So since mjp and I have redone my website, with all the secret back-end programming, I am now coming in on Google searches for Los Angeles contemporary artist on the first page, ranking at #7.
If you have a computer monitor as big as mine (22 inches!), you don’t even have to scroll down to see that!
Yeah, so HBO cancelled Enlightened, a show that I was quite fond of for many reasons. Mike White, one of my favorite, multifaceted writer-directors, somehow got paired up with the specialized talents of Laura Dern to create the show about a middle-aged woman trying to reassemble herself among her co-workers after making a spectacle of herself during a nervous breakdown in her corporate office.
Only Laura Dern could have played this character, a woman so much the opposite of self-aware, who you feel both disdain and pity for, while tension builds and builds as you move through each episode – something that is clearly the work of White and Dern as a team. If you have ever seen Chuck and Buck, you’d know what I mean, or Dern’s character way back in Blue Velvet. I loved that tension, which is hard to portray in both acting and/or writing.
I was so looking forward to this series, and it did not let me down. It did exactly what I expected in very unexpected ways. “Amy,” Dern’s character is just not likable, but by the end of the first season, the viewer, no matter who you are, will see themselves in her character – all the ugly, self-centered parts, and the parts that mean well.
We all mean well, and we find something beautiful and childlike in what she tried to discover about herself among the sea turtles on the hippy-dippy retreat she was on after her breakdown, which she reflects on occasionally in the episodes in the first season. And in the second season she comes back to try to take the corporation that she works for down, for all the corruption and environmental havoc only she knows they are guilty of.
Anyway, I loved this show, and like many other AMAZING shows, like Deadwood, for instance, HBO has cancelled before they even had time to percolate. Fuckers! On the other end, I am grateful for the risks they have taken and support they have given to shows like Girls, Six Feet Under, Sopranos, Big Love, OZ, etc.
I guess I will just have to cry my way to April 7th when Mad Men starts on AMC.
It’s a no-go on Yaddo. I got the rejection letter yesterday. Oh, boohoo. Whatever. I expect another letter from Montalvo mid-April. And I haven’t applied for anything else besides the California Community Foundation grant, and that one is practically impossible to get. I mean, I said that about the Pollock-Krasner and I somehow won that, but that was because they had a couple of drunken panel members who were also blind and possibly on fire. I don’t know how I won that thing! They probably got sick of seeing my name – “Give it to her already! Or she’ll never leave us alone!”
Went to therapy today. Yeah, therapy. They still haven’t fixed me. And I have to say I really love my therapist. It is really hard to find someone to trust and feel comfortable with. I think about people I know and the stories I have heard, and even a few stories of my own! It’s not easy to find a sane therapist. Many get into the field because they are not stable themselves, so it’s no wonder that there are plenty out there that are creepy or hippie-dippy, or just bad.
Before I went to mine, I researched thoroughly. Those of you that know me know that that probably means I went to each of their houses and took blood tests and asked for their birth certificates. I knew what kind of therapist I wanted and I didn’t want to fuck around with someone who didn’t know what they were doing because I had my face in psychology books for the last 10 years, and they were about specific issues you might want to call rare.
I found a winner. She is highly intelligent and understands everything I have been bringing to the table. So now, especially since I’m going through major medication changes, I want to see her once a week, at least for a little while, and that nice lady made it doable for me. 🙂
Then I came home a stood in my studio, too tired to really paint, but I have been thinking a LOT lately about setting up my drums. I began taking measurements and figuring out what to do about this electrical outlet and that plastic bin, and my drawing table, and where to put my carts, and long story short, I think I have it all figured out. It’s going to take a couple of days and I have to visit Home Depot, but I just might have a little drummer area up and running by next week. I have to squeeze it in – between paintings and doctor visits, and all my other dicking around I do.
I was going to talk about how fucking disappointed I am about how HBO cancelled Enlightened, but I need to get back to the easel, so I’ll bitch about it later.
So I have been working on the first of the three pieces of the six ideas I have mapped out with preliminary sketches. I swear, sometimes I just wish I had a magic wand that transferred my original drawings exactly the way I drew them on the smaller paper, and magically make them appear onto the canvas (or panel). Wouldn’t that be something? (White people’s problem.)
I tend to crush on the quick and messy, original sketch. BUT, if I did have it exactly as I drew it in the first place, all those new and unexpected things might not happen. “Mistakes” or just new happenstances. They usually do. And I usually like them. I just get fickle in this in-between time when the composition is laid down as good as it’s going to get and parts are getting painted and I don’t know exactly where it’s going until I dig in deeper with the paint. You know, the fun part. 🙂
I’m doing these paintings in chronological order – the way each idea came to me. I think that keeps a kind of excitement going because I am wanting to accomplish the ones I’m working on so that I can get to the newer ideas as soon as possible, if that makes sense.
