these texts are an archive of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area from march 2007 - march 2015. it stands as a record of close to a decade of my life, charting the struggles i faced as an artist, daughter, and lover. messy and chaotic at times, eloquent and poetic at others, these texts are an index i am proud of. it was here in this electric box that i learned how to be honest about my experiences and the person i needed to become. it was here that i first learned the truism that words make the world and how to trust such a beautiful, rife, hard fact.

thank you for meeting me here in such tall grass.


my artist website is here.

Apr 5, 2010

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yesterday it rained and rained. hard and constant. grey. dim. it felt like evening all day long. and i stayed in my pajamas, drawing and reading in bed, until it was time to get ready for dinner at our neighbor's house.

i read the introduction to Vitamin D- an artist bible if ever there was one... especially for those of us fond of working on paper. and the essay said everything i've been thinking about lately. ideas of mapping and charting personal environments... a "bedroom art" loaded with intimacy. what a perfect mirror. i eventually find myself drawing in bed at some point everyday. and today will be no different. there's just something about it, as an art and as an act, that fits so seamlessly with my interests right now. oil painting feels so final to me at present... a closed system... grand. and i don't want to do anything final or grand right now, i want to explore. if need be, get it wrong. i want to feel my way around, not worry about definitions... or anything definite. i want to crawl through the grass and pick up the fragments, stick them in my pocket, and feel around for more.

i'll move back to oil painting eventually. and probably sooner than later. but for now i need the intimacy of paper, the common attribute of it, a humble pencil in my hand.

it's the path toward "the right word" we've all been talking about so much lately... a truer language for me at this point in my life. the blacked in areas of my scratching, the white blankness that signifies loss or the unknown, the skipped over, the nexus of ALL COLOR.

and i know there is no "right word". but it is the search for it that counts. the hunting down of an honest mode. the defeat that must be overcome. persistence and honor and striving and finding. maybe these things are more important than "knowing".





Words




Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echos!
Echos travelling
Off from the centre like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road-

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.








-Sylvia Plath
(from Ariel)

8 comments:

Not Yosa Buson said...

Words are like raindrops, streaking colors on white sands, bridging sky and self.

Avo said...

Not to put a (tired) label on it or anything, but it sounds like what you are striving for, in words, in paint, in life... is art. Or is art only part of it? I love the part where I wonder about, wandering about my heart.

angela simione said...

not yosa buson- thank you for the introduction to Yosa Buson! i did not know of this poet! :)

angela simione said...

alesa, hello! and welcome!

"...wonder about, wander about my own heart." me too! i love that. it is a shifty, mysterious place, indeed!

and so linked to that notion, i guess what i'm searching for (to use an even more tired label) is something real, something honest... or a language that is somehow more complete than spoken words. art is the path i'm taking toward that. a life's work, definitely.

Avo said...

Thanks for the welcome.

By the way, Yosa Buson is also a famous sumie (india ink) artist. A brief google search turned up some of what I remembered: "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/A_black_hawk_and_two_crows_by_Yosa_Buson.jpg"... You might also be interested in looking up haboku (flung ink, a kind of impressionistic style of sumie), but its harder to find good examples of that online, it's a minor subset of not very well represented art form.

angela simione said...

alesa, thank you! haboku is gorgeous! and i agree- not many good examples of it online. in school, one of my printmaking teachers studied traditional printmaking and calligraphy in her homeland (japan) before coming to the states and her work was just BREATH-TAKING! so beautiful and also such sad work somehow.

Avo said...

Yes, beautiful and sad... those words often characterize classical Japanese art and culture. Not exclusively, of course, for instance your art, from what I've seen of it, isn't foreign to sadness and beauty either.

angela simione said...

thank you! :)