day i give all i can to my family/ies and give all i can to my art, and that's a mix in each of both outward and inward, of giving and getting, being on the surface and being in the moon. i feel i care as much as i can for the people around me, and already i'm too much of a martyr for my people-loves and dog-love and cat-loves and art. but i think right now i'm spinning around in my head about this thought and not articulating it clearly. i know i need to make what i make or else i'll rot (or if i had no paper but only potatoes, i would make something out of potatoes). and i don't think rosie was saying that one shouldn't have a quality and depth in life, but i think she felt the stark contrast to the limits of another's life not so far away, and the discomfort of being so privileged without at least acknowledging in some way the truth that other people are starving. that would be an interesting way to begin every lecture about one's own art--with a moment of silence for those who don't have enough food to think about the levity of art. or jasmine says i should carry around a card that points out how i donated money to the poor last night, just in case anyone doubts the value of my art. i am spinning now for sure, because i hear both--i hear rosie's desperation and practicality and thoughtfulness, and i hear art's push toward the divine, past bodies and hunger by going through them into the gut.

2007-01-18T22:25:00.000-05:00

after a good day at the studio, i went with steve, rosie, and steve's mom to see anne wilson (artist) talk about her art at the michigan theatre. an organist, big slides, color program, comfortable seats. ahh, money. why doesn't cranbrook have money? that is the question.

at dinner afterwards, rosie said that she couldn't appreciate the art b/c all she was thinking was how this woman should be putting her efforts into saving the people in thailand. boy did i feel dumb. i mean, i've thought about this before, but i've spent four years nonstop devoting myself to my own issues, and here this wise 12-year-old girl is telling me indirectly that i need to help the poor instead of just draw dumb stuff all day. she's right. i gave some intelligent but slightly weak (but still valid! still valid!) answer about the importance of helping people to see that they're more than just animals, the intellectualism and aestheticism and chance to interpret our own insides that art helps us to do. she sort of bought it. and she's said before that she wants to be a photographer, but really her mother's a social worker and who are we kidding there is a personality that can fall into the depths and pits of art and another personality that would rather look outward, and wo is me when the two mix and the artist makes overt political gestures ugh.

but anyway just to be sure i donated money to heifer international and also to a company that helps children born into poverty in america. just to be sure. just in case my art doesn't save the world any time soon.

and besides, a good drawing day today. drawing whatever i wanted to draw. drawing, gluing the cut-out drawings to big paper, and then drawing on that paper what moved me. 2-d and 3-d meet. it feels right.

2007-01-17T17:36:00.000-05:00

i don't want to make art only about obsesison and the constant replication of one thing--no matter i love making the multitude of bottle rockets. i don't want to make a composition centered around a nameable theme, but i don't want to make work only about the collection. putting drawings of pins on drawings is certainly making it feel like something about collection too much. because isn't everything about collection? i want more than that. i may like a drawing all on its own--the reverance of an object--but really i love the chaos in my studio, and i want to make a forest of a drawing.

i drew today on big paper a dog, then another dog, then an umbrella and bottle rockets and i hate it. it looks so dumb. what a waste of paper and a day. too much about rendering, not enough about the sadness inside, too perfect, too much about colored pencil and too much forcing a meaning i don't even get and certainly don't mean to imply.

i just want to make a drawing on the ground, but i did that and it dind't go over well. i want to do it again. today i don't want to make a drawing on big paper, but installation is arduous and i think too much about collection and not poetic enough, not thought through enough. i don't know what to do. lost.

all along i've held steady on this: love of drawing. drawing as having. cutting. cutting to turn into an object. drawing as object. so it's really been about the process and not as much about the outcome. is there something there? i feel like i make my life difficult by not being happy with just drawing or just making a thing that i can frame. i keep messing everything up, and it has no good end. i know in poetry that i've reached a poem, but i don't know in art. why?

