tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6788663804828002172024-03-05T00:28:37.153-05:00Liz Sweibel | ArtistNotesLiz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.comBlogger150125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-31962252182843770422021-04-06T19:02:00.005-04:002021-07-28T20:51:33.972-04:00I drafted the paragraphs below weeks ago, and found I only had to make minor adjustments.I thought I had something new to say, but rereading the last two posts I see I already said most of it. If anything has changed, it's my growing detachment from art in a gallery space. Or maybe art in any location that highlights the gulf between those who participate and those who don't.My Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-40185402632085491822021-02-28T09:04:00.000-05:002021-02-28T09:04:41.737-05:00Yesterday I inflated enough by 4.30 to grocery shop. The sun was out briefly and the spring-ish cold felt good. I also dropped a shirt at my dry cleaner, which I visit maybe twice a year. (I don't dry clean and I don't iron.) I walked in and felt like I was the owner's long-lost friend; I got and returned a very large and gleeful greeting, realizing that my appearance after a year-plus mustLiz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-49983184537657184882021-02-27T12:09:00.003-05:002021-04-06T19:06:09.917-04:00Covid LockdownIt's been almost a year since I wrote here; I just changed the copyright date from 2018 to 2021. I reread a little, including Anne Truitt's words on the aging body. Little has changed. My energy comes but mostly goes; ideas form but motivation doesn't form behind them. I have to convince myself there is a point to doing much of anything. I am keeping up with Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-61864492855427717872020-03-27T21:08:00.005-04:002020-03-27T21:09:49.806-04:00Sad SpringThis is the saddest spring I can remember. I take a walk every couple of days, and the magnolias, forsythia, daffodils, cherry and apple blossoms that have always brought a kind of life-excitement are blanketed by an all-eclipsing worry. I feel wrong, at odds with spring.Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-49897703132998040232020-03-17T09:00:00.005-04:002020-03-17T09:02:07.949-04:002020As of yesterday, all NYC schools are closed as we try to stop the spread of the coronavirus. A walk around my neighborhood was quiet. I can't go too far as my ankle is still healing from the break, but it feels good to breathe air and see first signs of spring. The empty playground at PS 152 is another matter.
I read back a little ways before starting this post, and much Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-29650952218343082522020-03-17T08:19:00.000-04:002020-03-17T08:20:40.407-04:00An unpublished draft from June 21, 2018The death spiral of our country is disorienting to my every layer and aspect. I feel this pressure on me toward numbness, paralysis - psychological and physical. It's makes shutting down a real risk.
I'm opting out of more events than usual. As I write, the opening party for Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself is under way at the Cigar Factory in Long Island City.&Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-55108839423375978392018-06-21T17:53:00.003-04:002018-06-21T17:56:02.786-04:00June 20 on June 21I looked briefly back at this blog, and it seems I'm always reading Anne Truitt. I just finished rereading Turn. I picked the right time to reread it; Truitt is in her early sixties and grappling with the changes in her body and thinking. The June 20 entry below describes my experience closely and was a relief to read. The date is even close to today's.
June 20, From Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-70113022338883966022018-06-21T17:36:00.000-04:002018-06-21T17:57:08.493-04:00
I started working with the divider cards again. It felt like a fresh chapter (paragraph might be more accurate). This was a couple of days ago. I had in mind baby swallows in the rafters of a shop ion the Nakasendo Way just a year ago. (I can hear the birds at sunset in Brooklyn. And a basketball bouncing. The light is spectacular where I sit.)
I should Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-19038844758138834052018-06-04T08:53:00.000-04:002018-06-21T17:41:18.427-04:00I Think I'll StayI concluded, yesterday, that this blog couldn't continue, because it can't hold what I need to say. That I need a new platform ... Tumblr? ... to underscore the difference. What difference? I just reread a long string of posts; nothing is so different other than I'm 61 now and all the anxieties I registered - about aging and the state of the country and world and making art - Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-4611839438042611902018-01-09T19:39:00.001-05:002018-06-21T17:41:18.435-04:00My Bodega
My bodega is the Glenwood Deli, open 24 hours except when closed. It is immaculate and run by nice, friendly men. They know I am all about peanut butter m&ms. (They were out of stock today.)
For the last few months, the bodega has hosted an older man who sits on a stool beside the freezer and monitors activity. He wears sunglasses and a hat, and his accent Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-2196660706334420602018-01-07T16:48:00.003-05:002018-06-21T17:41:18.431-04:00Turning Over a New Blog Leaf for the New Year?This blog might be the most underused tool in my social media kit. Seven months have passed! Each time I think to write here (at least weekly), I somehow sidestep or dismiss it as "not the best use of my time." I'm undervaluing the effort it takes for me to put words here - and the edge that effort adds. There is value in the work it takes me to articulate the private for Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-54518849416423677242017-05-29T21:29:00.003-04:002018-01-07T17:05:53.483-05:00No Words.I write from Kyoto to report that this personal revolution will not be blogged; I told some people it might be. Words are my currency from August to May.
My first impression upon deplaning in Tokyo was utter silence. Yes, in the airport. After the cacophony of JFK, it was glorious. So while I walked down the JFK ramp weeping because I was afraid to leave (in a Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-36673364813238013762017-05-28T20:33:00.000-04:002017-10-21T20:36:31.379-04:00Transition.Leaving the plane in Tokyo, utter silence. Occasional whispered instructions to watch my step on the moving sidewalks. Signage in English as well, thank the stars. A quiet wait for luggage, a prompt shuttle to my immaculate hotel, a tiny perfect room.
