sunday May 16

To continue......

I felt at ease today in a way I haven't for awhile. I'll enjoy it while it lasts, and that's not fatalistic, it's realistic. And maybe next time I spin out I can remember how I felt today.

Today? Laundry, hung out to dry in the warm sun. Love that. Made a print that I am okay with, pretty much, not being anything hugely special. I'm remembering all the little things I'm reading in the books on art and books by artists. Things like, the seeds for your next work lie in this one; ask your work what it needs.

I'm reading/looking at The Illustrated Life, a compendium of sketchbooks from which to draw inspiration from, but artists of all different stripes and spots. One of the women is an illustrator who graduated with a BFA and says that she isn't so happy so much with how she draws, that it's as if she's still nine years old, but that she's more okay with that now. That struck me like a bolt of lightening -- her drawings aren't very sophisticated, but they're genuine, and she draws every day, and she graduated from university with a degree......I felt in good company, and assured that all of my feelings about art, my self, my worth, expectations, etc ad nauseum (no disrespect to any of it).....are all normal and shit. So, yay!

Man I'm sleepy though. Here's the picture of the print, maybe some day I will approach the mad skillz of Kathe Kollwitz, but you know what? Maybe I never will, and......at least today...I'm okay with that. (another passage in Art and Fear - the reconciliation after the realization or intimation that you've done all your best work already...maybe I have....who knows? what if that's true? maybe I don't have to try so hard to top myself and struggle so much to create the kind of art I think makes me a 'real artist'...)

ps - last wednesday in my Intro to Visual Arts class, we looked at Kathe Kollwitz's work and I felt re-inspired. Fantastic feeling. Her works are so powerful. Also we viewed a short video and the artist is......hang on lemme look at my notes.......Gabriel Orozco. He's into all sorts of different stuff, and says that he would rather be a beginner in many mediums than an expert in just one or two. He's being filmed while noodling around, just noodling around doing stuff, nothing hugely monumental in the way we're taught to think of monumental 'art'. But, still -- the small monuments and homage to the creative impulse and living along/with/inside that creative momentum. I was inspired by both of these artists by their love of experiment and multi-medium -- I identify with that and I haven't been experimenting so much lately. I've been very concerned with (the stultifying) 'getting it right'. WTF. Oh that again. Okay, time to take out the trash!!