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.

Jul 22, 2010

this is why rants and blogs are good:

i re-read the post below and realized i answered my own question: sit here and look at the work and shuffle it all around and see what narratives arise as a result. patience patience patience. curation is tough stuff. the worst thing i can do is rush and start forcing things together.

anyway, for all the writers in the room, here's a portrait for you. ;)




writer
15" x 12"
graphite on paper
angela simione, 2010

10 comments:

Hannah Stephenson said...

WHEW!

gorgeous.

angela simione said...

thank you, hannah! just a little ode from me to you and all the writers of the world. i admire what you do and your stamina for the chase. :)

<3

Marylinn Kelly said...

I am not certain that I possess stamina for the chase; I feel that my vision has yet to widen sufficiently, but I know the sense of being impaled by the desire to produce work of depth, rich language and feelings evoked. Your art achieves that in such emphatic and forceful ways.

Roz Ito said...

ouch angela! boy do i know that feeling. the thorn in the writing palm, so to speak. thank you for this, i feel a lot less alone now.

so thinking about your questions below re: collection, i tend to agree with you about grouping pieces more by concept & time period (process time period) than by look & form. it's interesting what you say about the special pitfalls black & white artists have to look out for re: slickness. as a writer i think i may face the opposite dilemma from you-- rather than having lots of individual poems or pieces that i have to step back and consider grouping together, culling out, etc., i tend to latch onto a concept and get deeper & deeper into it so that any one single piece gets longer & longer until it actually becomes collection-length in itself. so it's rare for me to ever finish a poem or story, rather i have poems/stories that get to be 50 pages long that i've worked on for years and are still in progress, never quite finished. this is digressing a bit from your original question, but i bring it up to talk about length-- at least w/writing there is a sense of how many pages or how long a collection normally should be to be considered a collection. for a book of poems, maybe 70-100 pages; novel or book of stories, 150-250 pages? tied to audience expectations of attention span, it seems, like the 100 minute feature film. not sure what the analogy for visual art would be?

good luck with your self-curating! i'm sure your critical/aesthetic narrative will emerge as you spend more time with all your documentation.

Radish King said...

Hell yes.
xo

angela simione said...

marylinn, thank you so much!!! though i must disagree with you- your comments even showcase your stamina! you have such a deep lyricism and beauty within your word choice. and such a startling intelligence!

angela simione said...

roz, i'm happy to have provided some comfort. and hopefully even a smirk. ;) thank you!

i can completely relate to what you descibe here about writing swelling and swelling. most of the time i feel like my writing is really just snippets of the same big, crazy piece. but i like the reminded of word count. there is definitely a norm within the visual arts about how many pieces are needed when building a portfolio. i need to keep that in mind: piece count.

and HOORAY for concept! though my work is definitely realist, they're all metaphors dealing with abstract notions: daughterhood, loss, anxiety, fear, etc. very abstract notions that i'm trying to investigate using realism. i need to bear those notions more closely in mind as i shuffle the images all around.

thank you!

angela simione said...

rebecca! hahahahaha! you made me laugh outloud! very loud! thank you, sweet friend! i was thinking about you and your henry project right before i named it. ;)

Elisabeth said...

See what I mean about nearly dead - a dead hand, nailed. Thanks, Angela.

angela simione said...

hahahahahahha! elisabeth! you crack me up! i love it! thanks for that!