.
you fall asleep with your glasses on.
i turn off the movie you suggested.
i make a little film of myself dancing in the mirror:
black dress, swaying hips.
i send the film to jose because it's not out of the ordinary for him to be awake this late.
he sends me a film in return:
girls dancing in short skirts and my art on his walls.
i should send him more. what do i need all this art for?
sometimes i wonder about who i am
vs. what i was taught...
i think about that a lot lately.
maybe it has something to do with the time of year? the slant of the sun?` the yellow cast catches my eye- the way it drips from the leaves, the way it oozes through the blinds. i think of home... days when i'd come home from school to find my mother standing in the kitchen, days when i'd drag my body home so begrudgingly... always feeling at odds, always feeling the pull toward something else, always unable to just get along...
i look at myself in the mirror and i can see that i'm older but i don't feel as old as i am. really, i feel like i've just begun. maybe i'm just a late bloomer? i was simply getting ready all this time. i was simply gathering wool. i was only learning the vocabulary i'd need.
.
i walked down shattuck ave in the late afternoon and it felt so much like the late afternoons i spent in my hometown. i'll never hate oakland the way i hated redlands. i could never hate oakland at all, it's just that i've been here too long. i lust too hard after other sunrises. i lust too hard after other winds echoing across other avenues. i've drempt too hard for too long of far off places. the residency sealed it. i belong elsewhere. i've known it for quite some time. it feels good to have finally made the decision to click the BUY NOW button on a plane ticket and choose a new adventure. i need to walk down streets i'm inspired by again. i need to welcome the next phase.
i tried to throw away old art supplies today and couldn't do it.
there's so much to get rid of.
i cleaned the toilet instead.
i want to give myself the gift of a fresh start but it is horrendously painful to part with certain things. i'm leaving the contents of my bookcase until last. it'll break my heart to have to part with certain books. today, i looked at my copy of the collected novels of Jean Rhys and thought of Kate- those old days of writing back and forth to one another through email and the comment boxes of our blogs. i read all of Jean Rhys' novels during the 8 days i had to wait before i could board my plane to tennessee to go watch my mother die. then kate mailed me a copy of Roland Barthes' "Mourning Diary" after i returned home to california after the funeral.
i shouldn't have become so distant after all that (with everybody) but i honestly couldn't help it.
i couldn't help it.
sometimes i still can't
but i'm glad to not need such a deep silence now.
.
brian is curled up under my white quilt.
i love him and i'm glad he is here.
tonight while we walked home from the bar, i looked at him and said, "hey, brian elder, you're my best friend!"
he looked at me and said, "oh yeah? you're my best friend!"
i'm happy as fuck. :)
.
Showing posts with label rambling on. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rambling on. Show all posts
Feb 17, 2015
Nov 3, 2013
nothing in particular
.
let me begin. for however unsure i am, let me begin. i've been aching to write here, to feel the pleasing click of these keys beneath my fingers but then i clam up. there's some really strange shit happening in my private life. or, to say it better, some really disgusting shit... and i don't know how to keep it from bleeding out here. i don't know if speaking about certain things related to my family and our past should be spoken of here. i still war with the urge to keep the humiliating things secret, with whether or not my feelings even matter... just like a child.
my sister and i speak often these days of our childhood and formative years. we trade memories and see how our perception and recollections square up. it's interesting to be an adult now and to look back, to actually be successful at seeing things from her point of view, to be able to listen more as a sister rather than a Big Sister. we're only 3 years apart. at this point, we're really just the same age- 30 and 33. it feels so strange to think of my baby sister that way... weirder still to realize that our brother is now the same age our father was when he dove into that swimming pool and broke his neck. 35.
35 has never seemed so achingly young.
i come home and stick my tips in my mama's black and white striped teapot. i dream of germany in the summertime. i dream of france, of standing below the Eiffel Tower in june. i'll hardly be able to communicate in french by then but that's not going to stand in the way of the explorations i must make. more and more, i see the luck of my life and try to stop thinking of my age. i try to focus on this great romance i'm living, so far from the life that came before, the life which surrounded me just a year and half ago... a life i was not meant for and how inadequate the world felt as a result. now, i open my eyes to Hope. i open my eyes to Beauty in spite of the horrors we confide in each other about.
