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Catch Up

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It’s been forever since I’ve blogged. Forgive me. I’ve been both busy and lazy.

Today I finally finished a giant proposal for the National Museum of Women in the Arts Library Fellows Program Artists’ Book Grant. I have totally revamped my Houses idea into a new edition of 125 – that is, if I get the award. Everything is different now. The poem, the images, the papers, all of it. If I don’t get the award, I’ll have to revamp it again for a new smaller, special edition.

It took me all week to write the proposal, the budget, and create a dummy book, but I am happy with all of it and I am sending it out first thing tomorrow. I haven’t had much time to do anything else. Now I can get back to my busy schedule, which I have been lazily not doing. I have three paintings started – one is from a year ago! and I have not been working on painting since the two new ones I made for the “NO JOKE” show, which is still up until the end of the first week in July at Coagula Curatorial in Chinatown.

Well wait, that’s not entirely true because I did paint a couple little watercolors for the dummy book. One is a gouache, quite simple, and the other is a full-color watercolor and ink. They are both 6 x 9 inches.

housesmoved

I don’t know if I have mentioned that I have been mentoring an artist named Idelle Steinberg. I am trying to help get her career going and giving her as much inspiration and as many tools as I can. We meet about once a week and go over plans and it’s been a nice artist’s friendship so far. I actually put an ad on Craigslist for an apprentice who I could mentor in exchange for a little help in the studio and got a ton of responses. It was wild. I picked Idelle because she has a wonderful imagination and a super distinct style that I felt deserved nurturing. I had no idea I’d make such a good friend, but I did.

I am still waiting on being assigned my young teen girl from Create Now to mentor. I am very excited to meet her and do art with her. I wish there were such programs available when I was 13. If there were, I never knew about them. I believe this girl takes residence in a nearby orphanage. I am hoping to meet her at least twice a week.

If I have not mentioned this before, I got an editor for the literary book I have been working on for these last couple of years. Her name is Lisa Teasley. She is an award-winning novelist published with Bloomsbury and she is committed to taking on my book. I am still on the rough draft, but I am more than half way finished with that now. I wish I could, but I can not rush the process. I estimate I’ll be getting it to Lisa in a little under a year’s time.

I didn’t win the COLA, nor the California Fund Fellowship, but onward. I apply for those two grants every year for maybe 10 years now and I’ve never won, but I always know someone who wins them, which just makes me feel like I’m that much closer. But does it mean that? Maybe not.

I’m going to be in a group show at the Sunnyview Rehabilitation Hospital Foundation in Troy, NY in October and also another group show at the JCC Gotthelf Gallery in La Jolla, CA in December. Something to look forward to.

Philly, June, Wood, Etsy, Blast

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Here are a few pics of my work at Nichols Berg Gallery in Philadelphia. The show runs until the end of April.

Looks like I will be participating in a group show in the summer at Mat Gleason’s new gallery, Coagula Curatorial. The show opens in June and the working title is called Pen and Ink People.

I am working on a bunch of new work. It’s all experimental, so I don’t know where it’s going yet, but it looks like it’s two different series. Oil paintings on canvases and linen, and mostly pencil work on birch wood. Sneak peek:

Carol Es

I also updated my ETSY store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/carelesspress

Still working on the infamous book. I’m about 70,000 words into the rough now. It’s such a major undertaking this process. It’s a work of creative non-fiction, as I’m calling it, because I don’t like calling it an autobiography. I’ve been working on it for over two years now, but since I got Scrivener about a year ago, I’ve been working on it a lot more regularly.

I started writing it backwards, starting with my 40th year. Then, I went back and wrote a full family history from before I was born – everything I knew about my parents’ stories and why they were the way they were. After that, I started writing from the age six and I’ve been writing chronologically ever since. I’m at age 15 now. All of it is beyond belief. It won’t start getting boring until I’m 30. That’s when the entirety of it all hits me. Then It’s going to turn into some kind of self-help book as I spent the next 10 years learning to leave my own house, re-drive a car, make friends and build a new career.

The book deals with so many subjects, I don’t know what section of the bookstore it will stocked in if it ever gets published, as it deals with abuse, neglect, family dysfunction, rape, molestation, drug abuse, emancipation, cults, rock n roll, bisexuality, gender identity, child labor laws, past lives, suicide, mental illness, disability, divorce, art, love, loss, death, religion, celebrities, sex, lies, blackmail, adultery, + + + … Personally, I think it should be in the Humor section.

I have been struggling between 3 different tiles.

Shrapnel in the San Fernando Valley
Blast
Invisible Ink

Who Do I Think I Am?

Ayin Es2 Comments

I want to help artists, but I don’t know how. Especially now. I used to pride myself on being a real big shot when it came to self-promotion, organization, artistic discipline, and building a career in the arts. However, these past few years have put me into a tail spin where I have lost half my representation, made less sales, and produced the least amount of work in 2011. What on earth happened? Can I fully blame the economy? Now I know why it was called “The Depression!” These setbacks have me reevaluating the meaning of success. What qualifies me to help artists that are starting out on their career paths if mine is suffering? Is mine even suffering? I’m going to say NO.

Tuesday of this week I got word that I was rejected from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. I wanted to attend this residency so badly because it promoted that I would leave there a completely different artist than the one I came in as. Now that I was turned down, I had to think about my desires for wanting to go. Why did I want to be a completely different artist? If I don’t like the artist I am right now, that’s a bad sign. Do I really need to go to Maine to correct that problem? Is that the real problem? It was a little bit more complicated than that. It was more about a multitude of rejections I was internalizing that got me thinking I needed to be a different artist in order to be accepted…

Accepted by whomever was rejecting me at various places I was applying to: Galleries, grants, residencies, etc. How soon I forgot that I won the Pollock-Krasner Fellowship in 2009-2010. That’s nothing to ignore, yet I was feeling like some kind of loser for not getting some other new accolade. That, and a couple of my galleries dropped me, sales were getting bleak, and rejections were rolling in. Suddenly I felt like I had no career.

