Author: Ayin Es

HEAT!

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Ahhhhh! This heat is crazy! We are in the middle of a “mini” heat wave right now in Los Angeles and it is sucking butt. It’s kinda killing me. The heat is making me soooooo tired. Everything is in slow motion. You can’t take 2 steps outside without singing the bottom of your feet. Going outside is like being baked alive. If it kills me I hope to come back as a cake. Mmm.

I am still working on the big Lapland piece. Little bits at a time, and slowly but surely, it will come together. I just have to stay as focused as possible on this one, while at the same time try my best to crank out other smaller pieces. I had to bring the Lapland piece into the house because the garage is so hot, it is a kind of ancient torture chamber in there.

I have been working more on my black hole series on panels. I managed to finish one and start another. I usually make the black holes out of industrial manila pattern paper, paint it black and then stick it onto the panel with clear polymer. Then, as always these days, I make little me’s on them in pencil and oils. Why have I been doing this so much? I have no fucking clue! I wonder if I’m some kind of ego maniac. Me! me! me!

I actually really consider them girls when I’m making them. Sure they are self portraits of sorts, as all art really is to some degree or another, but I think these bitches are more about my dilemma with being female, relating to other woman, and trying to understand what sort of female identity I can’t ever decide I want to be.

Oh! I wanted to mention this great-great-great (Sorry, the heat has stolen my ability to think up better adjectives.) blog I found called My Love For You. HOURS of art, illustration, sculpture, animation, jewelry, accessories, and fun! Perhaps many of you already know about it, but Things seem to all blend together for me – there are just so many art websites these days. Once I found it, I knew I had to add it to my list for my web wasting time right away.

Meighan is the name of the babe that runs the joint, and she updates often. There are sometimes several blog posts a day. She is an art lover all right, and it shows. I love the site, and the title. You should too: My Love For You

Seize the Day

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I’m having sleeping problems again. Maybe it’s all the bad news from China, Myanmar, India, Iraq, you name it, I can only take so much. I am so sad about seeing the pictures from China. What a nightmare, but it’s no dream, it’s real. I was listening to NPR all day yesterday while trying to paint and many times I just stopped and wept.

I’ve been working on this bigger piece about Lapland. I’m no where near done, but here is a pic that Michael snapped without me knowing on Saturday.

Here’s what it looked like the day before:

Later in the evening I went to Kimberly Brooks‘ show at Taylor De Cordoba Gallery in Culver City. She created an exhibit of paintings that depicted what it was like to spend a summer of family vacations after realizing that her father was terminally ill. They are moving and organic, warm and colorful. The show is called “Technicolor Summer.” She wrote quite a nice article on the Huffington Post about the meaning behind the paintings and what it was like to work her way up to the show. I loved this piece in particular, called, “Yosemite Walk I.” Looky:


Kimberly Brooks, “Yosemite Walk I” 2008, Oil on Linen, 24″ x 18″


Kimberly Brooks, “Yosemite Walk I” (Detail), 2008.

I love the color and the loose brush strokes, all the while the people are more refined as if these family members are in ultra-focus against what a blur life has been when we forget how little time we have here on this beautiful Earth.

Technicolor Summer runs until June 14th.

I guess I had a busy week, even though my art progress has been so slow. I have also been writing for a grant, and those take forever when you’re trying to say just the right magic things that will ignite something perfect with the people who are reading it. Thursday night Baby Smith and I went to the Investing in Artists seminar at the Japanese American Cultural Center downtown to get a better perspective as to what CCI is going for. I’ve applied the last 2 rounds with no luck, but I feel I’m at least writing a better grant this time around. It is good practice to do these things. It’s a good way to define your goals, your needs and wants, and that is half the battle really. Today I feel lucky to be alive, in this country, and without catastrophe. Grant or no grant, life is beautiful. And life is sad. Seize the day, damn it.

Out of the Closet

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I do not usually post political tirades on my blog. I like to keep it generally about art, and a sort of document about what I am working on in my studio. AND it is difficult to out myself about this subject when it is completely unpopular amongst every single one of my peers; I have yet to find one artist that isn’t crazy gah-gah over Obama. And for the record, I am not against him. But I am a long time supporter of Clinton. If you want to throw tomatoes at me, that’s fine.

