It’s already the end of the first week of September, and I’ve fallen so far behind my studio schedule. It’s not even funny, so stop laughing.

I’m not laughing at all, but that’s because it’s all on me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me that I haven’t been painting. I mean, I’ve been through a lot and I’m still doing through plenty. 

This coming Thursday, I go into the hospital to do the brain angiogram, which is properly called a catheter cerebral angiography. I haven’t been thinking about it; otherwise, I would be too scared to do it. I have been through much worse, so I know I’m not a complete scaredy cat, but I’d lie if I said it doesn’t freak me out a little. One wrong little move and I could potentially have a stroke. It’s really hard to trust doctors in general, but sometimes, we have no other choice. 

I haven’t been posting my blog entries on Substack lately. I guess I thought they had been too personal, but I’m always personal, so what the hell. This one is going up. 

Early last week, I ended up rewriting my entire Guggenheim application, with Hannah‘s help. I stopped obsessing over it and wrote it in very plain language. Then, I submitted it. That part is over. The second part of the application starts in October. That’s when I submit my images and have my references write recommendation letters on my behalf. That part is a bit daunting, asking these people to do me that favor. I have no idea what they will write. They all have to be raving about how great I am as an artist. That’s pretty nerve-racking if you ask me. One of my references, Anne, will be meeting with me (on Zoom), and we’ll go over it a bit. I know she’ll be writing an excellent letter for me. She’s a great writer, and I use her as a reference quite frequently. She is now an independent curator and a huge supporter of mine. I truly appreciate her. She curated my first Exodus show. That was my best exhibition to date. She also wrote an amazing catalog essay for it.

I sent in a new submission for Skowhegan as well. This year, there is a new rule (just like Guggenheim’s new rules. Why me?!). Instead of an artist’s statement, we need to create a very short video to discuss who we are and what we’re interested in artistically—all in under 90 seconds. Try doing that. It’s not fun or easy. I initially wrote a bit of a script based on AI telling me how many words said aloud would be equal to 90 seconds, and it said about 200 words. I didn’t have much of a problem writing that down, but what I couldn’t do was talk that fast. The first time I recorded myself, it was over 2.5 minutes! That’s exceedingly too long. It was difficult leaving so much out, but I finally managed to get it down to 1.28 minutes. I left out a lot of key features, like any bit of my process, what most of my motivations are, and my history. Each item had to be more like one quick sentence. I cut it with a few pictures and sent it off. It’s cheaper if you apply earlier than later, but the deadline isn’t until October 17th.

Yesterday, Hannah and I spent most of the day working on bits of my website. I’ve been learning that having a footer is super important. Apparently, I’d have a higher likelihood of people joining my mailing list. Then, I woke up this morning to hundreds of spam mail from bots. Don’t know how to fix that, but it needs to be snuffed out somehow.

The rest of the pages are better aligned now. I have a lot of static pages on the site, so all those had to be addressed individually. I probably fixed over a hundred pages. Earlier in the day, we were having a hell of a time making the footer work for both desktop and mobile. I started thinking that I should just set up an entirely new site on Squarespace, so I threw a quick one together in an hour. My real site runs off a database of thousands of images. It would be over 20 years of work thrown in the trash. I’d have to pick very few areas and then upload them individually to Squarespace. When I was done, it sure looked nice, but it would never function in the same way my current site does. It’s just that, for the last 20 years, we’ve been kinda hacking the code together. It feels so messy on the backend. It looks right, but it always feels fragile. We started it long ago, when there was no such thing as a template or WordPress, or Squarespace, Wix, or any of that.

I actually build websites on Squarespace all the time, but only for artists. Not for free, of course; I still charge for it. It’s easy (for me) because Squarespace covers everything, and it’s already integrated. What more can you ask for? It is such a great deal, too. It’s somewhere around $300 a year to host it there, plus it comes with so much: the SSL, commerce, 24-7 support (probably the best support there is), and a domain. It’s all built into one place, and after building websites for a couple of decades, you just can’t beat it. Sounds like I work for Squarespace, doesn’t it? I swear I don’t. And why, if it’s so great, do I not have my site there? Because, like I said, my site runs off a massive database of ALL my work from the dawn of time. The site looks simple, but it aint. 

At some point, I need to get off my computer and start working on actual art. I wonder if I’ll ever do that.