THE BLANKETEER

2012-01-11T12:20:00.001-08:00

I am angry and surrounded by my paintings. I hung them all up in my studio like the whale room at the natural history museum- floating, scary sea creatures in a dark oval shaped space...
Recently people who read my blog have been making me feel ashtough i should "watch" what i "write". Fuck that.
I started this as a way for me to R E L E A S E my feelings as they flly off the page of my face, and help me paint btter.
this blog does not exist to make me sell my work! this blog does not exist so that people think i KNOW WHAAAT I AM DOING.
anybody who knows me or sees my work can tell that i know what im doing.
i exude htis.
my blog exudes all teh intensity with which i wrestle with everything that makes process fun and difficult.
i am very frustrated right now becasue my mother, who deals 19th century european paintings, came into my studio to look at my paitnings. now, remember, these paitnings ahve been through HELL.
i cut them into PIECES and drove them to new orleans in the back of a picku p truck, and then set htem up in benh zeitlin's pool.
by the time they came back here, they were missing mermaid fingers, battle scarred, and awesome.
its not hte damage that im meant to repari though, my mom suggested that i touch up somet of hte paintings. I DONT LIKE THIS IDEA/ i feel coepletely impossible to do this.
i dont know why.
it s just not what the work is about?
the work is about making paintings A S FAST and FURioUS as possible-- and using them, and enjoyin ghteir unfinishedness-- some of them are all about gesture, and soem of them are truly better than others, but hte idea of going back into each one and (re)painting it- is SO MUCH REWORKING im afraid it will kill me and the work.
She did have a good idea about finishing hte backs of hte pieces by painting them all black- to emphasize their silhouettes and simplify the forms.
I dont want to concentrate on the paintings right now at all.
i want to photograph them outside, play with setting htem up on the canal...
and then spend thurs/fri photographing them.
AND think about the pictures, and justin pointed out i can print my own set shots smalla nd frame them in the basement room with the mermaid in the fishtank...
and- if i want tpeople ot stay away from my big awesome pirate ship, i can add wood water in front of it to keep them back- and i have a week to get that stuff right-- .......
---------------------------------------
i am in good shape. i need to not worry about these paintings. if i am not having fun apinting i will not make good painting, i cannot fuck with work that is done, i need to make NEW work, MORE work, finisht he rope bodysuit and make some rope drawings!!
i dont want to cut down walker's head!!!!

2011-11-23T13:48:00.000-08:00

this was the mockup for the photo shoot i just cam eback from executing in new orleans.
i made 20 paintings in 3 weeeks and then cut htem into little pieces and drove them down south in a picku p truck and drowned them in a swimming pool and took picture so fit. i cannot put thsoe pictures up yet. you have ot come to my show to see those picutres!

a very strange thing just happened to me today. i havnet written about my upcoming show or everyhting ive been preparing for it because it all happened so fast, but a striking encounter has forced me to blog.
i was opening hte gate to my studio this afternoon letting some people out, and a woman stopped me and said, 'excuse me- do you know how i can get in ot htat buildling to photograph that mermaid?' and i said "waht?" immediately thinking she was talking about my painted mermaid, but then she said 'yes its on a wall - there--' and i thought she meant the graffiti wall that is visible from the carroll st bridgge, outside my studio, in the yard. so i said, oh , well, ou have to ask our landlord, david. and she thanked me and walked away. but then i realized she said, inside the building, and m y painted mermaid is visible through my gowanus window, from the bridge, because the whole studio is illuminated wiht a giant tota light right now. and then i checked the graffiti wall, and there IS NO mermaid there. there are other sea creatures and shit, but the mermaid she wanted to photograph was MY MERMAID> now i am so upset that i ddnt invite her into my studio and talk to her about what i am doing!! i really wish that i could haveher opinion and get her feedback and surprise an dthrill her. and now i dont know how to communicate wihte hr except to write some kind of giant silhouetted note on my window in reverse, so that next time she passes by teh silo she can look up into the tower and see the sea maiden, trapped, here, me the gatekeeper turning her awyay,....when i should have invited her ot my show!!
ayyhh sometimes fantasy and reality are never closer than when you spontaneiuosly encounter a stranger who knows you through your work.
lovely lady come find me! i will let you in!

ALos, i have been reading PETER PAN! it is so amazing! i am going to get a copy from book court tonight!! ther eare so many things about it, ive always known it was my bible, or at least, zeitlin reminds me constantly that when i met him in college i told him i was in 'z school' which was better than college, and that portrait of a lady had put me there, and that my heroes were robin hood and peter pan, and now it seems really important to me to really read this book- becaue i bought a copy for my 2 year old cousin this week, and unwrapped it on teh sybway so i coudl read it myself on teh way to give it to him, and then i found that wendy dreams of sewing a tent out of dried leaves!!! ((SO ME)) ______SEW ME!!! and then also that childhood begins to end when you begin to understand that childhood does end!!! and also so many more important things to note.... i will buy it and read it and blog it. i cannot think of abetter book to spend money on or a better store to suppport. thanks zack zook.

2011-10-23T21:01:00.001-07:00

really need feedbak on pokeys.
WHICH ONE IS BEST? which one looks like walker is actually flying on pokey's back throught he air? remmeber he is going to have a sword in his hand too..........
need to project this and cut it out TOMORROW NIGHT- so please reply!!!!
adding this imagery to the naval battle- seeems appropriate for some reason
also i have to make
the playmobil pirate ship wit h 20 little boys running around on it playing with swords
and
me tied to the masthead naked with rope, like odysseus, being beckoned by the mermaids,
the sirens
bob with the kraaken (picking up the breaking ship)

2011-10-19T21:35:00.000-07:00

AH! i am so happy and things are going so well! I am painting up a naval battle storm! And i just accidnetally stumbled upon this in my outbox from 2 years ago- before beasts of hte southern wild even existed-- its a set pic a drew for benh titled "sex barge"-- the first manifestation of the strip club on boat... but how much does this drawing also look lik ewhat im tyring to make for myself now?? weird and circular... more or less so than my idea to shoot battle in new orelans and cemetary at welseyan? crazy. ghosts of xmas past, the halloween tree, really wan to reread that, bradbury mmmmmmmm and also amy's eyes, such a great read- read all childrens boooks all the time.
good night

2011-10-06T14:40:00.001-07:00

Saw this amazing documentary called Marwencol. You should watch it and also buy it. These are my notes on the movie- they probably don't make sense and i'd rather leave them as an awkward lengthy haiku than edit htem. but they are all making sense- adding up to a clearer picture of the next installation o fmy wooden army....

MARWENCOL:
Hogancamp;s dream- love/sex too, EMBRACE
Pocket full of posies
My alter ego figure- I am a man? Who am i?
At least my alter ego can have a girlfriend, (it only drinks coffee)
Look at the face, who does it remind me of in my town
Hogancamps ruined stocking catfight club
“WHAT IF YOUR THERAPY BECAME ART?”
esopus mag, white columns
toy torture symbolizing REAL damage (scar on face)
tula as villain, mom as a general
“my mind cant decide what world to go for, realistic world? But there are dangers out there….my mind cant handle all that, I prefer to live in my world, I wanna live here, in marwencol”
then he gives his alter ego a camera, and has him set up models…

2011-09-15T10:03:00.000-07:00

At the Brooklyn Public Library and feeling SO HAPPY! this IS THE ART LIBARARY of my dreams! certainly enough to combat my fierce denied access to wesleyan's art library...michael lehman came to my studio yesterday, and it was so great. he was very very helpful and critical and suggested so many great artists for me to look at!
Mickalene Thomas! so amazing- her sculpture but also her painting is so textured, and the way she moves through mediums, using installation for photography, all with the same subject, is very elegant and moving.
He also told me to look at Vanessa Beecroft and Amy mayfield.

Michael wished my wooden people had more in common with one another-- he said i should concentrate on the notion of 'crafting a scene.' He liked the nudity, not in adn of itself, but as a running thread of bodies. a predictable quality, one of hte only uniting elements.

When i explained my idea of a fighting army, he suggested unity in their weapons, or variations on the same fighting pose...all because he wants a more ALLEGORICAL READING. something i am constantly afraid of. but when i explained my "golden fleece conundrum" (so funny isnt it, how one's/my art identity becomes a series of troubled knocked up balls, memory balls, idea balls, made of different materials, roling around into one another?? constantly becoming more complicated and also growing towards each other, but still also remaining separate non-unifiable objects?)
------> Keith Roberts writes, in a book on Bruegel: "But contradictions, with great artists, do not weaken their art; they become points of tension that generate power." (PHAIDON: 1982, p. 14)
...ok, regressing, "golden fleece conundrum": ie i make a painting based on an image that for ME tells a story- i was 8 years old, this was my toga party, my dad was dressed as a minotaur and we are all chasing him with supersoakers to get the golden fleece- i am confronted with the dilemma that the picture i chose to use, edited out too much information from the story. there is no minotaur! the other children are suggested by their hands- but they are not there! so the story becomes more interesting (or more developed) than the imagery of the painting. Possibly true also of blankey. Actually, that is what janine antoni told me when she critiqued that piece, that the title would defniitely matter. This problem occureed with THe Tailor too, only i knew hte backstory, not so important, but i was trying to explain the work with the byline (stolen from AIR gallery) "the man i wish i was."
So anyways, this is an important criticism from Michael, and something Joey has tried to tell me in the past, and also the reason why i am now looking at Bruegel and Bosch and other fantastic allegorical painters who make complex symbolic scenes. ANy recommendations please shoot my way.

Michael also said htat creating a BIG EXPERIENCE relies on all the paintings realting to a BIG IDEA. ..he said something about the whole scene being constructed out of a big wood fire. and then a photograph of the paintings (and wood fire) burning? shot from birds eye view? i dotn know. He suggested that i spent some time culling & collecting source imagery, which is why i am here. And that worked for me wiht Pro Scientia as well, although the painting had otehr unresolved issues, i loved working form source material. and learning art history. maybe this can also be a catalyst for my timeline project at home.

Lehman also mentioned the erotic element present in the nudity. because the scale is human and the pieces are naked. one idea i had then was to make a human pyramid of naked men in the water! i mean submerge it, in the water, after building it, and photograph it so that you can see the reflection. who would be my models for htis project? sam and max...cody, (would he get naked with other men?) some coudl be partially clothed...the more the better, i think i need at least ten.

in my notes from michael i also wrote down"make your work speak from beyond the figure"
People are not interested in self-reflexive questions about painting (meta-painting) it is not enough that they can be momentarily mistaken for real life in a photograph mixed with reality, that trope is old, not conceptual.

He also told me to get a Peter Doig book, in which the simplest images really do tell stories. and to check out Luc Tuymans. and the SVA summer residency program and the summer pre-mfa at columbia. he started talking about rachel hearrison and dana schutz as examples of artists who use the figure but completely sublimate it into something conceptual. that is why he likes my bodysuits so much. as do i. and also he said the texture and form is so strong. i am very excited to continue that series alongside this one. and check out nick cave who makes somes sort of soundsuits.

OH SHIT IT STarTED POURING RAIN. i dont have a coat, i am wearing a white bra-less shirt, and i have far to walk with my heavy library books and computer! oh no! i am too excited i accidentally broek the rules and spoke in the quiet space.

My assignments for myself to get started properly are
1) paint non-humans on luan cut out and see what happens (like the boat i am developing)
2) paint cut outs and join them together by layering them in a stack of 3-5 with 2/3 inch spacers in between and light from above. my reference for this is something we had at my parents house growing up, that i dont know the name for, but i found it on amazon titled: CUT PAPER WOOD ART ASIAN NATURE THEME MINI 3D VIEW
3) stage some example photo shoots...put together a list of likely willing models, have teh INTSTRUCtioNS ready! not a party like last time, very specific goaals, fighting shots, or the human pyramd, or a swampy bayou battle, and stage these and execute them, etiher in unison or sequentially, either individually or in a group, and see how this wokr sout. BEING SURE TO HAVE A STORY WTIH ALL NEC. INFO AND ALSO UNIFYING CHARACTERISTICS OF SCENE.

either way the idea is to carry these assignments out in order to move forward simultaneiously and quickly and see what does and doesn't work. pushing wood you in a number of ways at once! so excited , rain has slowed, thank you michael!

2011-09-13T11:50:00.000-07:00

Met with Eve the other day to talk about my plan for the fall. I want to have a really great show here, of wooden army, but I also want it to be more cohesive than it was prevoiusly. I met a 22 yr old surfer named Jan recently who challenged me playfully, that my soldiers looked more like they were partying than fighting, and who were the 2 sides? and what were they fighting over?
This got me thinking...
- i want to make more wooden creatures (animals/babies/monsters). i like the idea that some are in WORKSHOPS. (matt thompson naked in crawfish boots on top of a ladder with a drill), rob in the enormous whirl-tank he built for aurochs...
but in answer to the BATTLE question i think we have to fight ourseves. or at least, i do. and then there is the larger human struggle with figurative painting. that is something that feeels very worth expressing. art about art that is still fun for everyone and real.
But how do you fight with yourself visually? I would ask people to model and hten photograph them in battle position and then paint them and then ask them to come model AGAIN with their painted selves, and in stacatto moments shoot them, somewhere, in a set, on a backdrop...could be anywhere. and then exhibit these pieces in a gallery space with the wooden fighters also present. eve can fight her jewelry equipment, just as i fight my paintng, cody his photogrpahy, lydia bell and her body in dance, lizzie owens doing a tug of war with her clothes, or is that too literal, and maybe more fruitful wuold be just to have the fight come from wherever people have most internal tension, in terms of age or sex or gender? cross-dressing? or just purely posed physical might be enough? i like props, and the incorporation of other mediums, but the rules cant be too strict, i think i need to start contacting models and taking pictures. if you read htis and you are interested in being part of the project, please contact me! i want models to perform a dynamic within themselves.
This brings to mind hte other issues though, in fact what may be a whole complete, entirely different idea. i want to make a huge set-up, a tableau, a battle-FIELD, of 20 or more people--just like walker (my brother) used to draw, or like so many other famous painters have, and i should go to the library and look at some of these books, and get ideas for hte scale and background of htese painitngs. the painted figures becoming an army of ghosts-- reminsicent of the darkness in a hieronymous bosch painting. this paitning is also gongi to be about community-- and my first foray into a 'production'. more than a photo shoot, i will need to have a camera man, myself be the director, probably have someone shooting video just to capture the whole experience/process, eve will help me organize (play A.D.?) i will need vehicles and a location and lots of commitment from everyone! Also probably a more specific title, to differentiate this project from SF, this is my wooden army vs myself?? no...wood u vs u?
going to paint my wall to start now, and erect more usable surface area, and i have michael lehman coming tonight to do a studio visit! and i have to make a list of models to contact! Come December I want to be at WAR! (WOOD WAR!)

2011-08-28T10:56:00.000-07:00

THis is my most recent stress map, which i made while in Peru this August.

2011-08-28T08:22:00.000-07:00

john waters ROLE MODELS continued:
page 228- "It's appropriate to be depressed sometimes...Use your insanity to get ahead...Everybody has his or her 'love map' as the late, great, sadly discredited Baltimore sexologist Dr. Jon Money once called our predetermined sexual types. And we can never realy change our love maps, but we can learn to see them coming. A healthy neurotic knows his type can and probably will bring emotinal trouble combined with a powerful sexual wallop."

The entire chapter called ROOMMATES is worth transcribing here word for word...I feel so strongly about the way John describes the presence of art, the personality and life of paintings...here i find myself re-reading the chapter aloud to my father, as we sit upstate among family, awaiting oncoming hurricane irene, just because i am so aware of htat lost magic, (when you read osmeting and have a million thoughts, and write down five of htem,a nd then look at the page two months later and konw you are in love but cant remember the face or any other image or action of that body and soul you were ready to devour)

"I live alone but have a ton of roommates. Luckily, they're not human beings. I couldn't stand the idea of having someone else's belongings around. I don't have the mental space...Mike Kelley is one of my roommates. Yes, the man who made pitiful seem sexy by turning grimy thirft store stuffed animals into heartbreaking, jaw-droppingly beautiful sculptures by placing them on stained blankets on the floor or facedown on card tables next to one another like dead Jonestown suicide cultists. Suddenly a museum or an art galery took on the appearance of a coroner's office displaying corpses of toys after an airplane crashed into Santa's sleigh mid-flight on Christmas Eve...I love how mad Mike's work can make some poele. Isn't that the job of contemporary art? To infuriate? The real naysayers who can't see the reverse beauty of Mike's sculptures or paintings should be outraged because they secretly know that his art does hate them and they deserve it" (243)

--htis last sentiment i love so deeply it even brings humor to pieces i despise, to imagine that htey despise me too, which i already feel, but never acknowledge.

"my roommates need to be illusionists and MIke Kelly certainly is. He's a companion who can make you see something supposedly shameful in a beautiful, hilarious, radical, subversive way." (244)

"according to...Brenda Richardson, [Cy Twombly] can make even the most seasoned art ocllectors and accessions committees seethe in skepticism and rage over his work. My walls and floors are not worthy of Cy Twomblys' drawings, paitnings, or sculpture. Just look up his Untitled (1992) and yu'll see what i mean. NO i dont own it. You think im made of money? but i can fantasize cant i? If I ever won the stupid lottery or suddenly made a fortune with Pink Flamingos being turned into a video game, Cy's sculppture would be my midlife crisis purchase to impress myself...Owning this shockingly ugly and elegant work of art would make me feel young again." (245)

-in describing the catalogy of cy's paitnings 1948-60 waters describes finding a note explaining an offenders added scribble on one piece that should be noted is not by the artist, this catalogue was"...a book i read every work of like was following a mystery novel"
that setniment, of personal discovery, being the detective on a mystery that only u care about- the reason people bring notebooks to museums- almost like visitng prisons for interviews with the accused, is a stunning feeling i need to spend more time desvirining. it is why i write here, and why i get angry at myself for forgetting to.

"You see, Cy Twombly is, quite simply, better htan you and me and has the right to feel superior to all collectors. He should judge us because he makes perfect mistakes and laughs at the concerns of hte moneyed class, who deserve the problems of abstraction." (246)

TShe next few pages are dedicated to interpreting Cy's Drawings, waters makes up amazing monologues that each of hte drawings speak. Of course a filmmaker wiht such an imagination as john waters would have the vocabulary and impulse to assign words to the suggestions of wors written in pencil strokes on teh page, but he really, in citing 5 works, brings a conversation to light. WORTH READING> read this book!!
Next Waters compares Cy to Lee Lozano, who in a 'pathological, cockeyed, sexually political plan' vowed in 1971 for "'art' never to speak to women again...At the end of her life, Lee became ill and had to go live with her parents. But what did she do at the dinner table? BLock the view of her mother with her hands and demand, "Dad, will you please pass the salt?" (251-252)

"I've always said true success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks." (252)

"Isn't art supposed to transpose even teh most banal detail of our lives? Were poetry, garbage and genius ever such a holy mix as they were that rare night in artful Manhattan?" (254)

"I was too stupid to have heard of Fischli/Weiss at hte time, but i bough the book, becasme obsessed by these photographers, and, in what I now realize was a rather unsophisticated review, praised Airports in British Vogue. I went on about 'purposeful mediocrity' being the only 'subtle way to be new' and gushed that I had 'glimpsed a fresh kind of 1990s beauty, over and above the banality of pop or the exasperation of minimalism into a shockingly tedious, fair-to-middling, nothing-to-write-home-about kind of masterpiece'...The ritual, the control, the freedom, and the agony of hte airport now give me back the complete joy of being an art collector." (256-58)

"Being 'not ready' for your show, the ultimate nightmare of both gallery owner and artist, was suddenly art. I love art on the floor...I yell but I'm not mad because you can't really hurt a Carl Andre sculpture. But look out for my Fischli/Weiss! Those eight little pieces of faux scrap wood are so delicate, so quiet, that just looking at them could break your heart and theirs if you're not careful." (259)

"'Your art should just be in your house the way everything else is' Brenda Richardson once told me, and I agree. I love going to Brice and Helen Marden's New York townhouse, where you see pictures, drawings, or rare photographs casually leaning on top of one another on the floor, right out in the daylight. Now, that is elegance." (260)

"but Im atracted to serious rommates, too. ONes that are so smart I usually have no idea what they are talking about when they first move into my house. I don't want someone living with me whose work I can understand. I want an artist who can make me see something amazing from almost nothing—the exact opposite of moviemaking. Richard TUttle is the perfect choice...His bare plywood slat pieces nailed flat to the wall with just one thin side of hte depth of hte wood painted white were so beautiful, so simple, so plain, that I felt exhausted just imagining how complete the arist msut have felt when he decided the work was finished...Here, at last, was art made by someone obviously outside the human condition. As Richard Serra once said to me about Donald Judd's pieces, 'It was never a quesiton of liking his work', it was 'that you could never get over it!'" (261-262)

PLUS- on my John Waters TO DO LIST I sitll have to consume the following cultural items:
•The Bad Seed
•Gregory Green (artist)
•One Arm- Tennessee Williams
•Baby Doll
•Heiner Bastian (art historian)
•Parkett (art mag)
•The problem of reading (esay by Moyra Davey)
•Paul Lee's dirty dishrag
•Films by Armando Bó
•Susan Slade

Now I am currently reading BEAUTY TALK & MONSTERS by Masha Tupitsyn. I found this book because I started internet foraging for Masha, as she was my babysitter, and an interesting role model in her own right. As only the second film enthusiast loose biopic i've read (only a few months after reading role models) i am totally enthralled by this read. My annotations are coming soon, but even funnier are hte annotations I found already scrawled across the pages by a moronic feminist film student, who wrote such things as "i have no idea what happesn in this chapter" for no one's eyes but mine! ohhh the joys of second hand possessions.

2011-06-13T12:23:00.000-07:00

An interview with Pedro Reyes posted on artinfo led to the following stolen text snippets:

What project are you working on now? I was invited by the Guggenheim to do an off-site intervention in Brooklyn. My project is called "Sanatorium" and is a temporary clinic where we provide short, unconventional treatments to the public. In fact you can only experience the exhibition if you check in as a patient. We are fully operational with nearly 16 different treatments; last weekend we provided therapy to nearly 500 visitors.

Can you give some examples of therapies you offer at the "Sanatorium"? One of them is called "Goodoo" which is a positive version of the Voodoo doll. The patient chooses one person they want to help, and inserts a number of objects into the doll. It helps them to give material shape to their intentions. Then "The Museum of Hypothetical Lifetimes" therapy is an architecture model of a museum. Each room represents one period of your life. Next to the model is a shelving unit with hundreds of little objects you can choose to place as 'artworks' in the rooms of the model. The therapist works as a curator and works with you to see your past, present, and future as if you were visiting a museum retrospective of your lifetime.

These ideas excite me because the Sanatorium is a fully functional public service, and although i dont know how i woudl respond to visiting documentation of it, or seeing 'the show'- the concept is alluring. TThe museum of hypothetical lifetimes reminds me of the timeline i am making in my house right now--- i am painting a stripe through every room that will extend throughout the interior perimeter of my apartment. THen I will begin to fil in historical events chronologically in an effort to learn history (visually). i always lose a sense of time with periods so long0 and although i cannot divide my home proportionally - it will be more of an exponential curve- i want to have a growing map that i can study and become familiar with while i am moving within a space i already understand. therefore i will come to a better awareness of history by knowing what side of the regrigerator catherine the great lived on.

2011-06-06T15:13:00.000-07:00

This is hte postcard cody ranaldo shot for hte Bluxome Point opening last Friday.

I finished John Water's Role Models today. PHEW THAT BOOK IS cool. here are some excerpted quotations of choice- in true baraw blog style.

