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Ganesh, remover of obstacles and my favorite Hindu god:
A great book from the used bookstore:
My sketchbook:
Mock-ups for a collage:
I can't decide how to lay them out. I sort of like the footshroom tower best. (Yertle the Turtle, anyone?)
My new literary hero, Janice Erlbaum, whose new book I blogged about recently, has a great post on her blog about writer's block (even though she doesn't like to use that phrase), and it applies totally and completely to an artist's struggles in the studio, or better yet, the struggle to get into the studio. When I'm suddenly hitting the gym every single day for marathon workout sessions, and I'm tackling cleaning/organizing projects at home smack in the middle of the morning when I should be working, I know that I am avoiding the studio. And while there is value in down time and taking a breather, I think I've passed all that, and now I'm just avoiding my work. Maybe it's because I don't want to do more of the same, and the ideas I'm tossing around feel like dead ends, and so it feels sort of hopeless and pointless and just plain infuriating. Or maybe, as Janice suggests, there's some fear there. (Ya think???)
So in my blog surfing these past few days, I saw that Jeana Sohn had a post about Kiki Smith, and it was the proverbial light bulb going on in my head. Kiki Smith has been hugely inspirational to me -- for her use of animal imagery, her wrestlings with fairy tales, gender roles, and the human body, and also her willingness to tackle pretty much any and every conceivable material in the service of art making. So I took out my favorite book of her art, and maybe, just maybe felt inspired again. Her accordion-fold artist's books are my favorite.
(Scans from Kiki Smith: Prints, Books, and Things.)
In my tortured non-art making time, I've been thinking a lot about artist's books, woodcuts, Leonard Baskin, and Aubrey Beardsley. I've been photographing goldfinches in my back yard.
I've also been collaging in my sketchbook.
I don't know what I was thinking with the rabbit in the last one. Ugh!
Here at Casa Nature Morph, we are somewhat obsessed with the heavens: the constellations, the mythology behind them, the planets, the moon, the whole shebang. And there was an amazing lunar eclipse tonight! My camera was here at home with me, but both my tripods were in the studio, so I tried to photograph the eclipse without having anything to stabilize the camera other than my own hands. Ha! But I am totally into these photos, and I love how my unsteadiness with the camera led to Saturn, Regulus, and the moon making drawings in space.
The skunk cloud is lifting, at long last. And I feel rusty in the studio. It dawned on me that I've been doing so much collage that I started to have this weird sort of artist's block/anxiety about picking up a paint brush again. So I decided to re-integrate myself into the painting groove by making some quick watercolor sketches on all the little scraps of paper I've accumulated. Here's one.
My rule for myself was that I couldn't do any sketching with a pencil first. I want to do a whole bunch of these and see where they take me. I've also finally returned to my sketchbook, and to wolves.
I've also started working on some ideas for large watercolors. I'm still hooked on birch trees, but I want to finally make use of the pictures of carnivorous plants that I took at the end of the summer, which I blogged about here. Hopefully I'll have some images of them to post later in the week.
I am dreaming of warm weather, the beach, lazy playground days with my daughter, and life before the dog got skunked. I think I need to hire a fumigator. I went to the gym today, and when I opened my locker to get my stuff after I worked out, a huge cloud of SKUNK came out, and I just. about. died. I have bathed the dog in every concoction, twice. I have sprayed the rugs and furniture. I have done laundry ad nauseam. I am tempted to just throw in the towel and give up, except for the fact that the gym incident tells me that every article of my clothing smells like skunk. Or at least my down jacket does. (And you might be thinking that I myself smell like skunk, but I refuse to go there.) If anyone out there has any pearls of wisdom, I beseech you to send them my way. Thank you. I will reward you with great riches -- mushroom art, perhaps -- if you can save me from this horror.
In other news, I need to begin gearing up in earnest for my 2-person show with Justin Gibbens at Punch Gallery in Seattle. It opens April 3, and after much back-and-forth swapping of ideas for a show title (my own most ridiculous suggestion: "Scale of Dragon, Tooth of Wolf" from Macbeth. Gah!), we've decided on Animal Spell. The skunk situation is adding a whole new meaning to the title for me. I hope Justin won't kill me for posting a picture of his Unicorn Hare drawing here, since I have been working in the studio to no avail and have nothing new to share.
image: Justin Gibbens, Unicorn Hare.
You can see more of Justin's work in my post from the Aqua Art Miami fair in December.
Maybe I should just paint skunks?
My dog got sprayed by a skunk at midnight last night, and I bathed her in a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dish detergent at 2 a.m. Apparently this is the treatment du jour, taking the place of the long-revered tomato juice bath. So, in light of this late-night trauma, I thought some levity was in order: a spoonbillshroom. Happy weekend!
I began excavating some of the piles of paper, source material, and [to put it politely] stuff in my studio yesterday, and I unearthed a bundle of artist's books that I made years ago. These books have a lot of religious imagery and text in them, probably because I made them so soon after divinity school. But the thing that amazed me was how much collage I had done, because collage has only been in my work for the past nine months (or so I thought!).
