I've spent time in Prospect Park the last two days, and there was much to take in.  After my run yesterday I stopped by the lake to watch this swan - a really big one being really territorial.  He was bullying away all the ducks in his vicinity, run-paddling through the water to disperse them.  I didn't know a swan could move so fast.  Once he had cleared his space, he started a major housekeeping project.  It was absolutely a performance.  Any duck that got too close he'd chase off.  He started to move toward shore.  When he got in water shallow enough to stand, he started the next phase of cleaning, facing his human audience.  Out of nowhere, this little duck paddled up behind him and bit his ass and paddled away.  Hooray for the little guy.

Today held multiple events.  First, I fell again.  I looked away for a nanosecond and went down.  I was on the dirt path, since it's better for me to run off the pavement in terms of the pounding.  (I won't make the obvious joke.)  I took the brunt of the fall on my palms and really bruised my left hand, which was still bruised from last time.  I was upset, though of course kept going, covered in a fine Brooklyn dust.  My hand is going to hurt for weeks; it's swollen and tight and tender.

I parked myself by the lake afterward for a long, long time.  And it dawned on me:  This practice - of sitting by the water by myself for long periods, just watching and thinking - has been life-long.  In elementary school I'd ride my bike to the town dock with my fishing pole.  I didn't use bait or intend to catch anything, so the pole was a prop to make people think I had a practical purpose and wasn't just a young girl who preferred solitude.  I spent a lot of time at the duck pond by myself too.  These memories reinforce the Governor's Island residency, which feels very vulnerable to want so much.  I'll know within a month.

There's horseback riding at the park.  The horses are nice to see and seem well cared for, unlike the heart-breaking beasts pulling the carriages in Central Park.  As a string of horses walked by, one beautiful brown animal suddenly laid down (its rider slithered off gracefully considering) and started rolling around on its back in the dirt.  Amazing.  This giant animal, saddle and all, was just rocking out in the dirt.  He stood up, his rider remounted, and off they went.  Wonderful.

There's more!  Late afternoon must be swan bathing time.  A family of parents and four signets were floating close by each other, each busy with its own cleaning.  Each also had one leg somehow flipped over its back.  The flipper looked affixed to the swan at a ridiculous angle, at odds with the bird's grace.  That each swan was in the same awkward position floating close to the others made for a strange landscape.

Time to ice my hands.  I'm upset about the fall.  The last one was July 28, exactly a month ago.  Odd.

One Step, Then the Next. Repeat.

I finished my full-time job Friday.  While I was more than ready, having been planning my departure since spring, it was surreal and not the purely celebratory moment I envisioned.  I have unfinished business there, so that fuels some fuzziness in my departure, and perhaps that made it slower for me to realize I'm out.  Walking away my last day, I purposefully went straight across town - to exit the barren neighborhood of the college toward areas that remind me why I live in New York and toward where I now happily adjunct.

Yesterday, I began experiencing not going there.  It's a huge relief, yet I've always struggled with transitions.  Little of my time is structured now; I teach three mornings a week and have the rest for prepping and grading, writing/editing jobs, and reinvigorating my studio practice.  My financial anxiety is high.

I did submit a proposal to "Day Job" at the Drawing Center, the result of an eleventh-hour decision to either come up with an idea that resonated or not submit (unacceptable).  The collage-based ideas were dull and rote and forced.  Maybe I needed to be done with my job to free me up, as the better idea came (the day the proposal was due, of course).  It is as good as I could produce, and I overhauled my Artist Registry portfolio since that's what the Selection Committee will be using to see work.  It's hard, knowing what a long shot these things are, but it's no shot at all if I don't submit.

What I'm finding is that I need to cork the self-chatter that would have me wing it in my unstructured time.  I need to have clear objectives for each day and then not argue with myself or let myself off the hook.  I'm also planning to do much of my schoolwork at LIM so less comes home, especially grading.  I'll be more efficient there, and home will be clearer.  I'm grateful that LIM, unlike many or most colleges, welcomes its adjuncts and provides nice workspace and a good, friendly environment.

