last day

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i don't know what to say.  the only thing to say is simply "not yet".  not yet, not yet, not yet.  just one more day. 

always the desperate hunger for one more day. always, always, always.  just one more.  not yet, not yet, not yet.  we pack up our supplies and don't look much at one another.  the screech of packing tape, bottles clanking, someone is clearing their throat. 

i want to skip this part because it's going to hurt.  i plan to finish this experience without any eyeliner or mascara.  tears will find me, surely.  i'm a sentimental girl with a big bleeding heart.  the end of this comes too soon.



damn it, there's so much to say.

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midway

one of my studio mates is listening to Fleetwood Mac.  every now and then, he sings along as he paints.  every now and then, we all do.  it's monday night.  i'm sipping beer from a wine glass and we've all got our doors flung wide.  we walk in and out of each other's spaces whenever we want.  i can hear the music as clearly as if i were playing it in my own studio.  it's like art school but without papers to write.  it's like science camp but without bedtimes.

this is all such a big damn beautiful gift.

 

 

 

 

 

trying not to count the days

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i am awake and alone inside a silent house.  the light is beautiful and i had no bad dreams.

i booked a room at The Jane in new york for a few days in mid october before heading up to Montreal and then back down to Vermont for the residency.  less than 2 weeks now until i board my plane.  last week, i was full of excited anxiety and it was incredibly hard to go to work. this week, i'm calm.  i'm trying not to think about it much, only in terms of what needs to be handled before i leave my life here in Oakland for 6 weeks-  the packages that need to be shipped, the day i'll need to spend at the DMV replacing my lost driver's license, bill payments that need to be scheduled, etc etc.  when i start thinking about anything beyond these types of regular responsibilities, my blood runs too hot too quickly and i return to that semi-afraid state of elation that finds me so easily at the mere mention of travel.

but this is more than travel.  this is Time.  it's been years since i've had the time to just curl up with a book for three days straight if i want to.  it's been years since i've had the time to curl up with a drawing for three days straight if i want to.  it's been years since i've been surrounded by other artists on a daily basis.  not since art school.  and i'll tell ya, hanging out with other artists is what i miss most about that experience.  it's one of the things i'm looking forward to most about going to this residency.  i'll be one of 50 artists and writers.  i'm so excited for the conversations that we're going to have. 

i've been reading Keith Haring's journals the last few days and his descriptions of art school, going to painting class and poetry readings, putting together shows, and his own ideas about his practice are so intoxicating.  i revel in it.  i turn the pages hungrily, grateful for each word and insight.  i'm comforted by his texts, so full of casual language.  that's how i write in my diary.  i am no Anais Nin.  my eloquence finds me after a flood of slang and swear words.  i've always sort of felt bad that my diary is not a place of eloquence.  until now.  perhaps the eloquence is simply of a different variety?  perhaps my aims are totally different, totally my own.  i'm looking forward to traveling with Keith Haring's diary pressed against mine, two of the best travel companions i can think of.  i'm looking forward to walking around new york city and seeing the places he describes in these pages.  those that are still there.  i'm looking forward to going to the Guggenheim for the first time and central park.  funny i've yet to do such quintessentially new york things on past visits. 

but there i go dreaming. :) 

it's important to me to stay put in The Present the next 13 days.  i don't want to slide off into reverie just yet.  i want the realities that surround me.  i want to enjoy the peace and quiet of a slow morning at home before work.  i want to enjoy the sounds of the street and the screech of the train.  i want to enjoy walking in to a neighborhood bar at midnight after a long day at work and seeing my lover sitting on a bar stool waiting for me.  i want to see him turn and smile at me.  i want to hold his face in my hands and kiss it.  and i want to stay in that moment.  i want to laugh with him.  i want to laugh with my friends and fellow waiters and roommates.  i want to enjoy every single thing about the simple goodness of my life right this second and not slip off in to dreams.  the future will find me.  i am creating it.  there is no need today to loll inside such images. there is a need, instead, to be gratefully happy for the day i'm standing in. 

i am a very lucky girl. 

