Art & Process

What am I? Winner? Loser? Role Model for Narcissists?

October 18, 2013October 18, 2013Ayin Es2 Comments

I’ve been working on that COLA grant and not much in the way of art. I forgot about that damn thing. Saying “the COLA grant” is just a short way of saying the 2014-15 City of Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs Grant Program Application for the Individual Artist Master Fellowship.

I have applied for this grant every year since I have been eligible. You are eligible when you have had 15 or more years of professional experience. The only year I did not apply was last year. I guess I was just disheartened and felt like it was useless to apply anymore, so I don’t know why I am applying now, but I am. A friend of mine won last year. Actually, a friend of mine wins every year. Every year, at least one or two people I know pretty well wins. Same goes for the CalFund.

However, I applied for the Pollock-Krasner award seven times before I finally got it. I’m sure I have mentioned that thousands of times. I mention that because I want to be encouraging to other artists to keep trying. Don’t get discouraged. Stay on track. Keep going. Don’t let those poopers get you down. Yet here I am complaining.

You tell me. How can I express my own frustrations and honest insecurities while trying to be some sort of role model? That’s a toughy. Because I try to be candid as I possibly can here. I’m not full of shit. I might be full of myself, and I might not even be anybody’s role model, but I really do want to help other artists that are trying to do what I’m doing. I certainly know what it’s like – the feeling of running in place and getting nowhere. You look down and see that you’re just digging a hole into the dirt. And when you do that, there’s nothing else to do but climb out of it. There is nothing else to do. No one else is going to pull you out either.

Sure, you might have the good fortune of having a loving partner or friends, or a loving mom that tells you that you’re wonderful. That your art is fabulous. “You’re the biggest genius on the face of the Earth!” That’s nice to hear. But you and I know it goes in one ear and out the other when you don’t feel the same way about it than they do. YOU have to feel it. And you can get grants and awards and win the MacArthur (wouldn’t that be something!?), but other than taking you out of poverty for the moment, it’s not going to change how you feel about your art. Trust me. You have to believe in yourself. That’s why there’s nothing else to do than to dig yourself out of the hole and keep going.

But I wasn’t even going to talk about that. Nope. I really wasn’t. I was going to show you a few of my mediocre, colored pencil drawings that I happened to scan from some of the Today’s Quandary. books. Here are a strange few:

Lastly, but not leastly, I have another painting on the Huffington Post’s Image Blog! That’s always nice. Good promotion. I think anyway. No, I KNOW! I am grateful as all hell to be on that site. It’s kind of surreal that I have my own art on there, and that I can blog on there whenever I want as well. I just need to get my article writing chops up to par.

Anywho, thanks for reading, you!

Now I’m going to make a CD for my little sister of music that I myself have played on as the drummer. But I have to make it “age appropriate.” Now that’s going to be a challenge. No, not from the Extinct. It’s the band Circle of Power that’s going to be a problem. She loves rap too. A real quandary that is.

Books, Grants, Loss, Work

October 13, 2013October 13, 2013Ayin Es2 Comments

Things are going, you know… Life. Always flippin’ busy and I don’t say that to be a dick or dismissive, it’s just when I get caught up on one thing, more stuff comes and piles on top of the pile that was just about getting smaller – or the pile was a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be.

Like Today’s Quandary. for instance. Part of me thought I could just make the art in those the minute I got all the books in hand. Not possible, as I found that it’s taking me about a half day to do one drawing. I’m slow anyway – in more ways than one – but that’s the way it’s going, so no biggie, I decided it was better for me to do them as they were ordered for the most part anywho. I rather liked customizing them. Still, there are still at least 10 or more I have to send out to galleries and my book dealer that must be made, so I need to get those done. I want to get those done so I can get back onto the drawings for Monographie. <–That’s what I’m going to be calling Carol Es une Monographie de Lignes from now on.

