day 2 – ha!ha!

OK so summer was not a good time to try and post everyday.  It has been chaotic here the past week or so, my oldest daughter was ill again, necessitating another all night and some of the following day trip to the ER, but she is fully recovered now. And I have not been feeling so great, burning the candle at both ends inevitably leads to a physical crash. All the rain has left us with mold in the basement and one of the bathrooms where the roof leaked… as I have mentioned I am very allergic so I have been trying to deal with that and some troublesome cluster headaches that have made me at a pretty low ebb. I decided to stop blogging for a while to try and recoup some energy. Not much has been happening in the studio either, after putting in extra hours at the shop I am just not feeling very energetic or inspired when I get home. I have been reading for my art history class and trying to put together some lecture notes and quizzes, papers etc, but everything is like swimming through treacle right now. So expect another long break between posts as I try to find some personal balance and get some sleep, I am still reading blogs, just too tired to play along!

So on my book pile right now, these books for fun, the zoe klein was very good, the others I’m still working on, obviously I am working pretty hard on a mindset adjustment…

and the art history stack just keeps on growing, poor students I am soooooo excited about teaching this course and it is very early in the morning, think nice thoughts for them!!

day 8 – no reveal yet :(

It is so humid here that my project is just not ready to be revealed, I am having a lot of trouble getting various things to dry, which is frustrating! Added to that I am VERY allergic to mold and because my initial bundle got so wet I can only physically stand to work with the materials for a short period at a time. Everyone who has revealed their project today has made such great work I wouldn’t want to let the side down by revealing my unfinished work, I’ll just keep working on it tomorrow and hope that everything dries, but I think it will be worth the wait, it is looking so awesome… but head on over to the altered page to see what everyone else has been up to!

day 3-part 2 (art makes it all better!)

so after feeling totally sad I did what every woman does when faced with insurmountable problems, I tidied up my own corner of the world. I cleaned the studio, puttered around a bit and worked on my DisCo project, don’t forget the big reveal id coming up August 1, but here’s a sneak peak!!

blog revisit, another great idea from the altered page!

Seth Apter over at the altered page has a new idea up his sleeve, today bloggers all over will be re-posting their favorite post, a revisit. So here is my favorite, these posts are all about the things I think about when I am hiding out in my attic with all the dead girls from the past… and about the process of writing about art which is really difficult when your mind is a rat’s nest like mine!!

https://dryadart.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/new-statement/

https://dryadart.wordpress.com/2008/11/20/stupid-statements-part-2/

https://dryadart.wordpress.com/2008/12/04/wow/

Sorry that’s quite a journey I just sent you on, I hope some of you stuck it out, and that it was an interesting ride!!

While we’re talking about Seth, don’t forget that the big reveal for the second part of the disintegration project is fast approaching, the new works created from our weathered stuff will be making their debut on August 1st, so don’t forget to watch this space, and soooo many others too!! I wish I could tell you mine is chugging along, but honestly the weathered pages are so beautiful I am loathe to work on them lest failure occur!

I’ve been thinking

As I said last night much here to talk about, right now it is raining ferociously, and I am happily listening and thinking of my pages dissolving away and plotting gleeful things for their reincarnated remains, this was a truly inspirational project to change our hearts towards the weather’s capriciousness! Seth you are a genius as well as being an incredible inspiration and a conduit for our creativity, again, many thanks…

Even though I haven’t had much time to blog lately, I have still been reading, they will have to pry a book from my cold dead hands no doubt! Not as prolifically as usual, but this book, Distracted by Maggie Jackson has really turned those rusty cogs. I have been thinking a lot about attention and how it relates to art. This was the serious post I have been trying to formulate for a while now. What I am thinking is that I see a restlessness in many of my students, they can’t focus through a whole studio class. I tell them that I envy them 3 hrs of drawing time, a chance to bliss-out, and they look at me like I’m crazy (well I am a little, but…) with a few exceptions they can’t concentrate that long. After reading the book I wondered if the media driven culture we live in has something to do with their attention span? I don’t want to beat up on a generation following behind, after all that generation includes my own children, but I don’t think that the kind of divided attention that is normal to them is conducive to the depth that art making requires. At the same time I was also reading a collection of  essays by Robert Hughes, (Nothing if not critical) and I felt the same reverberations of attention and time. It made me wonder if I should just stop making art altogether, because when you spend hundreds of hours colouring a monolith of paper by hand, you at least hope for a few minutes of undivided attention for its message. I took my students to a gallery, because now I was curious to see them look at art, most raced around the room then stood looking bored in a cluster by the door.  Now I don’t know about any of you but a whole room full of art is often overwhelming for me, I can’t really take in all those pieces at once, maybe 3 or 4 before I get overloaded, but then again, I can’t read the ticker and listen to the newscaster at the same time either, so maybe the deficit lies in me! So now I am wondering about our divided attention, about this age of distraction, and what it means for art making and art seeing. Just wondering, what do you think? …

so much to talk about

well now! I’ve been silent for so long where to begin with everything I have in my little brain ready to spill out?! I think I should start with the disintegration project update so I don’t let my fellow artists down. As many of you who follow along here know, my original project was lost and then found. I had intended for it to be a piece that was completed by the processes at work outside and for it to reveal a hidden secret as it dissolved away. So it was included in my new exhibit, and here is a picture of it looking very official, ensconced in this locked glass case at my show

But when I thought it was lost, and because I lusted after everyone else\’s disintegrating pages, I started a second bundle which was a good thing because it is merrily weathering into wonderful stuff, but a little behind schedule, so I will delay its reveal another month, when it will become a fabulous book of its own, or maybe several! Its not quite ready yet! But here are it\’s before pictures I included some plate-litho prints, and old notebook from infants school, some old encyclopedias and some miscellaneous envelopes and ephemera I had lying around! I left it on the upstairs balcony. May they make something beautiful together! (OK I confess I have peeked and its progressing nicely!)

And I posted a new page with pictures from my show, if you REALLY want to see them you can click on the tab and go look!!

good news/bad news

so first the good news, the lights are up and I am moving back into my studio, I can’t even tell you how happy that has made me all day today (and it was a very trying day at the print shop full of equipment malfunctions and crazy deadlines…). It was so awesome to start putting my things back into my space last night… warm fuzzy glow all around!! My work is still progressing, see happy new image above!! There is much work still to do up there, I spent the evening putting up insulation, but a room of my own again, soooo happy, can’t even tell you!!

now some in between news… I have mentioned that I am participating (along with my 3D class) in Seth Apter’s disintegration project, well a few days ago, (in that long silence here) there was a wicked winter storm and my project blew down and away… sob! But fortunately after canvasing the neighborhood it is found again and it is definitely disintegrated! However what I didn’t mention earlier was that having checked out many of the other projects online I decided to make a second “bundle” and put that out too, mostly because so many people were subjecting books etc to the weather and I was lusting after their pages… it was not exactly a back up project but more an auxiliary one! I took pictures, but again with the missing chord to my camera, (putting buy a card reader on the top of my to do list!! knowing that as soon as I buy one said chord will miraculously appear!) Anyway, stay tuned for some amazing reveal photos May 1st!!

But life it seems is not content to leave me happy for long and so lastly the bad news, my husband just (literally) rushed off to see his mother who is in the hospital in SC (we live upstate in NY), she is very sick and has multiple existing health issues, heart, kidneys, diabetes, so if you believe in any higher powers, please pray for them both, thanks.