Shrapnel

Tail End of Houses

July 26, 2013July 26, 2013Ayin EsLeave a comment

It’s getting there. I haven’t been working on it every day like I would want to. I’ve had other things coming onto the front burners now.

I’ve been rearranging the way I’ve been working on my literary book and am almost writing in it again with some enthusiasm, now that the last of the traumatic incidents have been recorded. I’m all about discussing the reorganization and how I’m laying out the first draft, not so much the content, but I am very excited about how I am putting it together.

Secondly, I finally pulled Arctic Memory out and have been making the changes on it I want in a hurry now for a couple of studio visit reasons: I have people coming on August 1st and on August 6th. I will be participating in a group show at USC Hillel that will be curated by Sara Cannon (Director of the Museum Education and Tours Program at the Municipal Art Gallery and Hollyhock House). The other visit is a gallery I’ve been talking to for the last several months.

As for Houses, I finally found those see-through plastic envelopes with the string-tie closure that will actually fit a 6 x 9 inch document – I just don’t know how well it’s going to fit until I bind one and slip it in there. If it’s perfect, this can keep the price down. I had all kinds of ideas about having a custom-made box created for these, which would cost me no less than $45 each plus shipping. Plus, they wouldn’t have hinges. They would be a box you would lay down on a coffee table or something like that. I wouldn’t want you to shelve it, now would I? But we’ll see how it turns out.

I have three pages of eight left to do, and some are already done. Here is the checklist. Some pages have a few steps to them.

Dishes Page:

Draw: 1-8 Done

Holes: 1-8 Done

Linen/Fixatives: 1-8 Done

Sew 1: 1-3 Done

Sew 2: 1-3 Done

First Watercolor Page:

Draw 1-8: Done

Painted: 1-2 Done

Inked: 1 Done

Gouache Page:

Drawn: 1-8 Done

Painted: 1-2 Done

What does all this mean? It means I have 18 pages to do before I start to bind them all together. Time wise, (for the pages), that’s about 106 hours of work left to go. I still plan to release it at the beginning of the fall.

As I have endorsed and promoted before, I have been using Scrivener to organize and write my book in. I can not recommend it with more of my being if you are about to embark on writing anything long. It will make your life so much easier and you will thank me. And no, I don’t work for them.

I am still using the program, but because of the many subjects I was writing about, I was starting to get really bummed out and all but ceased to work on it. I knew I had to write about the troubled stuff in my life, and because I was writing in chronological order, I would begin to dread some of the things that were coming up. I would sometimes pick other areas, since the folders were already laid out before and after, but truly, that wasn’t working for me since my mindset during those times just after was changed substantially.

I began to think about this, and the thoughts I have about myself – just in the last couple of years. I don’t see myself as a victim. I never did, especially the more I grew and the more I became self-aware. Bad things that have happened to me, to us, do not define us as people. And so this chronological list of folders with sub-folders (much like the way your computer files work) seemed so one-dimensional to me. And Scrivener is capable of so much more – like Photoshop!

I have said, as many other people have too, Photoshop is like an onion. You can keep digging and digging into that program and find so many more things that it is capable of doing. If Photoshop can have all those layers, what about a person’s life? And how would you record and organize those layers into a program? It’s quite like a database, which is essentially what Scrivener is: a database program! So I got this idea to assign layers to my life, with the “ID#” or the main layer being Carol the person. That is the constant. What I think. That’s the main layer. Then all the other layers can be built around it and I can move them in and out, and all around the timeline as much as I feel like it.

In essence, this will not so much be a first pass, but more like a true first draft, but I am much further away from being done with it. So that’s the trade off.

How Thouse Thou Blog?

May 17, 2013May 17, 2013Ayin EsLeave a comment

I keep telling myself that I will start writing a new blog post at least twice a week. How do people do that, I wonder? Especially working artists. Especially working artists that are also writing a book, with friends and a life, that go to art shows, that have partners, that like to garden and watch a bit of TV, go to a couple of movies a month and have a dog?

If you have the answer to these questions, please reply, or email me. I’d like to know.

Since I have blogged, or rather, wrote the little review about the Avenue 50 show, Seven Beauties, on the Huffington Post, I have finished a couple of new paintings. Perhaps one of them I finished before that, called In Training. I mentioned it in a previous blog post. I was nearly finished with it then, but I had to allow that yellow to dry before I went back and cleaned up those black outlines. So here it is finished:

This is like the rest of the series: 24 x 24 inches, Oil on birch panel.

Yellow takes forever to dry, as I am learning – so does orange! I am still working on Rabbi Says. So in the meantime, I finished up another piece that I now know is my most favorite in the whole series! It only took two days, but I thought about it for a month. I even want it to be the cover for my book, if that’s possible. It’s called, Survivor: 24 x 24 inches, oil on birch panel:

Still wet, I took these and about 4 others with me to Shulamit Gallery yesterday down at Venice Beach. We had been trying to set up a meeting for a few weeks, actually for a studio visit, but that’s not going to happen until July. So, they asked me if I could come there with a few originals and paper works along with a few of my artists’ books. I would up staying there for nearly three hours. It went very well and we all know each other a little better. What will become of it, I do not know because I’m not absolutely sure I want to be in a gallery again just yet.

