Last week was a weird week - I kept writing in my daily diary, "tagh o lagh!" Classes started today, so maybe that was why. Who can say. It was a week of stresses and sinus headaches and mail issues (now resolved), but there were high points: ♡ Virtual studio time with Monát, whose birthday was last week (Asa showed up for one session!) ♡ Good mail days: Christmas packages from Monát and my brother Armando ♡ Going back through sketchbooks and finding things to work back into (Hawaiian girlfriends, above; also PMCX:AU(78) ♡ Re-watching 'Bad Blood', one of the best and funniest X-Files episodes ♡ Zoom Museum Sundays: We went to the virtual Guggenheim! It has very good 404 images. Katie and Dr. Steph came, which is more than I could hope for on any given day. Stressors are still stressing me, but I think of them as running in the background (stress.exe), and as such they have been manifesting as nightmares in which I have a tight schedule of partying all night in Paris before flying to another country, or in which my teeth have...I don't know, actually...boils? Whatever. I liked it better when I was digging my heels into the bed in my sleep. After reading The Lonely City (see last post!), I have had Henry Darger on the brain. I love that this is from a website with "art" in the title but they can't bother to credit this with a title! Since these were all posthumously found I am more lax about it. One of my favorite experiences with The Lonely City is an ongoing one - Olivia Laing describes many works of art, most of which I hadn't seen before, and so it was fun to get an image in my head of a painting or a photograph she described, look it up later, and see how the idea in my head and the actual image differed. Darger's art utilizes collage and carbon tracing, but also watercolors (such as the watercolor above); I had been imagining them as more heavy on the collage and the color saturation - a bit more like the work of collage artist Lance Letscher. There's so much to get into - normally I'd link to the American Folk Art Museum, but their server seems to be down today? - and I had filed away the carbon tracing and collage as a future project, but maybe this particular stress is well-suited to some tracing and collage. I think it might be. So that's something to do instead of letting my imagination borrow trouble. In closing, check out this 16-month performance on extinction by Australian artist Lucienne Rickard. The drawing of Xerces' Blue butterfly took her three months: People following her progress pleaded with her to cancel the butterfly’s erasure; to make an exception for the butterfly living on the page. Her parents applied similar pressure, lamenting their daughter’s efforts with the wings. Have a good week! ♡
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AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
February 2024
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