Thoughts

Working vs. Sleeping

Ayin Es1 Comment

I’ve been working towards an exhibit that I will be hanging the first week of January at the Learning Resource Center at UCLA Geffen School of Medicine called Bioillogical. It’s going to include a couple paintings and mostly drawings on pattern paper, plus a few of my specimens in glass Erlenmeyer flasks — speaking of which, I have put up a KickStarter project to complete this entire series. PLEASE HELP! There are some great incentives for you to contribute there.

I say I am working on the pieces for this upcoming show, but I have to admit, I am doing a lot of sleeping. I am STILL going through a long bout of fatigue that has not let up very much. I am embarrassed to admit just how long my daily naps are exactly, but I believe they are just not normal. I’m looking forward to getting back to what was once normal.

I’m also considering adopting a new doggie. I am going to take my Bordie Collie and myself to meet Spencer on Wednesday to see how we all like each other. If it goes well, I just might bring him home with me.

The novel is coming along slowly. I’m chipping away at it little bits at a time. I am still not even at the best parts, so it feels boring. While I’ve written in parts of my life at 40, stories about a few key people, a few tragedies, and my parents’ histories, I decided to then go chronologically from the beginning of my life and now I’m not yet nine years old. I’m at the part where my family finally got back together after a long separation, drove across the country from Pennsylvania to Los Angeles, and we are about to rent an apartment in North Hollywood on Coldwater Canyon Blvd. The bulk of the shit has yet to begin, but I’m at 52,000 words (200 pages) into this rough draft now. And I still have a lot to write.

Me and my brother with “Gigi” our doggie in Culver City, circa 1973.

Thinking

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I’ve been working on this project for over two years, but I don’t have the money to finish it, so I am considering doing a kind of lottery. Not sure yet, but if I could get enough people to buy lottery tickets, maybe I can raise the money to finish the project and the winner of the lottery can come away with a piece of art. I wonder what readers think about this? I need about $2500. The money is for the glass flasks for this so that they all look like these inside the glass.

Uh like so:

Stuff n stuff

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I’m not so good at blogging as often as I used to be. Sorry. It’s just that I have been using all my writing energy for my book these days. Didn’t I mention this before? I’ve been writing a book. It’s been a couple years in the making, but the past six months I have been really been focused on it, more or less, on a daily basis.

It wasn’t until then that I un-fictionalized it. Plus I got The most incredible program called Scrivner, which has made organizing the process about as easy as brushing my teeth. It’s a God send for anyone who is writing a book, screenplay, or what have you. I highly recommend it! It was a difficult decision to make it an actual autobiography of non-fiction. That was quite the hurdle actually. Now I am walking on very thin ice when I think about publishing it after it’s finished, but MJP was in my ear for over two years about it – telling me how I had to do it. The best thing about the entire story is that it’s all true. He has a good point there, but it’s not easy to then out my friends and family, and myself in a public manner about everything under the sun, moon and stars. It’s going to be difficult. And if this thing actually gets published by a real publisher, I’m probably going to get sued by a couple of people at least.

In other news, I am in an article on the Huffington Post that Mat Gleason wrote about the private studio tours he did during July. I had a few people come through my place and it was very fulfilling. Mat did a good job of describing the tours he did.

I also made my very first YouTube video! I have never tried to do such a thing before, so don’t be too critical:

Machine (In progress)

I’ve also recently applied for a grant at a NY foundation (pending) – wish me luck, and another residency at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY. I’m also in a new group show at Hebrew Union College at USC right now, but the reception date has not yet been announced. The show will be there until December however.

Here is a painting I just finished:

I’m also still working on my Artists’ book called Houses. I have 4 more pages to go, plus the covers. Times that by six copies though. I still need a couple of months at least. Slowly but surely…

True Validation

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I haven’t blogged in a while, so I guess it’s time for an update by now.

I have been in Joshua Tree for some weeks helping my best friend move there from Pennsylvania, after her absence from Southern California for almost nine years. I found her a house in J Tree back in April and it seemed perfect for her, although I was truly nervous about being responsible for being the sole picker-outer of her new home. It worked out and she loves it, but it was a big job working out everything for her on this end. I arrived at the house the day before the movers got there while she was still driving across the country, which proved to be quite the dilemma because the moving truck couldn’t quite make it onto the dirt road that was closest to her driveway and they wound up having to tote her belongings for the paved road about 1/8 of a mile from the house that went along a long, gravel driveway. They were pissed and shook me down for an extra $150 bucks, but I have to say they earned it. However, they dumped all her stuff in the middle of the living room, and most of it was upside down. I ended up having to move everything myself into the proper rooms and turn everything up, sliding the furniture on cardboard and whatnot as to not to scratch the wood floors.

I also cleaned the hell out of the place before she got there, made sure all her utilities were turned on, and had to fix little stupid things in the house. It’s not the kind of house where everything is super stellar, it’s more like a large cabin, so you get it as it is and you don’t really call the landlord unless something is majorly awry.

When my friend Tracey got there, she was in a bad way from all the traveling, plus she has been very sick. It took her a few days of recovery before she was really able to start helping out, but she started to come around and she is very happy with everything and I am just so glad she is just two hours away. I stayed some weeks with her and helped her set up and did a lot of house shopping with her, introduced her to a couple of J Tree people and we even went to the Gay Pride festival there and saw my friend’s band play. Artist Shari Elf has a wonderful space out there called Art Queen, which was where the festival took place, and her band The Kittens played. We had a great time.