Then, I guess because it’s October, I am applying for three different grants and helping to put one group exhibition proposal together. All four of those tasks take up an immense amount of time because of the intent/proposal parts. You have to word them just right. You’re always second guessing them because you are trying to angle them from the panel members’ perspective and what you think they want to hear. Then you wind up scraping all that and going back to not caring at all what the panel might think and re-writing it all from scratch in your own voice – which will probably also be a losing battle because then it won’t be “professional” enough, so either way you go you’re just screwed. Yet, for some reason, you try to do this every year anyway, and for what?

I don’t know either.

Not to mention all the formatting. Each grant wants you to write your letter of intent in so many characters or less, or so many words or less, or even your resume – which is near impossible, especially if you also have to show at least a 10 year history of professional exhibitions. Some grants want eight copies of everything, or eight copies of your resume, but not your letters of reference, but three copies of your signed insurance forms, and two copies of your application, etc, etc. It’s confusing for the ones that want hard copies, and yes I’m talking about the C.O.L.A. Mailing that grant application out is like putting a 20-pound trout in a giant envelope through the postal system. Those guys need to go electronic already!

So, I’m in grant writing hell right now.

But truthfully it takes the sting out of losing yet another close friend recently. Or rather, it’s been distracting me.

I can beat myself up about this seeming to be a habit, but I have learned from others that good friends, and very especially old friends, do come and go. You grow apart, or things change, or maybe you bring up an old wound you’d like to fix and it’s just too much water under the bridge. It’s the lesson I never seem to learn, or the lesson that keeps on giving: I just can’t have expectations of others or else I’m going to set myself up for disappointments.

Bottom line, I love this person and respect her. I always will. I just can’t make her be the way I want her to be, and that’s okay. She’s the best person she is the way she is, as am I. Maybe one day we can work it out. Or not. I really don’t know. I couldn’t keep going the way it was going. It was killing me. But finally bringing my pain to the surface didn’t go well. What can you do? I’ve thought of several options to make peace and they all seemed dishonest, so here I sit, frozen and sad. Mourning. I just sucks.

First A, then T, now J and none of them are even remotely comparable. Wait, I take that back. They all have something very much in common.

Anyway, I’m hoping to get through this week with a lot of catching up of drawings. I’ll try to start scanning them. I haven’t been doing that. I did scan one:

By the way, the TQ edition is more than half gone now, so if you are waiting, please stop waiting. It’s not a great idea.

Bye for now.

Busy Bizy Buzzy Bee

September 30, 2013September 30, 2013Ayin EsLeave a comment

But no painting.

Nope! No painting. I haven’t painted in months! It’s been all about the books Baby. Not baby books! Who said that? I didn’t. I don’t make baby books. But I might someday. I’d love to make some children’s books. You know, when I have some time? Who has time though? I don’t.

I have more time now than I used to, but I still don’t have any. I say “No” more now. No more now. No more yes-yes-yes. Yes, I will do that for you. Yes, I will show in that show and this show and that show. Yes, I will help you re-write your resume. Yes, I will meet you for a four hour lunch. Yes, I will build you a new website. Yes, I will come to your opening and stand on a cement floor for two hours. Yes, I know it doesn’t look like I have MS, but your cement floor is killing my fucking legs! Yes, I will keep smiling.

It’s just that I forget. I forget how to take care of myself. I forget TO take care of myself. I am genuinely interested in you and art and whatever I want to help with. I wish I could help more. When I was a kid I wanted to be a nun, and I wasn’t even Catholic.

In any case, I had a nice Saturday. I took Alicia to Watts Towers where there was a big drum festival, plus the gallery was open, and we got an official tour of the towers.

Then, when I got home, all my Today’s Quandary. chapbooks arrived from Bill in the mail! Woo hoo!!! They go on sale tomorrow for 25 bucks! You can email me and reserve one before that if you’d like to get yourself a low number. The first 10 are almost all reserved already. Almost. I have #9 sitting here that I’m about to make an original drawing in.

