You don’t need me to tell you it’s hot here. I’ve had a couple of dinners with friends which have moved me in the direction of paying more attention to my own individual work, as opposed to setting that aside in favor of my work in the classroom. There are itches that can only be… Continue Reading
Tag Archives: art
It’s better with the sound off…
I love the heft of a brass pencil sharpener in my palm, and the sound as I use it to point my prismacolors. When I wander through the day with podcasts blaring through my earbuds, a lot slips by. I haven’t drawn enough, but I’ve drawn. Tags: art, distractions
What the hell are we teaching artists?
It’s beautiful up here. And I’m feeling like I’m having an actual piece of vacation. Even though there’s work in the morning, I have felt relaxed and happy all afternoon. In fact I feel good enough to rant. Sometimes the New York Art world (which is shorthand here for the Current State of Affairs in… Continue Reading
The eye decays…
Looking through a bunch of previously posted pictures, I start to have the creeping suspicion that I used to do everything better. Things seem more startling, more sharply seen. Was it my camera, have I just become more conventional? Is it just that a few months or years have defamiliarized myself with these images, so… Continue Reading
Big Change
Here’s a picture of me with my friend David Yarritu from a few years ago. I ran across it while sorting through files yesterday and was stopped in my tracks by the difference in my size. As anyone can see by looking at the collection of personal pictures on my home page, I’ve changed shape… Continue Reading
Dealing with the Artist’s Block (a first attempt)
What if creativity is a place? A place in your mind where you are contemplating different sorts of connections and the possibility for different actions, the actions that result in works of art. We talk about types of thought activating different parts of the brain. About neural pathways. So if creativity is place in my… Continue Reading
Keep your eyes on the road, or not…
A dream about maps, about tracking progress, which may connect to why I feel off track. A series of small things awaken my distress: computers and phone and cameras acting up, things being misplaced, missing my flight. Alone, they are not much, together they make me feel like things are slipping away out of control…. Continue Reading
I stared at art…
…now I’m heading home. I could say that I’m an idiot who waited too long to get on the tube to get to Heathrow, thus missing his flight and having to pay lots of money to get on the next one, but if things had been normal with the trains I would have made it… Continue Reading
Why do you need to know that?
Finishing up on various job tasks in anticipation of my trip to London. Today I had a discussion with the the Graduate Committee that supports the MFA program I work in, talking about the past year and our upcoming strategies. Later on I went to see the latest work from my friend Marc Swanson, who’s… Continue Reading
Good-bye Joanna Russ
Finished with Geoff Dyer. In the New York Times I learned about the death of Joanna Russ, whose “The Female Man” and “Pornography by Women, for Women, with Love” were both important to me. The second is, I believe, the first essay to examine Slash fiction, and also provided an important model in allowing me… Continue Reading