The flight: Long. Really long. Fidgety. Anxious. However: two snacks and three meals, silverwareLiz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-8277406027389795482017-05-20T21:03:00.001-04:002017-05-20T21:03:21.355-04:00Reset.I'm leaving for Japan in less than a week, and badly badly want the adventure to be a whole-body-and-mind-and-soul reset. Something has to give. I need the culture jolt to yank me out of the fog of world affairs and US politics I have been in for months. I'm self-medicating with news, anxious, and relieved when some excitement pokes through the haze.
This place called "Japan" Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-21015643871329739432017-04-20T09:37:00.000-04:002017-05-14T13:01:02.635-04:00Scale Shifts.The Internet has opened life in countless ways, while closing it off in others and virtually ruining it with the 2016 election and all the meanness, selfishness, and ignorance made public during and since. I have moments of wishing it had never opened. I also see it - this blog and my Web site especially - as the site of the memoir I am unlikely otherwise to write. It is a Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-41289205136970604372017-04-07T08:00:00.003-04:002018-01-07T16:52:05.112-05:00Anticipatory Grief.Leading up to Big Emotional Events, I'm full-on anxious and a tad obsessive; on FB, I described myself as "howling" in the days leading up to my sixtieth birthday. I also knew that I would be back to (ab)normal on the actual date and thereafter, and I was and am. There is a history to this.
In 1975 my father had a massive heart attack; he was forty-six; I was a sophomore at the University Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-88386345596878528242017-03-30T09:26:00.002-04:002017-04-20T09:39:53.388-04:00Sixty.I am sixty years old today. It's 8.20 am as I begin writing - something I have been longing to do for awhile but unwilling to take the time for from something else, whether the priority of my studio, the obligations of my day job (endless grading and prepping), or my own tendency to slip in front of my own way and stop me. Already today, I have wept for my parents, neither of whom Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-52417606733307543062016-11-06T09:18:00.003-05:002018-01-07T16:52:21.424-05:00Almost another year has passed since writing, and I just ordered Journal of a Solitude ... how interesting, inevitable, and agonizing to reread from a year ago and see that my questions and struggles are pretty much as I left them.
What is shifting - by forceful intention - is my attitude toward my instinct for solitude and meaning-making. It isn't a weakness or flaw or source of Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-40857064269180880692015-11-29T11:17:00.003-05:002015-11-29T11:17:33.610-05:00How nice to be drawn back to this blog after so long. Just watching myself choose where to put myself in writing - one of my journals, personal e-mail, Facebook, my Web site - is interesting. Why am I choosing to give such access to myself today? A question for our times: countering feelings of invisibility, inaudibility, irrelevance, impossibility. And isn't it as Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-87388495936600435112015-02-20T15:15:00.001-05:002016-10-09T14:10:57.970-04:00I think of writing here almost daily, lately. Four draft posts sit; the starts were so directionless I abandoned each. I've been thinking about the places and ways I write, and I don't know where this blog fits, or if it does fit anymore.
I like writing in my notebooks, wcould I likands, so I can flip hysical act oback hether quick notes . They're a jouhere are no Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-70783197284863543682014-11-24T22:06:00.000-05:002015-08-05T17:37:56.111-04:00
I just carried my parents' old wing chair from the foyer into the
bedroom, which involves a couple of turns that I maneuvered in a new way; whatever the old way was was no longer a physical possibility for me. I got the chair where I wanted, but realize that to think of it in terms of being out of shape or tired is
to think of it as passing, changeable. It isn’t. That’s my Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-34198766870794555482014-08-02T09:22:00.002-04:002014-08-02T09:22:51.044-04:00Moving the studio home, my attitude has ranged from true excitement (at being able to grow things for my work, since I'm here to water) to disappointment that I'm "back" (oy, the judgment in that word) in this situation and anxiety about getting my work off the ground (interesting word choice; climb a sprout?).
The word "mindfulness" has become trite, but the concept and necessity are timeless.&Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-88055010784735117012014-07-25T10:16:00.007-04:002014-07-25T10:18:52.265-04:00It dawns on me that I've not felt fully settled in NYC since returning in 2004. No wonder I look around my apartment and see nests: found nests, made nests, suggestions of nests.
The loft was always a transient space; the trauma of that mass eviction (2007) still affects me. Judy and her third floor in NJ were the net that caught me and helped me keep sanity, momentum, and Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-3484056394559081252014-07-06T18:16:00.002-04:002014-11-25T07:03:00.656-05:00
Today was my first full day of studio work in months. And it’s new work.
An artist posted a query on Facebook about facing the blank
canvas, inviting others’ thoughts.
Reading responses (and not being a painter), I felt a bit alone in my
battle to even get myself to the studio.
I don’t mean the practical battle of time but the amorphous, tricky
battle of me. I want to Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-678866380482800217.post-3718624655306746072014-07-02T20:38:00.002-04:002014-07-25T10:23:28.713-04:00
Written
on the return flight Monday, June 30 (and toyed with ever since):
I’m at
35,000 feet as I write, mercifully that height and about three hours away from
closing my responsibility for the eight students still with me. One was dismissed, two left early to attend to
family matters, and one is continuing in Europe. I love Paris; I dislike the role of trip
leader.
Liz Sweibelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01192587387237217996noreply@blogger.com0