I’m also trying to get over a cold. Or is it a flu? I don’t know what it is, but mjp gave it to me and he still has it too. He got it on a plane coming back from Atlanta on business. Then, when he came home, it got really windy that one day. Remember that day? It was right after it was super hot the day before. So a huge branch of the tree in our backyard broke off. It was about a quarter of the tree! I found out that when trees get very, very hot, they get weak. Well, we have a Brazilian Pepper tree, and right now it’s bee season, so getting it hauled away proved to be tricky. In the fall, the bees from all over the world come to our pepper tree and eat the blossoms that this tree creates from the second week of September to the third week in November.

So if you want a very busy pet bee, YES! I can help you get one.

…5:17 p.m.

So, I’ve been out in the studio for the last couple of hours making drawings in these new chapbooks and I thought I would take a break. These are going to take quite a while, and I thought to myself, self, take your time. I kinda like the idea of knowing who I am drawing for. Since the first eight have been reserved, and they are reserved in a specific order, I know who is getting which number. The few people that I happen to know personally are getting custom drawings – because they are on my mind while I am drawing them. I can’t help it. So, while they are signed, I just might keep the drawing part open until they are ordered – at least some of them. I think that might be a pretty good idear there.

Anyway, I can’t get over how nice these things look. They sure are gorgeous. You should buy one! Such a deal! Especially because they have original art in them.

Oh yeah, I wanted to talk about how I did all this research the the perfect colored pencils and I finally got them today (perfect timing, right!?). So I was just trying them out. I wanted something softer than my Prismacolors, and after much research and speaking to experts, I decided to invest in a small set of Caran d’Ache Pablo Colored Pencils. Okay, NOT cheap, right?

I’m trying them out just now, and if you ask me, they are harder than the Prismacolors AND not quite as brilliant. I mean, that’s just my opinion. I know many people will disagree, but this is what I am seeing.

I work under a daylight white florescent light, but I also have the left side of me open to the outdoors. I mean the entire wall, so I’m seeing this mostly in real daylight. That is, until 5:15. I think I had a good assessment of seeing and comparing. I think the Prismacolor pigments are brighter.

Good thing I only got a set of 18 of the Pablos. I’ll still use them. They are still beautiful. But they made me appreciate what I had more.

I’m going to put these up for sale now. Have a good one!

Up To?

September 6, 2013September 6, 2013Ayin Es1 Comment

I’ve been in deep self-study as my year comes to a close. The High Holidays came early and it seemed like — heh, who am I kidding? It didn’t seem like anything. It was. I did: I got into a manic state of working just before Erev Rosh Hashanah. I worked on the new book, Carol Es une Monographie de Lignes. I worked on it before all of Houses were bound. I re-wrote my statement for my new gallery’s website. I applied for a grant. I wrote an essay as a submission for a small press publication, which then turned into a brand new project — a 26 page chapbook called Today’s Quandary. And I plan to release that one even sooner than the new book.

Then, I walked through the doors of my shull and I listened to my Rabbi speak. I started to feel a little different when I came home that night sometime around 11:00. And then the next morning, I thought about how Alicia is coming back into my life – I didn’t announce this, did I? She is! Soon. And I thought about what she is going to think about Outside the Lines. I pictured us working in it together with colored pencils.

While watching this video that Souris posted on her Tiny Iron Fists site, I could almost remember being that age. It reminded me of my very first contact with art, and how amazingly excited I was then.

Lulu and Moebius (01.14.11) from souris on Vimeo.

I have scattered memories: brief, fuzzy flashes of being very, very young, trying to grip the crayon. But what I remember most was a kind of limitless feeling. Art was limitless. That, and growing excitement in my belly. I think I was experiencing happiness. Real, true happiness.

Oh no, I’m going to cry.

Thanks Lulu.

I Miss You!

August 14, 2013August 14, 2013Ayin Es7 Comments

It’s been far too long! Like a month, ya? Almost. My God! What have you been doing while I was away? Whose blog have you been reading? I am so jealous. I sure hope it was worth it.

Well, I have been busy. Aren’t I always? But this time, extra, extra busy. I pretty much finished Houses. Just putting on the last touches, like the last bits of embroidery, making the slipcases (YES, slipcases I said), and I built this page so you can start ordering them if you feel so inclined, or, can afford the price of these babies.