-but FIRST- wanted to say taht i posted pictures from the opening on facebook, they will be on my website soon but not so soon, but the album should be open to anyone.

also- i am going to make a historic timeline in my house, this seems like a realy good way to learn some stuff and make my house cooler. i will paint it all around all the walls so taht i can learn dates and events visually and chronologically-- its the only way i absorb information anyways, and i like the idea that it grows and grows and htat differnet rooms in our house occupy different centuries. Justin really likes the idea too and it makes me think that we can collaborate creatively and research together which gets me hot.

ok: john waters. {pubished by FSG 2010}
each chapter is dedicated to a role model and also almost creative dimension therein inspried. I basicaly ended up with a ton of ideas about authority figures and a list of artists and films i should already know...

•IN his first chapter, on johnny mathis, waters talks about listening to mathis 45s and necking: specifically grinding and french kissing -- and realizing he watned to be "an exaggeration of a teenager" (5).
i love this idea, i especially relate to the idea of emphasizing a prolonged adolescence. I think humiliating and difficult periods of growth are worth going through as SLOWLY as possible.

•Which makes me want to watch THE BAD SEED.

•Waters compares himself to Catholic girls who were wrorried about being 'an occasion of sin' "That was the expression used if your clothes were too short and someone had lusting thoughts about you...I always worried as a little boy (and still do) taht I wasn't an occasion of sin. Will I ever, in my lifetime, be worthy of such a compliment, such a desired reverse state of grace?" (19).

•"For Patty, THE BAD SEED was a role; for me, it was a lifestyle" (21)
HOw many people continue to live cinematic lives because they are trapped in their heroes head? For me: Peter Pan.

•Patty on Willie Sutton-- "oh yes!...he was big news. i drew newspapers about him when i was eight or nine years old" (22).
what a great idea for childhood fame-- i still have my preschool "yearbook" (thanks so much to my parents) which features all sorts of really important news clippings from my friends own imaginative youths and all of it is so telling.

•On to the next described dance party-- John Waters dancing to the Monster mash!!"I 'did the mash' too, and many nights in the privacy of my own home I danced alone, or with real monsters I had brought home from my favorite redneck bars, and we blurted out, 'it was a graveyard smash!' while sniffing poppers" (24) -- i brought my poppers to see lila the other day but it hink i need new ones they are losing their effect.

•"A Pyschiatrist once told me early in treatment'stop trying to make me like you,' and what a sobering and welcome smack in the face that statement was. Yet somehow, every day of my life is STILL a campaign for popularity, or better yet, a crowded funeral."
(24)
When i htink about morbidity and graveyards and dancing i feel somthing in common with john waters. especially when at the end of the chapter he mentions 'cult graveyards'.

•Artist Gregory Green 's installation at waters home...i got sidetracked looking this up by the fate of another piece of greens, an installation of unfinished LSD at a chicago gallery, (Kinz and Tillou) that had green and kinz temporarily arrested because the police crashed the show, confiscated the fake drugs, tested them positive for LSD and then issued an apology when they were re-tested as non-doses. This is the sort of art that does not photograph particularly well in a gallery, and i cant imagine how boring hte show would be without media coverage and cops, but as an event it is completely compelling performance art. i guess i only like performance art that isnt a performance.

•On Bin Laden nesting dolls in his apt: "when im feeling especially confrontational, I put them out to horrify myself (yes, you, too, can be your own role model)" (29)
I completely agree and it is hwhen im having hte most fun in life that i dare myself to do what I WOULD DO if someone put a camera on me at that moment and told me to be myself. Maybe this is post traumatic stress from kentuckers mumblecore shoot on open five 2, or else just how i wish i'd be dared if i had someone around to dare me, as i oftne have to create these moments completely by myself...OR i almost forgto, if i am trying to COURT SOMEONE then it is advantageous also to act balls out and impress them with my lust for life.
The last time I did this I brought wooden emily roller hussie with me to a columbia university MFA grad student barbeque at my friend molly lowe's house. en route i stopped at an art opening for nate lowman at gbe because nick poe wa sgoing and i wanted to see him and also i really like riding the subway with my wooden army. i became quickly embarrassed after actually entering the gallery with my wooden person, but i couldnt not do it, after i had dared myself to. it was too challenging and why?? why is it such bad form to bring wooden emily into a gallery? i didnt leave her there or try to camouflage her into the wall...she is my guest and my going to the show was not an effacement of nate's art just beucase i have some big paitning with me. it doesnt even read as a paitning, more as a person. but people dont alwasy want to consume work, sometimes they REALLY dont want to pay attention to you at all. i m just so sick of going to openings and feeling OPPPRESSED by the ritual of fanciness, i thought it would help to bring a friend, especially one who makes me amused no matter where i am.

•Now i have to read Tennessee Williams "one arm" and rent baby doll. "I planned to show baby doll for the rest o fmy life, attracting th e wrath of hte pope and causing a scnadal in my parents neighborhood" (36)
Art is scandal.

•WHen we get into Rei Kawakubo and comme des Garcons i cant belive i dont know anything about fashion. Kawakubo "specializes in clothes that are torn, crooked, permanently wrinkled, ill-fitting, and epensive...The fashion hisotrian kazuko koike has described Rei as 'almost liket he leader of a religious movement' I genuflect to Rei's destruction of fashion rules. She is formidable, reclusive, intimidating, and has described her work as an 'exercise in suffering'...fashion is having a nervous breakdown" (96)

•We use the same eyebrow pencil, Maybelline expert eyes velvet balck. He uses it to draw his moustache, and so do i!! Althguoh i have also been known to apply it with sharpie, and sometimes i veer more towards whiskers.

•IN the cahpter on Baltimore Heroes Waters tells the story of Lady Zorro. THis is me. not really, but i am Z, nd she goes by Z, and also zorro is one of my childhood roleplaying identities... "'Z' (as she was known right up to the end by people in her life) had a real rage she brought to the stage, which added a demented hostile sex appeal" (134).
I have always wanted to harness my rage and hostility towards men and i definitely used kentuckers movie as an opportunity to act just as demented as i damn well pleased. although i dont know if it translates to sex appeal, my own favorite moment was whne i found out they wanted to shoot on thanksgiving, and i had to leave my family and go to some premiere of open five 1 in the city, which i hated, becuase its a mysognist film. more about that another time. or never. and because ray gave me the heads up on amtrak on my way there that i would have to walk in and be on camera, i stoppped at grand central station, bought a newspaper, cut out the bad review of the film, framed it, and on the subway to dumbo i cut out ransom note style letters and affixed htem to the arrticle wiht chewing gum to read "dear jake, i have a bigger dick than you and so does my art"
-- just remembered that i have written about this expereince before,. but some stories should be told tiwce. and just to prove my allegiance to lady zorro, i'll quote myself on dec 9th 2010 posting: "i made the thing on the f train between 42nd st and dumbo. it was really fun. can this go in my portfolio? the story shoud. i am fierce, thanks ray. for letting me know."

•"a horse-ish oaf with a beer-can dick" (224)
...more soon i have to go see F for Fake at the Jane and i have to much to express about john waters art collection which he describes in the final chapters.....

2011-04-25T11:44:00.000-07:00

Ah. I have to print postcards for my upcoming show in san francisco!
going to take photographs- possibly tonight?? of teh finished wood people i have so far, although i'd love to include michelle but i dont have wood forher...
borrowing a sabersaw from my dad because mine came loose at hte base- the cord is acting funny and teh power sporadically dies.
so far i have ready:
giant baby owen
azikiwe
(jess isnt here but maybe can be photoshopped in??)
tisch
jacqie
emily roller hussie

wheer should i set this troupe up? such a weird mix. i feel like i should go make more, but i also feel mad sick.
cody though, is more sick than me, and he actually sounds sick, and told me i sound fine. so now i feel retarded and lazy and i might have to just go to the studio and drink a lot o fwater and work through it.
shit
i also need ot have the name decided for the show.
Wood You?
ok, this is one possibility for hte postcard. i need toknow: when you see this: do you think: i am in for weird digital collages? OR : do you get that the superimposition is in reference to the process of serialing and simulating friends? (and that the show will be wooden paintingsculptures)

2011-04-19T12:25:00.000-07:00

These are Walter Dorin paintings that have been blowing my mind recently.
I think the idea is so simple and straightforward: Great Romance...love stories, couples throughout history, and the style so precise and formulated they are deeply affecting.
Thinking a lot about "getting my message across" recently, due, among other things, to many art conversations wth benh zeitlin.
As a filmmaker he has to know his narrative message becuase the content (story) of a film is articulated verbally as well as through visual language.
As a visual artist I find speaking about my work and writing about it to be sort of a jump from making it- as it never uses text or words to express itself. that said, he still makes a lot of good points, about where i am and how approximatethe disatnce is bewteen me, my message, and my audience. this is important stuff to be aware of, i feel that. and its good to hear it, maybe easier, from someone who loves me, loves my work, and yet still doesnt feel clearly as though he knows what im trying to say in making it. what my work says when it stands there withoutme.
i believe im trying to express the inadequacies of human attachment.
Materiality of life...we affect things, break them/killthem just by relating to htem...the rawness of experience and love. this is why im interested in thigns from the past, things with histories, even as i look forward into the future, my work is about connectedness and vulnerability and material decay.

2011-04-15T11:19:00.000-07:00

Meanwhile, Here are my curtains-- i want to take a welding class and start working at a frameshop. i think i could benefit from access to and expereince with metal and glass.
i want to put the curtains wedged between 2 sheets of gals,s and make a metal frame fo them. I dont know if it will have feet and be free-standing, or belong hung on the walll.

I went out with azikiwe adn benh the other night, and also last inght actually, and aslo last night went to turners opening at mountain fold SO GREAT. reminded me what an opneing is SUPPOSED TO FELE LIKE.
for me- anyawys

i saw will shapiro and lots of random freinds, but also CHURCH St SCHOOL parents and children! i love children at art shows! its so fun to me. i thinkthey take art out of its own context.,,like why i loved prospect 1 so much, the art is invisibly blended into the seams of reality, maybe thats also why i like to makke my money bodyysuit (next one after laether) because it can be worn in a way that walks the line between art and not art. hoepfully not fashion. jsut life and existence and an inversion of form.
i dont know if i like conceptual art or hate it or just have no desire fo rit. what does conceptual mean anyways? its a fake word. its an arena i dont know how to compete in, becasue it is not aligned with my aesthetic taste. and ar tis s o practically visual for me, and so rooted in my intimate, private self.
but hte money suit is a way for me to make something, and have it be difficult, and manual and performative, and timeb-ased, and representational(trying to represnt clothing?)NO BODY. BODY. tryint to represent mYSELf. physically. money selfportrait. BAM. so whats the leathersuit? hmmm...my fathers leather jacket sewn into my mothers....dead skin. child.

got a phone call from gaia-- whie im typing, i takl about plans for august, going to peru and then working on WHITE FOX MASK, i say i am following kentuckers advice:
kentuckers motto: doing something terrible is better than doing nothing at all.
gaia says- so you really are doing this project
becase you like being hte hot sexy angry girl raginG AGAINST IDIOTS. so you can tell them all to grow a dick and die.

hahah gaia.

2011-03-24T11:43:00.001-07:00

So much to catch up on--
First of all this goes back to January:
And then February (my valentines day present for justin outside EVR):

AND THEN MARCH brings us up to date with my lace curtains, still have to retouch those photographs.

I was in Chicago 2 weeks ago interviewing at SAIC and I visited the Art Institute Museum for the first time. Having my lace and now leather (in the works) bodysuit in mind, i started thinking about applications of these "costumes"....I saw some works on Harlequins, and began remembering my interest in the Harlequin figure as a child. I dressed as a jester once for halloween, played rumor from the tempest, many times played puck, delivering the epilogue from midsummers night dream on top of a mAYPOLE once in a thunderstorm- imagine im an 8 yr old lightning rod!!

"The New Harlequin Game: 1800/50
Hand colored woodcut
By the mid 19th century, Commedia dell'Arte characters were recast by Romantic novelists and poets—including Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, and Georges Sand— to express tragic sentimentality and disillusionment. At the same time, the most popular characters in France—the coquettish Columbine, the melancholy Pierrot, and the trickster Harlequine—increasingly appeared in vaudeville theaters, street pantomimes, the circus, and other crowd-pleasing, lowbrow entertainments, such as the dice game featured here..."

2011-02-10T13:48:00.000-08:00

AHHHH so many ideas from MARTY SCHAPIRO!!!! thank you for coming to my studio marty....and thank you for showing me maurice denis work. i love this time period, late 1880s, edward burne-jones is amazing too...i have so much to say and think about and DO. i really need a schedule for myself to be productive in these coming months...i have a show coming up in san francisco at ben fash's gallery and i am working very hard to decide the theme and i ithink it will be wooden skins. a body of wooden bodies. maybe they can all add up together to make a trojan z. like a trojan hourse.

PROJECTS: 1
LEATHER BODY SUIT- alejandro is giving me leather. i picked out some of his many scraps and they are gorgeosus and i am going to learn to use the tools to SEW with leather and oil it and work it and that is very exciting...i really like the idea of wearing real skin. adds to the lace body suits, corpse like effect. on saturday i am going to get all the leatehrmaterial to my studio and hten i can begin with the borrowed tools...

2: WOODEN BODIES- i am going to try to do 5 a week. I should make a new calendar, after talking to ben fash about hte dates of the show... i want to carry around my friends who are misssing (which is essentially all of them at any given time) -- i have reasons to doubt and worry about my interest in this project but mostly it is just something that i believe i can accomplish RAPIDLY and that is what is most important...i have the technique down....

3. LACE CURTAINS- figurative tapestries, in order to get htis porject underway i need: a scroll saw in my studio, which is now (at least temporarily) on MOTT AND BROOME St and huge and glorious and i share it with a great painter-- LOLA!! and some 2x4s, and my drill...(to construct the wall to work on)--
i will begin iwth the projection and sewing otmorrow...

4. FINISH THE BROTHERS PAINTING- in order to have the new wrk reaedy for grad school interviews which hopefuly i will begin to hear about starting soon... marty had lots fo good advice about this piece righ tnow and said interesting things about the "altar" and also i realized first i banked on joeys advice, then alex kestner's, and now martys...i need to add more gold leaf into the water, paint the water more realistically and lesss ribbony- and add MORE LIGHT INOT THE TOP OF THE PAINTING- and maybe max's refelction to help explaint hat he is underwater...also maybe light in the foreground too- but marty is right stik to the palette of the image i created in photoshop reather than the real photo...

5. 3D stuff is ("on hold") right now- cant get to into it because i am getitng ahead of mtsyef technically and i really want to be quickly and massively productive in this moment. marty had an idea though- silk screening large scale flower patterns- i tried to do lithography but i struggled with the process. ive been thinking about silk screening anyways in my bedroom so maybe i should give it a shot!?

2010-12-13T12:43:00.000-08:00

i had to cater a party on friday night, turned out a lot of the guests and host were argentinian!! that was lucky. i got there early and stopped at the book store downstairs, shakespeare and co, started reading gore vidal and then found this reiew of calvino he wrote for the nyrb (thanks toby for discouraging me from ever reading it)

"During the last quarter century Italo Calvino has advanced far beyond his American and English contemporraries. As tehy continue to look for the place wehre the spiders make thier nests, Calvino has not only found that special place, but learned how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere. In fact, reading Calvino, I had hte unnerving sense that I was also writing what he had written; thus does his art prove his case as writer and reader become one, or One."
-NYRB may 30, 1974

Of course as I am writing my personal statement for grad school applications I am becoming aware again of how my influences often include authors to a greater extent than artists. I recently went crazy in a moment of synchronicity, listening to Stan Brakhage start quoting HD!!!!! and another synchronicitous moment: i was approached by my friend eleonore to audition in a film by director martin de thurah- who is danish, right as i am planning a trip to denmark, to visit my brother walker who is going to school/work on a dig there this spring, and ALSO reading andrea zittel simultaneously, i turn the page to her A-Z POCKET PROPERTY project, where she built her own special floating island, which takes place in Denmark!

2010-12-09T12:53:00.001-08:00

Just finished my bird sentinel costume for jeffrey bliss's new movie. i will post some pictures...
tonight at 8 i have an opening at SACRED GALLERY, i made a piece i blogged about a while back for ricky powell, a painting over his photo of marv albert, and its showing with some other work tonight, chances with wolves will dj.
i want to write because i had a great studio visit from mly friend joey...he talked mostly about my in progress work, my 3d painting and the brothers geller, but also, as it was his first time visiting my house, about everything he noticed, patternwise, thematically, in my portfolio.
he mentioned the issue of "personal narrative" and how hard it can be to express it and work with it in art. He mentioned how excited i got telling the story behind each piece (ie: the tailor) and questioned my approach to concept/texture/material relations. he loved the 3d but thought the frame was me being afraid. he picked up on a tension i feel in my work that i have a hard time expressing. he loved the wood jess-- who i dont think i have photographed for my blog- but now i wonder if she should be in my portfolio too.
his thoughts on borthers gleler were that i was formally working with structure, one side of hte pianting is the 2 brothers, and the chess/checkerboard is the CENTRAL focus of hte piece, also built into the framing device., the other side he said, represented a duality, a chaos, an anti-structure, so i immediately thought that there would have to be antoehr way for me to approach the visualization of space. i have decided, therefore, to transform the wooden area between teh checkers into a continuation ofhte depiction of water. and the gold leafed area will be the signage of the chess pieces. sorry to be so inarticulate. i gave jake rabinbach a picture, framed, on camera, during the last shoot for open five 2, which was taking place at the actual opening of open five, and it was something i made on teh train coming into the city from thankgiving upstate, i took the ny times review of open five (which was pretty bad) and framed it, and using my pocket knife i cut out newspaper letters like a ransome note, and using chewing gum, i affixed them to the review so that on top of the article it read: dear jake, "i have a bigger dick than you and so does my art" love z. i bought the frame at hte grand central station cvs. i made the thing on the f train between 42nd st and dumbo. it was really fun.
can this go in my portfolio? the story shoud. i am fierce, thanks ray. for letting me know.

2010-12-02T00:27:00.001-08:00

just stayed up patinign (trying to finish two paintings in time for my mfa applications) and re-reading my BLOOK. really intersting things i found in there...
my interest in icharus and daedalus for instance made me realize that maybe i can use the wings im making for jeff bliss 's film and pu thtem in my own photo shoot wehre i am icharus....
itwas nice to be in touch with this old working habit, reading to distract muyself from paitning and vice versa.
i am exhauseted and have a lot tobuild tomorrow so thats all for tonight.
i saw kafka's metamorphosis performed at BAM and there was some amazing dancing in it- or falling/climbing...i hadn't thoguht about the spanish web in forever but it remeinded me of that. circus gym.
goodnghit

2010-11-29T10:11:00.001-08:00

After seeing Abelardo Morell's new show at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, i was completely in love with this painting: HAH, no, i mean photograph, but i do think it reads as a painting, it is a photo of a camera obscura projection over a painted wall--

these others are also beautiful.

2010-11-01T21:08:00.000-07:00

This is in response to a great radio show i discovered: by stan brakhage, the filmmaker:
Program #1- "i have to be free in doing this kind of program, it is NOthing but personal which is to say sometimes, often, maybe always, a fool in a way...my knowledge is amateur, in the sense of lover."

Th first movie= the night sky, motion picture stories = astrology

Arthur Rambo's first illumination- after the flood.

Carl Ruggles lifved in an old church. they were not quiet and peaceful old people. he was poundin g the same chord on hte organ over and over again and his visitor asks "why are you pounding that chord?" Carl responds "IM GIVING IT THE TEST OF TIME"

3 BRASS angels with trumpets, turned by candles as the smoke rises it pushes a mini wind-mill to spin the toy and ring bells...he wrote two versions of a piece called 'angels'based on this technology,

The notes he played were secondary to the overtones they produced.

Program #2 the TEST OF TIME
Edgar Verez- dresses allin plaid. dressed like the music he made.

"needing to express something of the inner mind, inner thought process at work, for which the older forms of music would not do..."
INgar Bergman: "Art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. IN former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God."i would make the claim that its all the same pursuit but that hte cathedral has become the mind, not in the sense of an egocentric or a giant monument which ist also unfortunately is too often thought of, but as an endless way through, to the universe and to forces and patterns which we dont understand"

2010-10-22T06:02:00.000-07:00

I AM SO HAPPY I DISCOVEreD WAKING UP EARLY AND WORKING!!!!!!
i am listening to these AMAZING LECUTRES by Stan Brakhage that i found on Ubuweb, and i am just blissed out wokring on the 3d painting...decided to mention all the things i have backed up to blog about- seeing as i am overdue- but ive been struggling with looking for work etc, so that i dont always feel internet-ready. also, for instance, i recently went to an absolutely horribly depressing (as always) show at the new museum- and i wanted terribly to complain about it, but then for a half a second i thought i might have the opportunity to work there, and then i thought, well, even if i hate it, i probably should do it for the experience of hte institution etc, and then i felt like i couldnt blog, until the unreal opportunity passed and it seeemed preposterous in the first place to even consider it, and now again i can trash the new museum on my blog. But really, since returning to new york i feel much rasher in boldly claiming my opinions online. i even thought twice about posting my essays for ARTVOICES. and i think now too about how i have never really put my blog to full use in terms of linking to otehr sites- i have somehow tried to keep my little blog a secret in the internet land by NoT making it easy to search and find other things through me or me through other things. i am going to make a conscious effort to be more public. I have a "college fair" to attend tomorrow so i am preparing work for my portfolio review. i had a portfolio review already on monday at the drawing center as part of being accepted into their viewing program. I really enjoyed that. I will blog about it later, as i taped the interview. IVE BEEN MeANING to blog about how much i am in love with stan brakhage's radio show-- but as ssonn as i started taking NOTES on teh show as i listened and painted, i realized that the entire fucking thing is available as a transcribed document online already; so much for my beloved: chicken scrawl/stop/rewind/repeat/chickenscrawl. unfortunatley there are only 20 or so episodes, but hten i discovered that Ubuweb has nothing but amazing educational materials, lectures interviews etc, spoken aloud. so i will have nothing short of great material to listen to while i paint and devise new ideas for formulating an MFA statement that will feel well researched and provocative. this is my newest concern of hte moment. THat, and that when i went to Bard last weekend i had to come to terms with something beautiful___THAT I HAVE MADE VIDEO WORK-- everything we've done as court13 collaboratively, i can chop up and show pieces of to demonstrate my contributions. so i can include music videos in my portfolio! my owl is saved!! i am going to email jordan about that right now. interesting tangential suppoint (sub/point) if i make another blook, which i have never even posted images of on my blog! how can i give voice to teh hyperlinks? and isnt that what pale fire does?? annotate itself like the internet??

2010-10-09T09:52:00.000-07:00

I am so frustrated by my 3d painting. good thing paul korzan has recently congratulated me on being ambitious becasue that dulls the distraught feeling inside me.
Here are some of the technical issues I face:
the red lens of the glasses turns out to be a narrow band with- so it only allows shades of red through- blocking all other colors.The cyan lens on the other hand, is 'full color' meaning it only blocks red, so yellows, magentas, greens etc all come through, and although the colors are tinted blue, your eye receives a picure that is not monochromatic. It is VERY DIFFICULT to match the blue gel in paint because of htis. also apparently the human eye can distinguish many more tones of blue than any other color...In order for 3d to work, the red lines i paint must DISAPPEAR when you look through the red lens, and the blue lines must disappear when you look through the blue lens. the red lens is like magic!! many red paints disappear-- but i went to GUERRA, an amazing paint store on 13th and A, and i looked at all their blues and only with a lot of translucency - i used water and urethane to thin the paint, will the cobalt bermuda blue color work. Ethan Moses advised me to use black in teh painting, which was against all my painterly instincts, i thought layering hte blue and red together would create the actual exact effect, but he thinks the contrast is a huge part of the illusion, so i am now glazing with black and white too. Which makes the paiting feel a little unwieldy and I had a realization today as i was working on it.
The texture is so unknown, the style is so un-confident, it doens't feel successful at all, and i thought how unusual that was, that i didnt hit my stride wiht a piece by now-- and then i remembered feeeling this frustrated once before, specifically, and the painting was at a critical time for me, it made me stop painting!
It was also a window painting, on canvas, but to scale, and the window also happened to be a bathroom window. It had some weird gunky film on it, that had texture and was cracked all over and someone had scratched "plastic forks' into the filth. The sun shining through the window would make the filmy layer glow, and in between the cracks the glass would light up with the blue of the sky...so i sat in the bathroom and painted this painting for a long time, weeks and a month went by, and every night the paitning wouldl change as hte sun went down and the light changed all day long so i was constantly repainting it, until finally the areas in between the gunk, the part htat was supposed to be hte clean background sky-- had built up so much from all the layers of paint that it just WAS the foregorund of the painting and nothing made sense and the colors were awful and it was a complete FAIlUre. in an attempt to get advice i brought it in to tula, since i was doing a non-credit tutorial with her at hte time- and she proceeded to use this painting as the reason why i was not prepared to do a painitng thesis. so after bieng very angry and getting no help, i did decide (somewhat by force) to major in drawing. I am looking at htis new 3D painting and thinking, dont you dare fuck with me like this PAINTING. Just because you are the same size, scale, format, and another weird blocky texture that i am obsessing over area by area, totally undecisively like a big scaredy cat- does not mean you can torment me!! this is a different boyfriend's bathroom window!! And you are on wood not canvas!! And its been four years!! And I dont have a mullet anymore and I'm not depressed!! ANd youare much more technically difficult because you have to FUNCTION--- PERFORM AN OPERATION-- DO AS I telL YOU. AND i am going to hav FUN painting you once you begin to BEhAVE. because i DO like to paint in black, just as my wheat pastings and projected tempera joints show. and Justin is right, when i said black is not a color ot paint with formally - as in not hte condoned way to darken colors, he said "no one knows anything" and he is RIGHT. i am not condoned.

2010-09-11T09:33:00.000-07:00

THings are going great with "THE BROTHERS GELLER"- and heere is my mock up for my 3d painting- i made this anaglyph as per ethan's advice- im about to start the painting in oil, i bought a new blue, manganese, to mimic cyan, and a perylene red too- have to do some color tests. let me know reader if you wanta pair of 3d glasses. i'll send them your way and then you can really enjoy the work.
meanwhile i am heading into tribeca to start my lessons with my mechanic, this could turn into an amazing apprenticeship....i hope everything goes well im sort of nervous but very excited. i hope my fucking car starts too.
ALSO I SCANNED my louisiana stress map~

2010-08-24T14:22:00.000-07:00

WELL -- ONE ENTIRE FEATURE FILM (benh zeitlin) AND A HALF (kentucker audley) LATER -- I AM BACK!
There is so much to explain///
i cannot post pictures from this zeitlin movie, BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD, because court 13 wishes to keep all visuals secret until the film is released. i was key scenic, so most of my pictures are sets and textures. i promise vehemently to one day post these images and what i learned from tehm on my blog.
kentuckers movie actually chronologically happened first.but it is still being made???? so it is not yet describable except maybe to reduce the experience to heart-breaking? i said this to josh safdie last night by accident- that all films i work on are inevitably heartbreaking and it felt so cheesy once i said it- but i truly have never given to a video that didnt hurt me back. and i must enjoy it, i mean, as i enjoy loving, you get so turned on you jump in and do everything you can to make it beautiful/ but its art ultimately so why do we have to break up???
ok, fast forward, i leave the bayou of southern louisiana --with everything i own in my 1983 mercedes wagon and head NORTH- i make it to brooklyn 20 hours before my plane leaves jkf, i unpack everyting to justins house and go to argentina to ARTEBA, i have some drawings that coty has promised to exhibit in the art fair, she has a booth, costado galeria, in el barrio joven (emerging artists) section of the fair. Justin comes with me, we stay at Jorge's house- so wonderful, he frames my drawings!!! I FELT SO SPECIAL AND LUCKY SPEAKING CASteLLANO with the FRAMER<
and then i drive a stick shift rental car up through misiones with eve and kray and see the 5th largest waterfall in teh world- iGUAZU.
on the 5th of july i am in ny- start my job 2 hours after gettin g off the plane- church st school again fro the summer. i am teaching art and using Federico Lamas's book VeTE al Diablo as a teaching tool for intro-3d.
FEDERICO: http://www.federicolamas.com.ar/home.html
HIS AMAZIN BOOK: http://www.federicolamas.com.ar/vetealdiablo.htm
meanwhile marty schapiro has redesigned my website, zbehl.com, and now it is really crazy and different. please let me know what you think. especially in comparison to the old site, which you can still weirdly access online at the moment, by going here: http://www.zbehl.110mb.com
on my birhtday i got very drunk at the chances with wolves dance party and got kicked out after kicking and breaking something outside which i wont get into beacus e iam afraid nowt hat the internet will tell on me and hold me fiscally responsible for my birthdya madness.
i also took naked pictures of my firends sam and max. they are going to be the stars of my new painting. it is going to be a reversible dyptich, very sculptural, it is a freestanding piece, built out of repurposed furniture. it is the sequel to pro scientia. here is a mock up for what the first side will look like:
meanwhile, in re-un-packing my new studio i found some cool things again. i found more love for paul sietsema for instance, and apsara diquinzio who writes so eloquently about him in one essay i have been re-reading for 2 years. Here are todays indefatiguable insights paraphrased:
over 8 years paul sietsemas has culled (Reduce the population of (a wild animal) by selective slaughter.) photos mostly indigenous artifacts, "through extensice studies involving raw materials as diverse as burned paper pulp, cement, latex, clay, jute (Jute is a long, soft, shiny vegetable fibre that can be spun into coarse, strong threads. )and human hair, sietsema reconstructs objects, pushing 2d forms into 3d ones that uncannily resemble their photographic counterparts...raw materials replace the vestigial photograph and the image becomes a 'reformalized subject' ...this displacement indexes a representational matrix involving photraphy, sculpture, time, and identity and also directs one to the material and formal studies carried out by artists such as eva hesse, yves klein, and robert morris."...sietsema chooses his subjects in order to 'structure a kind of loss' resulting in the inability to know a subject...photography acts as a superstrucutre that emblematizes this representational loss...also the 'drawings emulate photography by using manual rather than mechanical processes'...he 'skillfully navigates teh dark recesses and tactile surfaces of that elusive fissure (absence)".
This time i want to discuss sietsema in regards to my photos from last summer.

These are all photos i took shooting 35 mm and then cut with tiny blades and re-assembled by melting pieces together with a soder. I really loved printing from the frankenstein negatives. it was like primeval photoshop. you could choose the best sections of different negs, and in touching htem tegether their would be inevitable destruction to the edges, this part felt like drawing--- as the plastic melted it revealed each layer of chemical color embedded into the negative, so every edge is in effect a rainbow- different colors represent the topography of the melted edge. this plus added heat bubbles uncontrollably creating a constellation through the image. it was very hard to get the exposure right, but so fun to see the weird manual result of a precise digital process. this all now reminds me of hte sietsema text-- a land between photoraphy and sculpture, except im interested not in the subject being rendered in teh photos, but the material of them- and how the film is really a raw material, and how by pushing its dimensionality one can create drawings/sculptures that can then be printed just like photographs- in an awesome window of transmuted form. i started this post last night but then went to go see edan, who IS A GREAT RAPPER, so now it is time for pancakes.

2010-03-13T03:28:00.000-08:00

this is the first night ive spent wokring in this butter room studio. ive been up for 24 hours and im feeling finally WONDERFUL abut the work. My knot drawing is coming along. the 3D illusion is frustrating, but not becuase hte drawing is difficult, its very abstract and fiun and challenging- almost intuitive once im in the zone. tis the colored pencil thats driving me crazy, the blues i have wont match the cyan, and so i have to adjust my gel, get a new lens, until i find a superior utensil. There is somthing so guttural bout this piece, its mysterious as its unfinished, but i think in focusing on my edges i can make t really pop, even if its a dense cluster of tangles. Thnak you to Ethan Moses who helped me make the anaglyph. Check out his 3D pictures at ethanmoses.com although i just looked and couldnt find htem. hazve to get back wth real link.
just realized that patterns will work relaly well with 3d images, maybe i can tie inmy figurative paintings this way as well-- beginning to conceive of all these disparate projects as one portfolio for grad school.

2010-03-13T01:03:00.000-08:00

oops, heres one more from the sunny day shoot:
and then 2 of my post-mardi-gras costume. a non sexy lace bodysuit.

2010-03-13T00:46:00.000-08:00

Here are teh aforementioned pics from the sunny day in glasgow video. directed by bob weisz. art directed by myself. produced by josh penn.
And here's a link to the video:

2010-03-07T13:52:00.001-08:00

im already having a GREAT TIME in the Bayou. Kentucker Audley's movie is finally over, CHeCK. i am no longer emotionally involved in that process CHECK. i have to wrap up my residency application and studio business this week so i can officially SEVER myself from my private practice in new orleans for THREE WHOle MONTHS> but this is going to be great. i am goign to ahve a studio here in the bayou, and this paiting will be my work and i will love it. now i have to go.

2010-02-26T10:21:00.000-08:00

woke up in a gorgeous mood- thank you peggy guggenheim. i clutch you now to my bosom as i walk to the studio , dressed in last nights attire, my costume speaks summert o a new orleans ready for spring.
i have had a really great week int eh studio. yesterdayd i had to go teach my classes, at hte bywater art supply new orleans school of art, and at first no on eshowed up for morning portraiture. i waited ten minutes and then left. i wen tto my favorite junk shop and stole a cashmere sweater. upon leaving i ran into meg turner walking hand in hand with my student, tom, the ex-pastor. i gave him a ride to class and we scavanged his portfolio of old watercolors. he paints his father, a ww2 vet, over and over and over in uniform. his paintings might be getting worse every time. he seems to love pattern and his abstract work is interesting, so we brainstormed over ways to revisit his father's face from a new angle- making it either very very large, OR< making it very smalland simplified and repeating it often in pieces and then fitting those together to create a new facial fabric???? how is my writing otday? i am hungover and hapy. and in love with peggy G. who has finally started talking about art.
the first half of hte book went like this: Peggy was married to laurence and he beat her miserably--

"another day he told me he would like to throw all my uncles over the cliff where tiberius had killed his enemies. i was so offended i burst into tears"

(34) it is difficult now to remeer how laurence and i began fighting...he was an exhibitionist, so that most of his scenes were mad ein public. he also enjoyed breaking up everything in the house. he particularly liked throwing my shoes out of hte window, breaking crockery and smashing mirrors and atacking chandeliers. fights went on for housrs, sometimes days, once even for two weeks. i should have fought back. he wanted me to, but all idid was weep. thta annoyed him more than anything. when our fights worked up to a grand finale he would rub jam in my hair. but what i hated most was being knocked down in the streets, or having things thrown in restaurants. once he held me down under water in the bathtub until i felt i was going to drown....someone should have told him not to be such an ass" (36)

"i had resumed my russian lessons with jaues schiffrin, and i announced later to laurence htat i was in love with my teacher. Laurence picked up an ink-pot and hurled it at the wall. it broke the telephone and spattered the room with ink. the room had to be repapered. To remove the spots on the floor i found a miraculous little deaf man who came every day for weeks. he squatted on the floor bringing out from a bag an array of bottles which he applied one by one until the spots completely vanished" (37)

"He rushed into a private club wehre cPTAIN PATUNI WAS PLAYING CARDS with some men and threw all the cards he could size into capain Patuni's face. A Battle followed. a policeman had his thumb broken.Laurence was put in chains and lay on a table waiting to be carried off to jail...everyone on the island hasd a new scheme to free him. All the schemes involved enormous bribes, and they seeemed dangerous and uncertain...when we said goodbye to the jailer, who had become our dear freind we gave him a large tip. he immediately lost it or said he did, and had to be given anohter. he told Laurence his only desire in life would be to serve someone liek him by guarding his fortune. He said he would ahbe liked to sit and watch a large pile of money which should be placed on the floor in aroom , and which would be safe with him." (42)

"when he put me on the bus he purposely threw all my packages about or dropped them in order to embarrass me, for he was annoyed at having had to carry them all afternoon...the next day we went camping in the desert (45)

"when he finally caught me he was so furious he threw me udner the dressing table. i conserved my mane, but i could no longer consider it part of myself" (51)

"on new years eve we attended a party in a private nightclub. laurence got jealous of a man who asked me to dance, and went over to his table and insulted him. a big fight ensued. i was taken by the shoulders and hurled agaisnt he wall. i did not in the least relish this treatment because i was pregnant again. ..this so infuriated laurence that he smashed ot pieces a new tortoise shell drwessing table set i had bught taht vrey day...i had a complex about toilet sets ever since i had regarded with horror my mothers silver brushes and combs. ..laurence's destruction of it was to me more than painful. after he did it he dragged me down to the sea wehre , though it was a cold night, he rushed in with all his clothes on. after that he insisted on taking me to the cinema where he sat shivering iin his wet clothes." (58)

"he stopped laurence from making me quite nude in public, and then Laurence slapped me so hard in the facethat, although i must have been quite drunk, i became sober.By this time i had had enough, and i wanted to leave laurence, but iw as afraid to go off on my own...a few months before laurence had thrown me down the steps of his studio, and then burned up my sweater, and walked on my stomach four times in teh same evening"(83)

these are quotations from OUT Of htis CENTURY - confessions of an art addict "the autobiography of peggy guggenheim" i highly recommend it.

last night i made a werid peanut pasta dish for dinner, invited bob weisz over, then to the pizza speak-easy wehre we brought the party crew from kentucker's shoot, caroline, eleaonore- who took so many pictures of my blue stockings and red shoes in front of pizza paintings on trucks, in casr, and on cars)...rob leitzell is a darling and finally made it to bj's wehere we had a great time watching caroline white GREAT NAME(!) pump credits in to the jookbox and lipsinc with lipstick on. also the sound guy on this shoot is amazing. travis. he is a lovely sound guy. i have spent some time recently revisiting my voice memos. i found one from my visit with sarah to the midwife's office. She is two days overdue and four days prior to birth- and i recorded the sound of little owen burland's hiccups in the womb. hear is the song i made her about it. its not very good, but it started a long mix tape i made her for mothering and it was fun to play iwth garageband because i ahvent made anything with my sound bytes since will hood helped me make the kalimba piece for ali. ps ali osborn- i cant believe i made you such a nice instrument. its the only vaguely musical accomplishment i can take pride in.

2010-02-22T21:57:00.000-08:00

Here are some things I make when i am stressed out: one is from last year this exact time. the other is from this year a few weeks ago.

These are the things I have going on in the studio right now--
*wheat paste kids -BABIES/HEALERS -organize archive
*sew bodies )more in next post(
*3d rope drawing
*keyboards
*scanning photos (c-prints from last summer), plus collected other photos, plus negs
*HOBO inks- apart from the hobo hymnal collection (illustrations to joe kille's anthology) there are also a few stray drawings- i made one today while listening to chances with wolves on east village radio. Kray played only Eleanor Rigby- cover after cover over and over again for 2 hours- it was beautiful, and this is the drawing i made. If you don't listen to this radio show yet you should!! you can stream it online, just visit the website, eastvillageradio.com, or else the show's blog, chanceswithwolves.com to hear archived episodes or listen live. todays episode was #90. The idea behind these drawings for me is that they are song illustrations- fast, messy, imaginative depictions...i learned to play eleanor rigby on guitar when i was 8, and i still have the same super intense visual associations with the song-- i tried to let that influence this draiwng, but a drawing always is what it is, never quite a dream or a memory- its always firmer, more acute, more specific. maybe even decisive.

2010-02-19T14:53:00.000-08:00

Barbara Siegel talks about female body hair in an interview, after doing a series on bearded women. Siegel is an interesting artist and member of AIR gallery, this excerpti find relevant regarding my recent paintings of pubic hair:
"Antique fabrics seemed appropriate because most of the women lived in the 19th century. I embroidered the names and dates of these women onto the fabric because embroidery is a skill associated with women of an earlier era...drunk and rowdy members of the crowd at sideshows would often harass bearded ladies by coming up and yanking on their beards to try to prove they were fake."
and here is a comment- 'Hairy story' is such an apt title for the fascination we have with hair. Barbara's work unmasks all the' right/wrong' attitudes to hair, and how hair is a battleground for being accepted/exploited by our culture.
source:
http://uchiblogo.uchicago.edu/archives/2010/02/hairy_tales.html

•i enjoy barbara's association between hair and antique fabric.
•i save all my white hairs that grow out of the top of my head, the stress part, in a little box which for some reason i plan on gifting to my mother...
•i refuse to shave my hairs and i get very uppity about it.
•in the past when i have cut my own hair it makes me crazy and think constantly about gender and representations of femininity.

2010-01-26T16:52:00.000-08:00

These are two last paintings I did before vacating my studio and moving into a new studio called TEH BUtTER ROOm in gaia's house. We have my first Pussy Painting here, and also Paul Paul Sleep.

In San Francisco a while back (june 2008) i saw a great show of Paul Sietsema's work. Here are some excerpts from the write up at the museum--

"The secret of the photograph, the very clear mystery of its being lost and straying, is its flight into the strange in the very midst of the familiar." -Jean-Luc Nancy

"from these images he has constructed a layered world that fluctuates between historical periods, material phenomena, documentation, and reverie. The space of his studio circumscribes this conceptual environment, wherein the images and books become portals enabling the artist to traverse a wide range of locations, subjects, objects and materials. At the crux of the project is the matter of representation and its fugitive, shifting nature" -Apsara diQuinzio

the textures of his work were phenomenal, as were the concepst of mateirals as subject and object. Finding this first quote about photographs, i am tossed back into a previous headspace, from when i first started shooting film on the LOMO. i had the experience of LOSING pictures. both capturing something fleeting (or missing it) and then also just BAD PrOCESSING-- corrupt pictures, irrecoverable images. Retaining the memory of snapping a photo- but not having the MATERIAL EVIDENCE is a painful trick no other artistic medium quite masters.

2009-12-11T13:20:00.000-08:00

Guess what project is moving forward!?
My FIRST MAJOR INSTALLATION- an outdoor, temporary, public art piece: The Labyrinth.
I have submitted my proposal to the Front gallery, on St Claude, (in New Orleans: www.nolafront.org)
AND Habitat Restore has agreed to supply free building materials for the project!!
I aim to work for the month of January, opening the installation in February (hopefully on second saturday, the 13th, to coincide with the art openings on st claude.)
I also am pulling together sort of a TEAM! So please let me know if you are interested or available to help in jan/feb, pull this thing together! I will probably advertise for volunteers on craigslist, to try to pull in some new faces along with my usual suspects art dept crew...
In the meantime, i will be looking into small granting opportunities for public art works. The timeline being so immediate, i might be shit outta luck, so if you PerSONALLY know of anything- feel free to anonymously or eponymously email me!!!
[I say this becasue in recent conversations i have found out about a number of people who read my blog and even read it in CLASSROOMS which is so beyond my wildest dreams--especially in south america, where it has to be translated into spanish, and wiht typos and allllllll)
If you do read my blog, i love readership, feel free and welcome to comment - i do love feedback. adn dialogue. and readership.
Here are some delightful videos from a great artist, nyfa sculpture grant recipient 2009, Adam Frelin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCpG_ISHCH8
http://www.adamfrelin.com/html/video.html

2009-12-04T16:45:00.000-08:00

Astonishing Excerpts-
from Lorrie Moore's ANAGRAMS

this chapter was called "Strings too short to use" which is perfect for me in adn of istelf---
"He liked having to chisel at some remove to get to me" (11)
"hes a musician; i said doubtfully. Too often i made these sorts of excuses, like a Rumpelstiltskin of love, stickily spinning straw into gold" (12)
LOTS OF PLAY ON WORDS STUFF HTATS BRILLINAT - milk ducts/milk ducks
pg 22- visual perception as meditation, being close and far to a painting simultaneously
...she coudl buy the social diagram of woman as nestmaker and man as wanderer, invader, traveler in gangs...(23)

•"The world, all matter, i knew, was made up of strings. I had learned this on television. Physicists used to believe that the universe was made up of particles. But recently they had found out htey'd been wrong: The world, unsuspectedly, was made up of little tiny strings" (25) BEST THEORY YET

"She once told me about a frugal, lapsed Catholic aunt of hers who, when she died, left two large, mysterious boxes in her attic, one full of various marital and contraceptive devices, and one labeled "Strings too short to use," which was a huge collection of small pieves of string, multicolored and inexplicable, matted together in large coils and nests...ties too short to bind and therefore stowed away in a huge and secret box. But Eleanor clearly liked to lug her box around, display her ties like a traveling waresperson" (32)

"it was as if our possessions were embarked upon some osmotic, conjugal exchange, a giant french kiss of personal effects, which had somehow left us behind" (34)

"love, i realized, was soemthing your spine memorized. there was nothing you coud do about that" (37)

"from four blocks away i could see that the flock had a kind of group-life, a recognizable intelligence, no doubt in its random flutters their were patterns, but alone any one of those black bird swould not have knwon what was up. alone, as people live, they would crash their heads against walls. I walked slowly...and understood this small shred: between large and small, between near and far, there was no wisdom or truce to be had. To be near was to be blind; to be one among so may was to own no shape or say" (38)

"my heart hurts, spreads, folds over like an omelette" (40)

"the problem with a beautiful woman is that she mades everyone around her feel hopelessly masculine, which if you're already male to begin with poses no particular problem. but if youre anyone else, your whole sexual identity gets dragged into the principal's office: "So whats this i ehar baout you prancing around, masquerading as a woman?'" (48)

This is one of th most beautiful passages in the whole book:
"And then there is a guffawing, hiccuping sort of laughter, but it seems to be coming mostly from me, and i have collapsed, squatted on the grass, holding my stomach, this thing that might be laughter coming insistently, in gulps and waves. I lift my head and in the distance i see eleanor and gerard-- eleanor worried and coming towrd me, gerard afraid and not coming toward me, and jutting into my ilne of vision is hte edge of my own body, fading form the center first like a bloodstain or a bruise, only my outlying limbs, my perimeter lingering. Thatis all i can see, the three of us, here, small and vanishing, and caught in the side yard, selling htings." (54)

"tonight hte phone rings at 10:45.She brings it into the bathroom where hte air is warmer, and gazes into the medicine cabinet mirror: This way at least she'll fel as if she's talking ot an adult" (58)

"where does love go? when something you have taped on the wall falls off, what has happened ot the stickum? it has relaxed. it has accumulated an assortment of hairs and fuzzies. it has said fuck it and given up. it oens't go anywhere speical, its just gone." (75)

the difference between a poet and a non poet is that a non poet believes whe will rememver eveything hte nezt day without getting up and writing it down(105)

CLOSE ON MONDAY (123)
>>>>>i love her use of signage--missing letters morph the meaning- just like typos on a keyboard, fragments of mundane language dissappear to belie something more acute.
for instance:
"Meaning, it if existed at all, was unstable and could not survive hte slightest reshuffling of letters" (130)

"the trees have shed a large crunchy tea all around campus and a few students are lying out on it, faces closed and aimed at the sun...while the sky peels open in bright browns and reds like surgery" (134-6)

"i try to speak while crying, doing the garbled hyena of weep-speak" (146)-- THIS IS AKIN TO MY LAUGH CRYING

"all the world's a stage we're going through" (178) love it !!

"its as if we have disappointed each other into irritation; we have witnessed hte other's failures for too long, and it has made us cranky" (189)

"i feel the parentheses around my mouth, the turmoil of exhaustion in my gut" (193)

"the function of disguise is to vonvince the world you're not there, or that if you are, you sohould not be eaten" (194)

weird that she's so in tune to my own body's places of insecurity-- the KNEES, i ddi those weird paintings of them in high school...
"Benna looked back at her knees feeling that she'd veen made, forever ad for now, lik eher marriage vows, stupid with loneliness, bereft of any truth or wisdom or flicker of poetry, possessed only of hte wild glaze of a person who spends entire days making things up" (213)

Dear Lorrie Moore- I want to write you a letter. i think you are great. I love your sentances and your words.

2009-12-04T11:42:00.000-08:00

Today i am in a researchey mood. I feel like a writer. I need to be wriitng rigt now in my sketchbook and my blog. double fisting.
"its the car wreck in the back of the book" -gary panter

i just made a painting, was it for me or for justin? its about peter pan. looks more like an illustration really. i love hte letragraphs, what will i do once they are gone?

i am working on ideas for my labyrinth. here is a great image, i love, called crossroads, by a hungarian artist, Istvan Orosz:
This dude is obsessed with Anamorphosis: (a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image. "Ana - morphosis" comes from the Greek words meaning "formed again.)
This is especially interesting to me seeing as i just finished making a music video with Bob Weisz all about illusion from single vantage point-- we camouflaged the six members of Sunny Day in Glasgow into an abandoned housing projec tin New Orleans on a rainy dayyyyy! i only had a day of prep, flying back from new york for thanksgiving, waking up at 4 am and working for three days straight, we shot mon/tues, and the footage looks AWESOME. here are some stills, not on the backgrounds, as these were taken for reference in regard to continuity--

2009-11-10T09:32:00.001-08:00

this drawing is going in fits and starts. i desperately want to post an in-progress image but i left eht fucking cord at home...its having an identity crisis?? All the little parts are going in interesting directions but there is no overal unity, and the more i attack it the more i worry i'll lose the transient nature, someone at open studios hada good word...cant remembe,r not evanescence, but EPHEMERAL.
anyways, very frustrated with the things i have to finish- too many DEAD lines not enough playing in the studio. Have to write an article today on Miriam Waterman, who i interviewed last night, i realy like her photographs...

2009-11-08T14:58:00.000-08:00

wo wo wow ow owoooah wow woah wow
what a great day
came back from the bayou - last night in terrebonne benh zeitlin and annie evelyn's BIG FAMILY band played. We drank with children and slow danced with their families and then spent the night in a fleabag motel half an hour aaway wiht some local barflies and an internet jukebox.
TOdya
I wante dto go to the studio so badly, on the drive back, Ray kept playing great jams, like Glitter Penis- Andrew Van Wyngarden's ancient wacky glam project, and also the Shangri-Las make me think i should suck it up and learn to sing, and oh what else some smokey robinson and Electric Prunes and my fav zombies plus he forced bob to use his youtube iphone machine to give me hungry heart, which i craved for a musical climax, and was sadly absent from his perfect z mix.
I am so happy to be writing, so happy to be in my studio! I wanted to get here all day, but allowed for the hapy slow meandering that is my internal rhythm to bring me here.
I ate lila's lovely bread, tea and toast was lunch- sad to say that my potatoes were all smashed up in the backseat- i mean oranges, from the dance party i n my car, and the mayo made the pot salad rot overnight...
So i got on a bike becasue it was a lovely day, and the light was beautiful. and i rode to domino sound to get hte best record ever, Abner Jay's True Story of Abner Jay, to give to Justin, i hope he doesn't read this before it is delivered, and then i accidentally loved that they were playing the Gravediggaz so i tried to buy the album but they wouldnt let me cause it was something rare and so i had to buy some other great shit like a one dollar 45 that makes no sense--*****more about 45s and record collecting later, (reminds me of lost photographs and thrift stores- ok i'll just say it now: i think i look for things not to find things but for the sake of looking, and what i find with records is that i know nothing about music or hae the context or taste to find osmething objectively valuable, so i only take waht i relate to aesthetically, which somehow for record collections seems to work better than other manifestations of music-)
Having accomplished my errand, in a good mood, i went on towards my studio, riding through the quarter, stopped to photograph a building for my plein air watercolor class- ill be teaching in january at the bywater art guild, got fucking excited about biking and stopping-so naturally when i saw a book store on Dauphine, having missed the great book fair that i love in new orleans- i went last year- and myself in the market for two new sketchbooks and omse old art books, i indulged my bicycling style and went inside. I am running iwth the runons here but please allow me to- i couldn't read anything inside the store for hte sake of too many thoughts- i had to start photographing pages of books i couldnt buy and bought 50 bucks worth of books anyways. learnt about this amazing Baycaux tapestry, also found a beautiful claes oldenburg bok with his three pronged plug soft sculptre and lots of darwings- little art books like the kind Neda saved for me (like the 8 days chick book i made for BenEC). Kenneth Patchen was recommended to me for his vision as a watercolorist as well as a poet, like Blake and also HENRY MILLER who made paintings along with some love letters for a japanese woman wiht an obscure name. Lastly i picked up a book called 'the artful dodger' by Nick Bantock. The inside cover read it was about creative process of illustration- and so i flipped through and noticed PICTURES FROM MY CHILDHOOD STATIONARY SET which apparently he designed- and they came from letters he wrote to himself, or someone else fake, in an imaginary correspondence movitvated by love for stamps!!! and collage... and goodies... i really like the way its written- all autobiographical of the best nature- so i bought that too. and finally i am here blogging blogging soon drawing drawing. but how nice to bike into great music and be alble to give money to my favorite store sespcially the ones that are musty and well organized re-sellers with cats!

2009-10-20T12:27:00.001-07:00

Here are a few photos from a photographer i discovered recently, her name is joyce kim, she graduated from mica in 2007.
The wintery one has a red riding hood feel to it, the forest is so peaceful...and the pool is so forlorn in its emptiness. the carousel i think i am drawn to because i keep finding carousel-looking houses in new orleans as i explore- soon i will post some pictures of those.

(Copyright joyce kim)

2009-10-16T00:56:00.001-07:00

Here are the promised jpegs of new work for the man i wish i was:

apparently language is a strange vehicle.
this morning when i woke up hungover i meditated on this all day. something about the way words form in your mind to express simple thoughts gets interrupted when one is sick or twilighting or out of it, and the most FUN thing happesn- word play. misconstrued meanings. new inventions.
i am going to try to teach some classes at a guild here in New Orleans.
I am thinking, still life, with a focus on fabrics. An opportunity to create fun exercises that will build basic drawing skills while introducing dialogue about composition, material, value, lighting, etc
Portraiture- a portrait every class day, constantly changing materials, always working with the figure. We will discuss great portrait painters, their techniques, the history of portraiture, and what makes a portrait in figurative painting.

ALSO
since today was a day of ideas-
i want to paint the towers in OIL with PENCIL and whatever hte fuck else comes to mind. i cant believe i spent all this time believing i had to choose between drawing and painting. NO i dont.
What i learnt from these quick figurative paintings was that i dont' need to be afraid of my impulses with materials, and if i can use oil with acrylic, ink and thread, or oil with steel and watercolor, than why not OIL with gouache and graphite!?!
thats the plan
START the painting/see what happens on teh MDF, i already prepared the perfect surface for either, why not both and see which one takes over? let the materials have the fight on your surface, then all the energy of the studies will exude in teh work itself, bringing the spontaneity my work deserves adn i cherish. and since im not working on PAPER< who cares if there are mistaeks??? everything is remediable.!
GREAT DISCOVerY

and...
really want to paint more patterns/ beautiful intricate copying of patterns.
my gorgeous velvet shirt from leah singer, the repetition is so delightful and intricate/ and i LIKE the warm black background and the line bewteen oil and drawing that i am about to cross for myself here is going to do wonders to my interst in negative space/layers, /backgrounds/
once again, i will say, i had the worst undergraduate art professor. Her name was Tula Telfair, and she has STUNTED my growth as an artist by being Abusive and conniving. She managed to intimidate some of my best instincts out of me . Luckily i am persistent and will one day make that very clear to her. That she was completely wrong about teaching, about art, and about life. That still seems important to me, but not as important as these exciting discoveries!!!
-z

2009-10-08T16:42:00.000-07:00

a few quick comments before i leave for the day
1- i thinkthe shakespeare painting is too bold. the colors look garrish and there is no subtlety, no delicacy at all. it is less realized than the other paintings because i have not found a way to RESOLVE the surface. i think a layer of thin wax (1/4-1/2 inch) over eberything wth maybe some thread stuck iin it to create lines or soemthing would be great- subdue the boldness, take it away from grotesque and make it more ethereal, mystical.

2- about to start new drawing, 9/11, i was going to make it fit on paper i have in the studio, but then i thought, well, how big do i really watn to make this? and i projected it and found 76" x 58" worked rather well. it was ambitious scale, so then i thought how could i make it this big without using my gigantic role of paper? rolll of paper. wellllll i thought sewing different pieces together might incorporate different elements of the drawing i just did, and gessoing over the seams or soemthing. but just talking to my dad about framing Blankey i became rather depresed, i think maybe i should stretch it? or mount the paper on board? but thats silly,and much harder to transport. i am just trying to listen to him because he's saying dont work on paper cause its hard to frame, but thats NOT MY PROBLEM if i work on BOARD it will be hard to move.
so should i just work on ONE PIECE of paper? since i have one big enough? or should i try to put pieces together? making the final product potentially much more fragile??
please someone answer this question for me!

2009-10-02T14:45:00.000-07:00

okay- lots of feed back from wonderful Emily Farranto:
weird scale, not medium scale, or large or small.
Poised figures- a stiffened mannerism. That is what Shakespeare and the Tailor have in common.
NO ONE paints ENCAUSTIC this big. it is for SMALL paintings.
she said to check out Amy Cutler's work, that the fantasy/allegory element works with my work (fleece, blankey etc) and also Michael Raydecker.
The PROBLEm is that for the most part the painting is not integrated.
There are areas where it is working-- the hands and the gun (looks like Richard Diebenkorn the way the pencil works as an armature for the oil paint) are really rich, look FUN to paint.
EMily makes a point of , as a painter, saying that painting can be enjoyable (to look at) without even judging it as good, if it looks FUN (to do)- good in a 'secular' way.
She also told me to look up the work of Kendide Wiley who does lots of portraits.
She had me limit my palette, or consider sticking to a warm and cool of each primary--
we realized that i am drawn to the colors with a lot of white in them, the creamy colors that make MUD. i have to be careful with my mud.
really wish i could write more, but i think at this point with 5 hours left before i have to sacar los fotos, painting is more important!
zz

2009-10-01T19:07:00.000-07:00

ayayyy! going well! about 30 hours left til i have to be done with these three paintings, and theings are finally coming togehter. just today i made the decision how to deal iwth the third and final painting, (Shakespeare). i had wanted to find a way to dael with the wooden panels, so that they didn't read as individual units, interrupting the painting, so i tried to putty the gaps, but the putty is BRIGHT yellow and also creates another texture altogether, i would have to lay a primer over hte surface, but i like the look o f the putty stripes--- so i decided ENCAUSTIC
and ive never worked iwth it before, and on my way back from driving charlotte to the airport i went to the national art and hobby and bought some wax. i also got a heat gun from the jamaican community hardware spot. i thought id melt the wax in a hot pot but not working- hot pot kept automatically shutting off- so i decided just to blast the shit out of it on a tin pan with my NEW HEAT GUN. and its great!!!
im sure not waht encaustic painters would be into- but, its a super good way to incorporate fabric too- which is essential foreign ingredient to tie this painting back to number 2 which is all thread and embroidery, and number one which is silverpoint. NOW ive got three old fashioned techniques in new manifestations.
it would be nice to get the silverpoint more detailed on the metal golden fleece, and also to get the thrid hand a little more defined looking. i got really exited painting the feet on the second painting, which i still have to title. and i had to cut up my PANTS in order to get a green cloth for shakespeare. but i can still wear them. just one leg is a little short. really exited to se how far i can stretch this encaustic. so far i havent succeeded in mixing any colors- that seems hard, more to report later, back to work.

2009-09-23T14:40:00.000-07:00

Fuck me for losing my digital camera. No pics to upload of new studio, or the study i just finished in preparation for the first new painting in this series: THE MAN I WISH I WAS.
I am experiencing indecision over the following topic- should the golden fleece be painted on a white ground, with watercolor and pencil, or should it be in oil like the figure and the hands will be, all of it over metal. The oil has a real opaque fleshiness to it, and i can't decide if i like the fleece as a bodied, hairy thing, or as a translucent, abstract amorphous thing. maybe i have to try painting the fleece in oil and seeing how that looks by comparison.
If i do it all in oil, then that dictates more about the other pieces as well.

Right now, Shakespeare is set up to be oil on wood.But i may have to treat the surface differently as it is checkered and although i'll be removing the checks inside the silhouette of the figure, i still think hte painting will read better if i can unify the surface, or else distinguish different planes of hte surface, purple legs, pantaloons, vest, lace neckpiece, face, hat. Possibly by drawing some and painting others, or else by laying cut pieces of wood (masonite/luan) over separate areas so they are raised, and paitning on those.

The third piece, THE BOY I WAS, (still searching for its characterization to match "Shakespeare" and "The Golden Fleece") is supposed to be painted over vinyl, but again, becasue there are areas of extreme detail, i am afraid to paint it and instead feel more confident in my tedious drawing. At one point i thought maybe ink, but i dont think that will work well with the vinyl. I also wanted to incorporate some cutting and sewing into that piece. That seems tenuous if i am not doing anything else 'a-material' with the other piece,s but the surfaces feel LIBERAL enough, and distinct enough, that maybe it iwll work.

I am giving myself three days for each piece. YIKES! That means i have to be done with this fleece piece on SATURDAY. SHakespeare on TUESDAY. and BOY I WAS on FRIDAY. Plus simultaneously have a fourth piece in the works for a sketch image to be sent in, or else send in a detail of one of these three pieces.
To Eat, and then to Work.

2009-09-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

pretty confused about this new series i am starting. it is for the Air gallery show- the man i wish i was. so far i know i want to use images of me as a child, playing male roles-
i have shakespeare (writer crossdresser)
the golden fleece and (warrior, diana, healing, supersoaker, mythology)
this weird androgenous photo of me with short hair in clothes i made myself holding a ball.(i dont know what htis connotes besides the fabric and details in clothes being feminine to my masculine self-portrayal)

the hard part to figure out is am i going to paint them/ draw them? i dont think i want to work on paper. i really liked the silverpoint and althugh i could do them on veneers i dnt see the connection yet between this work and wood.

maybe i should have the 4th photo be one of me naked as a child, building, constructing, as an architect/artist. something manual and male- cant think of what this photo would be where i am actng inherently 'male'... anyways, i do need a fourth image but these ar ehte three i have chosen so far.

im interested in any feedback you might have to offer. should these images be treated uniquely each one? or should they all be done in silverpoint (see previous post of reconstruction) ...i want some oil paint, some mdf, some wood grain, some silverpoint, some fabric, some drawing...

2009-09-13T14:45:00.000-07:00

Just had an opening at Goodchildren gallery good turnout!
Showed two new pieces-
Balloon melted on my car, 30" x 22" my first watercolor,

and Reconstruction, 12" x 17" my first silverpoint

2009-08-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

Okay, the new piece I'm almost finished with. I will post images shortly of the balloon which is done, but here first is the 'map'i made (prototype) for the reconstruction piece im doing. the concept came from a group show themed 'flags' that rajko radovanovic invited me to participate in in December at Goodchildren gallery in New Orleans.

Here is the first ofa number of images i'm assembling of the Boy Crisis owl I made for the Fountain of Youth video we shot in McCarren Pool last weekend.

photo credit- ashley may

2009-08-16T11:35:00.000-07:00

this excerpt is form this article:
http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=32560
"Historically, Villinski's work has been concerned with the transformation of discarded, “worthless” objects into objects of new meaning and beauty. He employs materials that have potent, sometimes troubling associations in the original form and adds layers of new, often contrasting, meaning by endowing them with fresh, unexpected form."

its about a trailer that is meant to be an "emergency response studio"
the last sentence included above felt important to me. interesting as well that it was created for prospect 1 and is being displayed at zilkha gallery at wesleyan. how long before zilkha will show all our mgmt props/sets stuff? will put up images of the boy crisis owl soon.

2009-07-30T12:56:00.000-07:00

i am gettting very distracted thinking about these 2 articles, mostly the old, weird america review...it has me reading greil marcus and here are some notes on that (From the old, weird america, MARCUS, 1997 Picador);

'in the bastment the pas is alive to the degree that the future is open, when one can believe htat hte counrty remains unfnished, even unmade; when the future is foreclosed, the past is dead. how the future depends on teh past is more mysterious.' (70)

'just as the most delicate and intesnse of hte basement tapes songs are like a play about the old american mask and the basement itself a theaqter for its ritual assumption, removal, and replacement' (65)

masks of shame, west virginia mine war, 60

mark twain in how to tell a story: 'the humorous story is american...the humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it' = bob dylan on the basement tapes p 53

'time is longer than rope' p 68

'listeing to hte way each musician seemingly plays off of every other's baerly unfulfilled desire rather than whatever movement he has inf act made makes it impossible to believe hta tsix peole could ever kow each other better' p 35

historian georgina boyes: 'thus it is not hte singer who sings the song but the song that sings the singer, and thereore in performance it is the singer, not the siong, that is the asethsetic artifact, the work of art' (28)

folk revival: it was a place of the spirit, where authenticity in song and manner, in being, was the highest value' (19)

if dylan changes folk music
then harry smith changes folk music
then kamps changes visual artists, a compiler is a changer.
'within a year, dylan's performance would have changed all teh rules of folk music--or, rather, what had been understood as folk music would as a cultural force have all but ceased to exist' (13)

'the songs bob dylan began offering in 1965...took shape as treasure maps, and the treasure toward whch they pointed was a still-undiscovered sound. by the spring of 1966 the songs had become the treasure.' (10).... 'the basement tapes can begin to sound like a map; but if they are a map, what country, what lost mine, is it htat they center and fix?' (xix) 'the anthology of american folk music was bob dylan's first true map of a republic that was still a hunch to him' (88)
john cohen says the anthology introduced hundreds of artists 'who became like mystical gods to us...the anthology was our bible' -dave van ronk of greenwich village folk milieu in 1950s (88)

blonde on blonde and highway 61 revisited together are 21st c modernism, 'they join the whole gothic-romantic traverse of american self-regard' (xvii)

bob dylan as Folk, as prophet, 'signifying determination and honesty in a world of corruption and lies" (xvi)

'for thirty years people have listened to the basement tapes as palavers wiht a community of ghosts...their presence is undeniable; to most it is also an abstraction, at best a vague tourism of specters from a foreign country' (86)

dylan knocks on carl sandburg's door, sandburg wrote bio of lincoln and was a great poet, kenneth rexroth says dylan was looking for 'the old free america'in this 1964 viist.(old/free usa vs counterculture of the 1960s)
"'the old free america- the ide, the words themselves, seemed all but natural, coded in the inevitable betrayals that stemf rom the infinite idealism of american democracy. i dont hear any irony in those words. but while i respond helplessly to them, also recoil-- becasue those words cast americans out of their own history...they cut americans off from any need to meausre themselves against the idealism...americans have inherited. by fixing the free america, the true america in the past, those words exuse the betryals of those americans who might hear them...the old weird america is what one finds here-not rexroth's rebke to his readers, but an inheritance smith's listeners might prefer to claim had reached them by mistake' (89)

'as a document...the anthology was a seductive detour awa from what int eh 1950s was known not as america but as americanism. that meant consumer society--' norman mailers words: 'fear of "instant death by atomic war" and the fear of "a slow death by conformity with every creative instinct stifled" the antholgy was a mystery- an insistence that against every assurance ot the contryary, america was istelf a mystery' (96)

"smith was a ninetheenth-century mystic: not a reincarnation, but hte agelesss thing iteself, immortal, all mask" (97)

definition according to merriam webster online of an avatar:
1: the incarnation of a Hindu deity (as Vishnu)2 a: an incarnation in human form b: an embodiment (as of a concept or philosophy) often in a person3: a variant phase or version of a continuing basic entity4: an electronic image that represents and is manipulated by a computer user (as in a computer game)

benjamin, being quoted by marcus to explain harry smith's triumph in the anthology:
"it would accomplish a double task: it would dispel the mythic power of present being...by showing it to be composed of decaying objects with a history; it would dispel the myth of history as progress (or the modern as new) by showing history and modernity in the child's light as archaic" (102)

depression halts record sales just as this economic crisis has halted the art world
from 1929 to 1933 record sales fell to 7% of what they had been.

'people like springsteen had missed something, dylan said..."they werent there to see the end of the traditional people. But I was"...he had learned something about persistence and renewal. Or he might have been saying something simpler, and harder: I saw a vanishing. He was present to witness an extinction, to see the last memvers of a species dissapear. Thus it was left to to him to say what went out of the world when the traditional people left the stage." (196)

'the uncompleted world of the basement tapes was a fantasy beginning in artifacts refashioned by real people, dimly apprehended figures who out of the kettle of the folk revival appeared in teh flesh to send an unexpected message. the vanished world they incarnated--as history, a set of facts and an indistinct romance; as a set of artifacts, as a work of art. complete and finished--was going to die, and you were giong to be the last witness." (196)

2009-07-28T14:33:00.000-07:00

These are some images of my latest piece, in progress: the balloon that melted on my car. it has these funky stars all ove rit, it was a huge pink balloon, and it says soewhere very small copyrigth 1983!!!!

2009-07-09T13:41:00.000-07:00

This is the first drawing i did in my Cambridge studio.
i should do a series commemorating allof my temporary studios!!
I feel like i've been unproductive because i ahd to make this drawing so quickly it felt unambitious, and then i immediately shipped it to northampton for the giANT SALE show, but i made it, so here it is:

and weirdly enough, i was editing it in photoshop beucase i had photographed it so badly, and i made this version of it, which sort of shocked me, i know i like subtle soft low light, so to see the aggressive version of this drawing was sort of fanciful--

it makes me think of what i like about the heightened contrast in the ohter photoshopped jpegs of fabric i draw-- maybe something else to work with htere. not here now though, i have to conentrate on this watercolor im starting finally of that piece of rubber balloon ive been carrying around since it popped and melted on my car senior year of college.

2009-07-07T16:12:00.000-07:00

Just went to deCordova museum-- exhibit on old/weird america SO GREAT!!
some of my favorite things were:
David Rathman-
he made ink drawings of old westerns, his process was to freeze-frame VHS tapes and shoot polaroids of them!! 'he's interested in "a certain kind of aggressiveness as well as a certain kind of melancholy" that he associates with american masculinity'
one of his drawings depicted a cowboy sitting alone by the fire: "its funny to start thinking about women" was scrawled above, the title of the piece.
another "hell you ain't dead, just shut up a little" shows 2 cowboys lying on the ground, one holding himself up barely over the other, looking into his eyes. they are all framed in gorgeous wood-stained frames, quite era appropriate.

Eric Beltz does some amazing drawings in graphite on bristol. one is entitled "fuck you tree" something about hte text and the illustrationishy style of the drawings recalls Chris Ware, the self-consciousness too, of artistic appropriation of innocent imagery...

Bard Kilhammer did some strange watercolor drwaings, large scale...
Aaron Morse's stuff really blew me away=--- acrylic/oil/paper on canvas, a gorgeous palette, texture from teh collaged paper, one paintings was called "old farm" they were very psychedelic looking.

Barnaby Furnas did modernist civil war watercolors, nothing i was as impressed by as his paitning 'brown's raiders' which is the shit! relaly aweseome.

then i met an artist- nadya volicer who is putting up an installation in the museum for 2 years. pennie and i are supposed to go back tomorrow and help her. i looked up her other work and it is all very impressive, really up my alley. i referred to the work as menial and she seemed offended, but i meant that sort of complimentarily. i enjoy tediu,m, but when its someone else's tedium, its even less demanding, hence its menial. i just might not use that word correctly.
anyways i urge you to go to the deCordova, its a really great show

2009-07-03T13:26:00.000-07:00

thunder again, on the 3rd of july, hope the fireworks dont get rained out.
just finished a sketch of a burning building.
the fun part was the building, i forgot how much i love technical illustration. all those stuyvesant drafting classes i guess.
and the idea of the house being so flat and perfect, and then theres a gaping whole in teh roof i like, and the atnospheric smoke, instaed of a "WHITE" background, like ali osborn and i debated, is a nice idea, but not charcoal, too messy, keep graphite iwth graphite. i just thought charcoal would make nice smoke, since it is charred. but thiis is a very flat drawing and it is silly to attribute texture to it, it overpowers the fine lines very quickly.
i have also thoughta lot recently about drawing prisons. i ahve to make up some good homework assignments for myself these days. to ensure productivity heading in the right direction this summer.
i started reading the artist's guide, jackie battenfield's book-- its the SHiT!!! so excellent! realy helpfl. also full of good examples of artists work and how its labeled, packaged, introduced, explained, justified, etc.
some of the artists whose work she sites include: joe fig's miniatures of artists in their studios
joan linders drawings
Heeseop Yoon's drawings, dad's basement, 2004, is awsome
allyson strafella typewriter darwings
and id never actually seen images of christo's wrapped trees whicha re so evocative
i want to make a large drawing this summer that is NOT fabric.
something imaginative, abstract, an element of desturction.

2009-06-08T11:05:00.000-07:00

here is a new image of snake skin, 14" x 20", and i started a drawing of myself as a monster. trying ot get as much as possible out of my last days at studio at colton. what a sad idiotic thing it is to have to give up a studio.

2009-05-30T19:13:00.000-07:00

yo lots of new ideas.
and new images, although they are as of yet unedited.
one is a painting i made for Ben EC for his birthday, from a group nude portrait of roommates that found its way into my paws. and the other is my newest fabric darwing "dog rag".
also really excited to play with arpy's air brush this summer!!!
mostly i have been thinking tons about grad school, and my portfolio, but then recently ive also been looking to apply for some juried shows.
i think i have to include the following in my portfolio at least in an informal portfolio, like my website, or even just to think of as groups in my mind so i can do what jackie battenfield encouraged me to do- write statements for each project and then an artist statement for all:
rapt: blankey, pinky, poorcat, etc
some portraits, gabriel/jessica
monsters from MGMT- myself in costume. the fishy.
wheat pastings- playmobil, the kiss
my BLOOK?????
costume photography
think the project i want to propose to real artways is to do a timeline- and ben is always telling me this is impossible. but i think can isolate it to my lifetime, and i know i wan to sew it--beacuse i like that when you forge t parts you can cut them out and add it in and move things around becase sewing is fluid and shows history of its own production---mostly in black and white i imagine this being very long thinnish rectangular piece, and i want to use my parents photo albums obviously and my own self portraits, but i realized i am most interested in COSTUME, people in costume, mySELF in costume-- so what if i sew together images of myself in costumes throughout time, like all my halloweens, all my dressups etc, into a long banner of patchworked fabrics, and then lay it out all textrured and shit with all sorts of awesome rot used to represent the textures of the csostumes depicted, and hten DRAW IT!!! or just show it???

2009-04-13T15:00:00.001-07:00

my opening at Colton went really well, a lot of artists (30?) showed and i got to meet many awesome people from the neighborhood. my favorite artist who showed was bruce davenport,he actually attended colton as a junior high school student and now his work focuses on depicting marching bands from various high schools in te area. i love hte parades in new orleans, and the energy of performance in general, and i love these depictions, the perspective is so strange, and the colors are great- i dont know hwy they speak to me so well- they are drawings. he talks about them in a video here:
http://videos.nola.com/times-picayune/2008/08/bruce_davenport_jr.html
i've been reading a bunch about kk projects: http://www.kkprojects.org/home.htm

2009-04-04T12:45:00.000-07:00

HAH, i totally forgot about painting money, just reread last post- but I've recently learned about Mel Chin's project with funny money in new orleans.
(see fundred.org or http://blog.art21.org/2008/10/17/special-report-mel-chins-safehouse/)
It is truly awesome conceptual art.
Working on a piece now, but no internet in studio yet, so i have a hard time blogging about it. It 's a chewed up dog blanket, from Sam Kellman's house in vermont.
my blog has more hits than my website! this makes no sense to me, but whatever. if you haven't been to my website i just put up a link here. its www.zbehl.com
---also funny that i noticed i'd been blogging about sign language since I had an idea htis morning for the girl I tutor in Spanish. She has trouble memorizing vocab and i htought she should make up an action for every word (acting out a verb, or visualizing a noun etc) and perform it as she says the word out loud while studying. I dont know if htis will help or not, but it FEELS like it must. more associations with the word- more consideration of the word, (in determining the appropriate action). I am going to get her to do this. I would love to know more about its learning implications. interesting though in light of my recen tinterest in sign language.
ALSO. thinking about buying paper in sheets, lenox 100, instead of rolls. trying to downzise a little. --i like that inverse spelling.
int erms of my own classes here and studio--
i love the space, i am excited to use it, i feel comfortable iwht the class i teach- surprising;y. and i think i will add another. Keep my sunday class for beginners and add a monday night class for advanced students which can be more of a drop in. maybe i can discount it if you pay for 10 sessions up front, in addition to offering an hourly fee for drop ins. this way i can transfer my current sunday students into another program as they finish up my first course.
I also want to teach oil painting or watercolor for adults/ AND for kids, this is my new idea for the class--
*-have about 6 or 8 kids in high school (1th/12th graders) who i work with in depth on their portfolios- preparing them for design school. I want to communicate with some of the local design schools in new orleans, LSU, Xavier College, Delgado, UNO, Loyola, Tulane, etc, find out about portfolio requirements and expectations for applicants, then hopefully get some grant money for supplies and materials for hte students and to cover modeling costs etc, and set up a class that focuses on broadening experience in art - exposure to new materials and methods, and the opportunity to draw figures from life. We shall see if i can get htis done. ok. off to community bike shop.

2009-01-27T21:17:00.000-08:00

ok while ben is sleeping-
i fninished this werid charlie chaplin sketch rfrom china- i sort of like it, inked
INK! i forgot about how much i loved the ink during my thesis, on hte fourth drawing, it was so awesome-- abnd obviously the best link between drawing and painting!
at the marlene dumas show- those faces, that really shouted my name at me. they were such beautiful inks. and with the wheat pastings- they were sort of like Giant Inks- the watered down black tempera with some minimal color. --i think all tempera. but that gold tempera is fucking awesome.
why am i so addicted to my projector! im in cambridge and without i refuse to start anythign! i have to get over this...
also i went ot the harvard art museum - the fogg was closed- and i saw these uzbeki fabrics that were SO GORGEOUS. all silk and cotton and velvet the dye job was beautiful and they were AGED. ive been so into FLat pattern recently..
- i want to learn more about FIBERS and textiles the PRODUCTION end though, not design
- i want to learn sign language! what an awesome way to exercise your brain, to visualize language. and what a great skill! it feels like a responsibility!
- i want to paint htat money penny has.or INK it.

2009-01-23T09:47:00.001-08:00

3 things
1- i was just talking about taxidermy and sophie tintori has a friend who makes taxidermy art....then on nytimes today they feature a brooklyn taxidermist, melissa dixson. she makes light of the gruesomeness of the process, and she doesn't alter the animals wildly, but she did come to taxidermy with a painter's perspective.
2- hurricane images-- just saw one that was so beautiful. they LOOK very large scale, even before they are recognizable as hurricanes you understand the scale of the image- how is this possible when they are so abstract?
3- weird webiste ethan showed me, www.jeanyveslemoigne.com
click on personal work and theere are all these pictures of strange silver homeless people with unicorn horns on their heads. Ethan said it reminded him of me. I think he found them bevause he was doing his own series of photos of nyc bums.He recommended that i find work identical to this-- set dressing or costuming or whatever for some photographer. i do like the aesthetic of the image.s but the work feels too fashiony. the lighting is pretty awesome though-- and the HORN.

2009-01-16T11:30:00.001-08:00

it cant be possible! in the midst of non blogging i found so many more friends blogging that now i feel compelled wiht jealousy to make my blog an active world again. HAH.
i only wish i could control the scrolling so that the posts began with the last word typed, i guess that doesnt makes ense.
ok
marlene dumas-- such a great show. i loved her paintings. i had never seen them before- the canvas showing through- it made me love canvas! i have always hated painting on canvas but she really USED It. what else- her brushwork- unfathomably diverse. she was so inspiring and her sense of color was so morbid and lovely and her inkss!!! she had a room wih 100 faces, portraits, just heads, they were sketches from models, so i take it back, decidedly NOT portraits. and they were GORGEOUS 18 x 24 about, ad all washes of greys and blacks and bleeds into the washes...ooohhh so awesoem. and the text that she painted in always felt so appropriate and was grateful to it for being there.
i want to contact her and ask if sh'ell take me on as an assistant. i feel such a relationship to her work. i havent loved a painter in so long!
monumental hanoi- my friend David made a book. He printed it in vietnam after doing research there for a year. Go to monumental hanoi.blogspot.com and check it out tis so beatufill david cannot escape his mystical aesthetic sense. or aesthetic sense of mystery. or sense of aesthetic mysticism.
his is an incredibly relevant project for me because once i turned my blog into a physical book too-- a "blook", derived directly from my blog, i displayed it with my thesis. it raised so many questions for me about internet vs. physical, esp in terms of design. I am excited to see how david handled these issues or if he dealt with them at all. is his book an artists book? what a werid and stupid question. what a weird and stupid genre!!!
BLOGGING IS SO FUN
New orleans was crazy and even crazier is that im going bavck! you can see waht i did there mabye on paul's blog sort of> ? paulpaulhello.blogspot.com or in bob weisz's facebook albums. basically i learned a lot about latex. and super glue. and all osrts of toxic materials id never worked with before-- oh and airbrushing! what a delight!
and i learned htat some people have an intuitive understnading of powertools and wood construction that i have never before known. i guess just paul korzan, what a fucking genius. shiteater genius.
current project--
i am in the final steps of making a GIANT CANOPY htat looks like a circus tent from Moscow. It is striped and made mostly out of muslin and camou and gauze. it has 2 peaks and it sits over Ben Ewen Campen's four poster bed. I have been sewing it for 2 weeks. it is by far the bigggest thing ive eber sewed. soon i will post a picture.
in the meantime
i am printing ads for myself as a portrait painter directing peoplet o my new ly updated website: zbehl.com and i plan to poster schools, spas, etc, for the attentionof parents with money and little kids. in cambridge and in new york. and fuck it anywhere else too. the interne tis so empowering!]
HAPPY BIRTHDAY NICOLE!love, z

2008-11-06T08:09:00.001-08:00

in miami looking for galleries to visit:
bernice steinbaum gallery has an interesting website, Teresa Diehl has an amazing photo of an open mouth eating ice cream with sprinkles...and an interesting artist statement too
http://www.bernicesteinbaumgallery.com/artists/diehl/index_diehl.html
also castillo art has a real;y cool piece, very up my alley, ropa congelada by quisqueya henriquez:
http://www.castilloart.com/artists/quisqueya_henriquez/quisqueya_henriquez.html
and frances trombly who crochet's party favors...
at fredric snitzer there is an artist who also evokes fiber texturally in building layers of acrylic and enamel paint: loriel beltran
http://snitzer.com/artists/beltran/index.html

2008-08-08T15:28:00.001-07:00

ok i cant help myself, i have to blog RIGHT Now
so there's a show im trying to get work into , the theme is 'stepmothers, stepsisters, witches and virgins' ...so how doe smy work fit in thematically?
im hoping i can rock the ESCAPISM angle. my drawings, from Blankey to Pan, are Neverlands, places to hide in, and get lost in. I also had an idea, taking this theme as an assignment, i think it would be fun to supplement one or two of these drawings with other NESTS/CAGes. really play up the mother/daughter stuff, protection vs suffocation, virgins/witches, step relationships, all power dynamics, marital ties to other women,
security blankets tie in to this i ithnk--- being a virginal material , aging, becoming deteriorated, nasty. also i hitnk about witches only in terms of pot broom sticks right now because of botany of desire. what if i drew a giant pot broomstick? or just broomsitcks? too literal i fear...
a nest is so much more fun...scary nests, appealing cages.. fear and desire, those are htings my drawings can share with this theme.
nests mad eout of hair, braided
blown up to life size

2008-08-08T14:36:00.000-07:00

I went to see this show at Pierogi gallery in Williamsburg in June right before I left for vacation, it was so INCREDIBLE i bought the exhibition catalogue: Darina Karpov, Infinitely Small Disasters
It was the first drawing I've seen that reminded me so much of what my work could stand to achieve, it glistened with complexity and ambition and although the content was far from my own work, the process was exhilarating ---i mean to make this work, you could tell--and i felt very connected to it, and impressed by it.
I took some chaotic notes in the margins of the postcard
1. drawing--- painting vs paper "artistico fabriano" (this was the watermark on the paper she used, her scale was large, like mine so i was paying especially close attention to her paper choices and hanging technique) what she chose to paint on board vs draw on paper , more on this later, her paintings for hte most part were larger than ehr drawings.
2.monochromatic plus accent tones
---i felt the power of her minimal reds and working in other watercolor glazes etc, and the control to still keep the initial reaction to the work a grayscale piece...want to pursue more the function of color as power. maybe it becomes very graphic in this context? creates a secondary plane? black white and ANYTHING fading in and out of that look good togethers,
3.tiny brush work, full page covered in graphite. to just have giant GIANT areas of graphite (like i have charcoal in my z infinity drawing) very different effect, you feel it topically somehow, than the empty areas of her paintings.there is pencil almost everywhere on the page.
4. SCALE of her paintings: 48 x 78 inches. nice dimensions.
5. repetition of pattern, --varying and reappearing throughout, geometries are organic or otherwise,,,,mathematical slightly?
6.drips influence decisions in drawing, using the process, allowing thelife of the piece to direct itself, working with it not against it, those lines add new dimension, mostly by falsifying them as shadows
7. Planes/Scale Distorted/Collaged. This seemed the most heavyhanded part of her cocnept, that everything was pressing in on itself or moving, rotating pivoting around itself like a giant aggregate ball of trash.
8. lots of graphing. i meant not crosshatching but actualy perpendicular lines intersecting in GRIDS on angles everywhere, a very planar grid system was introduced somewaht representationally throughout hte drawings.
9. Bones
---these appear sometimes, also there are figures hidden in the drawings, which goes backto one of my first loves, Pavel Tchelitchew's HIde and Seek
10. the way you READ them, intense detail, indistinguishable amorphous larger forms
11. they all look like VESSELS
ships going somewhere, planetary, in motion...
12. dont like in light blue paintings the haphazard floating, i prefer the central clusters.
it seems the paintgs aren;t allowed to have the negative space that some of the drawings do, (the smallest ones mostly) tehy have to be fully atmospheric, and the chaos represented, the detials, seems more organically spattered at intervals across the painting (i think they were all on board) like they are either floating towards each other magnetically or else dispersing, the drawings by comparison are much more already clusters.
13. enjoy giant areas of blackness (graphite) perfect crumpled paper. the drawings are very much about light. shadows, silhouettes.
RECENTLY A FRIEND QUOTED A GRAPHIC DESIGNER TO ME, HE SAID DRAWING FABRIC WAS JUST STUDYING THE INTERPLAY OF LIGHT AND SHADOW.i dont konw why that sounded so beautiful at the time, but that the narratives could be dramatic, rather than just a tedious exercise, sounded really nice to me, studying the topography, geography of light and darkness. pretty fucking spiritual.
14.a tiny body and hair is visible, 2, 3?
15. hurricane, snow-laden branches, turns into landscape
16. gray inks: watered down india ink?
17.EMPTINESS incredibly precise lines, comic booky, unrendered outlines...varying line quality i finally realized has a very different quality from my on, more confident and also more illustrative.
18.what makes them disasters? things being held together by chains? ropes, weight...
19. How are they planned? Ruled out first, toned initially...
20. rays of red and black light
21. bulldozers machinery vs nature
22. you Dont understand...you CAN'T
then i have one more comment on the side, i think somewhere karpov must have referenced Toussaint's Making Love because i wanted to look it up. its apparently a good novel about a couple in japan...funny because im reading wild sheep chase right now.

2008-08-08T14:24:00.000-07:00

yikes, i tok a little yellow field bok to california with me, an dnow i write in it almost exclusively! but i can get over that to talk abaout new directions...

first, Francis Alys, a piece called "The Collector" in mexico city 1991.
it seemed amazing at hte time and still does
"For an indeterminate period of time, the magnetized collector takes a daily walk through the streets and gradually builds up a coat made of any metallic residue lying in its path. This process goes on until the collector is completely covered by its trophies."

second, Dennis Oppenheim,my friend Joel gave me an image of a boy drawing with a marker on a man's back, and the man translating the drawing he felt into a drawing he copied on the wall, so simultaneously two people are drawing, one is drawing what he feels the other drawing on his back...then they take turns and switch, pretty cool...

2008-06-12T10:41:00.000-07:00

In SF , met a great new friend...Tisch! Before i left i went to the most amazing show at Pierogi gallery -- Darina Karpov. I have a lot of notes to write up on the show but for now you should just go checkit out beuase i think it closes in the next week or so and that's before i'll be back on the east coast to deliver my sentiments. Suffice to say that her paintings and drawings utilize certain elements that make me inspired about creating more thoughtful narrative in my own work, while her simple talent in perspectival constructions and bold work with light is so impressive to me-- i cant help but want to emulate/assimilate the best qualities of this work. Maybe I can work for her. It doesnt look terribly like the sort of work that might need assistance, but I feel an alliance.
On other fronts, I've been selling drawings which is awesome, but feels emptier than i might have hoped. Maybe it's the pure lack of third party, which is better for me financially but feels less legit- i guess i question how much these works will be seen in tribeca homes. but maybe they just want to be lived with. intimately. dotn nkow, would like to get a show though., when i get back to ny i'll work on some more applications etc. i feel ready to amp up my portfolio/resume, i need to get some gigs!
Bizarrely enough i was emailed by a Spanish gallery with a virtual gallery online asking to show my work, but the translation was very very poor and the email seemed sort of shiesty so i dont know what ot make of htis.
i also met a really cool kid named Joel, he is in school out here for graphic design and he showed me a beautiful artist book he made, the cover was printed with a 3d printer. i haveno idea waht that means, i simply dont understand, its not a laser cutter...anyways it made me miss my blog a lot. and miss thinking about artist books too. his website is normalnumber.com its really nice site design. i am very jealous.

2008-05-02T14:58:00.001-07:00

At work Dan Fine wanted to give the kids an assignment where they painted over pages of sheet music, so he took a great composition and ran it through the photocopier printing onto thick watercolor paper and then we gave them watercolor and cray pas and shit like mate leaves to throw ont ehre. the music looked beautiful just printed on paper, i guess the composer Toru Takemitsu is really interested in silence, and the work is sort of "interpretable" even though its written out, it looks different from normal sheet music-- so we played the music in the class while kids drew. then i took home one of the unused sheets and worked on it myself, it had been through the copier twice accidentally, once printing just the front and once both sides-- so there was an eerie dissonance in the mis-registration of the xerox.
this is what i made-- the cut out is a picture of harriet the spy and the lines are all from running the whole thing through a sewing machine. i'll give you front and back.

2008-04-29T20:35:00.000-07:00

my charcoal fingers are forcing me to write-- i am working on NUCLEAR WAR: this is the piece for the faculty show- i started it back in november but now am actually making serious progress-- it looks dimensional, i added the ink, etc. i also keep ruminating over my thesis statement----no , i mean artist statement. i went to go see jackie battenfield about it and she told me to write about my kid portraits and my wheat pastings and revise my rapt statement and then to write about the three of them at once, and i realized this was her interpretation of my body of work-- and then also she told me that to her the obvious connection was ATTACHMENT which is psycho becuase hats exactly what i almost called my thesis except that is twans't a very good title so i called is Rapt.
jeez. it wwas so amazing and helpful to speak about my work academically and seriously - she's really being awesome for me. and in goo d time too becuase i will have to show this with an artist statement and then really try to put together a gallery packet or something. i ran into Cecilia's husband and son i n williamsburg and i told them i would swing by her gallery, the Hogar Collection which i am familiar with- i really like them.
i also realy like this image that i am working with now. its the roy lichtenstein t shirt with a woman crying on it wit hred lipstick and she's thinking in a thought bubble "nuclear war?? There goes my career!!" whats funny is that i have always loved this t shirt, and for a while in high school when it got too holy and holey i put it on the wall in my room and then my dad found anotehr one---i dont know where i feel like canal street, and then when i went to college my brother found it and took it off my wall and wore it, so now we have two completely obliterated matching nuclear war t shisrts and for 4 months i couldn't wear either of htem becasue i was drawing both of them. and also in high school i drew this woman on a composition notebook-one of those Mead books with the black and white covers, i drew it with white out. i love this woman. she's so vain and 80s and i just love images of women weeping maybe.
the current dilemma is just hat i dontk now how to arrange the second t shirt- they got sort of squihsed in transit so i got fed up and put one on for a while cause i coudnlt arrange it to my liking and now i have no idea how to make it fit with number one. i do like all the erasures that are happening htough. it almost creates a more dynamic ghostlike relationship. amd i do want the left one to be inside out, with the hand beckoning in. but who are they and why are they together and what are they saying? thisseems to be evocative again of september 11th type drama. funny i cant remember what i was wearing that day.
also check out my website, which is finally up: http://zbehl.com

2008-04-23T08:29:00.000-07:00

had a really crazy dream last night, i dreamt about going to stuyvesant to find more scantrons for this project. this is werid because i actually already went there last week, and only got ONE thanks to mr grossman's secret agenda in hosting me which prevented me from achieving adequate exploration time. in my dream he caught me infiltratingthe school and asked me if i rememberd some question from the previous class that i had attended and i couldnt, so i looked in my beautiful colorful history notebook and naamah was there!! so was jess! then we all went to grossman's office while his english class napped, we hung out. i rememver dancing to something at some point and then mr grossman and i who were both sitting down startd grinding!?!? together?!!?!? it was stragne, then something else hpapened and we were being attacked and chased and i had to run away and jump through windows and hide in long tall grass like the type i cut down las weekend in jersey for electric feel video. there were guns and trorturing and stuff. oh high schol.
i feel very conflicted because i clearly want to work on a drawing for the faculty show but i dont have the space ---i could take it somewhere but then i m afraid i wont have the time to go wowrk no it engouh in time for hte hsow. and i really want to help benh out this week which entails:
1- baking cookies
2-visiting him
the show gts hung may 9th and THIS weekend i have to say the dimensions prices titles of pieces im inclduing. YIKEs
i tried to start one piece smaller, for it, a litle inside out fox face but it didnt work out so well.
i also feel turmoil inside as i make more and more awesome friends in philadelphia, i want to move there, im scared, which is StuPID. and also great. i think its great. i think i move there.

2008-04-12T19:09:00.001-07:00

I am so down on myself recently i dont know what to do

2008-03-30T16:06:00.000-07:00

here are the scantron samples i have procured so far, right now my idea is to create a template by compiling teh different bubble patterns in photoshop, mixing colors and sizes and column widths etc. an dthen print outa large sheet that is the underdrawing of a drawing which will consist of filling in bubbls, maybne with different values, aybe not, remains to be seen. i m also thinking o f SCENES from stuyvesant more than portraits of individuals, besides the walker one.
cool

2008-03-29T14:47:00.000-07:00

i wen to this gallery on bedford on teh way home [edited] htis all made me think of, since all the work was pretty much about repeating a simple geometry to create some organic structure, was my ancient concept of scantron drawings!!!! i had always wanted to do a drawing of walker all punked out on some old tests of mine, scantron tests from high school. filling in the bubbles was an insane and awesome art assignment that i had nearly every day i n high school. it was nt meant to be art. but it was unavoidably incessantly visual.
so im going to go to stuyvesant and steal as many scantrons as i can. or if i have to i'll order them. i just found a bunch of my favorite ones online, i;ll put them up here. im guess ing i'll hve to collage a number of different ones, to get colors, sizes of boxes and registers,plus adequate white space,and htne i'll use a number two pencil----oooooh or maybe i should use color pencil!!!!! and fill in all the bubbles to create an image!!!! PLUS__ i can use the projector again!! i can blow up images, beccasue im going to have to sort of chuck close it in order to have them be more than silhouettes. oh , yeah, and my subjects are going to be StuYVESAnt StuDENTS i want it to be portraits. i reallly loved doing my last set of portraits. but they were so straightforward--nothing conceptually challengin,g0
i dont know what the concept is here- but its certainly going to be a fun project. i think porbably i just want to force tests to be cool. and to use the system of grading our brains to draw pictures of our bodies. also i can experiment a lot with the rules of the system. i could just draw one dot per column, as designated, or i couldjust do whatever i want. this is the fun part. using a tool like that and then breaking it.
ok here are the scantrons

2008-03-28T18:57:00.001-07:00

so much to say---im parked in my car, just got back form philly- on my way to party in south park slope. gotta love the wifi. here is an amalgamation of all the finished paintings, i did indeed do 21 of them. also i ting i need to show larger versions here somehwer,e but first i'll start with this. i do lovve htem, in the end . some of htem at lesat.

other realizations: want to go back to philly for first friday of the month to se wht the galleries are like, i want to live in west philly if i go there. but strangely it was weird to see my friends and feel distinctly like i would need to find my own scene there, that they would not be enough...ive always sort of known tht, but i really felt it strongly on this trip. it mad me wonder about trip-taking in general. god ive wanted to blog for so long and now i have to pee, just coming down off the verrazano bridge fo hte first time made me excited to write and go to the bathroom.
so here are the pictures.

2008-03-09T20:01:00.001-07:00

My paintings really suck. i am so fed up with this and i have so many left. i've done 7. hwich means i have TWELVE left. wow, i am a third of the way done. 12is less than i was expecting BUT. shit. it feels like they are getting harder and harder. maybe im just getting bored more quickly but i am very nervous. i am feeling so insecure about my painting i just want to tell TULA to DIE becuase i van't believe she is still inside my head telling me that i CAN"T PAINT.
they are so realistic, i wanted them to be gestural portraits but now im holding myslef to such a high standard. maybe when nina comes over she'll have somthing to say about htem .
i just have these moments of YESS MIXING COLOR IS GRAND followed by this disappointment in the utter effect ofht e picture. like is this the stopping point? iwanted them to be minimal but they aren't good enough. and why am i DOING SO MANY? should't i do fewer and let them get better with thime>? i dont know i dont know but right now im not enjoying it maybe ive painted too many boys in a row and in eed to go bak to girls. stupid little blonde tykes .
my whites are weak. still. i just want the negative space to play an imporntatn role so i dont want to paint eveythin, i want to leave it to peek through, but how am i supposed to do that idf color isnt activating the space. i htink i also need to buy dark blue, i can tremember prussian blue or something that once was SOO dark. i nee dthat. i keep feeling like i almost hae itm and then i lost it. i wonder also if hte wood is dulling my palette. drying and absorbing the rich color since its untreatd. well anyways, thanks to mel kendrick for cutting my wood for me on his table saw. that was awesome.

2008-03-03T11:19:00.000-08:00

eughhh. i am making portraits now for church st and it is driving me NUTS.
i am going mad mad mad amd mad mad

oh ok, i sold my piece at AIR!!!

but now i have htis installation for the window of church st school for music and art at 74 warren st where i work. and my concept was to do 21 paintings, quick, gestural portraits of the kids. i thought it would be great exercise for me as a painter, i realized with the wheat pastings how much i had missed painting, and painting like i am now, on untreated board, is akin to drawing. but i am doing portraits and they are supposed to appear recognizably like the children i teach, who are going to see them. but i really think that they might be mortified becuase they are somehwat TERRIFYING and SAD> shit. it is definintely good practice for me but wktn everyone i come to an new set of obstacles becuase so far i dont have a clear technique. i know that i am
- painting mostly with washes
- painting with saturated palette
- leaving much of the board showing through
- painting somewaht audaciously in terms of gesture
- changing brushes and brush size frequently

but there is so much going on, do i just eliminate white from my palette?
does it matter if all hte kids look really fucking sadd? i am suddenly so afraid to show my work in a way i never normally feel shy. i really need some feedback on this stuff. maybe i should ask ashley? or jason laylor? he's been writing to me about some knind of artists community. i feel so fed up with that search or term, but also intrigued by jason's interest in my own feedback. i TOTALLY believe in the internet as a great way to set up community. oh well
i didnt get the air fellowship FUCK thats ok, it owuld have hindered my plans to leave newyork. but now im supposed to meet with soemeone from their gallery because i asked for feedback on putting together a strong application and they granted me a meeting...so im petrified again about this. but i think its goingt obe very useful. i also am scared of sending my artist's statement to jackie battenfield. AYYYY i just feel strangely distant frmo my fabric drawings. not that i want to leave them, but ive been working more with paint again as some sort of test i geyys. (guess). so
where does an artist statement come from? eva hesse is my one true inspiration on this front. yikes back to work.

2008-02-10T19:59:00.000-08:00

AND MORE WHEAT PASTINGS

2008-02-09T14:59:00.000-08:00

The opening went really well!!
To see the piece visit:
AIR Gallery
511 W. 25th st
suite 301

There were tons of people, i think over 300 artists ...i saw Martina there, she had a piece in the show too (she grew up in the same building as me in tribeca, now she's married and has a gallery on teh lower east side, MF galery, that ive never visited!) ANd a really good vibe. Lots of interesting pieces, along with some crap, but i thought altogether more promising than most visits to chelsea.
I had some new ideas also in the past week

1- i remember Leslie first intimating to me that maybe my work needed to move away from the figurative nad towards the abstract-- i guess in the end it did, but i often juxtapose this with benh's comment that my work with depictions of myself or friends and family are the most potent for him and also teh facility with which i make this work is very much at odds with the labor intensive mapping of those larger pieces.
So i thought about incorporating the figure into my big drawings. having myself in every piece, depicted within the folds of fabric, eating it, being swallowed into it, vomiting it up, disappearing beneath it etc. it might work well with more textured drawings, more abstract treatment ofhte figure too, against the realistic rendering of the cloth.
then i had this other idea that stemmed from my wheat pastings, i cant tell yet if they are versions of each other that will be made separately or just lead one into the next, the better-

2- i've been thinking about my wheat pastings and the speed and volume of work i created on that scale. and if i were to make more without a specific preconceived theme of mom&papa, what would they be about?? i have been really stuck on ships. and when i see a figure in the ships, because i see figuresa s useful in wheat psating paintings beause they are so graphic its good to have a recognizable form involved, plus i loved making teh boat in the wehat paste of wlaker in the bath tub with the playmobil pirate ship. so the figure could be ME tied to the mast of a sinking ship, or a fleet of them. and then i think about how instead of putting them up outside, how maybe they can be sculptures, free standing wood, that i plaster these drawings on, and can have other netting and string and sculptural componenets that transition into line and drawing. then i think well they sound like set pieces, maybe they should be! and hten i wonder if they really belong within a story, as visual elements on a stage. this part clearly i dont know, but i have to build one and find out how they work as sculptures.

HERE ARE THE WHEAT PASTINGS

2008-01-29T14:14:00.000-08:00

This is the mock up for my new drawing, a piece for AIR. The show is a fundraiser for the gallery so this piece is going to silent auction!!
I never lassoed out the background as a usually do, instead i drew a grid over the image, becasue as im drawing this to scale i cant project it, so im transferring instead, ata 1:1 ratio.
I'm using gouache, soluble graphite, and a Mew i mean NEW medium: SILVERPOINT.
very exciting.( works over gouache!!)
im drawing on vellum, and the piece will be suspended in a float frame. tis got to be under 14 inches in any direcion including frame, so thats why im drawing one to one. i wonder if the conceptual pith of my drawings will hold true without blowing htem up larger than life--- also im departing from fabric in this piece: drawing paper pulp trash! the colors a little bit not subtle enouugh right now which i have to chang. the free hand version i did as a sketch is also more interesting than my stupid gridding at this stage. although i guess i may have been frustrated eventually when none of my areas of focus related in a non gridded environment .
SHIT is also going down at my studio. im working at Will's house right now because im working small so i can use a drafting table fine. i have a crazy neighbor and a crazy roommate. one is pyschotic/alcoholic and the other is depressive/anxiety disordered. im sick of this bullshit. i hate my stupid artist commune building. something big has to change in my life verysoon. more on that to come...

2008-01-22T16:01:00.000-08:00

I am going to have to revamp this blog, somehow. I really want it to stay current, so i am going to retitle it, as it no longer reflects tutorial reading, obviously i wil still inclue text excerpts etc, BUT i think it must morph as much as it may to represent the PRESENT. to present the present. state of my creation. (s).
so here is what the headline of my blog used to say:
ART AND WRITING
A SPACE IN WHICH I POST EXCERPTS FROM TEXTS ABOUT ARTISTS AND THE PROCESS OF CREATIVITY. I WILL RESPOND TO THE QUOTES HERE AND WELCOME EXTERNAL FEEDBACK AS WELL. I AM INTERESTED IN SHARING DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE LITERATURE AND MY OWN ART. IDEALLY A RUNNING COMMENTARY ON MY OWN PROCESS AS I CREATE A BODY OF ARTWORK. THE LOG ALSO NOTES MY THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS OF CONNECTION TO OR DISTANCE FROM THESE EXCERPTS IN REGARDS TO MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.
and basically everything from before april 2007 is thesis work, one project: Art and writing. and everything since then ---more or less (give or take a few posts) starting here, is a new project: A Post Thesis Studio.
also soon hopefully i will have a real website up and running at zbehl.com

2008-01-15T18:02:00.000-08:00

so much time has past!!! I am drawing, working on an image of my two nuclear war t-shirts. it feels a little empty though, or distant, or strange-- i think mostly because there is no external pressure to finish, which makes the drawing feel entirely for MYSELF which makes me full of internal conflict when i'm just as excited about sewing my own curtains and building a rod and installing it, or doing anything else to my room, environment.
Is that art? does that count? which makes me happier? theres also a real lack of awesome inspiration in my life, i miss instant female energy (living with 5 girls last year) and surprise studio visits...etc etc . everything feels a little more obsolete. that said, i am liking my drawing. i just forgot how LONG it takes to fucking get started on one of these, so many hours before it looks like anything. i already think blogging is helping me remember how drawing works though-- writing has always helped me to take art more seriously, o rat least to stay connected and focused on my efforts.
I am really excited about working less next semester/ i think that will be awesome for me. to waek up and have the whole day to devote to making things. it will allow me to take breaks from my big drawing and have other things going on simultaneously. ive never really enjoyed that before, but i htink thats because i was afraid of discovering too many disparate pleasures, concepts, that might have altered my thesis concept in an uncomfortable way given teh restrictions. (both self imposed and academic).
so anyways. i have some amazing stuff to show, i'll have to add another post for it- wheat pastings! for now im going back to work.
i think i really want to build my own typewriter
and sewing machine. based on the ones i own, but from scratch.
oh and i have tons of material that i collected to blog on-- but all in good time, for now, im back!

2007-09-17T22:45:00.001-07:00

this backlog, backblog, is becoming an issue. makes me unable to update on present stuff because i feel so much of the past month has gone unnoted. its because in iceland i started writing in a real physical book for lack of internet.\
importnat things to know: in iceland i had the most fun wandering through reykjavik. i saw lots of cool installations, learned about hte kling and bang gallery (moving to berlin) and started gathering sheeps wool that i found on farms.
There was a great roni horn exhibit at hte art museum, they exhibited her river photos among other things, which i remember having seen at the moma queens once, a long time ago. they are pictures of rivers, abstract almost, monochromatic just green or blue or yellow, and shot from above, the water fills the frame, its probably only a snapshot of about 6 square feet of water...
there are numbers (footnotes) on the photo, across the sruface, which allow you to follow the track of horn's eye and thoughts to the notes below the photo.
some of my favorites:
24: have you ever noticed how rarely water looks like water?
30: white water- thats for amusement
1: ...when you wade into this dark fluid, a kind of milk without nurture, you disappear
2: only being able to see in a few inches, water is 'occupied' with another water
4: thinking about water is thinking about the future- or just a future. my future- yours. its a personal thing- especially now. it makes sense that children fear water they can't see into. and hten, too, doesn't it make sense or someone who can't imagine a future to be attracted to it, to this semblance of water, to this other water?
14: delicate textures, ephemeral structures: more elusive treasure!
...all waters converge...
5 and 41 (both notes said the same thing) my gaze alights on the water- on some spot (this spot) on the river; i feel time stop as my gaze refueses to wander, and the river flows through my view.
6: watching the water, i am stricken with vertigo of meaning. water is the final conjugation: an infinity of form, relation, and content (i never know where i'm standing when i'm standing by the river).

these really touched me, they were able to bring so much to hte photographs. then there were long glass rods in the next room with phrases, the best were

THE MIND IS SUCH A NEW PLACE LAST NIGHT FEELS OBSOLETE

THE MOST INTANGIBLE THING IS THE MOST ADHESIVE

i will talk more about my recent ideas and projects soon. right now i am busy working full force on the management video, making teepees and bows and arrows and swords. its the best time EVER i cant believe i could do that for a living, can i?

2007-09-12T12:26:00.000-07:00

ayayyyyyICCCCELAND:
i bought a little book and wrote things down. this is an inaccurate transcription:
(to follow) just ran into nina at the media lab. yes im at wesleyan.

2007-08-07T23:10:00.001-07:00

These are notes and ideas from the History of Love, which i am in the middle of reading:

this novel reads with such poignant focus on the physical experience of emotion, "sometimes i imagine my own autopsy...disappointment in myself: right kidney. Disappointment of others in me: left kidney..." fingers are stiff-dreaming of childhood, pain of forgetthing- spine, ealry dark -wrists, realization that parents are dead- knees, loneliness-no organ that can take it all.

THE AGE OF SILENCE
the first language flowed from people's hands. "No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life...holding hangs, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night when its too drak to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other's bodies to make ourselves understood"

-feelings are not as old as time\

THE AGE OF STRING
"So many words get lost. Thhey leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly unmtil they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves...there was a time when it wasnt uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words to that otherwise might falter on teh way to tehir destinations...the physical distance gbetween two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need fro the string"

-different kinds of silence
-a person's death belongs to no one obut the one who's died

This very strange and beautiful book follows a narrative structure although less deliberate, as If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. So much so in factg that i really want to find my copy of htat book and compare the deatials and the language.
if on a winters night is simply a book of first chapters to different stories, with intercollary chapters of continuous narrative from the reader's pesrspective as he searches for and begins new books only to find them end halfway. His life becomes ultimeately intertwined with the characters in the novels he reads and teh titles of the books link together to form a poem at the end that speaks to him. i remember tehir being a sort of future where everhting desintegrates into chaos but not what that was supposed to mean...This book, A History of Love, is a mix of Calvino (because there is also some Invisible Cities type play at work here) and Nabokov's Pale Fire. But instead of being postmodern and a-textual and super fragmented, it feels as though those ffragmentary essences have been picked up, smoothed out, and been sewn or glued back together, painstakingly, as a labor of love, so that the 3 different levels of narration here echo each other as direclty and also are inextricably connected so immediately tghat htey could practically be literal patchwork. the thread is the sympathetic voice of leopold gursky, an old old Polish Jew in Brooklyn, the most sentimental type of character.. L.G> has written 2 books, both seemingly about a girl named Alma, and written from her perspective. His own son who he never knew was a critically acclaimed writer named Isaac. His best friend Bruno and he were in love wit the same women in their youth and still, Alma. In L.G.'s book'words for everything' ALma the child is searching for a new husband for her mother, she ends up searching for the true identity of ALma,the female character(s) in the 'HIstory of Love' which is a book written in spanish by a polish jew (zvi litvinoff) which her mother (Singer) is trnaslating for Jacob Marcus who was as effected by a similar book she translated as her late husband.
so far there is sthis clear parallel betwen LG and Litvinoff, he is his own writer's self. More emphatic though, is the pareallel between LG and Alma. He is writing a book in which the women he loved is reborn as a child and he speaks for her, through her, and she is also searching for herself and for a FATHER. The story of Zvi Litvinoff revelas that his own best friend was also a competitive writer just like Bruno. Both are touched and moved and write obits for Isaac Babel's death.
Now for te first time it seems as though LG and Alma girl actually live in the same world, so that the story she narrates is either not the one he is writing, which it is set up to make you wonder if it is, OR, that he is writing and living interchangeably and the reality of the page is all through his love and senility.What this menas is still unclear, but the book is so captivating in its sensitivity and its mystery and its yearning it wants to be pieced together very badly. i thought id start by transcribing my clues here.

2007-07-22T17:46:00.000-07:00

hmmm...well although this is the first ive written in a while its not becuas eo f a lack of desire-- only a lack of internet.and a lack of art, ive had many htings to write about but until i started drawing i felt this need to wait- i havne tstarted drawing "officially" yet though, but the urge to communicate my art feeligns has sufficed it to begin blogging again. i just applied to F.U.E.L. gallery in PHiladelphia with my thesis pics. i also applied to real art ways in hartford but they sent me back my jpegs with no word accompnying them so i guess thats a not interested. here's the artist statement from m y resume, this was a huge production at the end of the year, and Leslie left, and i was folding paper carefully to make a portfolio that looks stupid---but this is waht it says:

"Artist Statement:
I have always been interested in self-portraiture, and yet these drawings are the closest I’ve come to self-representation. Beginning with my blankey, I began to draw those inanimate forms around me that became animate through my intimate experience of them. I draw worn cloths not because I am interested in the mundane history of human attachment, but rather for what the textured surfaces of these textiles evoke formally, imaginatively, and aesthetically.

The move from drawing my own blankey to a foreign surface that I found equally dynamic and engaging proved to me that my interest lay really in the process of interpreting and rendering threads. I took liberties with mixed media to adapt my materials to each subject, and I never knew before hand how each piece might look. My own ideas of the fabrics took shape as I got lost in them, and working at such a large scale made the expansive planar surfaces encompass you. I wanted the viewer to be immersed, as I was, and able to interact with my most challenging spaces, those full of emotion and wrought with tension, expressed through the detailed depiction of woven line, breaking with time. "
-z behl may 2007

for fuel
i wrote that the drawings were about the oppressiveness of space and the potential of density.......weird.i never thought of htem that way before but now that i am revising concepts constantly in an effort to step again in hte right direction i have found taht they mean something very specific to me. i realized why i never liked the fifth drwaing-- esepcailly when jeffrey schiff referred to it as "pan's labyrinth-ey" its becasue its TOO PLAYFUL. i dont like how fantastical it seems. fantasy is about the possibilities of the imagination and im mor einterested in the unforeseen possibilities of the REAL.

on this note : i should mention that im an art teacher at church st in tribeca. for my observational drawing class on thursday i got sick of taking the kids to the park to draw and so we went instead on a walk through tribeca -i found staple st (under populated, broken glass and shit and stuff--stuff parenst really wouldnt be psyched about) and i gave the kids some clay (model magic actually) and had them each choose a little nook or cranny among the loading docks and old brick and metal, for a site specific sculpture installation. at first they were kind of apalled and baffled. i tried to tell htem /show them about Charles Simonds, who is one of my own favorite artsits. he built little intimate and intricate mini villages on houston st out of clay and left them to the elements. finally they got super into it and made characters more htan places, and used cigarette butts and other garbage they found and incorporated it inot their pieces.
there was an unhappy gallery nearby (they were very skeptical about our art) and one man coming out of a building who tried to give us dirty looks but i was SO ready to give thm as much shit as i could about how tribeca used to be a neighborhood of artists and how now it was full of elitist yuppie scum ---that i think they sensed my anger and backed off. i was fully anticipating reporting the conversation to the Tribeca Trib and kind of excited to get church st and our block of installations some publicity, but obviously nothing happened.

in other news-- i am OUT of love.
i am IN the studio--living, working, ready to make it feel completely functional. this is sort of hard, not sure why, but i remember how much time it took at wesleyan before the studio felt good- i just really need to MAKE here. ive been really set on getting a sewing machine i just want to MAKe the stuff i normally want to drraw, sew the scraps together or somehting . i Do think that i still want the 2d to be the ultimate result of 3d, but there's no reason i cant also be creating the fabrics. i need to Learn how to
KNIT
CROCHET
KNOT TYING
also id like to have a pet sheep so i can sheear it and weave its wool
i know how to weave. mayb ei should make my own LOOM. kind of like a womb. i was really intrigued by janine antoni's loom---she wove her REM patterns into a blanket and added more every morning after each night of dreams.
maybe i have to do somehting special with the frabrics before i draw them. like wear them as clothes and then fall in mud puddles or some otehr sort of natural wear and tear. also stuffing is strange, as a substance, as an idea. ok, tal's awake, i promise to blog more, and Chuck you should come visit me!!
-z

2007-06-22T21:13:00.000-07:00

oh boy. i'm all moved in. My keyboard is dusty from the plaster dust that coated everything during construction...but i mopped the floor and the wall to my bedroom was built (me and tal and Papa put it up together) so basically its time to start DRAWING. i feel so strange now. i've had so much intense time with my parents during this moving out era- you'd think the very idea of my own place would create distance between us and yet somehow they've managed to hold my hand even during this as well.
I'm utterly exhausted. today was walker's graduation and earlier today he and jeff and i went out to deep deep brooklyn to retrieve sarah's bed from storage so i get to BEDSIT a sweet queensize number--so big my sheets dont fit it!!
back to my old tricks: ive managed to not bore myself silly as usual summers go, instead i have been working my ass off making htis place come together, which is important becasue i start work at church st on monday. it hasnt really been creative energy though--just brute force and a sense of duty have pushed me through enjoying construction/renovation/mudanza...
i love my place, and my neighborhood, i have SO MUCH TO SAY. i want to get my ipod recorder uip and running again so i can speak when im too tired to write. ive really been missing words since college ended. i love that lines make letters/
tomorrow is the mermaid parade.
water is like the opposite of line
some things i want to write about:
new drawing idea--
scale changes and how to reconcile the loss of a digital projector
insular growth versus explorative growth conceptually
teachering.
ok- goodnight! love, z

2007-06-11T20:18:00.000-07:00

wow i am sitting on the roof during a very electric thudnerstorm and listening to the zombies. walker is about to come home and take his compter away from me. this will be sad beucacse this is the first time ihave blogged since coming home...since graudating actualy,
news!!!
i have a studio!! i just signed my first lease on friday-- i have a studio where i'll be living and working and tal will also be sharing hte workspace with me so he can paint. its in bushwick and its super beautiful and awesome. the details will come but most importantly i spent today trying to build my bedroom wall. it was very funa nd hard an di am so tired and lightning keeps reflecting off the tar of the roof into my eyes. there is no rain, just lightinign and some grumbles of thunder around new jersey somewhere. i have so many anxieties to express i dont know if i can deal right now. whenever i go to sleep i wake up and i dreamt about dying, my life is just becoming somehow more ridiculous and silly and sboering and dismal with every breath.
i am realy ready to start darwing and yet also i am NOT. my parents are helping me so much in the moving out, and yet almost to the extent that they are moving out with me. why??? am i supposed to be ungrateful? obviously not. but how am i supposed to be happy if even in moments of independent separation they hold my hand? walker is making me giv eup the computer. i miss blogging. i promise i'll keep it up as soona s ive moved in to my new place and have established some sort of working time etc...,life is too surreal right now for the internet.

2007-05-11T11:45:00.000-07:00

I am bogged down with blog work. i mean, i am writing a paper for my linguistics class on blogging and its really cool, and then im writing a bunch of papers that are a lot less cool. fuck school i am SO DONE> but i am really writing because while agonizing over this paper i just feel so jealous of the times when i was writing and not just writing about writing. i like writing about art more, is the conclusion.
but i NEED to get in the habit o fblogging again. and ali's website is up so i better get mine rolling. I am working at Zilkha right now, at the desk, and this creepy old man who stares at me every time he sees me loitering around the media lab came up to the desk and made me talk to him for about 40 minutes. it turned out he's an alum with extensive knowledge of chinese histoory and we talked a lot about "non antagonistic contradictions" which was a specialty topic of CHairman Mao.
Then also on graduating he told me "i've got hands, i've got feet, they'll do the job, so who the hell am i to choose?" ....interesting. i love my job at zilkha. i read and sleep until someone who desperately needs social interaction stands in front of me for too long and i finally have to engage them, which is basically effortless, as they give me a long extra-personal sschpiel on life after college and most of all ART.
This guy really like me though. I know ive seen him before and he said have fun whatever you do and i said i will and he said yeah you look like the type and that was weird too.
i have to stop doing TOO MUCH. i need to just do less, relax, and take things more seriously, commit to Faulkner, for instance, instead of topical association actually be involved in him wholly and be comfortable with distinctions. i dont like studying things that dont relate. i really have to write more about hte play...well, soon, after monday maybe, i will be back to blogging. i miss it. i miss drawing too, so much. i cant wait to make some new drawings. i had to take my car to the mechanic last week and there was a balloon tied to the roof from zonker harris day and then it melted on to the top of te car and i pulled it off and wa s throwing it out but instead saved it to draw from. i need to find a studio in NEW YORK! i'm working at church st school again this summer...but will i be able to get a place in brooklyn, or do i have to live at home? These ar ethe questions flooding my mind a thousand million miles per hour. Chris wants to leave Wesleyan and transfer to art school in ny. That sounds pretty cool to me/ I want to work on drawings with him. I need to surround myself with people who are drawing incessantly. i need practice/ i also should talk more with Tal.
ok, back to homework, how can i make it fun? dear diary thats it.z

2007-04-18T00:47:00.000-07:00

im back------im trying to do my reading now faulkner, but i wasnt having fun and i havcent been happy so its hard to focus on work. everytime im alone i have to call someone else to hang out iwth or talk to because im afraid if im alone i'll start having fun with myself. weird thesis guilt patterns stuff waht....ive been wanting to blog a lot. right now i want to play dress up a little and then do my fucking annotated bibliography. hmmm, can the blog get more playful post thesis? now i dont have to be so serrrrrrroius abnout everything all the time---------this play has taken all my time, the beast with two backs. thats why i havent blogged.
ive had a relally hard time recently. ive been pretty unhappy. which suxxxx/
yeahm but now im gonna do stuff to make myself happy alone. just drew my first blind drawing self porttrait since thesis. YIKES. ive been considering running away and doing a painting all day, a self portrait. i really want to just go to my studio and do it. HAH. what if i actually went rigth now...instead of doing this annotated bibliography.,.that would be very ineresting. i could ride my bike; no. thi sis a bad idea. its 4. ill go do it next chance i get-- thrudasy.
what a beautfiul word, "thrudasy"
i have all these weird pictures ive been collecting. like people/s wallet photos or smeohting . i ahve 4 really aewsome and unique ones. i should scan them in...i want the weather to get really nice.
"the circus has stolen my soul
for my head i have only a bowl
behind empty eyes
i am drowning inside
and now i have nowhere to go"
thats what i wrote on the photoshop card i made lee along time ago.

2007-03-27T01:30:00.000-07:00

I JUST FINISHED MY SENIOR THESIS!!!! I JUST HUNG MY SHOW IN THE GALLERY!!!! thanks so much to all the help...emily nicole, nina, chris, will...BEN. we even lit it. i dont know what to think. im exhausted. i feel insane. this is meant to be my last post, at least the last the last chapter in the thesis chronicles...unless zilkha is abou tto catch on fire or soemthing in hte next 4 hours/
i had an incredibly weird last two days, and i didnt sleep at all...i finished my fifth drawing at 5 30 last night, oh wait, i did sleep, ben drove me home/.//bowser attacked me....we overslept and came in today to hang...ok, well, point proven: im on the brink of delirium all the time.
Ive felt lots of negative feelings, doubt, embarrassment etc, in this last step.. today took me forever to hang. i couldnt do anything, not only becuase im so braindead but also i just needed to live with the drawings a little and feel them in a room together. I had fun waltzing with Nina and taking snack breaks and stufff...i feel like im puttting my kids up for adoption.
woah i jus fell aslep. anyways, i hopet hey dissapate when teh show opens and im finally removed from it. Now its time to finish this book!!!
-Z

2007-03-24T10:17:00.000-07:00

Oh man. These past two days have been really hard. I just dropped Pinky in the mud, carrying her to the studio. It was so sad. the drawing is so big i didnt know where to roll it,so i thought Ben and i could jsut carry it, and then i tripped in this big snowpile and fell and the drawing fell and mud splattered all over the edge of the page.
Luckily Pinky is only the drawing that has random splatters on it anyways from light gouache washes, and since ive been cutting into the paper iwth the x-acto it won't be that disruptive to have that kind of work hiding hte damage. It was just really stupid i guess. or very accidental.
I'm not that upset about it. I can't be. It'll be okay, and im just happy i finished the drawing.
Yesterday was really rough, though. Tim came to help me do a practice hang and i was a total mess. My mom called me early yesterday to tell me my friend Lily overdosed on heroin. I hadn't seen her in a really long time, but i grew up with her family and her little sister and i were best friends for years. It made me so horribly sad. She's beautifula nd a really great painter, and i always looked up to her. plus she was just in a movie in sxsw, just like tinman...even without having spoken to her for years she seems so close to my life and my friends lives...and just last weekend my parents saw her at her moms 60th birthday party and she was asking about my show and i was wondering when i was going to show her my stuff, and i wondered what she was making...Hearing about Lily was so shocking- it just threw me way off...I lost any sort of motivation and i felt suddenly like shit. It made me realize how fragile i am right now, and i can't believe how well ive worked and how happy i've been during htis entire process.
I've been forcing my body to put up with all sorts of physical stress and really pushing my limits with energy, but it's been ok because i'm really actually happy. And considering my normal range of emotions i've really held it together through this whole process. Of course i still have 2 crazy days left. i just cant feel normally right now, and i certainly cant process something huge like death. i really didnt want to write about it here, it feels inappropriate and too heavy and really something to think and feel about somewhere else. but i keep crying during my drawing, and i feel really differently, and my perspective on this project is abruptly changing...luckily it will all be over soon. if i can just muster enough to pull this last piece together.

2007-03-22T11:20:00.000-07:00

Blanketeer: a. One who uses a blanket. One who tosses in a blanket.
i finished the fourth drawing! And i think its shitty i have to call it "the fourth", titling at least serves as an identifier, so i dont have to describe them casually and apathetically "t-shirt", "dress" etc, which gets confusing as sooon as it becomes inconsistent, which is immediatley.
I'm blogging becasue i dont feel ike drawing. I slept last night, for the first tiem in three days, and now i feel awesome, and i dont wan tto be in the studio...so i guess sleeping was a mistake.
Reconsidering some ideas for titles based on a conversation with my dad, and then Nina.
It amazes me how un-opinionated i am about somethings...i'd expect to know how i feel about a project ive invested so much of myself into, but instead i just want to delegate responsibilities out to different people i trust, and then when thy give me conflicting advice i combust.
So in talking to nina i realized that i really like the name pinky, and i like blanky, so maybe i should just call the cat-t-shirt drawing "Poor Cat". after my first cat. and then she suggested i check the OED for words, and my dad tried to convince me that titles are poetry and i should just choose words i like to identify with the drawings.
I hit the random entry button and the word that came up was TEXTILE!! out of the entire OED it chose a word that i have looked up before in direct relation to my thesis...so then i started clicking on technical terms for fabric, and i found the following stuff:
•woad, n.: 1. A blue dye-stuff prepared from the leaves of Isatis tinctoria (see 2) powdered and fermented: now generally superseded by indigo, in the preparation of which it is still sometimes used.
woad of the sea: seaweed. The sea ore, or woad as some call yt, which is verye weedes growinge vnder water in the sea.

-good for the 2nd drawing (blue dress). all the water imagery...

•spate, n.: c. fig. A sudden or violent outburst or outpouring of some quality, feeling, etc.; a sudden rush or flood, an unusual number or quantity, of words, events, etc.

-totally appropriate sentiment for any of them...especially the fifth. and maybe the first?

• silk: d. A parachute; chiefly in phr. to take to or hit the silk, to bale out of an aircraft by parachute. U.S. Air Force slang. "Over Germany..we got clobbered and I hit the silk"
The Burma rubies..usually..show small patches of ‘silk’ consisting of fine needles of rutile intersecting at 60°. These have a silky appearance by reflected light.
silk snapper, a Bermudan fish (see quot. and sense 5a, and cf. silt-snapper); silk snatcher (see quot.); silk waste, the fibres which remain after the reeling of silk yarn, or those obtained from damaged cocoons;
c. Ent. In the names of various silk-producing insects: silk-fly, the silkworm moth; silk insect, moth (see quots.); silk-spider, one or other of various species of silk-spinning spiders; silk-spinner, a spider or a silk-moth. resemble caterpillars
silkette: A fabric made of silk and cotton, chiefly used for lining dresses.

-i really like "hitting the silk". also all the associations with corn husk and organic webbing and fibres. like spinning rapunzel's hair into rope. i could just call the blue one "silk" since thats the material of the dress, or silkette, which is essentially waht it is.

•wool: shorn,
As the material of the thread spun and cut off by the Fates.

-the fifth drawing is woolly. so is the third (emily's blanket-pinky).

•woold, n.: a. Naut. =woolding b. attrib. in woold cord, rope (cf. WFlem. oelkorde): binding cord or rope.

-deifnitely makes me think of the first drawing, but maybe also the fourth. these terms are so esoteric though. Leslie commented on the importance of having the titles be no less accessible than the work itself, or people will think they are missing some part of understanding the work.

•damask, n.: from damascus (ancient city famous for steel and silk fabrics). A rich silk fabric woven with elaborate designs and figures, often of a variety of colours.

-clearly makes me think of #3, Pinky.

•flax, n.: The fibres of the plant whether dressed or undressed.
flax, v.: To wrap in fine linen, to knock about, bestir oneself.

options to consider:
1)pinky blankey silky woolly and poor cat.
2)damask spate woad flax and woold.

2007-03-21T01:29:00.000-07:00

4 30 and im not even tired. This fifth drawing looks really nice in the dark, subdued reflection of my giant window. It is brooding, and also i just realized what resonated with me when I was manipulating the composition– it looks just like the movement of one of those chinese dragons like i used to have on my old black and orange t-shirt. Floating and turning in on itself, all scaley and bumpy. It looks intestinal. (first blankey is described as muscular/sinewy, and the fourth as bone, the third is certainly the fleshiest -pinky- whats the second??)
Drawing this fifth i thought it seemed like an insect, following its ribs, exo or endoskeleton, it was definitely a creature. It's also the GROSSEST by far that i've yet encountered. How fitting that my fascination with the grotesque finally enters into the final culminatind drama of the fifth and last drawing which in process evolved into a PAINTING. my mom was the first to pick up on the significance of that final step. It means i've found a way to re-own painting. To make it my own. It has absolutely nothing to do with Tula or oil, from the technique to the effect the execution's all my own design, and completely confident. Leslie noted my gesture in this drawing to be my best yet. She liked painting gouache over the vine charcoal and said i should work to balance leaving some o fhte initial gesture which has innate strength, with a more developed form and weight which has to come across to make the object have a real spatial., volumetric presence.
I can't stop mulling over the same things in my head while i'm drawing, its frustrating me to no end. I want to feel like thi s is all i want and need, this process. I want to feel really satisfied working, and enthused and driven. And at moments i do, and maybe the only important reality is those moments. When you feel for five seconds to five minutes tops like you've realy made something amazing,t hat you love, thats exceeded you. And then the magic disappears and there's no more reward, just a higher standard set for yourself.
I want drawing as a love substitute. I told Ben i was involved with each of my drawings, as relationships. I am so committed to them, obsessed with them, i flirt with them i fight with them and they all have realy different personalities. NO TITLES. i decided. I dont want to anchor them down, if they are each distinct, and abstract, then assigning a word to each would imply too much about their inter-relations . Then Ben found a quote from Alfred Stieglitz and transcribed it on lens tissue, leaving it for me. he was saying exactly what i was:
"when i make a picture i make love. if what is created is not made with all of oneslef, in sacred spirit–with the ardor of the first pristine kiss– it has no right to be called a work of art"
I think im worried about breaking up wiht my drawings. separation anxiety. i really hope they are bought. i want them to have homes. but can i keep drawing like this? do i love it? do i even like it or do i just do it compulsively? soemtimes i really dont know. and sometimes i do know. that i like it. but rarely does that come from the drawing gruntwork--crosshatching etc. Do you ever know the answer to a question like this? I know its not supposed to get easier or even more comfortable. The thing is, soemtiems it really does feel perfect. It's just the being really lonely part that carves a deep deep rift between me and the rest of college. its torturous for me to emerge from my studio and remember the world im denying im part of. i hope that part at least gets easier when im not locked on some campus full of partying people happy to distract me with a million wonderful less committed projects where i have much less at stake. I also love having everything at stake. For some reason tonight i feel drawn to the idea of living in new york again instead of somewehre else. ive hated that idea with all my guts and soul. ive thought i need to move to change, to learn about another place and define my life within another city's parameters before i can exist happily in new york and grow there. because every summer its felt so stagnant. New york made me though, and the idea of growing with it and through it feels so epic. z stop trying to be your own hero. and stop talking to yourself. and stop showing it to other people on the internet@!!! just draw, and then cry, and then graduate.

2007-03-20T03:54:00.000-07:00

Lots of progress, im happy to report. This last week is going to be risky. I put off the fifth and went back into the fourth, faking the bottom half since the pose changed, and I drew partly from a photograph, which is the first time ive done that for my thesis. I upped the contrast considerably, so now the weight distribution is uneven and disconcerting and that adds a new sort of tension to the drawing, whivh makes it more interesting. But i still think i have to get it off the wall with the fifth. Having three drawings up at the same time is too demanding.
I agree that its important to be owrking on more than one thing at once, but not more than one massive drawing. I know thats' how most people work, but i think the relationship i have to each piece is too involved, jumping back and forth makes me dizzy. ALthough, it does seem to free up my style. Switching techniques as i try to finish everything reveals how much ive developed each and how they inform the next evolution of mark.
I HAVE A PAINTING. I idont konw what to do. when i finally started the fifth drawing i tried to do an underpainting of the linty areas in gouache, and then i just covered almost the entire body. and it isnt minimal washy stuff, its intense washy stuff, the blues and greens are VERY strong, and im afraid its too colorful. having reds yelllows and blues where as my other pieces are faithfully monocromatic. I HAVE MONOCROMATISIS AND I WANT TO MAKE PAINTINGS> i think value is driving me mad.
THe otehr interesting thing that happened was: besides upping the contrast and filling in blank areas of drawing 4 (cat tshirt) i decided that it needed another component, and all it lacked in procedure was the tissue paper texture that found its way into every other drawing. Deciding to include it at such a late stage was a risk, and even moreso since adding it to the fourth drawing means almost definitely that it must be present in the fifth.
How am i drawing the fifth??? i really like wahts happening on a small scale, but , afraid ive gone too farwith the paint and i dont know whetherto start over or somehow tone it down. I tried to temper it with graphite but other than subdueing the color nothing changes, the tone is still very dark and experssionistic and painterly. and i am going to have to work in VERY careful draftsmanship if i aim to curtail the initial impact of a liberated color painting.
It also feels too small for me. Ben Fash warned me saying i coulnd[t possibly pull off a larger drawing in the 6 days i have left, but i am afriad to commit to something weak and whiney. So far i have managed not to FAIL, i dont know how or what that means exactly, but everything has been not a mistake. No bad accidents, only good ones. thats awesome, and i know the way to proceed isnt to become overcautious but to continue with confidence ----i only worry that paint is less forgiving, and boldness gone awry is messy...i cant redo watercolor. there is no erasing. But also painting in this manner lays perfect emphasis on negative space, the whites are never so active as they are in watercolor. So mayb ei should restart drawing 5 VERY CONTROLLED soemhow, lots of careful sketching in hard pencil, and then use watercolor (gouache is maybe too opaque) and only include minimal color, subtle temperature changes. Teh color is so overwhleming right now i cant imagine what kind of paper i would add or where. it knows what it wants to be and i am not yet aware and i think i should just keep working for now and see and not be too quick to judge beause this is the most exciting part but also i am wary of overworking the wet media. YIKES.
Will stayed all night with me in the studio, even after Ben left. He's writing his thesis too. We had a really nice conversation eating oatmeal around 5 am, and it made my brain start ticking again. My thesis has clouded over all my other thoughts and ideas with this one narrow lens, pushing everything else out of focus, that was one thing i realized talking to him. That i haven't done the usual amount of growing in and out of my opinions and comfort zone and bla bla bla college college that i get out of lots of surprising cotidian interactions, because I spend all my time by myself or relating to those who im already very close to, and thats a different kind of pushing. its not new. new pushing comes from class soemtimes, but over break there is no class, only STUDIO. so it was nice, talking ot him.
I rememver thinking there was a lot to write down, but now i only remember that OH wait, two things, 1- having three drawings up at once makes me move differently, and now i waddle from corner to corner and pull up all my table/stool stations around me, so im blocked in, and then i just rotate my body ever so slightly and im well positioned to address another piece, or ruin it with an accidental spill--2- its funny that i sleep here and i have a million blankeys all around, but i cant actually USE any of them beacuse htey are very delicately positioned and i cant touch them. I should design some ceremony for dismantling the set ups since its so easy and so irreversible. i'd rather crawl into my blankey drawing and go to sleep than crawl into the hammock with my blankey anyways.

2007-03-18T14:20:00.000-07:00

AAAAAHHHHHHH im so frustrated right now!!!! I am running out of time, and i can't pull it together, printing my fucking blog is so damn complicated, and my fifth drawing is all about summoning the right energy to start, and the third drawing is just placidly staring me in the face, and i feel so far from it, and the fourth drawing is this bad kid, who im not paying attention to, who's just hanging on, waiting for me to explain everything to it, becuase i know how to deal iwth it i think... and then i touched the third drawing, and i cant just start drawing, and its not that hard....but looking at it, from far away, its so big, i dont believe i can change it, or make it better. the longer i spend without drawing , the harder it is to remember how to start, it odesnt seem possible to affect them so easily. And i know if i start the fifth and im not careful its going to run away with me, and from me, and i need to be controlling it, because its my opportunity to strenghten the entire show. there is so much potential for this drawing, i want to be fully conscious of that as i realize it. i need to be somehwere much more meditative and with less thought and more work and much less stress, i need to not really be paying attention, but already have the details worked out, so i can go on auto pilot and just be creative and let myself do wahtever becuase i have set up the rules already so breaking them will only emphasize what they are.
does this make sense? is it making me feel better? i dotn know, i have to finish that third drawing. maybe i should do that today.
then that wall can change. that wall changing will DEFINITELY help me psychologically. Having three drawings up at once might just be too much going on for me to function.
Even if im ignoring two of them. Then i just feel irresponsible.
Heidi wants a cigarette break. I'm going to finish the third drawing today and take it down and then i can move the fourth over to the other wall, and maybe on that side of hte studio i'll have a new perspective on it......and i can really put some energy into it. cuase it needs more energy and determination. and FUN.

2007-03-17T22:18:00.000-07:00

I STARTED MY LAST DRAWING!!!
things are really coming to a close here. I just finished starting the last drawing, and now i must start finishing ALL OF THEM. Just a peek of what's to come, here's the digipic of my underdrawing, with the projector on. I realized its taken me half as long to complete each drawing sequentially, i'm increasing my speed exponentially!!
1st drawing- 3 months (oct-dec)
2nd drawing- 6 weeks (jan-mid feb)
3rd drawing -3 weeks (midfeb-midmarch)
4th drawing- 10 days (mid march)
5th drawing -----oh my god what if i did it in FIVE!!?!?!? impossible. but, i have only nine days ahead of me, soo it can;t take much longer than that...especially since im still touching up 3 and 4 in major ways...and the first drawing could use an hour or two of attention as well...(pulling whites and pushing blacks, cleaning edges, watching contrast)
Feeling pretty good, pretty tired, it's Saint Patrick's Day. ive never been drunk on st patrick's day. Well at least this drawing is green.

2007-03-14T14:20:00.000-07:00

in my happy post nap lethargy im taking a moment to write. I have had the urge to blog for the past 5 days and yet not found the time!! Today is beautiful outside. its so sunny, and i slept in today finally and went to Guida's for cheeseburgers and milkshakes. My body is starting to really hurt though, my arms are tired. and my legs and butt and lower back are all achey. As soon as I approach the stool i feel all cramped and there's this cringe and repulsive gesture from my body that requires a lot of mental determination to overcome. Standing at the other drawing and moving gets tiring too.
I've been thinking so much. I've been drawing for days straight, so all i have time to do is think. and pull my hair out. There are so many veins of thought here...my mind works on the same problems over and over while i try not to pay attention, to stay focused on the line, and then i just talk to myself about everything. But its a weird sort of thinking, like just hearing my thoughts but not answering them.
Definitely the most pressing conversation ive had with myself (and many others) is about the blook. Wow, its great that this term embodies not only the words "blog" and "book", but "look" as well. I've thought about it so much i have really changed my ideas about it. And my feelings about asking for and recieving criticism on works in progress. This i know i've blogged about, but also thinking about what the blog meeans i've had to remove myself from it, and write less, and consider what it is i have written...i've carried around a huge stack of cut up papers, scrap prints and good prints and unprinted sheets in an empty case of rolling rock, from the media lab, to emily's sewing machine, to my studio, to the printshop, and i've tried to reconceptualize my method for constructing the project.
It's somehow fitting that books are all about trial and error and DRAFTS> always experimenting and EDITING. that there are a million pages that aren't used for every page that is. But i'm going to try to USE ALL of my PAGES, not edit at all, only revise as i go, refining my ideas as i progress, but not eliminating anything from before.
Benh Zeitlin is going to help me think through this a lot or not at all. What will he help me think through then? I know he can help, he was the one who i first explained Z School to freshman year.
I've been thinking of the scope of the project, and in printing it, ive been examining and re-examining the entries, and i can't believe how much i'v eleft out! There are so many intended entries that were never published!!! how could i have neglected to post on so much stuff!!! ANd i think in the beginning i was especially unaware of how useful it is to landmark these ideas with little details about where i am in what im working on, waht stage of what drawing, etc. Although everything was less directed then. I've thought of keeping a small pad with ideas for posts in it, so i remember to post on everything i want to since i let tangential patterns develop and determine the course of any entry. but not this time. i want to talk about the blook. really the show. i am going to do a fifth drawing, after my meeting with Leslie, she said she was proud of me, how much work i'd accomplished, i really almost completed the fourth drawing, and made a lot of progress in other areas as well. A testament to how much school fucks with my work. There is such a thing as being OVERSTIMULATED> And i switched bays from the middle to the last, Ali's bay. And Jen is going to construct a 12 foot wall that extends out dividing my bay from back bay, soi'll ahve extra space to hang. The big question is, what are the drawings going to do once they are all in the same space together, facing each other on three sides? And what purpose does the blook serve in that context? Other artists, like Andrea Zittell, who publish their journals or sketchbooks don't necessarily include them in their exhibitions, and I have to wonder how it changes the show to have the blook there.
At first i freaked out cause i felt so strongly about including it and that made me realize i was afraid of waht the drawings meant standing on their own, that putting ONLy them up in the gallery was somehow not enough was very distrubing....that means that there's a lot of displaced energy in this whole thesis- and also that my mode of feeling connected to hte drawings is through this blog, so maybe i have to get over that, and let myself be disconnected from the drawings. People are, after all, coming to see them, not me. They are what is beautiful and interesting, not me. Not you, Z. And what is this blook besides a self-portrait? And how can i justify including it if that is all it is? I went from feeling a guttural need for hte book to be in the show to instead feeling morally obligated to only accept it as part of the work if i can rationally justify it. So in my recent design i am sewing the book together myself, on emily's machine, (instead of gluing it which is really messy) and the loose threads look great, they relate to the drawings visually, and i can even sew the jpegs onto the backsides of the vellum. The staggered line of thread feels like drawing in itself, and hopefully i can make the blook feel like a drawing, if it looks like a book. Why is it a book? Why isn't it text printed out on a 5x7 foot page, like the other works...?? Becaues i think about it from a literary standpoint- no, i definiltye dont do that. but i dont think about it visually either, becaues its on the internet and i cant control what my template looks like beyond some baby steps in controlling format. What is the relationship of text to my work? I wanted to ask Janine Antoni this question at her lecture, but i was embarrassed. Since she put that book together with her friends short stories for the moor project, but that wans't shown with the art except later, in another book about the project, where images of both the book and sculpture were presented in unison. I know i use the blog as a way to articulate and digest my ideas about hte drawings, which i've never had to formally express, so it is through my words and writing that i define what my vision is and where i should invest energy and exert control to manipulate the project to be one coherent thing (that still maintains a rich texture of suggestions, implications and potential for much further probing)....The blog is NOT me justifying the work. It does not exist because i dont think the drawings are good enough. but in fact, does the work justify the blog? does it justify the blook? I'd like to think so. I have to be careful here, to be very conscious of how much of my process i LET people see, how much they want, or don't want, i dont konw. or how much that ultimately alters the interpretation of the work.
the problem is that i dont know wht the drawings mean. tehy are the one thing i cannot afford to have distance from. physically, mentally, financially, socially, intellectually, EMOTIONALLY. And so i can't see what they say to the book the same way i cant see what they say to each other until they Are hung together. but hte blook must develop along with the drawings if it is to be relevant at all. i twas a mistake to allow this part o fthe project to parallel teh drawings veering closer to and further from being integral to the show...i either have to accept or deny its presence and then work towards the SHOW and what it is going to be,and if that means some other object or picture or text is shown in addition to the drawings then i should make room for that to be more relevant, and not just shove all extra info and context inside of a messy dense logand expect that to cover my bases. ALso theres' the question of the internet. How much do i have to express about the internet in the book itself? (ie: why isnt it handwritten? how does it affect the reading that the posts live online, and here are reproduced without editing, with a self-consciousness of being BLOG, but then now appearing as real words!! the sense of anonymity is completely lost. but the internet was never the point for me, only a vehicle. a place for the words to gather, really RAW. fuck i dont even think about my writing and whether or not its good or sounds really stupid when people read it. which i think it does, when nina laughs out loud at my cheesy jokes, i take myself too seriously?? or not seriously enough...
WORDS
there is another subject to breach---must stay on track:
TITLES
5 drawings, no artist statement. blook. (for now at least i am going to try to really push into it, amd make it something people respond well to, then i can decide ot forget it if i want to, but i have to give it a chance and LOVE it a little and let it change form and identity the way the drawings do too)
If i title the pieces i can only imagine one function for the title: designating the object's identity or role or place. (for the artist?) so "my blankey" (can i just call it "Blankey"? will people know its mine?), "emily's blankey: pinky", funny becasue its actually "browney", emily has two blankeys, and i liked this one better, but i mixed up the names, so it really reflects this odd familiarity but also the distance in the sentiment since only a friend might assume the closeness and affectionate relationship to the same object, but then mix up its name. Frank liked that i went from drawing my own blankey to another person's, and then to drawing something from the costume shop, the history of which is completely foreign to me, and the distress inherent in the cloth is purposeful, almost artificial. So then the green drawing could be "mock blankey" or "found blankey", i like that. since its not a blankey. its the liner from an old army jacket. its better than pointing out its artifice, its instead expressing the potential it has to be real, just by my affection for it and vision of it. Then there's the blue dress, which is mine, but worn and shared by many, alison moy, nina macintosh, countless children who found it in my dress up box growing up, and lastly me at the sex party (that was the night it died--emily pinned it to me and then i danced until it started to tear from bottom up, when i took it off that night it couldnt hold anything anymore, no longer a volume, a shape with space inside for living ,moving, but torn at the seams, it returned to 2 d imesnions. a flat sheet, it stretches out not around, and can only be worn if wrapped. (rapt!)) so what do i call it and where does it fit in the trajectory of my intimacy to these fabrics?
Then there's teh t-shirt. I've had taht since i was five. Cody and Lee Ranaldo silkscreened cat t-shrits for christmas every year for all cody's friends, and this was the first. THe logo is from some japanese shipping company. it's called Kuroneko takkyubin and the logo is 2 black cats, the mama carrying a kitten by its neck on a yellow background. It's still wearable, although its disintegrated a lot around the sleeves. I had to cut the neck so i could continue to fit it over my head, and then i stitched with yellow thread, all along the neck to keep it from fraying, and i sewed up the armpit holes at the time, and then they just got bigger from being poked endlessly by a needle...i dont want to call it something stupid like favorite tshirt/ id rather call it kuroneko takkyubin, but Leslie cautioned me against titling them something esoteric, as she thinks a strength of the drawings is their accessibility on a universal level. so what can i call the t shirt and the dress besides just inserting the possessive article before the noun? "T-shirt from cody: worn since age 5" "t-shirt: 16 years of love". 4 days of drawing. blankey: 21 years of love. 3 months of drawing. or substitute the word love with "distress". dont want to say how long it took to drew, but its a funny comparison. which years make one take so much longer than the next>? "my shirt: kuroneko takkyubin" or "my cat shirt" funny since in the drawingn they are not clearly cats at all."dress-up" is a bad title. "used to be a dress" used to be my dress, "from the dress up box". or maybe no titles at all. for anything. INPUT DESIRED>
give me feedback!

2007-03-12T15:17:00.000-07:00

im starving and im living in the studio.
if sandy wasn't about to come pick me up for dinner i'd be about to take a nap over in my napping corner. I set up ben's hammock over the heater, it isnt a permanent solution for the hammock, but i managed to tie it really taughtw iththe little pieces of string left over from my plaster experiment with negative space...little 8 inch rope strands with frayed ends are all that suspends me 4 inches off the floor, the heater blows really strong underneath me and i have my blanket, plus a pillow terence gave me to draw taht was living in the trash heap on his porch. There is fabric littered everywhere and food too. Last night Ben helped me bring drawing 4 and 3 down about 16 inches lower on the wall so i could reach the high parts.
When I first did this with the blue drawing it totally changed the studio space for me, and now again, having "lowered" the center of both walls and moved all my floating stations (tables, stools, carts of supplies, speaker box) towards the middle in a sort of chaotic island, i feel like my space has become gnomeland.
sandy's here, more later

2007-03-08T14:02:00.000-08:00

Strange Attractors: Signs of Chaos
this book grabbed my attention because of its format, its typeset in unique format and the pages are different widths, very stylized. So happened the chaos described within is often a version of my own aesthetic interest in abstraction.

Notess---
James Welling and his Aluminum Foil photos:
Laura Trippi: "were you after a tension between legibility and illegibility in these photographs?"
JW: "I understoodt aht i was creating a program or a machine to manufacture randomness, a system to make random images. It seemed simple, straightforward, and economical, and also yielded all these images. This one piece of metal could be constantly refolded into itself. It was both a physical way to make pictures, and an analogy for other things, like language: the way language uses the same words but is constantly repermuted and reconfigured."
....
LT: "that brings us back to the idea of 'primitive experiments', of aluminum foil or draped fabric as a device for making random images..."

Matrin Meisel
Chaos Deja-Vu
"one might object that the 'science of chaos' is a paradoxical misnomer, if 'science' means enlarging the territories of what we can grasp and describe, and 'chaos' is taken to mean absolute disorder, disorder at the limiting extreme. Finding recursive patterns and generative rules in chaos, and ways to represent both its behavior and its structure, would seem to negate the truly chaotic. Here knowing finds itself in much the same boat as imagining, for this deconstructive paradox has plagued–and stimulated–the arts through a very long engagement with the problem of representing chaos. How does one represent the unimaginable? Is not representation necessarily a taming?....Although the common vernacular use of 'chaos' is more suggestive of overwhelming presence than of negation and absence, the etymology of the word, its early cosmic significance, and its long association with origins and endings are fraught with the notion of nothing–a Something that is Nothing. The root of the word is the Greek verb stem Xa, meaning to yawn or to gape...Chaos is imagined as the precursor and enabling ground of 'what is,'perhaps as an instantiating discontinuity, momentous because it is a hole in the absence of the solid, teeming, and various All. "

He goes on to describe the difficulties of representing chaos in image, rather than language, in which the convention of negation is a convenient tool for describing what chaos is not, narrowing what it is.
..."What is sstriking is how powerfully the very act of representation evokes order, an order sometimes inherent in the strategy, and soemtimes in the medium and its conventions. Sometimes it seems as if order were generated, as it were, by the material world itself, through self-organization."

More on inversion as a tactic for depicting chaos, reversing existing hierarchy...then an example of an engraving enspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, by the Flemish artist Abraham Diepenbeek, printed in 1655. The description of the work is fantastic, and the image which was reproduced in this book harkens back to my own final drawing from drawing 2. "If primal chaos is primal innocence as in origin legends, number is the serpent in the garden, the insidious agent of fall. Number enters as soon as the extreme of disorder is conceived positively, as in the Chaos of a Something. But then–unlike chaos when it is conceived as next to Nothing–chaos appears in two modes: it can be imagined as a condition of unlimited plurality and diversity, or it can ve imagined as a condition of extreme simplicity, of undifferentiation to the point of sameness."

Back to an analysis of Genesis, Meisel points out the transition between chaos and cosmos. Differnetiation of light from dark, a succession of time, (days). the word for 'create' in 1:1 is the same word used to mean 'cut/divide'. And of course the Tower of Babel, the last piece of Genesis comes from 'balal': 'to confuse'. confusion of tongues and the primal confusion.
Meisel references a film called Tango by Zbgigniew Rybczinski in which actions are repeated, accumulating information for the viewer,
"the multiplicity of the elements and the diversity of the recurrences are more than the mind can hold in a comprehensive pattern, and all at once it is experienced as chaos...In the film, having lost a comprehensive grasp of the whole, one is likely to fasten attention on a region, or on a few elements, arbitrarily chosen, whose reocurrence continues to be perceived as a pattern...One cannot in the immediate throes of apperception impose a narrative on the sequence of events. One can, of course, retrospectively impose a comprehensive interpretation, as a proposition on what the film is 'about': ALIENATION AND SOLIPSISM IN MODERN SOCIETY...a metaphoric picture of human fate. "

-chaos of the many versus chaos of the one
"multitudinousness comes to be experienced , not as number, but as numberlessness. Number, on the other hand, has served as an imaginative tool for dispelling chaos, or distancing it, or working magic againstg it, from the beginning. Counting things, however, has meant diminishing or ignoring their infinite differences. Mensuration–which depends , not just on comparison, but on teh establishment of a unity of comparison–has entailed reducing multivalence to the mere fact of sameness. Through counting and measuring, identity, or discrete individuality, being oneself and not other, admist the possibility of interchangeability–but it also lays down the groundwork for differentiation. WIthout identity there is no basis for enumeration; but without number there is no path of connection between teh one and the many...the real energies that have powered the imagination of chaos come from deeper levels, inhabited by feelings about liberty and security, desire and constraint, violence within and without; but the appetite for life itself and the fear of the loss of self, of dissolution and death...In much cosmogonic myth, the underworld is hwere the remains of ancient Chaos are exiled and confined, and there they erect a parodic kingdom of the Dead...the imagination of chaos is the assertion of life over form."

Excerpts from Fractured Fairy Tales, Chaotic Regimes by Laura Trippi
Chaos science= 1) fractal geometry, 2) complex dynamic systems
"the term 'fractal,' a variant of 'fractional,' points to the idea both of fragmentation and irregularity. An emerging branch of geometry, the study of fractals breaks with the Euclidean tradition of idealized forms. With an infinite nesting of pattern within pattern, repeating across scales, fractal images open onto an area devoid of fixed coordinates. Because the mathematical operations that produce fractal 'landscapes' depend on the introduction of chance (random number generation), each repetition of a given pattern asserts a fractional difference from all others. The notion of boundary, too, is confounded. On closer look, the line dividing two regions reveals unexpected complexity. In the literature, this is sometimes expressed as the 'competition of several centers for domination of the plane'.
The richness of the fractal domain arises largely out of these 'border skirmishes'. Instead of a clear line of demarcation, one finds an endless regress of detail: surfaces that give way on inspection to more surface, boundaries that never resolve."

Trippi then explores "phase space" (according to wikipedia: in mathematics and physics, phase space is the space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the phase space.) and her essay becomes very technical, but the visuals i get from this poetic scientific mathematical language are intense:

"The shape is fractal, and its formation in phase space is often compared withthe repeated stretching and folding of dough. This plastic, topological transformation of phase space characterizes the third class of phase space figures. The system has found its strange attractor and entered a chaotic regime. Concentrating on phase transitions, the study of dynamical systems notes a more or less abrupt change of behavior as some parameter–'degree of freedom' –reaches a critical value. Linear temporal flow is translated into a figural dimension, Wrapping infinite difference into a bounded region of phase space, the strange attractor twists and wraps and jumps and creases endlessly, not tending toward a final culmination....it implodes as it 'settles onto' its new orbit, exhibiting an oddly compelling property of stable instability, predicatble unpredictability, determinate indeterminacy: deterministic chaos."

-Woah. I just imagined that math world describing my fourth drawing, the t-shirt. i love the reference to philosophical determinism. i was a big propounder of soft determinism in my high school philosophy class. All this stuff about linear temporal flow in figural dimension makes me understand (or want to push) the skins on my drawings (the attached tracing paper) as the strange attractors, moving fatelessly towards a climactic moment in which they balance into orbit becoming suddenly stable aroundthe chaotic field they search.
Is it too simplistic to post anything dense and full of my buzz words and then appropriate the concepts and apply them to my drawings?
My ideas seem to come from two places:
1) random assortment of findings breed interconnections and synthesize new images and ideas for understanding what i make
2) internal intuition draws me towards focusing on certain feelings, feeling with my imagination for resonance in the object im drawing, seeing what it could look like and then letting it represent, talking to people and expressing my deepest most personal sentiments about the work.
I keep thinking about dualities today.
Attached vs Rapt is a theme, it seems. Who do i listen to? i feel really betrayed about my blook. It seems it won't work to print my blog into my doctored copy of Portrait of An Artist, it looks unimpressive, and according to some, seems conceptually heavy-handed. I HATE that term. Heavy-hande.d what the fuck does it mean???? Too obvious. blatent, coarse. it means a lazy job, underdeveloped idea, too vague and generic without finding the tension in the argument, the specific moments of interest. It's a really insulting thing to say.
I guess the idea is that putting myself inside that book is lame. Unnecessary, i don t need to supplant joyce with my own process-journal. For me its a gesture of confidence, its rash to do that, and i like behaving rashly (rash is also a textile: a type of silk).
Even if i print out the blog and make my own book from it, without the joyce cover, i'm exposing everything, and expecting people to read it and LIKE it so then why is it any more obnoxoius or ARROGANT to have the cover be joyce??

2007-03-07T12:32:00.000-08:00

fuck.
leslie says there's no way i can diniah my five drawings in teh next 2.5 weeks.
yes FIVE. i wen tto see Peer Gynt on Sunday and the set was amazing. I have to track Marcella down before the end of the year and make friends with her. I wish I'd taken set design here. What a waste. Anyways, highlights of the show: the rainstorm, the set (a long rectangular sandpit) turned into a boat, with ropes hanging and sails, then ----beginning to realize that all of my favorite compositions connote pirate ships for me---and the TROLLS were awesome, just pantyhose on the head type stuff, weird bulbous bumps in the body, staggers and new movement, all the players took turns shifting characters, and all the males acted for one act each as the lead, Peer Gynt, so costume was an important signifier for roles. After the show it occured to me that the costume shop might have great shredded things, and Leslie had mentioned a fifth piece as being a good goal, so I went to take a look. They had BOXES UPON BOXES of distressed clothing. I borrowed three bedraggled items, one of which was the liner falling out of a green army jacket. You're allowed to further the distress of any item to whatever degree so i actually hacked out the lining from the jacket, tearing all the little strings and set it up as a really beautiful, epic green earthy-toned sea-like netted fluid drawing. It was the same sense of monumentalism as the first drawing, unfortunately that means its almnost equally ambitious. A lot more variety of tedxture etc.
Leslie said i might have to choose between this fifth and the fourth that ive just started. (and actually re-composed, based on my mom's suggestion of including the t-shirt graphic to tie it in more closely with pinky/emily's white blakney). She cautioned me against trying to do more than i can handle, saying that it will ultimately take away from the show, losing energy that could be spent on something that will surely be included...WHich made me very angry and i feel super-determined suddenly to have a fifth drawing just to spite her. Or, really, to spite myself. I started working intentionally on the fourht drawing, i told myself i would "finish" it today (meaning that i have to completely cover the page, delineating everything, then i can rework it later). This at least will allow me to understand and evaluate its presence.
If i can finish the third and fourth for tuesday, then maybe i have a chance, with thirteen days after that, to do a last drawing. WHO KNOWS!!!
More anxiety and drama: Last night Terence printed the first fifteen pages of my "blook" (blog-book) and i glued them in and they look ass-nasty. im really bummed. I can't think of what to do besides talk to chuck...I want to re-think this. i mean i have ot.
I wish i had time to re-conceptualize the physical manifestation of my blog. because including it in the show is an idea im very attached to, but aesthetically it has to be relevant, and on par with the drawings, it can't look shabby unconsciously or non-purposefully. And making the podium etc is alot of extra work. Especially with this new drawing dilemma. I should maybe do something simpler....can i? just print out everything on white trace 90, including images? what happens to the sketches etc. that ive already glued into the book? what about the shape of it, can i stil lcuut out my profile>?? Nina was saying that she thought the blog didn't need to be ina copy of Portrait of the Artist anyways. That it speaks for itself, am i beyondt hat? If that isnt the shell forthe text then what is? i need to make my own cover....i still like the idea of being in that old bookt hough. it feels like a safe place to hide. and stealthy. and very menacing somehow. like a cruel trick to play on the innocent academic joyce enthusiast...and the profile is so resonant with the cover etc. that was such an easy amazing solution. I better get myself some more of those over the next three weeks.
Okay, back to the drawing board, in so many more way than one.

2007-03-02T17:47:00.000-08:00

I have to finish writing an essay right now so i can DRAWWWW, but i stupidlydecided to write my survey of criticism on Joyce so I had an excuse to read "the Dead" after Frank told me about it, so here I am reading criticism on it and lo and behold, i have to blog:
-"to explicate this figural contrast, I shall draw on a distinction Paul Ricoeur makes between two kinds of discursive images: bound and wild. Bound images are those 'concrete representations aroused by the verbal element and controlled by it'. Basic to the projection of the pictorial image, they merge sense with pictorial form, the one reinforcing and stabilizing the other. Self-identity is their essential component...Wild images, by contrast, are (at least partly) extrinsic to the fabric of sense. As Ricoeur explains, they induce the reader, 'who has become a dreamer rather than a reader, to indulge himself in the delusive attempt...to possess magically the absent thing, body, or person'. In my sense, they differentiate and destabilize the pictorial image, shifting its focus on to other perspectives beyond the immediate setting: their orientation is elsewhere. Because a wedge of metaphorical difference fractures and splits them, these images no longer coincide with thier literal manifestations. Gesturing towards alternative dimensions they do not clearly define, these sensory icons interrupt of suspend the reading process itself, transforming the reader into a dreamer. Because it is no longer congruent with realistic perception, character depiction becomes fascinating, strange, or inscrutable." -from Doherty's Dubliner's Dozen (p 146)

-have i totally lost it so much so that i can only see the children im painting swirling around beyond my computer screen and now making their way on to it? all i can think about in this description is the kids ive been drawing on emily's blanket...depictions, illustrations, characters, they are the PICTORIAL IMAGE, their orientation is ELSEWHERE> perhaps i should call this drawing "Gabriel and Gretta" after the characters from "the dead".

okay okay, and since im posting when i shouldnt be let me also add the passages from Sanctuary where Faulkner cites RAPT:
ooh, not sure ill find it, amazing how words if you dont underline them, grab them, arrest their position, glide away hidden in sentences that you dont want to read. here's a great description of BLANKEY instead: "from a line between two posts in front of this door three square cloths hung damp and limp, as though recently washed, and a woman's undergarment of faded pink silk. It had been washed until the lace resembled a ragged, fibre-like fraying of the cloth itself. It bore a patch of calico, neatly sewn" (49).

2007-03-02T10:57:00.000-08:00

Today it is absolutely pouring rain.
My earmuffs are acting like sponges sopping up the water trapped in my hair. My studio is practically underwater!! The cfa is flooded! the courtyard to the woodshop is compeltely unaccessible...there is at least 10 inches of water from wall to wall, it looks like a swimming pool. I had to access my thesis loft through the tunnels, which are also very leaky. I sure hope my precious crows nest doesn't flood. It's been known to leak as well, all the architecture here does. And with my resoluble watercolors that could be a disaster!!!
Walking to work though I remembered suddenly riding my bike in the rain, last summer, it rained for two weeks, and the puddles were so pretty at night, the streets of New York were black and silver and reflective. That inspired me to rethink my Infinity drawing and I tried to conceive of another large project that could involve depicting flat, dark, space. I wanted the puddles to act as abstractions, not to render reality but to offer an alternative to the concrete plane. The next day I went out and photographed the street and sidewalk. I made three drawings last summer from those photos, and I thought they might become my thesis work. It's interesting to consider them now, their formal qualities, and how they differ and relate. I'm going to include the jpegs because everyone wants more pictures on my site, but BEWARE, this is old work. I AM BEYOND THIS!!
I think the drawing on translucent paper, where the edges of the page are all torn (the third image), is an interesting comparison to the way I've used the lasso tool in photoshop to mimic a similar edge from the object to the space around it. The flatness has translated to the fabric as well. And the freeness in a multimedia approach to rendering.

The last drawing here is of a rock in lichen, something I was really interested in drawing on gravestones for a while, in color. This is the best lichen drawing though, becuazse the rock is such a simple shape, and there is no color, so it has the same elements of abstraction that tie it to the fabrics. All the energy exists within the boundary-lines of the perimeter, there is a consciousness of volume, you can see the form of the rock slightly in the bottom right corner, but it stands mostly as a window into the inner activity,all dots and lines.