This is a little book (6x4 inches) that I made as a sort of cathartic exercise after a friend and I had a dramatic falling-out. Ouch!
I found a whole bunch of these little books; I'll post more over the weekend.
Here are scans of my spread in the new 2008 Northeast edition of New American Paintings. On newsstands now!
This is my fourth time being published in this book (!). (Does that make me old??) It has always done good things for me -- shows, sales, etc. If you are an artist, I highly recommend that you submit your work. You can find the submission guidelines on their website. The publication's offices are in the same building as my studio, and I've known the folks who run Open Studios Press for years, and I have only good things to say about them.
(Side note: the sun is out, so there will be no whining about being drenched on this blog today!)
Today was another one of those days of extreme soddenness and downtroddenness, the drama of which is not lost on those people who have known me a long time (hello Stephanie!). So: we got inches of rain today. I am still wearing an open-toed, ER-issued, broken-toe shoe, with an environment-killing plastic bag covering my sock (which, shockingly, still got drenched). I barreled my way way into the studio, though, and craved color, and made these sketchbook collages.
It could be fun to pop out of the base of a mushroom, all swathed in pink chiffon, no? And:
Maybe I just need to wrap my head in pink satin?
Anyway, the big news is that I was nominated for a very significant artist's prize here in Boston. Now I have to submit a disc of images in hopes of being juried into the final group of four artists who get a show at the institution in question and will then be juried again for the big prize. I'm thrilled to be nominated but am also feeling like I have to steel myself for all this jurying. Apparently there are dozens and dozens of us vying for those four final spots. Ugh.
Now check out this amazing photograph, reproduced here by permission of Birthe Piontek.
My daughter has been doing a lot of cutting and pasting and collaging (like mother, like daughter), and she of the Rapunzel hair has been inadvertently cutting off little end pieces of her hair as she cuts up paper. So last night, I had to officially trim her hair to even it out, and all the little shiny blond curls on the bathroom floor reminded me of this Untitled (Sub Rosa series) Birthe Piontek photo I saw at the Jen Bekman Gallery opening on Friday night in NYC. Another one of Birthe's photographs is being featured today over on 20x200. I love her work.
While we're on the subject of New York, when I was there over the weekend, my publicist friend Lauren gave me a copy of the new Janice Erlbaum book, which she happens to be publicizing. I read Have You Found Her in in the airport, on the shuttle, and the rest of the night on the couch. It is quite a read. At one point, midway through, I didn't want to keep reading: I couldn't bear the story, and I was mad at the way that every single character in the book was behaving. The book made me completely uncomfortable and squirmy, and I take that as a sign that a) I have issues, or b) the book is a good one, or c) both of the above. The author has a blog, and I think I'm going to be a frequent visitor there. What I truly appreciate about Janice's blog is how she's put it all out there: the anxiety and exaltation of writing and publishing and launching a book. I relate to all of it, since it is very much like making work for a show, installing it, and then freaking out before the opening (what if people hate the work? what if nothing sells? what if it gets a scathing review?). So I recommend that you read Janice Erlbaum in whatever format you choose.
And that's all she wrote.
Thanks for the sympathy for my poor broken toe. This collage is what I felt like, limping around New York on one good leg. I managed to get down there for a whirlwind visit that was much shorter than what I had originally planned, but I squeezed in as much art and as many friends as I possibly could. I did not take a single photo, which is very unlike me, but I attribute it to being completely preoccupied with my foot and making sure that no one stepped on it!
While I was away, the Boston Globe ran this little piece on the Love Fest show at Allston Skirt, and I was so happy to see that they had reproduced one of my collages.
One of the highlights of my trip was brunching with the brilliant woman behind Lux Lotus, who looked at me across the table at Good World and said: slow down, chill out, and do less, better. And she's right. I have been laughing off my inability to keep my new year's resolution to say the word "no" more often, to slow down and make less work and sign on to less shows, and make the work that I do do, better. So it was good to hear it again from someone who has picked up on the constant frenetic nature of my life and believes in me enough to tell me to just. slow. down. (Let's not even psychoanalyze the fact that the "freak accident" that broke my toe was me colliding with my drawing portfolio in the kitchen at midnight the night before I was supposed to leave for New York. Okay.)
I got around the city mostly by cab, but I did ride the subway a few times, and I saw one of the posters from the Poetry in Motion program on the subway that totally rocked my world. I googled it and found that many people have seen it and been moved, which I think is really cool. It's called "If There is Desire" by Vera Pavlova. I wrote it down on the little hotel notepad that was in my purse and then had to transcribe my chicken scratch.
If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.
If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.
If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.
If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.
Wow. I can hardly wrap my brain around it, but it reads like a mantra or a chant, and I can't seem to turn away from it. So, thank you, Vera Pavlova and Poetry in Motion and the New York City subway.