Beginners Mind

As I ease out of my full-time job (one week to go), I'm seeing with more clarity (and pain) how silenced I am in my work; it set in with the loss of my loft in October 2007 then took deep hold starting in 2008.  I'm starting to see that the worst thing I can do is go into my studio and try to "pick up where I left off."  I did that last week, and while I felt some success in the bare fact of working, I was sidestepping how inconsequential my work has come to feel.  My attempts to maneuver the collages into a proposal for "Day Job" are forced and futile.

Better to stay out of the studio.  Better to create conditions that will help me open up.  I don't know what they are (and barely what they aren't), but think one place to begin is to ask myself some very hard questions and be unsatisfied with every answer that doesn't make me cry.  Another is to acknowledge what gets me going, since I'm so shut down that whatever does must be very important.  I think starting with the latter will help with the former.

1. In a single museum visit, Anne Truitt first saw the work of Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, and one other artist she could not remember.  In a kind of epiphany, she realized she didn't need to work in the service of materials but rather could make whatever she wanted.  Her breakthrough piece, First, came soon after and set the course of her work for the rest of her life.
2. In the Art:21 episode on Doris Salcedo, a studio assistant told of one day when they heard gunshots outside the studio in Bogota.  They were working on Unland: The Orphan's Tunic, weaving strands of human hair into cloth and table.  He said something like, "What can you do but drill millions of tiny holes?"  The only response to violence is to dig deeper into what we can do to protest it, even if it's the accumulation of a zillion seemingly tiny acts.  Salcedo's work - what she can do - gives the victims and survivors a voice.
3. Douglas Weathersby used a small project he did in my Boston studio to make photographs, which I never forgot.  Even his invoice was special.  He integrates his life and work, and achieves a kind of intimacy and universality where the risk is pettiness or grandiosity.  Alethea Norene, an artist I learned about this week, strikes a similar chord.  So does Nina Katchadourian.

I'm going to leave it at that for now.  Three is a good number.  I meditated this morning.  I'm going running this afternoon and will think about (1) making whatever I want that (2) does what I can do about what's most important to me and (3) seeks integrating my day-to-day into the doing.  Being back into regular running is a big help these days.

Size ... Scale

I've been in the studio all day working with "Day Job" ideas.  I fall into illustrative mode when I'm out of my practice or pushing myself to explore a set theme, and the work tends to be immature and heavy-handed.  But I worked solidly, and since it is the first time in many weeks and has left me with things to think about, I am satisfied.

The experience of my full-time job is a potent mix, from the thrill of seeing students progress to anguish over my sense of complicity with my employer to astonishment at the thinking and behavior within the organization.  When I try to net it out, the job has made me and my efforts and abilities feel small and futile against the dysfunction in the college and the larger cultures in which it operates.  My idealism has taken a beating; I'm disillusioned, angry, and deflated.

So what does that look like?  I'm spring-boarding off my series of collages, thinking about size and scale.  A clear distinction was put in front of me recently:  size is absolute and scale is relative.  The architecture of the collages is interior and is not a scaled-down version of the world but a to-size portrait of my interior life.  The size matches my body, and the viewer's, which is how they are intimate.

Their exploration of scale is another matter; scale shifts ask the viewer to look more carefully.  They deliver nuance, surprises that complicate the perspective.  So if the collages' small size is one way to call for a viewer's attention, scale shifts are another.

My full-time job has shrunk me as a person, made me feel less powerful and able and less good about my potential to have an impact.  It's also produced a scale shift; I experience the poverty and pain in the world as much, much huger than before.  I feel utterly tiny beside it.  This is not my employer's doing, though; I've been exposed to new people and cultures, and that could have happened in any number of environments.

A Chink

The Drawing Center released an open call to Viewing Program artists for an exhibit titled "Day Job."  I began writing last night and in 20 minutes produced a lucid explanation of my situation from a perspective I'd not been conscious of:  essentially, that while the theme of my work has always been care, relationship, and paying attention, my day job has shown me the stronghold that abuse and exploitation can have within and between communities and individuals.  And not just shown me, but inserted me into.