tonight, Amanda said "i'm sorry" when i mentioned that the holiday season makes me sad. i saw it in her eyes that she was thinking of my dead mother and absent father, the fact that i work every holiday because that's exactly where i prefer to be. my siblings each live no less than a 8 hour drive away. there is no one's home to skip off to on thanksgiving. not that i'd even really want one after all that's happened. i don't. i'm finally learning how to walk passed smiling families and not bat an eye. i'm finally becoming okay with all the normal things normal families have and do. little by little, we heal. little by little, i catch sight of myself standing tall regardless. fucking regardless. :)
this isn't a pity party. i don't feel sorry for myself. i feel a bit horrified at times and very confused, but never sorry. i laughed all night with my coworkers and friends and the guests to our restaurant. i walked, one foot in front of the other, with total assurance and power through the darkened Oakland streets, to my humble little home. i have a roof over my head tonight and a white russian on the bedside table. i'm wearing the matching Marc Jacobs rings Annie and i bought in late july in new york. i am snug below my white quilt. i look up at the postcards Becca sent me tucked in the corner of the armoire mirror and the ones i sent myself from Berlin. more often than not, i feel so impatient with myself and think i should be doing more than waiting tables and making yarnbombs and drawings. but lately i've somehow managed to feel privileged- it is a privileged to be an artist and it is a privilege to be learning other languages. lately, the sweetness of my life wells up before me and it becomes hard for me to complain. i sit back and try to relax. i tell myself "you're good enough, little girl. you're doing just fine." more than fine.
on Halloween, i danced all night long with my beautiful friends. i drank hard and shook my sequins even harder. i felt alive and beautiful and happy in a way that is sometimes hard for us orphans to feel- i felt normal.
the thing i like most about restaurant life is that it gives me a place where i can feel like i belong.
.
let me begin. for however unsure i am, let me begin. i've been aching to write here, to feel the pleasing click of these keys beneath my fingers but then i clam up. there's some really strange shit happening in my private life. or, to say it better, some really disgusting shit... and i don't know how to keep it from bleeding out here. i don't know if speaking about certain things related to my family and our past should be spoken of here. i still war with the urge to keep the humiliating things secret, with whether or not my feelings even matter... just like a child.
my sister and i speak often these days of our childhood and formative years. we trade memories and see how our perception and recollections square up. it's interesting to be an adult now and to look back, to actually be successful at seeing things from her point of view, to be able to listen more as a sister rather than a Big Sister. we're only 3 years apart. at this point, we're really just the same age- 30 and 33. it feels so strange to think of my baby sister that way... weirder still to realize that our brother is now the same age our father was when he dove into that swimming pool and broke his neck. 35.
35 has never seemed so achingly young.
i come home and stick my tips in my mama's black and white striped teapot. i dream of germany in the summertime. i dream of france, of standing below the Eiffel Tower in june. i'll hardly be able to communicate in french by then but that's not going to stand in the way of the explorations i must make. more and more, i see the luck of my life and try to stop thinking of my age. i try to focus on this great romance i'm living, so far from the life that came before, the life which surrounded me just a year and half ago... a life i was not meant for and how inadequate the world felt as a result. now, i open my eyes to Hope. i open my eyes to Beauty in spite of the horrors we confide in each other about.
tonight, Amanda said "i'm sorry" when i mentioned that the holiday season makes me sad. i saw it in her eyes that she was thinking of my dead mother and absent father, the fact that i work every holiday because that's exactly where i prefer to be. my siblings each live no less than a 8 hour drive away. there is no one's home to skip off to on thanksgiving. not that i'd even really want one after all that's happened. i don't. i'm finally learning how to walk passed smiling families and not bat an eye. i'm finally becoming okay with all the normal things normal families have and do. little by little, we heal. little by little, i catch sight of myself standing tall regardless. fucking regardless. :)
this isn't a pity party. i don't feel sorry for myself. i feel a bit horrified at times and very confused, but never sorry. i laughed all night with my coworkers and friends and the guests to our restaurant. i walked, one foot in front of the other, with total assurance and power through the darkened Oakland streets, to my humble little home. i have a roof over my head tonight and a white russian on the bedside table. i'm wearing the matching Marc Jacobs rings Annie and i bought in late july in new york. i am snug below my white quilt. i look up at the postcards Becca sent me tucked in the corner of the armoire mirror and the ones i sent myself from Berlin. more often than not, i feel so impatient with myself and think i should be doing more than waiting tables and making yarnbombs and drawings. but lately i've somehow managed to feel privileged- it is a privileged to be an artist and it is a privilege to be learning other languages. lately, the sweetness of my life wells up before me and it becomes hard for me to complain. i sit back and try to relax. i tell myself "you're good enough, little girl. you're doing just fine." more than fine.
on Halloween, i danced all night long with my beautiful friends. i drank hard and shook my sequins even harder. i felt alive and beautiful and happy in a way that is sometimes hard for us orphans to feel- i felt normal.
the thing i like most about restaurant life is that it gives me a place where i can feel like i belong.
.
