Thoughts

My sleep times are all off these days. I don’t blame the recent daylight savings thing though. Honestly, I’ve been sick on and off since right before my show, or rather, under the weather. The worse it gets is a slight fever and crazy exhaustion, and some days it’s a stuffy head, runny nose and nausea. It’s a bug that won’t really hit full force, but won’t really dissipate either, so it’s really getting on my nerves!

I haven’t been getting all that much accomplished. I am jotting down ideas and prepping some pieces for a couple group shows for December, while I get my head on straight for the book drawings for Bottle of Smoke Press.

I should mention that I got a GREAT review by A. Moret in WhiteHot Magazine, so I am very thankful for that.

The drawings I’m doing for the Finegood Gallery show are like brothers and sisters for this piece I did a few years back. It’s titled Forgiveness on my Sleeve. It’s on a sleeve pattern and the smaller clothing patterns are arranged to spell sloch in Hebrew, which means “forgive.” So I am going to do a few other pieces like this one on different garment pieces that read in Hebrew.

For the Soft show, I am going to show piece(s) from my Ethereal Research Labs project.

Luckily, some of the work from my current show at George Billis will be in Miami during the weekend of fairs at the Red Dot Fair at his booth. I hope there is a good response, since he is bringing some very good pieces (I think). He will have both the Calvin Doll and the Mom doll, and a couple of Dan paintings too.

Today I woke up at 7:30 and took a nap around 5 after I watched Some Like it Hot (1959). I woke up again at 9:30 and now I am wondering when I will go back to sleep. I am just happy I can breathe out of both nostrils right now.

Now that I’m kinda done with this particular post — oh I was going to talk a little bit about some of my ideas for a drawing I have in mind for my book of poems. I had this idea to do some little watercolor and ink drawings of small items from my childhood: just random “things.” As I was falling asleep the other night I had a good 20 items that seemed perfect, but when I woke up I could only remember 2 of them. Before my nap today, I remembered about 6 more and scribbled them down. I’m still on the quest to remember them all. So far I have:

a cigarette burning in an ashtray
a tricycle
Wheel-o
a fire engine pedal car
a fish with a knife in it
slinky
a swingset
cereal

It was beautiful! We saw the Cumberland River. We went to the Hatch Show Print! and took a walk down lower Broadway. What a great town – in case you didn’t know, there is music – everywhere! Oy! Enough with the music already! Music music music! Come on now…who doesn’t like music? Luckily, the only kind of music I didn’t hear there was POP music. It’s a great town for bluegrass though, and I do so like bluegrass.

Tinney Contemporary is by far the best gallery in town, hands down! I am one lucky little duck. Beautiful gallery space and amazing staff!

I have to admit I am really high right now. I’ve been high for a couple days. I was high when I got on the plane to get back, and I’m high today because I just had a bunch of dental work done on the left side on my mouth. The Novocaine part is starting to wear off and I’m starting to feel the tooth pain and I’m about to get really screamy, so I’ll make this here real quick like.

Here is a little blurb about the show in Nashville. It’s part of the highlights of their art crawl. And I put together a few pictures here. Don’t laugh at how fat I am. You’ll win a prize if you don’t think bad thoughts about me. My friend Kyla made that hat.

I was very very pleased with the show. So many people came. My little speech to the Vanderbilt alumni went pretty darn well, and so many people were very interested in my work and wanted to speak with me. I felt very important all evening and it was because everyone in Nashville is so incredibly nice!

Okay, time for another pain pill!

Reading what I wrote last month makes me feel like I actually got something accomplished. I have 5 pieces left to do and 2 of them are more than half way there. I’m going to show WIPS (that’s works in progress folks!) and a few things I’ve completed over the last month.

Most of my danvites are done. They are for VIPS, so sorry if you don’t get one. They take forever to sew and I’m trying to entice certain critics and curators to come to the show – so that’s who they’re for. I did finally design my postcard the other day and it’s being printed right now. And by the way, I’d like to give a bit of a shout out for a local printer I use that kicks Modern Postcard’s ass. They are called America’s Printer and they do a stellar job on heavier card stock, with UV coating (or not), for way cheaper, and all online. Use them! Their customer service is amazing too.

So I’m on the last 3 paintings and then I’ll be working on the last 2 pieces which are dolls. I’m going to be showing some of my handmade dolls. Did I already mention that? Well now I did. So we got yer paintings, yer drawings, yer handmade dolls, and the amazing Scribbles in a Sandstorm, the big Dan premiere… it’s going to be one helluva show ladies and gentlemen.