My work feels puny in its shadow.  No wonder I feel so lost; no wonder whatever I do feels so futile; no wonder my work feels irrelevant in relation to my art heroes.  The need to leave my job in order to continue working has been a much bigger force than I knew.  And now that I am leaving, I can't just pick up where I left off, because its puniness is exposed.  The "Day Job" proposal comes at a synchronous time (it's even due August 23, the Monday after I leave); it's having me understand and confront this sooner than later.

It's also tapping my sense of being under-ambitious in my work, a sense that predates and stands apart from my day job.  In Prospect, Anne Truitt writes, "I remember a life-or-death feeling that security lay only in independence.  And I remember grief, grief that the cost of independence was an unspeakable loneliness."  Independence was essential in my growing-up too, and I've never learned to take on anything that was bigger than what I could do myself.  It could well be that my growth now hinges on my willingness to challenge this, and in the instant of writing this I feel myself grieving my ways of working, instantly forgetting that I don't have to give them up but do have to question and expand them.  I've grown too comfortable, which is grating given how uncomfortable I am.

Easier Said Than Done

The studio is excruciating when it's been dormant, or nearly so, and when I've gone through so much time and so many changes since really engaging that I don't know what I make any more.

I worked with paper today, then wire, watching myself struggle to construct something that stands up or is coherent out of small, undefined bits.  It's the same struggle I'm having outside the studio, in my working life, made worse by my concern that I won't get ahead of myself in the studio to help with the risks I'm taking outside it.

The real need now is to open my work up to whatever it needs to be.  Isn't that what I'm making all these changes for?  When I think of my art heroes, a miles-wide chasm opens between what I do and the work I most respect.  I feel like a little girl looking at the grown-ups and wanting something, but not sure what it is for me or how to go about finding out, let alone how to get it.  This is a hard, hard, painful thing to feel at my age - the logical result of how I've lived, but that's small comfort.  What is a comfort is writing.  Or is it a distraction?

Now that the shock's worn off from yesterday's fall and I've taken stock of all the places that are scraped or hurting, I see I'm lucky I didn't seriously injure or break anything.  I plan to go running again tomorrow - to get back on the horse.  Same with the studio.  I'm very agitated.

In My Head, Gardening

I'm very much in my head.  The upside is my head is a better place to be, as I'm getting excited about the next phase:  more art, more teaching, more flexibility over my time.  When I was waiting to give notice and lagging, my wise friend Alicia promised I'd get my energy back once I leave.  Just giving notice has helped.  I've been going running more, which energizes me, so the momentum is positive.  I have the next four days off and will be able to move into the studio.

There's a lovely small house that I pine for when I run.  It's architecturally out of place, but quietly so.  (I empathize.)  The front yard has an ivy cover, and a garden along the facade.  I was imagining what I would do with that garden - English-style, with lilies and ... - when I hit the pavement.  I was down before I knew I was falling.  I saw my bruised shoulder right away but didn't notice my bleeding knuckles until a half mile or so down the road.

Why the photos?  They seem an apt juxtaposition to my roller-skating days.

It's strange to fall as a grown-up.  I fell twice before in the last couple of years.  One was also while running (though on a path in Prospect Park); the other was while walking along the street at night and missing a cliff in the sidewalk.  I had to chase rolling cans of cat food and collect my asparagus.

At 53, I can still bounce up from a spill and keep running.  It's reassuring given the changes ahead.

Transitioning

I started a post a few days ago but wasn't able to find the right tone, or the many right tones.  My connection to my self is fragile and I'm quickly overwhelmed.  I resigned my full-time job.  On August 20 I return to independent worker status.  I've got a nice line-up of fall classes to teach at LIM College and a book to edit, but need to be in marketing mode 24/7 to get this new life off the ground - and keep it aloft.

My reasons for leaving my full-time job are complex but boil down to making space for my artwork to grow into and the impossibility of continuing to work for my employer.  I adore the students but have come to feel complicit with practices I can't abide.  The leaving is bittersweet; some colleagues and many students have touched me.  I'd like to write about some of the students but feel tentative.  Their lives are very different from mine, and writing from where we've connected seems to risk romanticizing them, and that is at best unfair.