2007-01-16T18:45:00.000-05:00

couldn't go to school today, the roads filled with ice. the trees made of glass. two broke in our front yard. a glass forest. power lines out. heavy trees, they all bow so low the roads are narrower.

instead worked some on the manuscript, got my home studio in order, went for a walk in the woods (dodging frozen branches everywhere, chipping ice with grass blades inside of them on the ground, the berries on the trees so suddenly frozen that their juice has dripped into the ice enclosing each berry, so it is a watercolor, it is my drawings with the cut out shape around each delicate object), went to a meeting, worked on my wedding dress, cleaned, and cooked. so much to do everyday, and sometimes the days feel too long to hold the stamina to do it all, sometimes i feel too weak, sometimes it gets dark before i feel i've even woken. let something go, the therapist says, but i don' t know which can wait, everything is important.

dreaming of my drawings. i want to draw today all day. to draw with my eyes closed and to see the mess that comes of it. to draw carefully and messily. i want a paper big enough to hold it all, and a heart strong enough to last for the whole page.

blindly

2007-01-15T20:11:00.000-05:00

an artist visited my blog and said it was good but you could tell that i wasn't writing a personal journal so much as a journal put out by the mailbox to see if someone would read it. i know exactly what she means, and i don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but i'm going to say it's to be expected and i'd like to try writing with the only audience being myself for a little while and see how that feels. so here begins the experiment.

(no photos. camera still packed from trip to d.c.)

okay, here begins the experiment.

drawing little rocket fragments, those flower-like plastic jewels. their shadows. drew a paper garlic bulb and its shadow, but the paper was too small? the composition already bad? i cut them all out, with their shadows, too, like wings from below. now unrecognizable. a piece of garlic drawn on paper and cut out to be the shape of a real garlic but now abstracted, then that drawn, then that drawn with its shadow and that cut out. plus now have three papers up on my wall to see what each one will do, if they can be a series with each other. the dogs drowned and wrinkled (the drawings of the dogs drowned and then drawn, and now drawn again) floating with the bottle-rocket stars. the yellow ones really looks like stars. yellow is a color that reverberates. almost not really a color, more a glow. i want to do a whole drawing of only yellow. went to the store to buy more paper--experimenting now with different papers. this one i used today is too forgiving, it's too easy, and it looks too much like a drawing than like an interaction with paper. i need ink to bleed into paper and mess itself up.

and i was going for beauty today for the first time it seems in a while. i went online and found an artist who seems to be absent of sense but is visually beautiful and i was drawn in. beauty is a magnet. i want to see ink bleed and drip, run, seep, crawl. i want to get out of the way. i painstakingly drew a dead flower and it just looks like a painstakingly drawn dead flower. boring.

in d.c. the baptism was simple and layla didn't cry. we were united as a family and my sister cried. joy, responsibility, momentous. i held layla for an hour and she slept in my arms and we stared at her like people stare at babies for so long, why i'm not sure, just awe or like staring at a fire, it's in our blood, our ancestors did it. sometimes i want to give up my baby dreams and make my books my only babies and then i hold a baby in the flesh and know i can have everything in due time.

now the wedding dress. i think better than the first try. the seams not perfect, hopefully i'll get help with that. trying hard. trying to make sewing a gentle dance, trying to think about skill and not just art, but trying always to remember art. not boring.

cruciferous week

2007-01-12T13:30:00.000-05:00

a visiting artist came today and i felt like hugging her, she seemed to understand my project instantly. she encouraged me to just keep going, keep drawing, just make as many drawings as i can before i graduate. i felt so inspired i pulled my old drawing off the wall and began a new one. it felt so refreshing, so satisfying to feel understood and inspired. to have a teacher-figure whose main function is to be a light.

i'm in d.c. for the weekend, typing up my powerpoint project on the plane and eating way too much good food after this week of mostly only vegetables.

2007-01-11T23:22:00.000-05:00

this afternoon after our department meeting i hemmed and hawed and scrubbed my studio floor on my hands and knees and then i started to draw. i put the paper on the floor and drew on my knees. it feels better that way. less scholarly, more prayerful. i drew these bottle rocket discards, like flower-like pieces of plastic. plastic! tomorrow i need to draw more plastic. the stuff that people want to throw away.

if i have to say what i mean right now, i think i mean that i need to draw what others overlooked, and by drawing to look at it deeply and to put love into it, then to draw that love and that love until it's highest self is the furthest from its actual body.

the visiting artist today had a true artist spirit, and she made everything feel spontaneous and fun. you make art because you need to. you make art always filled half with doubt and half with inspiration. no one ever feels they have arrived anywhere that will be stable for long. that all feels so much more true than the professionalism we're sometimes taught. i yearn for that flight to overwhelm my studio, and to be able to close my studio door (we don't have doors) and just make without feeling watched. i suppose there will be the rest of my life for most no one to care what i'm working on. i should be grateful now.

in dressmaking, the fewest stitches and the least weight often equate to the most carefully made dress. i'm trying that with the wedding dress. trying to see how one stitch can hold together layers and layers and make a curve that says what two curves couldn't. it makes me want to sew my drawings together, to contain them and make them have some order based on connection.

