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.

May 2, 2010

mmm hmmm mmm hmmm mmm hmmm

such a rumble. such a burning agitation. such a nebulous resistance that courses through, in the blood stream, in the brain, in the heart, in the bones. such a smoking dream. steam rising. the steam lets me know it's real.

i painted all day yesterday. another 5 footer. it should be done in a few days. but i refuse to put pressure on myself. i refuse to put pressure on the individual canvasses anymore. it's a bad way to work. it doesn't help me. it slows me down. everything feeds everything. there's nothing to do but follow where it leads. some days the best thing to do is read, some days the best thing to do is draw. it all pours out of and in to the same deep dark well of desire. the desire that fuels the whole shebang. this weird enterprise of being an artist. the strange symbiotic nature of The Practice. "what you put in is what you get out" is true. super true in a vast variety of ways. and so i dump in poetry, i dump in patti smith, i dump in roland barthes, i dump in margueritte duras, rebecca loudon, henry rollins, richard longo, kiki smith, sally mann, sharon olds, sylvia plath, anne sexton, angela carter, richard hugo, herta muller, gerhard richter, banks violette, sophie jodoin, donnie darko, and blue velvet. ETC, ETC, ETC! make myself a big, angry, gurgling, uncontrollable goulash to flail in. see what lands in the bottom of my lungs. see what gets coughed up. see where i am in a relation to all these things. see what captivates me and follow it. follow it. follow it. i'll find out "why" by chasing the thing down, flipping it on its belly, and taking a good hard look.

the thing i realized (again) is this: art matters. and it isn't supposed to be FINAL. nothing is FINAL but death and art doesn't die. at least it doesn't stay dead. forget what you've heard. the beast comes back and back again. i looked at artemisia gentileschi's work last night for a long long time and fell deep in love with her all over again, with her spirit of resistance, the big FUCK YOU of her work itself. her love for the thing shining through. the love that allowed her to be persistent, unrepentant, to paint herself as the Allegory. to say, out loud, "it is relevant to ME!"

there is no wrong way to be an artist. no ONE way either. no rules. no timeline. no FINAL. just GO.

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