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simple

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today, i bought myself flowers.  big, red daisies.  i don't know their actual name.  i cut their stems and put them in a mason jar.  i put the mason jar on the dresser by the bed.  i listen to patti smith.  i twist thin, soft, black yarn around my crochet hook and sink into a revery about how life once was.  not all my reveries are sad but i allow myself even those that are -  the freedom to mourn, the freedom to be upset, the freedom to feel lonely and singular.  the light was beautiful today and the food i'd bought for myself tasted good.  i walked in the sun, bought myself a new notebook, let my deep scars shine inside of me.  i tried to listen to them.  today, they want to cry.  sometimes, the old aches wake up.  sometimes, the best thing to do is to let them...  to give them their due, to allow for a reckoning, to give them their say.  and so i twist yarn around a hook and listen to car alarms, listen to my laundry tumbling in the dryer, listen to patti smith.  i pour myself a glass of Dr. Loosen Riesling and salivate all over a tiny hunk of Saint Auger blue cheese. i allow myself these pleasures, these luxuries, so distant incongruous to the life i once lived.  i allow myself this moment.  i allow myself to be silent, to stop the performance of so many things, to free myself from the cage of constant smiling.  i lay on my bed in front of the small electric fan and twirl my hair.  today, i am grateful for it all, everything that has happened even though my spirit lowers its feathers to hide its diamonds. despite the anvil of memory, today was new.  and tomorrow so shall be.  

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i just love her. :)

always david

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he is almost an instinct of mine.  in my alcohol-fueled lethargy, i began to quiz myself over the relevance of art...  what it means, what my art means and whether or not it even matters.  this is an aggravating little game artists play with themselves, it seems, but in the moment it really hurts.  it hurts to ask yourself, "is art meaningless?"  it's so close to asking whether or not life is meaningless.

and maybe it is.  maybe life is meaningless.  maybe art's role is to provide the meaning we're all searching for?  or at least an avenue to it.  i don't know.  i just suddenly found myself wondering this evening whether or not i'm defeated...  whether or not i still contain the requisite amount of FIGHT.  despite recent encouragements, i suddenly felt worn out.  

i got out of bed and went to my book case.  i needed another artist.  i needed a mentor.  i needed someone to tell me that everything is okay and to pull my shoulders back and fuck what the rest of the world thinks.  my eyes flowed across my collection of art books.  so many volumes of kiki smith's work, louise bourgeois, keith haring, andy warhol.  i paused at francesca woodman.  i paused again at terrence koh.  then i came across a book i forgot i had.  a book i hadn't even read yet.  i pulled it from the shelf.  david wojnarowicz's 7 MILES A SECOND. 

the moment i start reading his work i come face to face with the truth that art is a way of life.  i don't need to torture myself with the question of whether or not my work "matters".  what does that even mean?  i don't need to make myself cry about the accomplishments i've not yet made.  art is a path.  or better yet, art is a language.  it is how i speak.

i read his texts and i want to cry.  not only because of the sadness his work so often describes but because of his fearlessness in telling his story, his bravery in regard to confronting the twists of the heart and mind.  his love of humanity was so unapologetic, so humbling...  and so i want to cry when i am confronted with his work:  i am humbled.  i realize, in the face of david wojnarowicz's work, to ask, "does my art matter?" is a waste of time and effort.  just do the work.  just speak.  and even if it's just to speak about something as aggravating as my struggles with my own artistic temperament, that's alright.  i silence myself too quickly sometimes.  i mean, we all need to complain to each other every now and then.  it does us good to know we're not total freaks in this regard.  we all fear our work is total crap...  that how we are choosing to spend our lives is an act of  futility.  david's work reminds me that this is absolutely not the case.  the point is to care enough about the brevity of life to use what time you have to connect the way you want to connect with other human beings.  the point is to breathe as deeply as you can breathe, so deeply it hurts and then to tell the truth about yourself...  the truth that hurts.  the truth that nags and won't stop tossing and turning until you finally acknowledge it exists and needs a space in which to be seen, to be dealt with, to be wrestled with and contended with.

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memory lane can be the road to the Present

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spent the whole day behind the hook and am now enjoying an over-poured glass of Auslese.  this is the very definition of a wonderful day off.

and i've needed it.  the passed week or so has been a bit of an emotional roller-coaster.  a huge box arrived unexpectedly containing my mother's collection of family photos, more than 3 1/2 years after her death.  i opened the box only to be sure of what it was and then closed it again.  i wasn't in the mood for that type of upheaval and i wasn't prepared to slice open a cardboard box and be greeted by my mother's face and the dresses she saved that my sister and i wore as little girls in an Olen Mill's portrait so soooooo many years ago.  kelly must've been 4 or 5.  that would have made me 7 or 8.

a few days later, i reached back inside the box and pulled the dresses out.  i remember hating them as a little girl but, now, they look like art pieces.  something possibly akin to the Kiki Smith piece, Sisters, or the twins in The Shining.  ha!

i gazed at them in between rounds of digging through the 7 portfolios that are stored in my bedroom closet.  it was a strange walk down memory lane.  it's amazing what an accurate barometer of emotion art is.  looking at my work from just a few years ago, i relived the pain and confusion and longing i was entrenched in during those days.  and the sheer MASS of my personal collection is astounding! i've thrown away SO MUCH each time i've moved and i still have such an enormous stockpile of work! it was heartrending to go through it all but there were also moments when i smiled.  and smiled wide like a goofy child, at that.  in the middle of a portfolio that largely houses work i did during the last year i lived in Calistoga, i came across a self-portrait i drew when i was 21 years old.  it was made during one of the happiest times in my life DESPITE the fact that i had yet to leave my hated home town.

 

it was drawn during the time Jose and i lived together in my very first apartment.  we were inseparable and i loved being with him.  we smoked way too many cigarettes and drank blended frappaccinos way too often and squeezed our bellies  and called ourselves fat just like two silly teenagers would.  :)  thinking back on all that makes me so happy.  we listened to Bikini Kill and dreamed of New York together.  what's really special is that sometimes we still do.  it's not at all irregular for Jose and i to refer to each other as Rebel Girl more than 10 years later.  :)

all this made somehow brought me to the realization that for the last several years i needed a deep round of PLAY.  it's no secret that life is hard and it's no secret that my life has been hard.  looking at my own work, my own hand smearing charcoal and graphite, the words i'd scrawl sometimes in the margins or on the back of the paper...  i realized that in the span of 3 short years i lost all three parental figures and the person i considered to be the closest member of my immediate family, my partner for 7 years.  with the exception of my siblings, my entire immediate family basically collapsed.   and all the emotion of those days was right there.  right in my hands, in the black and white smears and screams of my drawings.

it was hard to leave the house that day.  i wanted to hide in bed.  i wanted to be dirty and dumb and lounge around in dingy pajamas.  i wanted to not give a fuck about anything and just spend the day drinking.  i wanted to raise a middle finger to the world and cry my eyes out.  sometimes i hear my voice inside my own head and it sounds so small.  so painfully small. so heartbreaking.  i think of my mother and i think of my father and i think of my siblings and what their pain must be and i whisper inside myself, "this isn't fair"...

but looking at the artwork i made during such a tumultuous era allowed me to see that i have, in fact, healed from a great many pains and that i long to return to a certain type of seriousness again, a particular breed of deep introspection and artistic investigation.  basically, it made me want to draw again.  :)

we'll see.  i sure enjoyed laying in bed all day with my crochet hook and black yarn today, that's for sure.



i'm confident the Future is an interesting place.  

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all in

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i re-opened my etsy shop today.  it's something i've been wanting to do for quite sometime now and getting into the residency helped me pull the trigger on that this morning.  i'll be putting more and more things up for sale in the coming week, it was just important to open it today.  i simply needed to make the commitment to it.  and it's about more than just needing to raise funds for travel and supplies, it's about having an artistic presence in the world in as many forms and places as i feel able to and interested in.  it's about giving the art a chance to find its rightful home.  it's about taking my role as an artist a bit more seriously each day.

i've been watching my bosses lately, paying attention to how they move, the expressions on their faces, the way they carry themselves, how they speak and, most importantly, how much time they dedicate to their profession every day.  i started watching all this because 2 of them recently had birthdays and they were both in the restaurant on those days.  i'd remarked to our Sommelier "working on your birthday?  that sucks!" and her matter of fact retort was, "that's what this job takes."  her assertion stayed with me the rest of the evening and has followed me around in the weeks since, popping in to my brain almost daily, and is now slapping my in the face with a very simple truism: those who work daily toward their goals, undaunted and with total stubborn persistence, achieve them. those the road through this world is a bit more unclear for artists, it is nevertheless true that making a 7 day a week commitment to ANYTHING will eventually lead to success.  and i'm not even sure what i mean when i use the word "success" in relation to art as i largely already consider myself to be successfully living s an artist-  i wake up every day with enough time to luxuriate in the landscape of my diary before getting dressed for work.  i tend to work a 4-day work week and therefore have 3 days off every week to dedicate toward my own artist aims, whether it be holing up in bed and geeking out on a project of spending an entire day flipping through the monographs of artists i adore. i successfully incorporate art into my daily life.  but i'd rather be plugging 12 to 14 hours a day in to my practice than do anything else.  if i can look at my bosses and take a hint from them, what i'm seeing is the glaring reality to pursue what i want with as much steam and muscle as i've got because, as the lady said, "that's what this job takes." 

