My work/career path right now is SO SERIOUS.  It takes a lot to give myself permission to just screw around in the studio.  So not only does it feel strange to be so awful to this book (some of the things they suggest you do is smear pages with dirt, chew on the pages, etc.), but it also feels strange to share things that I’ve done to this book, because my efforts aren’t… serious.

I’ve moved into my new studio this past week.  This is my first day off from work, teaching, or moving since the beginning of June.  I’ve been keeping a mental sketchbook of what I want to work on this past month and a half.  After a month an a half of not physically working on my art, I have a huge list.

When I walked into my studio this morning, ready to get to work, I of course, felt totally overwhelmed.  I noticed this book on my desk and decided to crack this book open today and started dabbling through the pages.

I worked on the book for about an hour.  I found myself feeling limited, which surprised me.  This book tells you what to do on each page, and I kept finding myself thinking, “But I want to do this instead” or “I’ll start with this ‘instruction’ but then I’ll embellish it”.

While working I was reminded of a practice that I used to do in my studio:  The first thing I would do after walking into my studio, would be to pull out a piece of paper and just mindlessly watercolor for a half hour.  By the time I felt done with it, I would have a new idea, or a struggle with a current project would seem more clear.  Sometime this process would help me remember what I was working on the day before, or would help me make a decision to get some new work started.  The act of getting my hand moving made the transition from home to work easier.

The thing I like about what is happening with this book is I’m not creating art pieces.  When I’m working on watercolors, I still have a dialog in my head about whether or not what I’m working on will be any good.  I’m still judging.  With this book I found myself trying to solve problems with the tasks presented to me, and looking for new avenues, with but had no intention of making an “art piece”.

Here is some of the pages I wanted to share today:

I started with this page, where it asks you to drip something on the page and then fold the book in half and make a print.  I poured coffee, india ink and speed ball ink on the page and got this:

Since this book is not designed to hold that much ink, it bled through about 4-5 pages.  Actually the pattern on the back looks pretty cool:

I then decided to cut through multiple pages:

And then I took all the scraps and scotch taped them to the front page of the book, which actually gave me an idea for a book project I’ve been wanting to work on:

I’ll keep working on this throughout the week/weekend.  Maybe I’ll be able to take some of the explorations in this book an apply it to my regular studio practice.

There is a common device I use in my installations: I place a found object (beat-up furniture, scrap wood, old typewriter) in a space and draw attention to its shadow or reflection. I usually make the shadow out of something that looks like it could just be a product of light, having no substance, but upon further inspection it is made from solid material. This is often thick black house paint, collaged materials painted black, or my favorite, black pleather contact paper. The contact paper is especially meaningful to me because it is not only representing a representation of an object (the shadow cast by a chair for example), but being pleather, it is also by nature a representation of leather. How meta! (I joke, but really.)

I don’t know if my obsession with shadows comes out my art school training, which for the past 20 years has placed great emphasis on the importance of negative space, or if it comes from my obsession with film noir, German expressionism, and live theater? Probably a little of both. Negative space is a formal issue that makes the artist consider the space around a subject as equally important as the subject itself. To me the negative space or cast shadow often becomes the subject. Dramatic film and theater are stylistic choices that bring an element of danger, despair, humor, and self-consciousness to its viewers. Perhaps daily goings on are just less interesting to me than what is reflected when I shine a light on them.

Everyday I walk down Pine Street past the bars, past the dog park. I cross over the roaring highway and the first thing I see is a beacon of this very topic: It is the side of the historic Paramount Theatre looking like it was suddenly separated from it’s family, a strange gray cement wall with fire escape and evenly placed windows from top to bottom. Below each window is a perfectly made organic soot mark which I assume is caused by the rain, but looks like it was theatrically and intentionally placed there. It looks like a model for a building rather than a building itself. There’s something artificial about it and now that I’ve had this thought I can’t look at it without thinking it’s part of a very elaborate Seattle stage set, welcoming me into work each morning. Though the architecture is lovely and old, I’m more interested in what it has become for me in my imagination. The building will never just be itself; it will always resemble itself and serve as a symbol for my daily morning walks.

I always search for the seams and the dark underbelly of people and things. I’m moved by contrast and conflict. In spite of the fact that I will never be able to get away from formal issues like negative space, I can emphasize cast shadows and their distorted abstract qualities. This way I will be able to satisfy my obsession with drawing and painting issues that have been so rigorously drilled into me while communicating something emotional, psychological, and humorous.