But maybe by the time they offer me something, IF they offer me something, I will be.

In the meantime, I just feel so good about painting right now, I’m just going to keep on going on my merry way. I am loving this path.

Speaking of the book, I finally got back to working on it just a bit. I even interviewed a couple people from my past and I think that is going to help me a little in writing this because we don’t always remember things exactly the way they happened. I probably will only use a fraction of these interviews, but I think it’s good to reconnect, let people know they might appear in the manuscript, and in what context – especially if I am going to be making fun of them.

No one gets made fun of more than me, and that I can guarantee all of them!

One of them was an ex-boyfriend. He is significant for a few of reasons. First of all, he pretty much turned me on to oil painting. The relationship was a whirlwind: very unlike me to move in with someone so fast, and then it ended as fast as it flew together, yet I learned a lot about art: the application of it, a little bit about the sales of it, the dichotomy of it, and some of the hard lessons. I think he was the first person I dated outside of my own circles and I learned a lot about sharing, compromise, tolerance, acceptance, all in such a short amount of time. At the time, I am not sure I even knew I was learning this. Ha!

I also am importing in a shit load of data from, get this, on-line forum dialog! I have typed more about my viewpoints on art than I have even talked about to any one person. So now I have to weed through all of that stuff and use it where it’s usable.

I was also lucky enough to make a couple of sales in the past couple weeks so I could get more panels – small ones – so in the next couple months I will have more affordable works on hand, which I think is smart.

That’s all for now.

Rainbow Country

April 22, 2013April 22, 2013Ayin Es1 Comment

I have not been working on my book for a long, long time. It’s so hard to juggle all that I have, but I’m not taking on any new shows for a while, so I hope that I can dedicate some time to my writing when I’m done with these eight paintings

Shrapnel in the San Fernando Valley, as it it is called for now – and I don’t foresee changing it – has been the toughest project I have probably ever had to do. I am reliving all the parts of my life – all the hardest parts of my life. Sure, I will be editing out the boring, the non-pertinent, the lengthy rants that are similar to my blog (because in using anything like those, they won’t necessarily be to promote, protect or to entertain), but the rough draft inevitably needs to be written. I’m living through all of it just the same.

It is much harder to remember it and write it out than it was to experience it at the time. Doesn’t seem possible, right? But when you are going through a traumatic event, you go into survival mode. We all do. We dissociate to some degree, or we find a way endure it. We have to. Then we move on. Because we have to. And in moving on, we most likely do not think about it. That just works wonders.

Diving in and out of this book is bitter sweet. I like writing about the first time the light bulb went off for me in terms of art, music, love, friendship, independence, and stuff like that thar. I’ve been writing pretty much in chronological order, so knowing that something horrible is coming up, just makes me avoid getting back to a writing session.

I wish it was done, really. I’m 75-80% finished with the rough draft. That is far from done. That is bare bones stuff. I have never written a book before. I know nothing about how it’s done. I only know how I am going to do it before I hand it off to the editor. She might change everything, but I know exactly how I am going to structure the thing – section by section, chapter by chapter, because sometimes the helicopter flies high over miles of mountain ranges. Sometimes, it flies lower and circles around a camp. And many times it will land so the pilot can get out to get a really good look at the dirt.

Some future problems with this thing that I needlessly worry about are:

SUBJECT: What the hell is this? A memoir? Autobiography? Creative non-fiction, Artist memoir? Family memoir? Music biography? Women’s biography? Religious biography? Dark humor – non-fiction, …and HOLY SHIT! I’m sorry. I was just reading something that I did not realize on Barnes and Noble. Is this true? Someone please tell me if I am misunderstanding this:

Is PUSH fiction???? It is filed under fiction. I’m having a heart attack! I did NOT know that!

I am totally baffled now. I will be back when I get my head on straight. I am just….baffled. I can’t finish this blog entry right now. Sorry.

7:16 PM Okay, I am back now. I’m over it. I painted. I got some stuff done. I made decisions. I feel better. Fuck it.

When I read The Color Purple, I was well aware of Alice Walker. I guess I was stupid enough to think that Push was actually written by a young, illiterate girl who experienced these things and still on her way to becoming educated despite being such a young, single mother.

Now, both books do not lie. I am not mad that it is fiction, because it is not a fictitious story. My mind was just blown, that’s all.

All this time, I have been somewhat modeling, or rather just thinking about where my book belongs in terms of Push. That book was giving me courage to tell my story! I figured it would be, if published, close together on the shelf in the bookstore. I felt like, if people accepted her story

and believed it

and still loved her

maybe I had a chance of receiving the same reaction.