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reflection

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today i submitted another residency proposal and requested the paperwork to defer my student loan (again).  i'm trying to find ways to parlay the one residency offer i've received in to other opportunities.  it's amazing what one little nod of encouragement can do.  suddenly, it's not such a chore to send off a proposal.  suddenly, my dreams feel serious again and i feel the need to run toward a new future with every ounce of sweat and love i've got. 

still, it's scary.  but it's also exhillerating, and i think maybe the time has come to let myself be a bit shaken up again.  i'm very comfortable in my daily life.  i don't get as much art made or as much writing done as i'd like, but i'm not unhappy.  i like my job.  i like the people i work with.  i have fun everyday.  but when i think about waiting tables for the next 3 years rather than traveling, or rather than going to grad school, or rather than moving to new york and just committing to making it work...  i feel deflated.  i think somewhere along the line, maybe around the start of the year, i decided to coast.  and maybe i needed that.  maybe i needed a bit of ease and a lot of fun.  maybe i needed a break from all the big worries, all the pressure i generally feel to make each second MEAN SOMETHING.  it gets to be too much after awhile.  a person needs to spend a bit of time in shallow waters every now and then. 

over the course of the last few days, i return again and again to something my father used to say to me: "follow your first dreams first."  he's right.  that's exactly what a person should do.  that's exactly what an artist needs to do.  i know that i'll be waiting tables for the next few years but the question is really about where and what for?  what dreams are being financed?  what opportunities does being a waiter allow me to take advantage of?  which opportuniies am i chasing and creating for myself along the way?  and am i inspired by the life that surrounds me?

more and more, i've come to the knowledge that for the last several years i've been living a half-in, half-out kind of life, not fully committed to anything (other than art), ready to leave things and people behind at a moments notice if need be.  thankfully, i haven't needed to do such a thing but i'm more troubled/compelled by the fact that i was ready to.  i don't want to be that way.  for a time, it was necessary to be non-committal.  i needed it for my own protection while i healed from past hurts...  but i'm not planted here.  i love oakland yet i resist putting down real roots.  my mind and heart both pull hard toward a different city and the only thing that's keeping me in oakland at this point is fear of the unknown.  i'm selling myself short.  i'm keeping my dreams on the back-burner and the longer i keep them there, the easier it becomes to simply leave them there.  and doing this means i'm not truly committed to my dreams. i'm not taking myself seriously.  i seem to have fallen prey to the delusion that there will always be time for certain things later.  i know for a fact that's not true and it surprises me that i can even think this way. 

doris lessing said, "whatever you're meant to do, do it now.  the conditions are always impossible."

i'm trying to hold on to this, let it challenge and steel me and make me brave.  one day i'm going to die and i want to use my time on this planet as beautifully and effectively as i can.  i don't want to be a person who shies away from risk.  i know from my own past experiences that it is on the other side of risk where real happiness is found.  and not just happiness, but self-respect and self-knowledge.  i know that the adventure is always worth it.  i've got to let my steam build.  it's an artist's life i want, and it's an artist's life i'm built for.

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ecstatic

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late night drawing session, dancing to cyndi lauper.  :)

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this morning...

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...counting my many blessings.   

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satisfaction is a wonderful feeling

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romance.


and last night while walking in the cold, cold wind in san francisco, i realized no one has ever provided for me as well as i provide for myself.  i must somehow allow myself at least a short moment to feel proud of myself and the life i am creating.  these dreams once seemed so far out of reach...  impossible to believe ever coming true.  here i am with a passport and plane tickets with my name on them.  BIG MIDDLE FINGER TO ALL THE PEOPLE WHO SAID MY GOALS WERE STUPID AND UNREALISTIC. 

smiling so big right now.  :D 


hahahahaaa!  and i cannot help but giggle to myself.  i know i still have 3 1/2 weeks to wait until i board my plane to New York but it's going to fly by and my excitement is building building building.  Becca and i will rendezvous at her favorite restaurant in the village 2 days before we get on another plane to Heathrow Airport.  i'm trying not to get misty eyed just thinking of it now.  i'm trying not to get too far ahead of myself.  i have absolutely no idea what to expect but i can't wait to grab my bag and let this adventure begin.  yesterday, i played tourist in SF and bought the bag i will live out of for a month.  bright yellow in honor of my long lost Bumble Bug.  i loved that little car so much but the life that awaits is one in which owning a car is totally unnecessary.  it's unnecessary now.  i love that i live in such a way that allows me to enjoy the romance of riding trains daily.  and aside from which, me and my converse get around just fine.   ;) 

artist life.

HOLY SHIT!