On Fire Island

Queens Boulevard, Forest Hills, 7.15.2010

Sally invited me to her family’s Fire Island beach cottage last weekend, one of the best invitations ever.  The stress goes out as soon as I board the ferry and the nostalgia comes in, like a tide.

I took the LIRR to Bay Shore Thursday night so I could wake up on the island.  (The photos are from my trip.)  The station names echoed - Jamaica, Freeport, Lynbrook.  Friday morning over coffee, I started talking about my parents’ deaths, sad narratives I hadn’t spoken in a long time.

That night I dreamed I was running from a string of violent crimes I’d committed.  I was running with someone; I don't know if it was a man or woman, only that I was at risk of getting caught having done harm.  I'd grotesquely reduced one victim to a balloon animal.

Platform, Jamaica Station, LIRR, 7.15.2010

Marquez on Time

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes "...and then they understood that Jose Arcadio Buendia was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room."  This is an incredibly beautiful and poignant sentence.

I'm getting emotionally overwhelmed, between opening wide to memory to write my LMCC proposal and upcoming changes in my immediate family (chosen and of origin) and work life.  My wonderful cat Riley's death was a year ago Saturday, and that's with me as well.  Everything just feels so sensitive.

Braving Want

I'm finished with Turn, and as much as Anne Truitt's way and work move and inspire me, we don't live in the same (art) world or time.  If I want my work to be visible, I have to market it - hard.  Her fortunate early meetings with Kenneth Noland, David Smith, Clement Greenberg, and Andre Emmerich laid the foundation for her career; even the way she writes about these introductions, casually, is to visit a different universe.  But her marriage to James Truitt already had her traveling in rare circles, though she didn't seem to feel of them, and so perhaps other rare circles would seem equally "normal."

I'm working on an application to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for a Swing Space residency on Governor's Island.  I want this so much, and am making my want public.  This residency is perfect for me - the island locale, the ferry commute, the studio space, the work hours available and expected, and the fit with my work and the life I'm maneuvering toward.

The trick is it's project-based; I'm oriented to process.  So I'm taking that as a new challenge too:  to envision an outcome that the tools and spirit of this residency will particularly make possible.  I'm getting there, daydreaming and making notes on the subway.  The application is due July 22.

"Echoes reconcile."

Paul Chan spoke in a panel at MoMA last night about Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, which was staged in the Lower Ninth Ward in November 2007.  Other panelists were Robert Lynn Green, a life-long Lower Ninth resident, Katrina survivor (he lost his mother and granddaughter), and neighborhood ambassador for Chan's project; Greta Gladney, Executive Director of the Renaissance Project, a nonprofit committed to quality-of-life in New Orleans; and Christopher McElroen, the director.  Kathy Halbreich of MoMA moderated.

I must be relating all these facts because there's so little I can write to convey the human and humane power of their conversation.  Green's everyday eloquence (wearing socks with flip-flops with his suit), Gladney's professionalism just barely and not always holding back a well of high emotion (her family home is in the Lower Ninth), McElroen's pointed sensitivity to place and people, and Chan's profound intelligence (and humor) (and absence of ego) (and gift for articulating his thoughts) made for a bittersweet, poignant coming-together that had me holding my breath and holding back tears (not so successfully).

I've been thinking about the pull of geography, and how bird-like many of us are in our magnetic draw to a place and what it holds.  For Green and Gladney, Katrina was an unfathomable devastation of their place.

Paul Chan's statement about the project is well worth reading.  The power of art to bring awareness and compassion and to effect change doesn't get better than this.

Return to the Studio

It's been a long time since I went into my studio newly, with no work under way.  Since I begin with process and materials rather than idea, it's a matter of going in empty and hoping something will come out.  It's unnerving (at best), waiting without knowing what I'm waiting for or whether anything will come, but it's how I work.  My grad school theory instructor, Iain Kerr, introduced me to the idea of active waiting, and that's saved me from just plain waiting ever since.

I'm reading Anne Truitt's second journal, Turn; continuing to have her voice in my ear feels necessary and soothing after Daybook.  Truitt would see her sculptures whole in her mind's eye, then make them.  Executing a vision has never worked for me (as spontaneous expressiveness never worked for her).  So it's not about the studio in particular that makes Turn so valuable now, but Truitt writing about getting older, being alone, seeing changes in her body and energy, and remembering her childhood and parents.