If you think I’m against what Obama stands for, that would be incorrect. I am all for “Change.” I just think a REAL change would be Hillary Clinton as our first woman president. Don’t you think men have run this country long enough? And I’m not only for Clinton because she is a woman. I am for her because she has a long history for fighting for our civil rights, has tried to change the healthcare system when she had a little bit of power during the Clinton administration, and has not given up despite people telling her to quit. She’s specific and cares about people. She has to deal with all the media making her look bad because they are obviously pro-Obama. I love NPR, but they are HARD on Hillary. Every media outlet has been hard on her. People have been harder on her than they have been for any man — and have expected far more from her than they would from a man. When have you ever heard the media disappointed in a male candidate for not showing his “softer side?” Boy was I pissed when Hillary had to cry a little after that whole thing. She shouldn’t have! She’s tough, and so what? It’s such a double standard, and she’s putting up with a lot. She’s the underdog, not Obama. And we just may have a nominee based on 48 states instead of all 50. People seem to be forgetting about that too. How fair is that to Michigan and Florida, not to mention all of us? Shouldn’t everybody’s vote count? Is this the hijack of 2000 all over again?

Anyway, I just wanted to come out of the closet about all this. This morning I was on hillaryspeaksforme.com watching all the videos, and I was moved to type this up.  So let the attacks on me begin.

writing

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I am the great Alter,
bring me your sufferings
and sacrifice your cock.
Unhook me from these power lines
& nail my hands to your hips.
I’ll be your portable guru.

That is from a poem I wrote a long, long time ago. I wrote a lot of poems in my lifetime and I was just going over some of them and realized that they all totally suck. Most are gibberish and make little sense to me now, but I was sure into feeling the feelings at the time I wrote them. I think that was the problem with them. I wasn’t writing about anything specific. I was mostly just angry, hurt, in love/in hate, betrayed or stuck inside a dark hole of some kind of injustice. Things were just flying around in my mind like random chaos.

One thing’s for sure, re-reading a lot of my writings is that I sure had a twisted, brutal sense of repressed sexual vehemence. It’s as if I could be reading the diary of a potential serial killer, or other such disturbed person. It is interesting how different I am now. I am the same in a lot of ways. I am still disturbed. I just don’t want to kill anyone anymore. And I don’t blame myself for indulging in a Mad Max fantasy – I’ve lived through some horrific experiences. I think it’s perfectly healthy to want to conquer victimhood and come out shining like a rose. I just find it interesting that now as I’m nearing 40, I no longer feel the same. My thoughts seem a lot more connected in context, and my feelings are easier to recognize. I guess I’ve reached a better place with age.

I was thinking a lot about this stuff because I was cruising around in the Bukowski.net forum on a thread about whether being a writer could be suggested as a career path. I think like any creative endeavor, it takes passion and guts, sacrifice and undying determination. And that determination doesn’t necessarily have to come from confidence in your work either. You can just be a crazy son of a bitch with an obsessive disorder. That’s what seems to be working for me.

New Painting

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I have been working like molasses. The art is coming out so slow it seems. I am still not in any kind of “swing” and especially not the same swing I was in before I moved. Working at home is something I used to do, so you’d think I would adjust after 6 whole months of settling in, but it’s just not the same. Using both my office and garage space is a bit strange. It’s cramped, and I don’t want to make any kind of mess in a place I only rent. Not that I’m a big mess maker anyway, but a wet brush flying around is never a good thing, especially around all my completed work a few inches away. I miss having at least one clean white wall with ample space around it to create larger pieces.

That being said, here is another piece I did in my office that is just 30 x 30 inches. It seems to look good with Eve’s Dilemma. I call it Head in the Soul (for now), which comes from the meaning of shin in the earliest extant book on Jewish esotericism. It’s done in oil, pattern paper, pencil and thread on canvas. The shin is stitched with black and white thread through the pattern paper, and the black & red bugs are embroidered.

Many people like to read what I write in my work, and I must say that I never mean it to be read so overtly. It is supposed to be part of the whole painting, but I can not control the viewer, nor do I ever want to. But for those of you that need to know what it says:

What words can not say:

My essence discarded,

lost in chemicals,

numb to embedded grains of dust.

Spirit bugs invade my skill

is hollow.

Buried, my hand disconnects from the magic tragedy

and creativity slowly leaks from my gut like molasses.

Hey, don’t ask why this stuff comes out of me.

I started working on a bigger piece the other day. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time and wanted to incorporate my Laplandic ancestory, likened to a genetic memory. It will be mostly white with some tiny reindeer and little lavvus (which is what the Saami people call the dwellings that look like teepees.) I should probably call that one, “I Bet You Never Heard of a Jewish Reindeer Herder, Did ya?” or something along that line. I just hope that one turns out remotely close to how I envision it. These last 2 canvases started with a pretty vague composition, while the rest of it just happened as I went along. I guess that is something I should embrace, since over-thinking art is just profoundly overrated. It’s a fine line between instinct and plan. I’m always looking for that perfect balance between the two. I’ll let you know when I find it.