I don’t know what I think. I’m busy all the time and I don’t seem to have much time to write much anymore. I have to change things around so that isn’t so. I don’t think people, others, friends, anybody really knows or understands how much time I truly need to myself. So much more than I get. But some might think I already have too much. I’m full of luck they’d say. Full of luck. Yeah. I am. Yet I don’t have time to make a call, pay my bills, clean my house, make some food, paint or draw, or write. So, here I am. Writing. Writing about how I don’t get to write. How am I supposed to keep the blog up and running, get followers, promote, promote, promote, and still have time to keep up an art practice? A writer’s practice? See my therapist? I’m just tired. My illness makes me tired, plus I didn’t get enough sleep last night, plus I’m trying to quit smoking again. I quit the day before yesterday, but – like and idiot – I had one cigarette today, so I ruined everything! I’m in such a bad mood. I’m disappointed in my being, which has no real will power. I don’t even know what I really think of myself. Whatever whatever whatever. The day flies by. I look up and it’s six o’clock and nothing important has been done – nothing important to me. I only give my life to and for one thing …sacrificed for one single, cheesy reason. People think I’m goal-obsessed. That aint it. I just want to be saved. Swallow a little magic. I need to go change my nicotine patch.
Kvetches
What am I? Winner? Loser? Role Model for Narcissists?
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.
Weather, Crows, and Grammar
I slept until noon today. I haven’t done that in a long-ass time. I guess this cold is still lingering a bit. But that’s okay, my calendar is free for making art for the next two days and I am very excited and happy about that. I don’t usually have two whole days free and dedicated to do that.
Yet here I am writing in my blog.
But I’m getting to it. I like to write a little in the “morning,” either in my book, or on some forums I participate in (WetCanvas if you’re curious). and before that, I have my coffee and go outside and have a smoke (yes, I’m still smoking and yes I’m still full of guilt and shame because of it).
And while I was outside, I felt the beginnings of the winds that come here in Southern California, which are known as the Santa Anas. They are arriving right on time. They are here today, just barely, but I feel them. Maybe because I was expecting them. I was expecting them yesterday, or maybe the day before, but it was actually kind of gloomy, and the Santa Anas have nothing to do with humidity. For some reason today, there is a slight sense of coolness to them. But that will go away by tomorrow. I knew they were about to come because yesterday while I was working in my studio, all I could hear were the crows cawing like crazy. Instead of letting them drive me mad, I just accepted it as if they had a “nice” song like all the other birds, but that wasn’t an easy feat.
I don’t know why I am sensitive to these little changes in the air. I’ve always been a city person, but I’m in tune with this shit. Right around the 15th of October the hot winds come, the giant black crows come in murders, and the mountains light up in flame. It’s called fire season here. The humidity becomes zero by the end of October and the Santa Anas fly through the air at high speeds, making it near impossible for firefighters to keep the fires contained. It’s because it would be something natural that would happen otherwise, but we’ve built homes too close to the mountains and forest land, so that’s what we get.
Just like mud slides along the cliffs and bluffs on hillsides that aren’t bedrock – your house might slide down the hillside if it rains a lot, and you should know that going in.
We have peculiarities here in Los Angeles, and it seems like everyone is surprised each year when it all happens all over again. Like the first week of September – that is not yet fall my friends. That is still summer, and we have a heat wave every time in the first week or so of September. I have a Brazilian Pepper tree out back that lost a quarter of its branches the second week of September, just after that heat wave. That’s because we didn’t have it trimmed properly, the branches got weak from the heat and the whole thing came down. Poor tree. Now I see (and hear) the other branches weakening, but I can’t trim them until all the bees get the hell out of my yard, which won’t be until after November.
I remember going back to school that first week of September when I was a kid. Of course, that would never last. I’d inevitably be taken out of school for one reason or another, but I do remember the times when I’d get that fresh start after the summer break and newly sit in one of those Godforsaken classrooms – asbestos floors and ceilings, no A/C, and we’d all be just sweating our asses off in our new school clothes because there was a heatwave that week. We’d all have migraines, and if there was enough smog, thank goodness we’d be restricted from playing on the playground, but we’d still just have to sit still in the classroom that sometimes did and sometimes didn’t have a fan.
That’s how I remember that there’s a heatwave the first week or two in September.
Nowadays, we don’t have the kind of smog we had back then in the 70s. <– Ha! I love how now when you type 1970s or 50s instead of 60’s in your browsers, email, Google, etc., you will get a red underline. Who in God’s name programmed these grammar functions? Did you know that putting a ‘ before the s after the year is absolutely incorrect? Don’t take my word for it. Just ask the Harvard Linguistics authority I learned it from on KCRW a couple of years ago. Also, something I never needed a Harvard pussy to tell me: please resort to you Strunk and White (the above is also probably in there too): ANY TIME you use quotes, please stop putting your punctuation after the quotes! It’s not correct. Like “when you do this”, this is not right. “this is,” right. No matter what.
I am done with my grammar and weather lessons for the day. Onto art.
Books, Grants, Loss, Work
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.
Took a Week Off to Work Hard?
I haven’t been painting. Have I? I have not. I have been making pages, rather small pages, of lists. Lists of things to do. The kind that have little boxes in front of them so I can place an “X” in them once I have completed the tasks. The tasks run the gamut from taking care of a parking ticket to cleaning up my entire mailing list, which takes …I don’t know how long that takes. I’m still working on that, but I have to go through each name one at a time, edited their first and last name, and/or delete it.
