My easel and palette are in the “laundry room” of my new house. I’ve been working on a painting of the long hallway that leads to the front door of our shot gun Victorian.

My partner shares my “studio” space, which would have been the parlor, or dining room, before our home was divided into a duplex. I have a desk on one side of the room, facing the window. His easel and palette are on the opposite wall of the room, the wall that shares the door to the hallway. We have a pocket door that separates the “studio” from the “living room”. It is open most of the time, allowing us to converse while we work on our computers.

For some reason I am unable to think of any element of our new house without putting quotation marks around it. In fact, I kind of think of it as our new “house”. Our actual home feels like it exists elsewhere. As such, my studio doesn’t really exist here either. I’ve been thinking about the pluses and minuses of this.

In graduate school I had a studio. It had tall ceilings, ventilation, peers to interact with. It was place I could go to, close the door, and artistically brood. It was also a place I could leave, work and all.

After grad school, I rented a garage space, which had a handful of issues, but I liked it anyway. I could go there make work and go home. Again, leaving the work behind. For some reason I put this feature in the category of “plus”.

None of the spaces I work in right now are dedicated. Right now all rooms that I occupy in my life, bedroom, laundry room, studio, coffee shop, and classroom, have become my studio. When you think of it, this is kind of ideal. Sure, I don’t have the ability to close the door and artistically brood in the same way, but I now am on the path to integrating my work with my life.

Since my work is no longer isolated, it’s become more active and has steered towards being about my observations, as opposed to about a concept. I know this a direct result of me trying to understand a new city, but I know this new working environment is a contributing factor.

It’s unrealistic to think I can sustain this eagerness to understand my new home/city after it becomes old hat. My wish is to remember what it feels like to have this primal need to understand where I am, at the forefront of my mind. If I can engage and apply this feeling to my work in the future, it will help me remember why making things is instrumental to my experience.

Over pints, a writer friend of mine confessed his plans to apply to law schools. He said, “I’ve realized writing is the least important thing I do” and went on to remind me that everyone is reading blogs (ahem) instead of books anyway. I wanted to scream “You traitor!” but instead I sank back in the booth, sipped my beer, and muttered “Really?”

And there are more things I wanted to say but didn’t:

Won’t you miss out on discovering what it is you will say? (Writers often don’t know, until it’s on the page.)

Won’t the rest of us miss out on discovering what you will say?

Certainly you weren’t in it for the money, right?

Don’t you feel a part of you withers with each month you don’t make time to jot down a few lines?

Aren’t you afraid this is soul suicide?

I didn’t ask because these are the questions I was busily asking myself. In this precarious position of trying to make a life of art, it is easy to adopt others’ cynicism as our own, and it can be tempting to give up. We wonder, is this all just self-serving? Would I be better off with a desk job and a therapist? Wouldn’t I eliminate a whole file in my cabinet of things to worry about if I were no longer fretting over Time to Create? How dare I be so selfish as to spend time “creating”! People are starving. People are killing each other.

If I dwell on the starving and killing long enough, I’m liable to end it all here and now. So what can I do? How can I help? How can I write and help? I won’t admit any great wisdom on the subject. What I do know is that art has and does change perspectives, inform policy, expose the underexposed, and help people to feel less alone. These are not nothing. Also, art keeps those of us with the compulsion to make it from withering. Surely we are better citizens when all our synapses are firing with vibrant energy and when our bodies feel nurtured and intact.

Another reason I didn’t bombard my friend with the list of questions about quitting is because, in the moment, I was ashamed to think of myself as actively pursuing a writing career. He had unintentionally shot me down. It was a reminder to me that whenever we express thoughts of trying something else, it’s important to have a little sensitivity to those still trying to make a go of art.

And what of my friend? Should I have tried to convince him to “stay”? It’s a little silly, these lines we draw. One doesn’t stick with or leave the art world like a club. The idea of a departure has much more to do with identity than with the reality (which is that, for a lot of us, sometimes we spend lots of time making art and sometimes we do other things—make money, be with family, whatever). We come and we go; there are no official dues. In hindsight, I think I should have reminded my friend that his fiction has made me cry. I should have told him to do what makes sense now. I should have said that the departure need not be forever.

I’ll try my best to clearly articulate my intention and focus:  I need this blog to help me get creatively organized.  I’m counting on it to get me back on track.  I’m counting on it to help me solidify and make sense of the last 5 months.

In the last five months I said goodbye to my partner as he began a cross country trip.  Within a week after his departure I was hired to teach a foundations art class part-time.  I moved across the country, reunited with my partner, and started my new job.  We gradually moved into our new house and became acquainted with new neighbors and friends, cuisine and culture.  I worked at my new job and my old job simultaneously.  I reached a range of successes and failures in both.  I was pushed to my absolute limits.  I took refuge on the beach, in the bottom of wine glasses, and on the couch staring at the ceiling.

The fall quarter ends this week.  In preparation to get working in the studio again, I swept, dusted and rearranged my studio room this weekend.  I am greatly looking forward to exploring new ideas, new surroundings and new inspiration in the work to come.

Things on the forefront my mind right now are:

1. Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit
2. Yoga/Anatomy/The Body
3. The house across the street from my studio window
4. Fireplaces
5. Textures

We’ll see where these bits and pieces take me.

Last Thursday, June 12, 2008 I officially became a Master of Fine Arts. All hail the master! Um….er…right. One nervous breakdown, a few grant proposals, and 3 temp jobs later I am finally comfortable in my new school-less lot in life. I wasn’t expecting fireworks or balloons even, but the anti-climactic post-graduation experience shocked me to the core.