You might ask why I would do all this for my friend, or maybe not. She is my friend and I would do anything for her, but she is something very special to me anyway. When I was a kid, Tracey took me in when my life was very volatile at home. She is eight years older than me and I met her when I was probably 12 years old. I lived with her when I was 13 or 14, and she took care of me when no one else would, like my own parents. She taught me to be a responsible young adult and helped me to become a good person. She saved my life actually. So I would do anything for this woman. She is an incredible person and she needed the help right now.

While I was away, many changes took place in me, and I found out about a few art-related/career-related opportunities that became major disappointments. I was rejected by the California Foundation, then the next week I found out I was denied the MacDowell Colony residency, then finally I was rejected by the City of Los Angeles Artist’s grant. It all started to wear on me and I got depressed. Tracey, who has known me all my life pointed out some things to me that at first seemed to me like she just didn’t understand about the art game, but it was actually good to get her viewpoint because she has known me for so long and she is outside of the contemporary art world. She was worried for me that I had been after this kind of prestige and/or looking to beef up my resume on the grounds of trying to be impressive in turn for considering this “success.” And she was absolutely right.

When I got home, I did a lot of soul searching. I realized I could just replace this word “prestige” for “external validation” and I might as well just harken this back to my mom and dad. This cognition appeared after speaking with MJP, who knows even more about me and my internal issues regarding all this and watches me on a daily basis working my ass off towards my unreachable goals. He tries to put my feet on the right track all the time, but I am always so manic and focused on I-don’t-know-what, pushing and trying to get to that next rung on that ladder – a ladder that leads me to much misery and often takes the magic out of creating art.

I am grateful that I am in galleries, that I have won grants and awards, shown in museums and am in important collections. These are great accomplishments, feathers in my hat, etc., but it seems it has truly taken me a lifetime to learn that a person’s value is not measured by their accomplishments – that has been a foreign concept to me, as ashamed as I am to say it. That does not mean I have judged others in this way, but myself. I have been all too hard on myself and have expected impossible things beyond my ability at times, and it’s never been good enough. It’s long overdue that I be good enough.

After all this realization occurred, i was rejected from my last ditch effort on a NYC gallery. My friend took some original work into her gallery there to see if they’d be interested in my work. I couldn’t have received a better type of referral than that one, and all my eggs were honestly in that basket because I have now exhausted every gallery lead I have in NY, and this particular place couldn’t have been more perfect for me. I waited by my computer after 3pm on word of what went down on the day she took my work to them. They were not interested.

Normally, I would be in bed, depressed for a couple of days after news like that, but I wasn’t. Disappointed, yes, but I was fine. I don’t care anymore. I make the work I make. This is not going to change. I will always do what I want to do art-wise. If someone appreciates it, that’s great. If someone does not, that is fine too. There is no “right” person appreciating it when it happens – that’s what it comes down to. I have a lot of people who love my work and those are the people that make it all worth while. I don’t need Mr. Saatchi, or a New York gallery, or Christopher Knight to tell me I’m doing it right or wrong. I only need my own internal validation, and I have that now. FTW!

Back from Joshua Tree

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I just got back from my little trip to Joshua Tree where I worked on a little project for Art House Co-op called The Fiction Project (the site is being revamped at this very moment, so the info may not be there when you click on the link, as they are also promoting their next sketchbook project…), which I posted a little preview of on my website here.

The book is called Inside/Outside. It’s a 40 page lined sketchbook that is mostly handwritten text with some art in it. I did it all in five days in a beautiful rented vacation house right near the west entrance of Joshua Tree National Park called the Skylark House. This was all made possible from a grant provided by the National Arts and Disability Center, or else I would not had been able to stay in such a great place for that length of time. The book was a documentation of my stay out there, so it wasn’t exactly a work of fiction, but more like creative non-fiction. Well, 99% of it anyway. Dan appears in the story a little bit, but in many ways, he has become real.

I was also looking for a rental for my friend Tracey there because she may be moving there from Pennsylvania. She is moving back to Southern California after being away for nearly nine years now. I have been scoping places out for here in various locations and JT was one of them. I kinda found the perfect place for her there, but I’m not sure if she is taking it. There might be other options, it all depends on where she feels most comfortable since she has been living in quite the rural situation for the past many years.

When I got back I found out that I did not win the People’s Choice Award for the Artist’s Wanted contest. I feel bad making all these people vote for me daily. I thought I was really close to getting it, but I guess I was not close enough. Of the first 100 people who entered I was at least 500 votes beyond any of those artists, but I had no way of knowing how many votes the rest of the artists were racking up – apparently a lot. I wound up with roughly 1200 in the end. Not enough to win. *Sigh* …but I am so very very appreciative for everyone who wanted me to win and tried so hard and voted for me so loyally. I have learned, however, not to enter such contests like this again.

I am constantly applying for things, and that’s fine. I get rejected from most everything I apply for, but this is something that winds up disappointing all the people that were trying to help me too. Plus I had to hound people to vote for me, and that was like panhandling in front of a 7-11 for change or something. I know I was a such a nuisance and I hated it. I’d much rather apply for things the regular way without bringing the whole world into the process.

Now that that’s over, I’m moving onto other things. I got my letterpress pages back for my Houses book today and they look marvelous! I still need to print those plates I made and start the watercolor pages now that I got these letterpress pages back. There’s much to do, plus I have to make a miniature version of Danarama for strategic purposes… Install my dolls and The Deal at 18th Street for the “Los Angeles-Instanbul Connection” show on Tuesday morning and get to work on a painting that’s been in my head for the last month! I will tell you that it involves a stuffed snake! 🙂

Plus, did I mention that I’m going to be in a show called TEL-ART-PHONE, curated by Mat Gleason? Here is the weird painting I made that will make more sense if you see it in the show: