busy is good

i just finished crocheting the last 25 roses for my wall installation at Slingshot which i will begin installing tonight. there are 300 roses total. it's a big piece. and inviting. the last time i made one of these (first and only, actually. until now.) people would walk up to the wall and lay against the roses. :) i'm excited to see the piece installed and may go ahead and work through the night to get it done. once it's up, i can focus all my attention on the new painting.

my schedule is completely irregular these days. so be it. i'm still getting everything done that i need to, it's just at different times of the day than it usually is. still running, still working, still getting good sleep, but i am in a race against the end of the year and I WILL WIN.

BURN, BABY, BURN!

i spent next to no time online this weekend. i holed up with books and papers and pencils instead. phone calls from old friends and lots of soul-searching, excavating existentialism. ha! i read Helaine Posner's long and beautiful essay on the work of Kiki Smith and rolled around in the ideas of Trust it contains. very much a "believe in yourself and trust the work" refrain. and then saturday, my birthday present arrived. while we were at the grocery store, the mail lady dropped off a big fat book at our door that jared had ordered for me. the huge Henry Darger book by Klaus Biesenbach. and so i spent the bulk of saturday afternoon and evening looking at the absolutely gorgeous reproductions of Darger's work, getting absolutely lost in the drive his work materializes- absolute faith in "the call"... the answering of that call, the reward. last night, i finally started reading the text of the book and am anxious to get back to it. and in between all this, tons of drawing. tons. i burned through so many pencils this weekend and will soon be left with only the stubs. which i'm saving for something a la Arman:





:) i've always admired his accumulations.

and this morning: i obeyed the MIGHTY RUN - 3.5 miles - came home, ate fruit and greek yogurt, read Malevich's treatise on Suprematism (which i will have to read again and again until it sinks in deep and i understand well enough to agree with half and dispute the other half), and have already gotten a good hour of drawing under my belt. this is a fantastic start to the new week. and most welcome after last week's recurrent disillusionment and deflated attribute. oh, the joys of the artist ego! FRAILTY! ha! but i have resurfaced and am thinking a lot about my own values and ideas... finding ways to keep the fire stoked and high. it is all about maintaining one's own passionate commitment to this thing. answering the call is the reward.

every single day, i must find a way to answer it.

my twisty education has lit back up.

the wage...

hmmmmmm... it could be too soon to jump into her diaries. yesterday, i spent a pretty hefty chunk of the day with them, off and on between projects, and by 4 in the afternoon i was beginning to feel more than slightly disillusioned and sad about life. no good. but the writing is just so beautiful and i can run around in it because i know these things she's describing... and reading her work makes my writing better- more intricate, more subtle, more meaningful. i don't want to back away from her art just because it might make me sad. my work does the same thing to people sometimes and i've always counted that as a good quality... that the work can be responded to emotionally, intensely... not that i am comparing my paintings to a Plath poem, just that the experience of sadness isn't something i should use to run away from good work- work that sparks and flies around the room and makes you look at your own life from a new and different angle... work that makes your own work grow and turn.

i will have to take the diaries in doses though, i think. they're pretty intense. the last time (the first time) i read them, i was in my last year in college and had other things to read so it took me about 4 months to read them all. i read it on the train to school and back home everyday. i read it on the weekends after my projects were satisfied. sometimes i even left the house to do "errands" so that i could sit somewhere and read them without any interruption or outside expectation. it's when i started writing again. seriously writing. my love of poetry woke back up because of this collection and i've been hot for it ever since. it's a slightly painful form of inspiration, i will admit. it takes a lot out of me. i've always thought that poetry is harder than painting. a landslide harder. a piece of writing seems to ask more from the person with the pen than a painting does. paintings seem to have an outside opinion that, at some point (for me anyway), i can relinquish control to and the work becomes itself. it stops being my work. it's its own work.

in the end, the work takes care of me... not the other way around.