I’ve been fittin’ to make a new Artist’s book about Dan, so I’ve been pretty busy working out all the logistics, layout, words, supplies, etc. for all of that. These things take a lot of planning and months to complete.

Add it to yet another project I have going toward my solo show next November at Compound Yucca Valley. I’m hereby under pressure, and a year may not be enough time for what I have planned: the Artist’s book edition, paintings, the floor sculpture, forty-eight embroideries, drawings, soft specimen sculptures, and, get this, a performance!

Yup!

I’ve never done that one before. I am not a performance artist. Well, not exactly. I am a musician. I’ve played drums in front of large audiences in the past, but only with a band. Never by myself, aside from taking the occasional drum solo, pretty much against my will. I never liked doing them. I think they’re stupid.

However, that’s what I plan to do. Not exactly a “drum solo” in the traditional sense, but I will be playing drums in the performance I have planned. You’d think I’d be jamming with another musician in this performance, but no. I’m going to be playing by myself in a Dan costume! I have to create a costume, too.

Also, I’m supposed to make collaborative pieces with Margeaux Walter for the outside bays at the gallery, which will run during my show. This is what I mean about a year not being enough time. I have a little bit of a life in between all of this and a disability that hits me daily with fatigue, bad. I’m already a little stressed.

But I’m still very excited. Right now, I am very focused on the Dan book, which is called Medicine Dan. I love talking about it because I’m so into it right now. I recently learned a new binding that I’ll be using that looks ultra cool: a buttonhole binding. Here are a couple of pictures of what that binding looks like. It exposes the signatures, so I’m using some nice imported papers to wrap each of them.

I’ll also have a die-cut cover and some other little details in it. Nothing extremely time-consuming, but enough to take a good, long while nonetheless. I still have to paint all the original pages at least the one time, even though most will be printed, and a few pages will be original in each book. I’m going to try to make eight of them in the edition. More if I can, but I’ll say eight for now. I don’t want to knock myself out completely, and this is why I’m not planning for too many original pages.

As far as the whole show title, I’ve been hovering around On the Mend, but I don’t know if that is good enough yet. It’s at least it’s the working title for now because the show has a lot of stitching involved, and all in all, it’s about stuff that heals.

And I do have a self-imposed deadline to get at least one, if not two, more Discarded Snapshots paintings done before the end of the year. I think even just one will be hard. That deadline is actually because of my last attempt at the Yaddo application. I need a few more in this series to use for the submission, or I’d like to have more anyway.

So that’s the scoop for now. Of course, I have way more shit to talk about. A bunch of personal dilemmas that I won’t mention, and I can type about it all forever, but that’s all the time I have for now.