Two, Third, Seven, Eight

Ayin Es2 Comments

I’m just waiting for my camera charge light to turn green and I think I will post the first two pieces of the series of seven? I suppose I’m still on the fence. Still thinking about it. Two are officially finished. The third one had a bit of a glitch in the Matrix, so it won’t be finished until later this week, or even the weekend, so I will be starting the next four this week and perhaps an eighth one will pop into my spaghetti brain. I really wanted to have eight in total before I showed them to anyone. I did, however, show a preliminary drawing on Google+ because that is where I spend all my social media time.

If any of you Facebook peoples wonder where I am, that’s where. Google+. If you aren’t on there yet, you should be. It is taking over Internetland.

So last week I worked, but not as much as I would have liked since I was ill. A different kind of ill if you had been following my entries. I have been feeling much better – with a lot of trepidation – which I suppose is normal. I am just glad I have been feeling better. 🙂

Little things made me appreciate my life. Actually, they usually do, but finishing little parts of the painting I was working on. It is not titled yet, but it has four black ovals. I was filling them in. I started with the edges, where I had to be very careful because they are against the finished birch wood. Just getting the line connected around from one end to the other made me do a happy dance. Filling them in was just icing on the cake. I was celebrating – and this particular painting isn’t even the one I like most. It’s the one I like least probably. Now that it’s all done, I like it pretty good. No feet, but I like it. It reminds me a bit of my 2004 work.

2004 was the year before I was picked up by the gallery, or rather, before they began courting me. It was a long process, yet everything seemed to have happened so fast. It was October and I did a residency at Vermont Studio Center. It was wonderful. Life changing really. I cried when I left to go back home, yet it was such a BIG deal that I even went.  Not too long before I went there, I was a shut in.

Not too many people know this about me, but there were a few years where I couldn’t leave the house, drive a car – I mean – I couldn’t even check the mailbox that stood a few steps outside our front door.  And at the time, I was in a wheelchair much of the time. It took years of therapy and reading books, and doing panic and phobia workbooks to get out of that mud, little by little. By the time I applied for that residency, I was barely ready for it. mjp had to fly out there with me and sort of set me up before it started so I could get used to the whole idea that I was going to be there for a month by myself without him and fly back alone.

My little secret that no one knew was that I came back a week early (pre-planned) and just didn’t answer my phone or use my computer, but I think my friend Suzan Woodruff knew and left a message about coming with her to meet George and the director at George Billis. It was kind of an important window of opportunity. I wasn’t even looking for a gallery. It fell into my lap, really.

These were the pieces that they ended up taking into inventory at the very end of 2004.

Polar Bearing, 2003. Paper patterns, thread, pins, oil & graphite on canvas, 24 x 24 inches.

 

Odetostas, 2004. Acrylic, oil and graphite on masonite panel, 20 x 16 inches.

 

Buffalo Girls, 2004. Acrylic, oil, fabric, pins & graphite on panel, 14 x 11 inches.

 

Electric Bill, 2004. Paper, acrylic, graphite & oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches.

But, the ones I was thinking of in regards to the painting I’m talking about are these, which were done at the very wee-end of 2004 after I had a major surgery. Another story for another time.

Pollination, 2004. Oil, paper, acrylic and thread on canvas, 24 x 24 inches.

 

Night Blooming Seed Pods, 2005. Oil, pencil, paper and sticks on canvas, 12 x 12 inches.

 

The Roots of Gelt with Pods, 2005. Watercolor, pencil, ink, paper, money and sticks on paper, 22.5 x 30 inches.

The Week Went Well

Ayin Es4 Comments

How’d your week go Carol?

Why, the week went well, thank you.

The week went well for the birds that fly through my garden. The rats that live in my cranberry bush and the possum on the other side of the fence. The week went well for most Americans. Many of them got paid today, some got laid this morning, most had a good hair day, but even less knew the importance of their lives.

The week went well for the stars in the sky, the air when it moved in the early morning hours, it got brisk, and you needed a sweater.

Monday should have been a day where my back pulled straight, where I got a little taller, and my teeth showed a little when I smiled.  My drums were set up as I wanted. My studio looked bitchen. My first three paintings were half way there – and I even still liked them. They are masterpieces after all.

I began to appreciate my surroundings. My life. The people I choose to share it with.

And I thought about how I arrived here

and how I will never fucken get over it.

meat11small

 

I’m 11 here.

Drums, Blah

Ayin Es4 Comments

Yeah yeah yeah….. I set my drums up in my studio. It was a pain in the ass – had to rearrange a lot of stuff blah blah blah. Energy: Gone, really sore all over, oh my achin’ reah reah reah… Too depressed to write a blog post. An honest one anyway. Meds sucking. Here’s a pic, but I made a whole page about it on my site here.

Google Rankings

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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!

brad

Television!

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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.