Then I thought about what advice I would tell another artist if they came to me with these very same woes. I would remind them that the body of work that they have created and all the sales, honors, awards, and acknowledgements they have received throughout their career is theirs for life. It never goes away. And all that, along with the rejection of all the attempts of having tried bravely is a mountain you can stand on top of and be proud of because these are things you accomplished yourself through tooth and nail. So why the hell don’t I feel my own advice? I’m sure as shit qualified to help someone at an earlier stage in art if I can help myself at my own stage, right?

I know I don’t make the most commercial, salable work around. It’s pretty odd and personal, childlike and crude, but besides that, we are in a pretty bad recession. There was a big story on 20/20 about how the Art Market is not suffering, but unless you are Damien Hirst or some other artist in the $20K-$10 Million range, you are feeling it if your work doesn’t appeal to a mass market. The way I see it, for artists like me, it is a time to create, invent, explore, and experiment. If a sale comes, great (I just sold something to a collector in Canada as a matter of fact), but I’m not counting on sales at this time.

What I’d like to do is work on a couple new series for 2012 and exhibit them in 2013 sometime at my LA gallery. I’d also like to help out artists where and if I can.

How can I help you?

Whatever…

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Got word today that it’s a no-go on Skowhegan. I will not be going there this summer. This is the 3rd, wait, make that the 6th residency I’ve been rejected from. More if I’m counting that some of those places declined me twice. I was looking forward to Skowhegan the most in that it was a school. Oh well.

Just so happens that last night I got a great idea for a new series of work. I’ll be busy all summer anyway.

I sat down here to write a really long blog post about things that I feel and that have been going on internally with me, and now I don’t feel like it anymore.

I sold this watercolor the other day:

Carol Es

“Childhood Centerfold,” 2011. 8.5 x 14 inches, Watercolor and ink on paper.

NY Wore Me Down…

Ayin Es3 Comments

Where have I been? It’s hard to believe, but I had pneumonia AGAIN! I just had it in November, and when I got back from NY, I got it again, but worse than I may have ever had it. I wound up in the hospital this time. Oh, it was baaaad. I still have it, but I am much better since I got out of the hospital this past Monday. Tomorrow is my last day of antibiotics and steroids. I was on them via IV while in the hospital for five days. I don’t think I’ve ever been so sick. I could not breathe. It was terrible. I am never smoking again – so at least that is something very good that has come from all of this.

I smoked practically my whole life, then I quit when I was 29 for a year. I was back on again for four months, then I quit for 10 years. 10 years! You’d think it was totally over, wouldn’t you? But then when my father was dying in hospice, I had such friction with my brother about his care, that the stress drove me to smoking again. I smoked for two months, but quit again before it got real bad. Then three months after that, my mother got into a horrible accident and I started smoking again on the night it happened, and from then on out, I just kept smoking. I quit a couple times, but when she died, I just went back and continued to smoke out of sheer depression. That was two and a half years ago and I’ve had absolutely no excuse other than just being hooked.

Now I am free. I’ve seen the dark side. I now know what it’s like to not be able to breathe, what it must be like for someone with emphysema. I don’t want to wind up like that one day. I actually have asthma. I was a fool to smoke at all. Why do we do stupid shit to ourselves? I have no idea. It felt connected to my personality. Isn’t that so ridiculous? I say that, and it’s so stupid, but I really felt that way. And I know when I feel all the way better, I’m going to have a hard time not incorporating it into my life – mentally (not physically).

But anywho… New York was GREAT! You know, before I got so sick. I felt it coming the very last day I was there. I may have partied a little too hard, but I was alone in NY with three days to do everything I could fit in, and we all know that’s just not enough time. I went overboard. I don’t usually drink, but I drank. I don’t usually stay up late, but I stayed up really late. I don’t usually walk around in 38 degree weather, but I did that too. I don’t usually walk around much at all (I live in Los Angeles after all!) so my legs were starting to collapse near the end of my stay. But I got to see a lot of art and a fair amount of NY that I had not yet seen. This was my 3rd time to NYC. I stayed at my regular place in Chelsea, the Chelsea Lodge – which was so perfect (2 blocks from the gallery).

I had never been to the Lower East Side, so I went there. I had a light dinner with Oriane Stender at a local wine bar and then went to see an art show at Mulherin + Pollard. I have been following Katharine Mulherin’s projects for some years. I’ve bought artwork from her in the past when I saw her at the art fairs. She’s a Toronto dealer. It was nice to see a gallery there in NY with her involved. I found out about it through a fellow artist friend, Brian Novatny, who I show with at George Billis in Los Angeles. He lives in Brooklyn and we hung out a bit in NY while I was there. He has begun to work a bit with Mulherin + Pollard. It was a cool little gallery and the Lower East Side has a nice up-and-coming contemporary art vibe to it, like Chelsea used to have before it got super popular.

A lot of people came to the opening at Denise Bibro, and I met some wonderful peeps, namely Judith Braun from the first season of Work of Art. She is so cool! I talked to her for a long time and really enjoyed her company. I also sat right next to Bill Gusky at dinner, who was in the show with me. He and his wife are cool peoples. And of course Nancy Baker, who made the entire exhibition happen in the first place. She is my Jewish sister and I owe her a giant birthday cake. I love her, and her amazing artwork.

Jeez, I could go on a bunch about NY, but I’d be here all day.