The first idea, like a few of these, came out of my secret EyeBook. I keep a few different sketch books. All of them have different purposes and ways I use them in practice. I can’t tell you exactly how I use the EyeBook, but it’s the most important of all my sketch books. Up until recently, I worked in it every day. The exception lately has been because of some serious depression and a long, drawn out change in medications. I have worked in it here and there on the days I am feeling like myself, but I don’t think there is one page in it in March yet.
The EyeBook sketchbook is about being able to see your own work in an objective manner, partly. The sketches are not supposed to become paintings, unless they just so happen to command it. It’s also about identifying (and clarifying) how you feel about (your) art, and your emotions, and knowing the difference. The point is, one of the first ideas came about because I was so preoccupied that particular day, I could not do the exercise. I wanted instead to get outside and start sanding and sealing all the small panels I had left stored under my work bench. I wound up drawing a quick, abstract sketch of someone sanding a panel – “The Sander.” I painted all the black outlines in oil on that one already. I’m waiting for that to dry so I can paint the rest white and tan. There will be a small rectangle of fluorescent orange because I marked that page in the book with one of those sticky tags.
Another day, I looked in another sketchbook of mine, I just call it the “drumset book.” It has a red drum set embossed on the cover. One of my collector friends – Kel, from North Carolina, sent it to me, and I love it so much. I try to only use it when I have a worthy idea to put in it. I am going to be sad when it is totally filled and I can’t use it anymore. But anyways, I found a sketch in there that I thought was a great idea when I drew it (right before I fell asleep), but then I woke up the next morning and decided it was really, really stupid.
Later, I took the drumset book with me when I went to Palm Springs and I added tiny little lines to it while I was thinking about whether or not I should leave my gallery and what I wanted to do with my life as an artist, and I started to really like it. I thought, “Why did I think this was so stupid? Because I thought the gallery might have thought it was stupid? …Well too bad.” Working title” “Four Thinkers.” It’s mostly black with fluorescent green, red and a bunch of pencil lines.
And the one I started on a pretty birch panel today I think I will call “Red Scarf” because if I call it “Rainbow Eater” then it might make people think it’s a face, and it’s really not. It is abstract and has no representational meaning. There is a curved area near the top that I took into Photoshop and colored it red, but I also colored another one purple.
I spent two days flipping back and forth between these two images, asking and re-asking mjp, “red or purple?” yet, not really listening to his answers because it was ultimately my decision.
Here is where I can sometimes go a little nuts. (A little?) Yeah, maybe it was three days. It wasn’t easy, but I made it red and to me, it was a scarf. And to me it was REALLY important. I love this composition and now it’s kinda different now that it’s on the panel and slightly different than the original sketch. There is a spiral in it that is now stout when it was kind of tall and thin. There is an extra band of light yellow above the main area of coverage. All the horizontal color bands are thicker and the foot (yes, I just love putting feet on things these days as you can plainly see) is a little bigger than I first drew it.
Is it ruined? No. Just different. I am just getting started painting all three now, and I have most of the week for quiet painting time. I am so happy and we’ll see where this all goes.
Thank you for reading without any images. It must be quite boring and quite difficult.
I picked up my last piece from Billis the other day.
It wasn’t weird. You’d think it would be, but it wasn’t. Like I said before, I didn’t burn any bridges there and I feel that Tressa and Brooks, and even George remain my friends. I’m still listed on their website though. That change might take a while. I think they hire their webmaster but three times a year.
Just a couple of weeks out and what’s really interesting is the amount of ideas that have been coming to me since I gave my notice. I’m working on six pieces – five on birch panels (24 x 24 inches) and one of the same size on canvas. I am kinda crazy happy about all of them.
Arctic Memory will have to wait a bit, but it’s still set up in the studio, little broken threads laying all over the floor just in front of it. I realized that I did not paint the landscape under the letters after all. As I applied water to the paper, it was easier to pull them off and there was nothing but white, primed canvas under there. I then realized, I couldn’t have painted oil under the letters because I put those things on with a clear, acrylic polymer. Duh. Now I’m debating if I should just paint right over them (the Hei and the Kuf) and work on pulling off the other three since those are practically black. Whatever I do, it’s a back-burner project for now.
I am waiting for results from Yaddo to come any day now. I applied at the beginning of the winter, hoping to do a one month residency. This will be the third time I have applied. No, wait, the second time. I have applied to the MacDowell Colony twice as well. I’m not counting on it. I had written to them beforehand and asked them what the age range was in their last pool of selected artists. The oldest was 35. Yaddo was 40. I once applied to the Skowhegan School and the oldest ever was about 40. So I’m not counting on it.
I am hoping to make it to one of Peter Clothier’s One Hour/One Painting events – particularly the one on Miriam Wosk at SMMoA on March 23rd at 2:00 PM. Peter has a book out right now about the art of looking at art called Slow Looking. I highly admire Peter as both a writer and as a person who practices meditation regularly <– something I was never quite interested in until I began to know Peter and started to read his blog.
Anyway, I should get back to this canvas I’m painting. I am going to be hoarding the new work, so I will have to start thinking about what sort of pictures to insert into my posts. Here is a random elephant:
