Welcome to the
rebellious blog of an obsessively overly perfectionistic
artist, who is compelled to create and occasionally write about the proccess.
Do
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not, but the water is warm, so dive in and find out!
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"Be
a good craftsman; it won't stop you being a genius." - Auguste Renoir
2/19/2007
On Writing about Writing
song du jour:I Know There's Something Going On, Frida
mood: oh...whatever...
Yes, my writing has been rather intermittently uploaded of late. I have been writing but only in snippets. You'll have to take my word that they are somewhat brilliant snippets ;-) as I can't paste them in here with no segue whatsoever. I often pop into the studio in the middle of cooking lunch or dinner and write in an unaddressed draft email the sentence or two that just popped into my head, while I was obsessing about some important topic of the moment. (Apple's Mail is easily searchable and always open. I hate Word. In fact, I usually call it 4-Letter-Word, and my beloved Write Now, which even 8 years out of date is the most intuitive user friendly word processing software ever invented, no longer works on my G5.)
The weird reality is that I have so many nearly formed books in my head on such a diverse range of topics (Yeah, don't. I know who this sounds like, but there are no 800 page trilogies in store.) that I'm in some weird limbo of perpetually writing and perpetually feeling stuck where blogging is concerned. In my very recent frustration of wanting to blog and just going on (and on) in private emails instead, I've realized I'm often opting for a second eclair, putting off the dinner of fillet mignon. More importantly, I just realized why.
Books have their own built in motivation for me, but whenever I think of blogging, I have to acknowledge that here in Jeannie's bottle, my desk is a MESS of bills, catalogs, office supply coupons, ancient CD's, and whatever toy Skyler has left behind. This is hardly the clear space some writers crave nor the blank page some fear. There are literally hundreds of books and all too many geeky blogs that discuss the idea of writing as "practice." Ick. Please, it's not weightlifting nor time on the treadmill (both activities that I loathe). This is a creative act. Don't suck the life out of it by relegating it, along with eating plenty of fiber, to the mere list of things to do every day because it's "good for you."
Getting back to my desk, it turns out that it's not the state of this slab of sustainably forrested Scandanavian pine causing me to feel like the words are being leeched out of me via a butter knife to a small vein. It's this little window that is making me gag on my own words. I used to blog on the field of yummy purple that is the background of my website, but Dreamweaver would go all haunted on me for no apparent reason on my old blog pages, and there was no sane way to create the all important RSS feed from there, so my friend, Matthew, graciously set up that which comes to you now, which has also helped to increase my audience. Previously, another friend had almost figured out how to change this boring, white with a little blue, Blogger window also to look like my site, but the blog itself never worked well with WordPress.
Now I know I've already lost most of you guys by now. Good thing I didn't use the word lavender to describe my site's background, or most men would have clicked away in confusion three sentences earlier. - Why is it that so many straight men are actually proud of the fact they don't know the visual correlate to the word mauve? - No, the trouble is that I can't see as much of my entries as a whole. There is instead, endless scrolling and clicking of the button "preview." There is also this persistent feeling that I'm really just on a comments section of some customer no-service website about to exceed the given number of characters allowed.
At this point, if your even still interested, you're probably asking, "Why the hell doesn't she just pop some flowery background on some other program, blog her little brains out, and paste the hopefully decent results in the stupid Blogger box?!? The answer is that when I do that, blogger publishes all the punctuation as $#*$&#*&*@ and vowels with umlauts or those single little doughnuts on top. Who wants to edit that? Oh, and blogger on a Mac means one actually has to type in all style and link codes. Yawn. Where's my butter knife?
If only I could collage on my virtual desktop! I would print my hand carved stamps in the margins and type in intense cobalt blue! I would tear bits of my hand painted rice papers, and glue them down to the edges with fake gold dust splattered across them. Instead, the sum total of my visual awareness looks like this.  Does this inspire your inner Angelou? If it does, you're probably not of the feminine persuasion. Might as well give me a steno pad, and order me to write the great American novel. I'm off to make an organic ice cream filled crepe with chocolate gravy on top. Now that's a visual!
P.S.
Thanks to the Holons crew for including my blog in their list!Labels: butter knife, creativity, lavender, mauve ;-), Yawn
11:55 AM
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2/16/2007
Sage
song du jour: Stardust, Ella Fitzgerald
mood: playful (as always)
Some people do runes, others tarot, and some are into the I Ching, but cool as runes are and as archetypal as tarot is supposed to be, I've never been into any type of divination for long. I love symbols and have often incorporated them into my work. Still, it is with a sense of irony and mischievousness that I have done so. For years though, my one guilty pleasure in the world of random foretelling has been Nick Bantock's made up, oracle, match up game, Sage.
It's a big bad mistake in artworld to say I want to create work like _____, but when I see Nick Bantock's drawings, I feel a powerful pull to grab paper and pen to render in exquisite drawings and creative narrative such magic realism of my own. Perhaps the reason I gravitate toward Sage when I'm feeling the need to play or focus is that I know it's completely made up. It's history is about as verifiably real as the stories of Griffen & Sabine or The Forgetting Room, yet contained within the 'cards' are the wisdom of fortune cookies written by some well traveled, tuned it, medieval mystic.
One first clicks on the question cards, reads it, and then clicks on an answer card. At worst together, they sound like some obscure bit of advice, at best they offer a seriously brilliant bit of wisdom on which to ponder or meditate. Here are a few examples I clicked on just before writing this post:
Q: "Who crafts the instruments we use to injure ourselves?"
A: "The sting of the scorpion is not personal, especially when the seed of discontent is sown in the pocket."
Q: "Why do we have feet of stone when change faces us"
A: Those who mistake the road for the journey will find themselves facing the broken muzzled wolves of the Steppes."
Q: "Must desire always sweep aside good intent?"
A: "Adversity unfurls while our mind watches for the snakes. Erase all the problems, and you will have but one."
They're not always all so dark, but apparently my mouse divination skills are being swayed that way tonight. ;-) (I've always said that the two words that I would use to describe myself are 'determined' and 'irreverent'. )
Play, have fun, and remember: taking life too seriously doesn't make it a better experience.
10:16 PM
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2/14/2007
Happy V Day!
song du jour: It's Only Paper Moon, Ella Fitzgerald
mood: hmmm
When students ask me if spirals are structurally necessary to doing Russian filigree, I tell them "No, but... yeah. Try them for now to learn the technique and then venture out," but what I really want to answer is that spirals are the ultimate metaphor shape for Life. We believe life is circular and cyclical, but, like our solar system in the Milky Way, where we come back around to is never the exact spot we were last time. Seasons return, but the year changes, and so do we.
Nothing reminds me of this discovery more than holidays, as mine have been co-opted not into the grown up dreams of my childhood, but of childhood itself. Forget the dozen reds. I'm surrounded by cut out hearts with crayon embellishments, homemade heart cookies, and the same Snoopy and Woodstock valentines that I would beg my mother to buy each year of elementary school. (Do today's overly sophisticated 6th grade girls even give those out anymore?!?)
I don't mean to be cynical, but the years of obligatory though sometimes fun Valentine's dinners when I was married seem, in retrospect, more about frantically rushing to make a dinner reservation or waiting 2 hours for tables than about romance. Then again, for nearly half my life this day has been more about selling my work than being on the receiving end of a jewelry box. (Woe to the man, who is clueless enough to buy me someone else's work, let alone some dreadful, commercial, bad bling.) Attention and thoughtfulness are great, perhaps more so now that they come in the form of skinny little arms flung around my neck and cookies thrust in my face when I'm trying to blog, and I wouldn't trade the way things are for anything.
Whatever your plans or lack thereof I wish you, from the box of Peanuts cards, the valentine I saved for my best friend or silliest crush, the one with Snoopy hugging Woodstock. Happy Valentine's Day!
1:11 PM
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