2007-01-10T21:24:00.000-05:00

i admit i've worked all day (besides my morning walk in the woods) on wedding stuff. i know the school year will swallow me up, so i made my save the date cards this morning, ordered the envelopes, and worked on my dress in the afternoon until now. well, still working on it now.

the dress. it's fiber, right? i tell myself that all day. i've never sewn before, and now all i want to do is make my own clothes.

i'm getting tired of celebrity gossip. this is a big step for me. i think i may be getting over that obsession--a four year obsession that i can't quite understand. i think my life has absorbed it, my art has become a sort of celebrity gossip, and i've written about my life enough to feel that camera always on me. i've become it now, in my own way. this is a relief.

i don't know why sometimes my energy is like a magnet drawn to a certain part of my life and then another and then another. i thought i wouldn't ever have energy to work on the wedding or the house, and now that's all i think about. always a certain amount of energy, it just depends where it's directed. no, sometimes energy lulls, but i feel it inside me like a heavy battery sitting in its charger.

in san francisco, we got our key to our hotel, walked into the room, and someone was sleeping there. we rushed out, but the man didn't stir. public/private, intimate/in full view.

2007-01-09T23:17:00.000-05:00

the first official day. i woke feeling ready for a pure new day, but opened my eyes and felt the old one rush in. that feeling, of wanting newness and finding something stale, that is a sad one. but i trudged through a walk, this sadness feeling more like anger--that need to push things out instead of just deflate. that's healthier sometimes. i pushed past it, talked it out, and drove to school feeling more alive.

not ready to draw yet--besides, we had lecture and meetings and a dinner and more lecture, from 2 until 9:30 all this went on. and before that i nearly finished my paper--whose deadline extended two weeks out of the blue.

but almost ready to draw. afraid to. no big paper yet, no. i just want a clean studio. i can't figure out how to take everything down and not ruin it and not make it wilt under something else in a box. little shallow boxes now filled with a couple random things. no order. the woman who came to my studio today asked about my order--do i need it, how do i want my drawings ordered inside the big drawing. i'm not sure. order threatens to turn cheeky. i like chaos, with accidental order. but that may be a cop-out.

over break, i fell in love with rust. i just want to draw rust. is that okay? hooks and screws all rusted. i actually want to draw in paper a huge tractor that is rusting. life-sized. i've been itching to do that. or maybe the scale that i see it when i'm standing a house away.

home now by the fire, 11:30pm. my dog is getting so responsible. he didn't jump on me when i walked in tonight, and now he's sitting with us very still and not bothering the cat, just watching steve type on his computer, watching the screen scroll down.

new day

2007-01-08T19:33:00.000-05:00

i pictured last night that entering this last semester is like driving slowly through a sunny day and knowing that in no time at all--i can see it in front of me--i'm about to enter a blizzard with big trucks all around me in an 80 mph zone.
so no suprise really that i awoke to a snow storm.

then a walk in the woods (so good, and thank goodness), a phone call with the agent, then school for a small bit, then home again to take photographs for our save-the-date cards, then a trip to look for material for the wedding dress, and now we're working on the card when i really need to write the final section of my paper due on the 10th. the photo is not going well. we've been through 3 photo shoots now with our photographer (s's daughter), and so far neither of us both look fantastic in the same picture. now it's starting to look a little unspontaneous. the last one, s had a headache and gave his face in every one that said he's unhappy, not humoring this, and feeling ironic. i gave myface that said i was unhappy, not into feeling ironic, and tired. it wasn't a good mix, no. and throughout, the camera was focusing on the lamp above us and not on our faces, so it's fuzzy anyway, every single one of them.