I made some marks on small pieces of paper (most about 1 x 5") using black acrylic paint and a piece of wire.  The awkwardness of the tool made it impossible to fail (should I be foolish enough to seek success), and the marks would be something to react to.  I can't remember when I last touched raw materials, between working on the Web site and before that working digitally and before that making collages, which come about differently than my drawings.

The marks of black paint suggested a broken landscape and I began working into the gaps with graphite or colored pencil.  Each drawing has one type of mark or shape (lines, circles, squares, or x's) in one color beside the black.  I made about 15 of them, thinking and investing as little as possible.  It is remarkable how my touch, vocabulary, and concerns so insist on themselves.  These drawings are no more than the busywork of waiting, but they're still of me, and that is good and valuable reassurance at this delicate juncture.

I'm readying to recommit to my work as I haven't since losing my loft in October 2007, which was just three months after an incredibly affirming experience at Vermont Studio Center.  It is a new time for me, and I don't know what that means other than that my determination and need have become more powerful than the things that draw me away.

The Day After, Plus

The new Web site is launched; early feedback is positive.  I had a huge wave of anxiety after sending it live last night, but seem to have recovered without permanent damage.   I joined Facebook today.  I despise it.  Utterly.  It's ugly, it's cluttered, it's juvenile, there's irrelevant stuff I can't seem to make go away, and it's hard to work with.  Do I sound like a dinosaur?  Some excellent advice I received about developing my presence as an artist on the Web is to go where the people are.  The people are on Facebook and so I'm there now too, even if the earth shudders when I walk.  I'm sure I don't have my settings right yet, but I can't fool with it for another moment today.

I was not accepted into NYFA's Artist Boot Camp, but it was the nicest rejection letter ever.  So nice I responded to it.  I wrote that while I'm disappointed, I'm making my own boot camp.  With one camper.  One tenacious, passionate, determined, fed-up-with-the-status-quo camper, who is returning to studio practice now that the Web site is done.  And looking for opportunities to exhibit.

Tomorrow is Marina Abramovic's last day at MoMA.  I wonder how she feels, what this has been like for her.  What will it be like to stand up, knowing it is done?  What will she do on Tuesday?  Wednesday?  I visited last week, and the line to sit with her was halfway around the Atrium.  People were meditating, holding yoga positions, drawing her, sneaking photos.  Some looked like they were performing (yuck).  It was crowded.  Abramovic looked exactly the same as she did in March, except her dress is white instead of blue and the table is gone due to some inappropriate behavior.

A Big Anniversary

The entire month of May was very difficult for me for years, as my father spent the month in the hospital, then died on May 29.  Tomorrow will mark 30 years since that terrible month.  It's still sort of unbelievable to me, because I can summon and feel his presence and voice.  I miss him, as I was too young to be without him or to have achieved any kind of adult relationship with him, and he was too young to die.  He was 51; I am 53.  I have questions, lots of them, and the wish we had had time to overcome the emotional barricade we had up to hide our very real love and like for each other.

I've been working on my new Web site for weeks, and knew I wanted a meaningful launch date.  It was only in the last week that I realized the site is close to ready, and of course it's no accident that this anniversary was right in front of me.  So my new Web site will launch tomorrow.

My father was complicated.  He was charismatic, quick and smart, funny as hell, a late-blooming sailor, and scrappy.  He was also angry, frustrated, sensitive, and a bit rudderless.  He didn't finish college and had no career as such, but applied his inborn entrepreneurial spirit to what seemed right at the time, from the bar in Harlem to a mysterious company that made him rich, to semi-retirement in his early 40s, to some investments that drained his resources, to buying a small wire company that had nowhere to go but up, which he ran fairly happily (or so it seemed, though I'm sure he would've liked it to be more lucrative) until he died.  I've been told he felt he lost his touch after he emerged from semi-retirement, and my feeling is that he gave up in some fundamental way.