The Monday after Pomp and Circumstance, I took a walk through my neighborhood pretending everything was the same. The Online Coffee Company was the same Online Coffee Company I’d written many research papers in, the Hot House Spa was the same Hot House Spa I’d spent many hours soaking with my girlfriends in. But there was something different about the way I was experiencing these places. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

I realized that nothing was the same and that I’d been living in this city as a ghost resident for two years staying dry under the umbrella of graduate school. Though I made a consistent effort to make friends outside of the program and stay plugged in to the goings on in the city, I didn’t get the “real” taste of what it means to be a true Seattlite; graduate school is a very sheltered, private, introspective experience.

Over the last two years I learned to be with myself. I’ve always been a bit of a loner, a bit of an independent, but I think most of the privacy I’ve required can be chalked up to protecting myself from heartbreak, loneliness, and disappointment. I would try on different personalities, jobs, and hobbies, people even, but never really see any of them through to completion. In graduate school I didn’t have a choice. It was sink or float. I came face to face with my needs, habits, and insecurities as well as my joys and my cares. Alone in my studio or installation space I was faced with self-imposed challenges that I had to complete or at least investigate. These explorations became so much more than just work – the ways I dealt with the highs and lows of painting became a metaphor for the way I function in my daily life.

From my studio practice I learned that I hate not knowing whether or not the thing I’m pursuing will result in success. Ironically, this very struggle is the impetus for creating in the first place. If there were no struggle, no uncertainty to the outcome, no room for error, painting would be dead. It is my firm belief that an artist’s pursuit comes out of intense curiosity and a desire for surprise. There’s also a daredevil aspect to making art: you set up a scenario that guarantees excitement, dread, confusion, and disorientation and willingly surrender to it. You don’t know if you’ll make it out alive, but the thrill of the experience outweighs this minor concern.

This is where the metaphor for life part comes in. I live because I am curious, because I want to surprise and be surprised. It’s so enlightening to peel off my grad school goggles and see my city through fresh eyes. Everything feels comfortable, yet new. Like in my painting practice, I have moved through the oh-my-god-i-suck-that’ll-never-work phase and into the there-that’s-not-so-bad-opportunities-abound phase. By being patient and submitting to the nebulous nature of my situation I’ve been offered a few opportunities to show my work and have even started applying for grants and jobs. Like in my studio when I’m struggling with a painting, I accept that I don’t know how my new life will pan out. And I’m ok with that. Or at least I am right at this moment. I know this feeling will wax and wane as it does in and out of my studio.

This isn’t one of those “good things come to those who wait” stories because that would be sickening. Rather it’s one about a freshly crowned MFA coming to terms with herself, her practice, and her role in her new/old city.

In my studio I’ve been working from this image for the last 5 months:

Since November of last year I have made 3 etchings, 6 watercolors, a small model of the patio area, and a triptych in oil on canvas from this image.

I found this photograph in an antique store in Bellingham, WA last July. I don’t know when the image was taken, who the children are, where the house is located, or who it previously belonged to. I bought it because of the quality of the light (heavy contrast, slight dispersal) and the way in which the photograph was composed (large space in the front, small groupings of shapes and value on the top).

As a painter, I primarily use photographs as my source. I have always been conflicted by this choice and have wondered if it is more honest to work directly from life or if I can achieve this ‘honesty’ (i.e. convey my real experiences, thoughts, humanity) when I use photography as a tool.

In 2001 David Hockney put together a book entitled ‘Secret Knowledge’ that speaks about the history of the use of photography as a tool in art. He reveals visual evidence that optical tools were utilized by master painters, such as Vermeer, Tintoretto, Gericault, and Jan Van Eyck, to achieve naturalistic spaces, figures and light. In this book he points out “that the use of optics does not diminish the immensity of artistic achievement. A tool is just a tool, and it is still the artist’s hand and creative vision that produce a work of art.”

In my own work, I don’t think it is important to make a decision to follow one path (working from life) or another (using photographs as a tool). What I do think is important is to have an understanding of why you are using a source, or tool, or medium.

As I’ve mentioned before my work focuses largely on memory. Photographs, since the advent of photography, or, more precisely, the Kodak Point and Shoot Camera, have become deeply ingrained in the history of my generation as an American. The common place snapshot has become a type of reliquary. These common place images preserve and trigger our memory.

For example, an image of a high school friend begins the recollection of the road trip the two of you took when you moved to a new city. Or a picture of you holding a freshly caught fish with your father could remind you of that one summer when the mosquitoes were so bad that every time you went out onto the lake you could barely breathe.

In the case of the found photograph I have been working with, there are no memories to trigger. Rather an imagined narrative comes into forefront, speculation and curiosity arise, and a collective understanding of all of our slices in time begins. Because of this inherent content and historic weight, these photographs lay a meaningful foundation for me to explore ideas of contemporary reliquary, and the fleeting nature of our memories.

Of course, using photographs as a foundation is not a rule. In the book ‘Proust Was a Neuroscientist‘, author Jonah Lehrer has a lovely chapter dedicated to Cezanne who, along with the Impressionists, was making work during the dawn of photography. In his book, Leher discusses how Cezanne’s paintings reminded a photo-smitten world that our brain does not see the way a photograph looks. Our eyes do not freeze and slice images out from time. It goes without saying, but if Cezanne had utilized photography as a tool to paint his still lifes, even if his work was aesthetically similar, his objective would never have been reached.

If I choose to abandon my interest in memory in my work to explore a different path, it would be my responsibility as an artist to re-examine the means with which I make my work, and ask myself if my process (source, tool, medium) is the best way with which to explore these new ideas.