The other day, a friend asked me how I dealt with sadness and my answers were: walk up a big hill, watch television, exercise. Surprisingly, my answer did not involve any practice that fueled that sadness into creation. As an adult I rarely rely on creative coping techniques and instead rely on practices that remove myself mentally from the situation. I didn’t realize this about myself until just now, typing out those words. I’m reminded of what Alison wrote in her previous post about quitting, “Won’t you miss out on discovering what it is you will say? (Writers often don’t know, until it’s on the page)”. When I don’t write I do miss what I have to say. How did I forget this and also, how was I so wise eleven years ago? My initial title for this post was “teenagers that don’t scare the shit out of me,” where I would list all of the blogs I read that are written by teenagers and how they make me more optimistic for the future. As much as I hated my teenage years, I’m realizing its redeeming qualities by reading what teenagers now have to say. It seems I have a lot to re-learn from myself of eleven ago.

A few:

http://childhoodflames.blogspot.com/

http://www.lauramarling.com/

http://www.lookbook.nu (many of these kids have blogs)

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.

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.

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.

The lesson I continue to be smacked with goes something like this: Teach: Guess whose music I brought in today? Students: (Silence) Teach: It’s someone mentioned in the story. His nickname is Bird. Students: (Silence) Teach: It’s Charlie Parker. I’m going to put on a Parker song so we can listen to the kind of music Sonny [the character in the story] wants to play and eventually masters. Students: (Silence, some smirks). The music plays, and some of the students start giggling, likely embarrassed by the awkward feeling of sitting in an English class, staring forward at a teacher who is clearly excited about the outside media she’s brought in to illustrate the text but is now pacing around at the front of the room to jazz, trying to perfect the volume level and praying the students will find something useful or interesting in the exercise. The first song finishes and another one starts, and the teacher can sense that the giggling, shifting-in-their-seats students are done with Charlie Parker and feel sorry for the lost soul at the front of the room who thought this might be “cool.” The silence after the music is far heavier than any silence that comes after “Will someone read x out loud?” or “Does anyone have an idea about y?” It is the silence of pedagogical flailing. The students know it, and the teacher, with all of her good intentions knows it, too. Slowly, painfully, the teacher asks a few students for their reactions to the music, and when the answers fail to penetrate the level of “yep, it’s jazz,” the teacher steers the conversation back toward the comfort zone—the routine—discussions of plot, character, and theme.

But maybe I’m a little hard on myself. Not all learning happens in the classroom. I’ve experienced as a student how something my prof. said or did clicked weeks or months later. And maybe there is value in being pushed a little out of the comfort zone, departing from the usual let’s get in a circle and talk about the reading routine. The lesson in the moment of flailing, as I understand it, is a simple one: teaching is hard. Teaching something you love has its own peculiar challenges. I’ve never brought music to my composition classes because the material never plucked at my soul the way fiction does, begging to be discussed and presented in ways that can, with hope, encourage students to find intrigue and value in narrative. And maybe the crux of the problem is that I’m expecting students to find that intrigue in the same ways I do, without doing much explaining regarding my pedagogical choices.

Like making and, maybe more so, revising art, teaching requires a keen understanding of one’s purpose as well as an open mindedness toward purpose and meaning that comes to mind (both teacher’s and students’) in the moment, in the classroom. I know that the dreaded questions are the most vague and often feel rhetorical: What did you think? What does it mean? So??? But I ask them anyway. And my hope is that, as I gain confidence in myself as a teacher and my ability to impart wisdom about the material at hand, I’ll continue to ask those questions, but I’ll have a few specific and interesting back up plans. I’ll know exactly why I had them listen to jazz, besides the obvious reference in the story, and I’ll be able to talk about it with grace. Until then, I’ll flail, but I’ll pay close attention in the process.

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.

Some elements of this novel have been extracted directly from her own experience. Other elements of the story are outside of her own experience, most notably the profession and gender of her main character.

In her talk she spoke of the extensive level of research she undertook in order to bring authenticity to the profession of her main character. She studied and took the New York psychology licensing exam until she was able to pass, read passages of her book to the New York Psychology Board, and began to teach a writing workshop at a mental hospital.

When a member of the audience asked what her next book would be about, and she responded that the next novel will most likely be told from a woman’s point of view. She mentioned that since it takes her about 5 years to write a novel and her last two have been from the point of view of a male main character, she has essentially spent the last 10 years as a man.

I know that playing a role, or inventing a character is common practice for writers, actors, and some visual and performance artists. I also know that we all have different reasons to go about creating the way that we do. When I think of this practice and how it would benefit the writer, I believe it would allow you to the opportunity to view your experience in a mirror, rather than through a camera.

I’m curious to know, for those of you that make work that embodies a reality outside of your waking experience, what is that like and what has it taught you that self-portraiture or auto-biography is unable to?

Many of his projects involve him going into communities and getting the residents involved in art pieces. You might be most familiar with his collaboration with Miranda July, www.learningtoloveyoumore.com a site that gives readers art assignments to create and post on the web site. A number of the results have been featured in gallery shows and in the Learning to Love You More book published last year.

I will not go further through the laundry list of awesome projects he has made, inspired, orchestrated or curated because I think this is better off discovered if you go to one of his web sites and become inspired yourself:

• www.learningtoloveyoumore.com
• www.harrellfletcher.com

Yes.