And did I mention that the Neil Farber | Carol Es book is now officially on sale!? Talk about price – these astonishingly rare book-works of art are at a hair-raising steal of just $125 a book! Yup. Not a joke in any way, shape or form. Chance Press is just cool like that. Oh, but you better get a move on because I hear that there are only like nine books left! And that was about three days ago – so GET ON IT!

This is the collaborative piece I created with Neil. It’s crazy cool!

Speaking of books, and confessions. What? Okay, maybe I haven’t been moving on binding up the Houses books as quickly as I should have been because I have been preoccupied with other things – and maybe just one of those things is the preparation of my next Artist’s book. I know, I know: I shouldn’t start a new project before I’ve completed the last, but I am just so fucking excited! I feel like if I don’t work on it just a little bit, I will pee all over the floor!

It’s pretty ironic though, don’t you think? I haven’t made a book out of Careless Press in over five years, and then suddenly, here comes two. Well, I’m telling you now that this next one will not get released until the beginning of 2014, and it is going to retail for way under $100. Not only that, it’s going to have more pages than any other book I have made so far! That’s mostly because it’s going to be offset printed. I would never be able to make a 120 original page book – at least not in five months. Ha!

So as you can tell, I already know a lot about this book. Do you want to know more? As much as I know?

Nah… Why would you want to know such silly things?

Well, I think I’m going to tell you anyway, whether you are here reading this or not. It’s my diary. Not yours.

I titled this book in French because it sounded way more fancy. It’s titled, Carol Es une Monographie de Lignes (a Monograph in Lines). What that is, is like a mini autobiography done only in black pen sketches. Only one page will have an original, colored page in colored pencil and ink. It will have somewhere between 45 and 75 drawings in it, eight chapters, and a letterpressed, hardbound cover.

And that’s a lot of information. The only thing I’m not giving you are the names of the chapters and the visuals. Hmmm wait. I know. There is a chapter called, Preliminaries. Here is the preliminary for Wrong Mom, 2001.

Okay, enough of that. I told you I was busy this last month, right? Well I had meetings. Meetings all over the place. Some were at my synagogue where I finally learned to read Hebrew! I bet you thought I already knew how, didn’t you? Well NO, I didn’t. Otherwise, I wouldn’t of had to pull Arctic Memory apart and repaint it, now would I? I was busy doing that too. I finished it. See?

That’s what it looks like now. Now the Hebrew is correct. Now I KNOW the Hebrew is correct. 😉

The Hebrew classes were not only informative, but fun. I thought it was going to be so incredibly hard to read a new language that had a completely different alphabet in different looking characters, and I mean, it’s not like it was a breeze, but it wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it was going to be. It is a fairly simple language, much simpler than English, as far as the sounds of the consonants and vowels and those rules go. It was a short class so I didn’t get deep into grammar yet, but I loved the whole experience enough to want to continue and even become an official member of the temple.

Sales have been up, so I just had to purchase this nifty case for my studio to hold all my very important brushes and other tools of the trade. My studio, Rubber Soul, as I have called it, gets dusty easily since it is just a converted garage, and I H-A-T-E that my beautiful brushes get dirty before I use them! There isn’t a sink in there. I have dreamed of having such a case for years! I have owned most of my brushes for some 25 years. I take damn good care of them and now I can take even better care of them, and the new ones I add to them.

I also like some of the synthetic brushes, and while those don’t last too long, I think I can make them last a lot longer than possible, and with the case keeping them clean and pristine, it will make that even easier. And of course, all my sable brushes thank me for having a proper home, even in their old age. I just love this thing. It’s perfect for an anal retentive, meticulous control freak like me.

Finally, I had other meetings. The curator for the show I wound up in at USC Hillel, for instance (see my news page), and a local gallery I have been talking/negotiating/courting for a few months now. And, after this last meeting we both decided to work together, so… Expect an official announcement real soon.