All original images and text are copyright 2008-2021 Liz Sweibel


Monday, February 22, 2010

This Artist's Way

I've been opening Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way at random spots and reading, thinking I'll land where I need to be. The book is so art school and the writing is, for me, sometimes over the top, but it's dismissed at my own peril. Cameron's guidance is helping me see the mental mindgames I sometimes play for what they are, and getting to work.


I've been invited by poet Rich Murphy to include work in the next issue of Ekleksographia, which he's guest curating. The cover will be one of my videos, and I've been working on the content for my page. Rich wanted to include more videos, as did I, but I found the variables in how they'd look and play from one screen to the next too numerous for comfort. Also, the Ekleksographia page design is geared to writers and illustrators and, while I like it, it's too visually active for my videos.


Rich's concept is experimental work - whether in the larger scheme of art or the more intimate scale of the artist's practice - that shows a "distrust of grammar" in favor of an "ordinary language poetics" (via Wittgenstein, though that's beyond my knowledge). Probably all of my work fits that description, but it's digital work that's most experimental for me and so I'm moving toward presenting photographs in addition to the video cover.

The images I'm working with include conceptual projects (photos of property boundaries in my neighborhood), formal works, and family photos. While none are very good per se (except my father's black-and-white images of me at age three, in the living room in my first roller skates), they are interesting and keep resonating for me, so perhaps they'll resonate with others. The target launch date is next month, at least for now, so I have a little time.

It's nice to write here again. It's been a long time.