Thursday, June 23, 2011

Studio video

Two UNCG graduate students made this video of me this past year--finally found where it was posted on youtube.

Helen O'Leary

Two images from Helen O'Leary's recent show at Coleman Burke Gallery.  I particularly love the second image's matter-of-fact crustiness.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Mark Grotjahn

Intrigued by the fact that these paintings by Mark Grotjahn are on cardboard--wish I could see what the impact of that is visually, wish I was standing in front of this instead of wondering.  But they still look great.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

State of the Studio: tape ball (and some of what it generates)




Some things in progress...

Instances of Disorder


As ever, the collision of order and disorder permeates my daily life and my studio life. 

Louise Erdrich Quote #2

And now the second quote...about being a writer and having children.  As there are so few instances of women talking about being artists and mothers, and as I am nearly 8 months pregnant with my second child, I am very interested in any meditation on the link between making art and motherhood.
"By having children, I've both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. [...] With a child you certainly can't be a Bruce Chatwin or a Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona. If you value your relationships with your children, you can't write about them. You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one's inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I'd have written with less fervor; I wouldn't understand life in the same way. I'd write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I'd probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I'd have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I've made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor."

Louise Erdrich Quote #1

In high school I fell in love with the books of Louise Erdrich.  I recall writing a paper on one of her first novels, Love Medicine.  I actually haven't read much of her writing of late, so I can't vividly recall why I loved her so much.  I do think it had to do with her being one of the first writers who helped me see that it is possible to phrase something in the most particular of ways--in a way that no one else does, or has ever thought of before.  This inclination toward invention has grabbed hold of me ever since.
My mother sent me this week's Writer's Almanac; Louise Erdrich is quoted extensively.  The first quote I have to record here involves book-love, which I very much relate to:
"We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif—books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at beside, to be dutifully examined—to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can't imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is."