ARt life

I love being in school. maybe it doesn't sound like it sometimes, but I sure do. As hard as it is, it totally fills me.
Yesterday I spent 12 hours there and came home and slept hard and felt I deserved it!

My teachers are really amazing. It makes me want to become one. I think I've always flirted with that idea, that and art therapy and textile design and graphic design and fine art painting and fashion design and being a bad ass lawyer too.... and the thing of it is, I can do all. I am in a weird way (well maybe not the law part, but that's why I have a best friend in law school, right?).

My friend Christina and I were talking yesterday about integrating all of our creative pursuits and styles, when really I think that our side projects inform the rest of our art work and life and vice versa. Yes even waitressing informs my art! It's funny when I talk about art and life separately because they are not.... and sometimes I forget.

So maybe after this stint in illustration I'll get my MFA in painting. And then teach college kids. And in the meanwhile publish my children's book(s) and teach bookmaking and writing through classroom visits and lead more expressive art workshops at shelters and prisons, and silk screen my own line of t-shirts and learn more graphic design as well!

It's fun to dream.

My current heros and inspiration look at existing forms and ask why does it have to be that way?

Saul Bass created the opening movie credits before there were any. Imagine having that little idea before it existed? Think old school Hitchcock films and then Howard Hughes and then Scorsese. I saw an interview with him where he was talking about how his work never comes out how he wants it to, even when he's won academy awards for it. Isn't that a bit profound and true that it's so hard to match what's in your mind's eye? He said after 60 years working in design, he wants to keep working and going into "scary territory". He said, "The wheel has been invented-- take it and build a chariot".

Vincent Van Gough only spent 10 years painting. I must get my hands on his letters to his brother Theo.

Tywla Tharp gets up every morning at 5:30 am to go train in the gym for dance, even though she choreographs.

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes- Deaf at 46 became more introverted and learned to capture the essense of things in his paintings. In many of his works, especially "The Execution of Third of May", he is making an Anti-war statement like never before seen.

Bob Dylan- did y'all watch the documentary the other week on PBS? Imagine combining rock and folk before it was thought of!

Maira Kalman- LOVE her...
"I was out walking the dear dog (who is a sweet meal ticket – two books about him, one New Yorker cover and a back page) and I saw 500 things that made me want to make art. I ran into a father taking two kids to school. The girls were wearing green skirts and orange rain boots and one of them had a ponytail and was carrying a pink book and was pigeon-toed. Then I saw a man wearing a bowler hat with a feather and he was wearing an eye mask like Zorro made out of a twenty-dollar bill and I thought, ‘There is a God. Thank you, whoever is showing me this'."

**Who are your heros and what does it mean to feel fulfilled in work/art/life?**