break: home, pennsylvania, where i slept and watched movies and made presents and met with friends and a long time with family. held my new and only niece and watched her look up at me (before she cried and went back to her mother). she gets so beautiful, and more and more i want to run away with her in my arms. family is always a time of feeling like things never change and like things are changing. too much feels different too quickly, and too much i wish were different that isn't. and plus wedding planning, which (why does it? does it have to be?) is full of tensions, or choices on which no one can agree. family is intimate, but when you've been away for so long, it's a jarring mix sometimes of closeness and a sudden realization of difference.

then to cincinnati for a wedding. by this point, i'd finished two great books. ("random family" by adrian nicole leblanc, and john gottman's new-ish book about how to have more productive conversations in a relationship--not because we don't, but actually because we have really great conversations and i want to know why and i want to be the best converesationalist in the wooooooorrrrllld.)

then s, his daughter and i flew to san francisco. felt like tourists, but really i spent the time praying any chance i could that i could be unconditionally loving, patient, and forgiving to all who had to share a small room with me for a week. really, like praying in the shower, praying in the bathroom, any chance i was alone or could just be inside of my head. i think it worked. it was easier by the end to just feel a simple joy and appreciation, though boy it was work.

then home to paint the kitchen, the cabinets, tear down the basement ceiling, and start sanding the UGLY knotty pine on the basement walls to prepare it for a coat of paint. and trying to re-bond with all the animals i abandoned for too long.

now school is back, and my anxiety about it is not small. i was up nearly all of last night, stock still and staring inside my eyes at the wedding dress i need to fix, at what i should do. by morning i had an answer. sigh. but the wedding plus school? plus commute? plus family? plus manuscript? i like to test my limits of energy, yes, but not when my little dog gets neglected. among others. i feel isolated my everyone including myself with my over-need to keep pushing forward. and my poor research paper gets left in the dust, as well.

feeling tired now. not a great way to start. i am not good with beginnings, or not with the beginnings of semesters. almost every single one leaves me feeling inadequate and a strange version of nervous. exhausted. overwhelmed. insecure. as soon as i get drawing, i'll be okay. drawing calms me--it focuses me so much, directs my attention in a way that nothing else can.

these next two weeks the main job will be choosing a new head of the fiber department. we go to lots of meetings, lectures, dinners, etc., then put in our student vote for who could best lead us. i'm excited, and maybe it will be a chance to calm down and focus outward before i begin the long haul inward. snow storm, start.

2006-12-15T00:06:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-13T20:20:00.000-05:00

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)

2006-12-12T21:33:00.000-05:00

a rainbow at 7:30 in the morning

2006-12-12T16:52:00.000-05:00

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..

2006-12-11T19:13:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-09T18:45:00.000-05:00

2006-12-08T20:20:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-07T22:06:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-06T18:21:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-05T22:14:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-04T21:46:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-12-02T21:19:00.000-05:00

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

2006-12-01T18:10:00.000-05:00

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!

falling off the cliff of vaguery

2006-11-30T14:51:00.000-05:00

woke early enough to get to school to draw before our 10am meeting. but afterwards i had to come home and now have to try to quarantine myself to read and write notes which will hopefully lead to a research paper. i can't wait to not have to write 'research paper' anymore. i don't even know what it means. there aren't even any guidelines. no page length, no topic requirement. that level of vaguery makes me not feel free but rather afraid and useless. i need sonnets to push up against their walls.
feeling boring today. i better write something good. but man it felt good to draw. i felt for about half an hour today like i know what i'm doing and i'm excited about it. that's a rare feeling in my art world.

ps: do you know you can click on pictures to see them bigger? i like that about blogger: b/c i upload them so big, they're really big and detailed when you click on them.

a recording of love in december

2006-11-29T16:39:00.000-05:00

it's the strangest thing to me that a week ago i wasn't sure if i'd stay in art school and yesterday and today i feel inspired far beyond what i deserve. how did that happen? where did all that affection for art go? and why did it return?

anyway, most of the day was spent with critiques--four hours of them. but critiques are a great time to see your own work in a different way. it always seems that when we're describing someone else's work, we're really describing our own.