As I’ve said before, I stopped doing this list-making for a few years, but I’m back on it now. I started to forget things and also, or maybe because, things weren’t getting done. Additionally, I felt like I wasn’t getting anything done in general even though I wasn’t twiddling my thumbs all day. I work, but at what? I guess it’s so I can remember in the past. It’s so I can feel some sense of accomplishment when I’m not painting. The paintings show me that I did something. But big woop.
It’s also so I can break the big things into littler things so I don’t procrastinate anymore (on the bigger things). Not that I’m a big procrastinator. I’m more of a worrier. I worry about procrastinating.
One thing that sucks ass is that every time I’m in the head space to write, it’s not when I have the time to sit here and write. Any readers I get here – that are still with me anyway – that haven’t left screaming from their machines, “Ahhhh, death by boredom!” They just aren’t getting the best of my brains. I think of the good stuff when I’m out in the yard gardening or something, which I did a lot of this past week and especially over the last couple weekends.
It all started when I found grape vines along my backyard fence. This is alarming since grapes can kill your dog and my doggie is about as big as a loaf of bread.
I got manic and tore them down and tried to find where they were growing out from, which was difficult. I found myself cursing at the cords coming out of the dirt and slicing them with my almighty sharp gardening cutters without cutting any of the other foliage. That fence is thick with a ton of other pretty things and it was hard not to hurt them, and not to cut all the wires that were set up for the grape vines which someone had obviously organized in a grid precisely carefully along the fence. I was going to need those for whatever else I was going to plant in its place. But, I managed to cut a few of the wires anyway. Better those than my fingers though.
You know how one thing turns into another thing, which turns into another bigger thing, and then your life gets eaten away? Well, that’s what my backyard did to me this last week or so.
Along this part of the fence I planted some white and burgundy Bougainvillea and a few Marigolds in front.
I H-A-T-E those Sunset magazines with all those pictures of perfect yards, expensive plants, beautiful patio furniture, genius landscaping with pristine river rocks between each pant (that happen to somehow be in bloom during the moment of the photograph), and not a single dead leaf to be found! Who are these people?
Once and a while, you visit a real home like this and you wonder, are they doing the work out there? Do they pay their gardeners double to help keep it up? Where do you find gardeners like that? Where do any rich people find their gardeners? Who is raking out the dead leaves stuck inside their rosemary bushes? Can that even be done? Or are they planting new ones every week? I’m serious! Drive through Beverly Hills once and a while and ask yourself this shit. In my case, I live by San Marino – far prettier than Beverly Hills. It’s on the way to Armstrong Garden Center, ironically, and I think about stupid crap like this.
Here’s a pretty good picture because you can’t get too close to it to see all the dead leaves in the bed of my cactus garden, but once upon a time there were a few more live ones in the back and I had even made a design in the rocks that’s now long gone because there is a tree way above it that sheds dead leaves like crazy. Every time I clean it out, a few rocks went with it, so there really aren’t many rocks left, but it used to have red rocks on one side, river rocks on the other and a white kind of eye shape in the middle that divided them. It was cool. I built it six years ago. It was a drained out fish pond when we moved in.
Right now, it’s 1:25 PM. My gardeners are supposed to be here by 2:00, but they won’t be here. They come twice a month and cut the lawn. That’s all. If I want more, I have to ask them, even though they’ve been told to “always” keep the ivy away from the doors and windows. Once the ivy grows on the doors and windows, I have to go out there and ask them to cut it back. And the Mondays they are supposed to come, sometimes they won’t. Or, they will come at 3:00, 4:00, 5:00 – making me stay home all day because I have to let them into the back.
Anyway, I have a few more things I want to plant in the back yard and I think I will be done with it for a while. If these things live, that is. I always have a few causalities. My thumb is not exactly green. It’s a kind of mood-thumb. One day it’s black, the next it’s a kind of blue-green algae that I make a smoothie out of: a horrible-tasting pseudo-ephedrine thing I try to sell to my friends at every opportunity I can find.
Other than gardening, getting my car to pass the smog test, paying some bills, catching up on laundry, I was able to get the rest of the art supplies I needed for the rest of the year, although I still need to make one last trip to McManus and Morgan for the Houses book. I’m getting some of the golden handmade paper from Nepal, like the flysheets that are inside my All Done But None books. Still in love with it. Here is the “mock-up” for that page, which will have a linoleum block print on it.
And speaking of books!…I just got word from Chance Press that the Neil Farber | Carol Es book will be out right at the beginning of next month and they are now taking discounted pre-orders at the crazy low price of $75 before the release. After that they will be priced at $100. There are only 18 for sale. It’s a very limited edition, so if you want this utmost fantastic work of art-as-book — what the hell are you waiting for????
Finally, tomorrow is mjp and my 14th anniversary, so we are going away for a couple of days to a 100-year-old resort later in the week. We found a trustworthy place to board our Gemma since every time we have left town in the past two years, we have taken her with us every time. The place is called Wagville and she has been going there for daycare every other day for more and more time to get acclimated to the place. We should have thought about this a long time ago because she is such a terrified little pup, this seems just the right kind of medicine for her. She’s been having a lot of fun and now, so shall we.
Anniversary advice that you didn’t ask for:
Fourteen years seems like nothing. Seriously. For all of you that haven’t made it very long yet or ever, it’s really no big thing. Love changes. It gets different. It gets BETTER. New love is for suckers. If you fight a lot, that’s not a good sign. Ha!
And for those of you that have made it much further as easily as we have, you know what I mean.
All those boring things that old people tell you are true: Trust, communication, and same sense of humor.
