Thoughts on my ARt making for today

Yesterday I spent the first solid uninterrupted day, minus a blog post during my lunch break, in the studio from 10:30 am till 10:30 pm, in a long time. I got so many highs and lows and bites of inspiration and then losing the vision and then getting something altogether different. Time passed painfully slow and then there was no awareness of time. I need me a 12 hour stretch to get real headway and enter that unbridled anything can happen zone of experimentation.

I've been preparing work for the "Girly Show" in L.A. which will be not only fun to take a little trip down South, but to meet some really sweet and judging by our emails sassafrass ladies! Who may or may not being wearing hot shoes and their birthday suits to the show:)


I've been thinking a lot about what my art is about.... and how to pull it together. This show deadline has been great because it is allowing me to break all the school "rules" that I had constructed for myself. I had a heirarchy I'm realizing of what wouldn't go over well in a painting critique, which varied upon the teacher and the class. NO: Illustration like, cute, trendy, words in art if they were discernable, mission style... which is where i began making art and am influenced... you know the wonderful thing is... i have forgotten the majority of the others! At one point after a crit I wrote on tape all of the things that the teacher had said and taped it directly onto the painting. I wished I had actually made a spread sheet with all of the different marks that were deemed good or bad just to show the silliness and contradictions.

On my 2nd to last crit one of my teachers said to me:"You don't really know what you're doing, do you?" This felt like the craziest affront because what the h-e-double popsicle sticks was I doing here?! Learning, that 's what Mr. I Know What I do. Art is contradictory because on the one hand you want to be a person like myself who is sensitive and filters the world that way by noticing little things and documenting and on the other you need to be completely outside yourself and imperviable.

I am eager to get to a point where I crave a formal critique again. Right now I am so loving making everything wrong, because I think then I am actually making things right. I look at the art I made in artschool and see so much experimentation within my painting marks, but the actual paintings are extremely ugly to me and paralyzed by what not to do.

I am returning to collage, silk-screen, cute characters, messy bright colors, words in art... what have you. I think the hot pink lace elephants were one of my first f*k offs to my art school days! Which isn't to say that I didn't learn tremendously, I am just having to relearn some parts, and integrate what is me. In the best sense I think art school taught me to push an idea. Blow it up and think bigger and connect the dots. I think I am going to make a trampede of pink elephants in my paintings that are most girly.