Jan 13, 2010
blah blah blah technique. blah blah blah practice.
the more i work with gouache, the more i love it. absolutely love it! in that dire, swirling, crazy-pants kind of way. and i suppose it's fitting. my practice is a practice of opposites. or an examination of opposites. not quite contradiction, rather a fuzziness of identity- black and white. faceless portraits. and now... water and oil.
the other day i met a friend of a friend and was introduced as "an artist" (always sort of a weird moment. ha!) and the other person asked what i work in, what i do, what my subject is. most artists will tell you that this is an odd moment. there's so much to say in response to these seemingly direct and simple questions... so the trick becomes scaling back, not scaring the person away with art historical references and philosophic meandering and all the stuff that goes in to The Artist Statement. they don't care and that's NOT what they're asking. they want the basics... or, usually, they're just being polite.
i've got my token answer all worked out at this point. usually something along the lines of "oh, i'm pretty much all over the place. a bit of this, a bit of that. mostly painting though. mostly portraits." i learned pretty quick NOT to say "i make headless portraits" because most people start envisioning rather gruesome images which is not at all what my work is. and so i started in with my token response and this time it didn't feel quite right when she asked what my primary medium is and i said oil. at least half the paintings i do at this point are in gouache. and i see no reason not to proceed painting in both mediums alternately, as often as i can or want to or need to; whatever fits the subject and day and mood the best, giving primacy to neither.
and gouache is just so much faster and i've been jump-started again, in love with so many ideas, so many ways to work with a single image, that gouache allows me to proceed with my investigation in a much more rapid way than oil.
i love oil tremendously. everything about it. the look, the smell, the process, everything. but it lends itself better to certain images more than others. the maid portraits for sure. and believe it or not, i've got a ton of paintings crammed in my little cottage right this second that are being given the time to dry so that i can proceed with at least some type of gusto. in order to do that with oil, since my process relies so heavily on glazing and dry-brush techniques, i have to have a multitude of canvasses going at once in order to keep working while i wait for one or another to dry. there's a lot of down time in my oil painting practice. and this is exactly why it's so lovely to be working in an "opposite" medium. water-based paints dry almost instantly by comparison and i can actually get a painting finished in a single day! that's awesome!
yesterday, i spent about 5 hours working on a gouache painting- hair. yep. strand by strand pretty much. thin layers that absorb in to the paper so quickly than i can just keep pushing along with the image unrestricted by waiting-time. it'll be done soon. maybe today. but i'm running out of gouache and payday is still a few days away. another practice in patience, i suppose. ha! the major ingredient in every part of my practice since moving to realism. would you have guessed i started as an abstractionist?
the other day i met a friend of a friend and was introduced as "an artist" (always sort of a weird moment. ha!) and the other person asked what i work in, what i do, what my subject is. most artists will tell you that this is an odd moment. there's so much to say in response to these seemingly direct and simple questions... so the trick becomes scaling back, not scaring the person away with art historical references and philosophic meandering and all the stuff that goes in to The Artist Statement. they don't care and that's NOT what they're asking. they want the basics... or, usually, they're just being polite.
i've got my token answer all worked out at this point. usually something along the lines of "oh, i'm pretty much all over the place. a bit of this, a bit of that. mostly painting though. mostly portraits." i learned pretty quick NOT to say "i make headless portraits" because most people start envisioning rather gruesome images which is not at all what my work is. and so i started in with my token response and this time it didn't feel quite right when she asked what my primary medium is and i said oil. at least half the paintings i do at this point are in gouache. and i see no reason not to proceed painting in both mediums alternately, as often as i can or want to or need to; whatever fits the subject and day and mood the best, giving primacy to neither.
and gouache is just so much faster and i've been jump-started again, in love with so many ideas, so many ways to work with a single image, that gouache allows me to proceed with my investigation in a much more rapid way than oil.
i love oil tremendously. everything about it. the look, the smell, the process, everything. but it lends itself better to certain images more than others. the maid portraits for sure. and believe it or not, i've got a ton of paintings crammed in my little cottage right this second that are being given the time to dry so that i can proceed with at least some type of gusto. in order to do that with oil, since my process relies so heavily on glazing and dry-brush techniques, i have to have a multitude of canvasses going at once in order to keep working while i wait for one or another to dry. there's a lot of down time in my oil painting practice. and this is exactly why it's so lovely to be working in an "opposite" medium. water-based paints dry almost instantly by comparison and i can actually get a painting finished in a single day! that's awesome!
yesterday, i spent about 5 hours working on a gouache painting- hair. yep. strand by strand pretty much. thin layers that absorb in to the paper so quickly than i can just keep pushing along with the image unrestricted by waiting-time. it'll be done soon. maybe today. but i'm running out of gouache and payday is still a few days away. another practice in patience, i suppose. ha! the major ingredient in every part of my practice since moving to realism. would you have guessed i started as an abstractionist?
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