so i began to think this morning before critiques about this idea of photographing drawings as a means of capturing them. but my impulse after a moment was to draw the drawings again. in fact, to draw my whole wall. a blog of sorts. a recording of love in december.

i rolled out a big piece of paper and the drawing has begun, albeit just a little because jack's over tonight and i have to get back. and because steve and i have been missing each other's boats badly for two days, and finally today i remembered what i'm supposed to say when he says 'i'm not feeling connected to you'--my line is: 'i'm sorry, baby, can i make it up to you by taking you out to dinner?' which is what we're going to do. no more blaming, just eating.

transmutations into love

2006-11-28T17:29:00.000-05:00

woke early, walked an hour in the woods, dropped off the manuscript at the post office, bought archival paper at an ann arbor paper store, drove to school (stopped halfway for a desperate sushi fix), and then worked intermittently on my paper and on my studio work.

i've decided that my research paper really, really has to be something that helps me to grow and can't just be a boring paper that no one cares about. no one will care about it anyway, so i might as well care about it. so i spent a couple of hours trying to analyze what my personal position is on writing and art and their confluence, trying to understand why i like to unite the two in my head, why i favor one over the other sometimes, etc. then i delved into research, reading, online googling, went to the cranbrook library.

and now my barely healthy body is starting to take on the characteristics of the flu-riddled, swishy feeling in my temples. come home, steve keeps writing me, just to be funny really because he knows how little it would take to sway me because all i want is popcorn and to sit and read these art books beside my beautiful puppy. but really it feels so good to be in the studio, to confront my work and have it talk to me from the side of my head as i read and research.

i started thinking today more about what i'm doing, what will make me most happy in the studio. i really am thinking about love. and i really do love some things i've made. but not so much them--they can go, be thrown away and i'd be okay--but their relationship to light and to a moment. maybe it's true that photography is the way to capture that. a life-size photograph of the object that gets a hold of the light. and photography as our method of cherishing, of fixing. --but also of falsifying. a photograph isn't always as honest as the real thing b/c i look at my own photographs and wonder if i've touched them up or enhanced them in some way. i'm not sure if the honesty would be lost if i only showed photographs. but there's something satisfying and sort of mean to me about making my work be the photograph of the work. would it hold the same magic? or more magic? the photograph sometimes feels more like a poem than the actual object. it feels more like a point of view of a loved thing than the loved thing itself, which is what a poem gets at. hmm. have to think more about this. here is one i took today, a photograph of a drawing of a napkin. the napkin itself wasn't loved, but something about it asked me to draw it to make it mine, and the drawing was fine but the cut-out drawing became more the real thing, and now the photograph turns it more possibly into a real napkin in some crazy world--it must be real if i can photograph it, and now it's difficult to tell if it's just a trick of the eye that causes the apparent flattening since it does cast a shadow after all. and maybe it would be small enough to fit in my wallet, a photograph of a drawing of a napkin i never really liked but now sort of love, nostalgically.

2006-11-27T20:49:00.000-05:00

i woke early, walked in the woods, then spent the morning and early afternoon working on the manuscript. it was terrible to work on it. too much stress involved in the final day before we send it off again to the agent. too much a feeling of hating it because i've stared at it too much and certain parts i feel are still inadequate. little paragraphs here and there that make me want to barf, to put it bluntly sorry.

then went to school. after first sitting on my bed for half an hour, unable to get up, unable to go on with my life after busy busy and then thanksgiving family and then driving back and here needing to throw myself into work again. not feeling decompressed yet.

but thank god i got to the studio and felt inspired and drew a little and remembered why i love this art thing so much. i felt i made some progress even, got to see things differently and felt glad for some things i've made that i really truly do love.

then i read in front of some of the school, an essay about auras that i wrote under the most loveliest anne carson's tutelage. it was fun, and gary said it was like i was an undercover assassin and i came out from under my fiber art disguise to shoot people down with all the tricks up my sleeve. it was pretty fun.

then wine and cheese and the great brian evenson, then a drive home. now we're off to print out our manuscript at steve's office. then off to school tomorrow early so i can spend the day in my studio and ugh writing my research paper reeeeeeesuuuurgchhhhhhhhhh paaaaaaaeprrrrrrrrrrrr.