I note this because I'm a lot like him and I've run a somewhat parallel course.  While I did finish college (twice, actually, plus two master's degrees), I also earned a lot of money way before my 40s, and have been struggling financially ever since allowing my artist-self to live.  (I don't, however, have a family with four kids.  Thank GOD.)  I'm at a point where it feels like I either declare myself the artist I am and put that first or give up and be a hobbyist.  The latter is so repugnant that it's helping me overcome my fear of the former.  The new Web site is my symbolic and practical claim to my identity.  It's a gift to my father, but also a refusal.

I'd be remiss in not mentioning my mother here, since she was a gifted painter and as much an influence as my father, but her story will be for another day.

On Commerce

Why does it feel like I have to keep money and art separate?  I've been reworking my Web site for weeks, and one of my intentions is to set it up for commerce.  Even the intention feels a little shameful, like it dirties me as an artist and cheapens the work itself, as if the content and formal strength of the work spill out when I put a price on it.  I know this isn't new or just me; it's the myth that starvation and art are a productive line-up, that the baseness of money and the loftiness of art should not meet.  (Not surprisingly, I'm not a fan of Koons or Hirst.)

I've spent a lot - I mean a lot - of hours trying to tuck a little shop into a discreet corner of my site.  I've invested days trying to keep "serious" visitors from noticing that some work is for sale.  Finally, I'm seeing that all this time has been me buying into exactly the division I object to.  I've been working so hard not to offend others' sensibilities or feel like I'm selling out that I've been setting up to starve myself.  It's a one-woman drama.

How could I think it better to keep good work in a drawer than to make it available to people who might love to live with it?  Art is the start of a dialogue; without a viewer it may as well not exist.  While there's a rich history of reclusive or invisible artists - the Philadelphia Wire Man, outsiders, Joseph Cornell - wanting to move the work into the world is not intrinsically anything.  I've kept my sights narrow.  And when I grow arrogant enough to think I've learned to suspend judgment, I run smack into one, and it's always me judging me and it's always rooted in fear.

Maybe now this new site will move forward so I can get back into the studio.

Roller Skating

I wrote a week ago that my father was good with a camera, then posted photos whose value to me were as clues to where he might have worked and what his world was like before I was born yet he was married and adult (or maybe not so adult; there was something about him that never quite grew up in "normal" terms, as there is with me).

He took the photos below when I was two or three, and even though my stake is personal, I love them - for the mood and light, the movement, and the unself-consciousness, interiority, tenacity, and adventurousness I see in myself as a little girl.

I'm trying to reground myself in these qualities now. I have to, if I'm to stay true to my gifts, my needs, and my ambition. I feel like my life has come to a deciding place about what the rest is going to be. This isn't morbid thinking or high drama, but the reality that, at 53, if I don't leap I will look back and know I betrayed myself. That's not my nature, but the tug to playing it safe is real. I am single, with not much of a net, so I have only myself to rely on. We're all in that situation, single or not, but in practical terms, the bills have to be paid. The emotional risks are at least as daunting: exposing my interior life, both in my work and in going public with my ambition; not knowing what forms my work might want to take in the world; and being afraid to find out because it may be a lot to want and require me to extend myself in utterly foreign ways. Wanting, not knowing, being imperfect, and asking for help were unsafe in my family, particularly with my father, and so these fears are as essential in me as my tenacity and willingness to take risks.

It's 5.30 am and the sun is coming up over Brooklyn - stripes of brilliant coral, golden orange-yellow, and pinkish-gray; a soft, cottony edge where the sunrise meets the leaving smoky blue night sky. The birds are very chatty; their voices seem to come from everywhere and nowhere. The temperature is exactly right. This weekend is two perfect days of spring, weather not to be taken for granted in New York.

Pushing

I've been working hard to push through into my work and get more involved in art in the city.  For last night, I'd signed up for a panel on social issues in artistic practice, and rushed there after work.  I couldn't find it.  The address didn't exist, or was one of those hiding art addresses that you have to know to know. I wish it didn't bother me but it did.  I walked back and forth a little, self-conscious.  [Postscript:  When I got to work this morning, I saw my Post-It with the address on my desk, and I hadn't remembered it correctly.  But it doesn't matter.  It's the same thing.  A part of me doesn't want to go to these events and so I find a way to not go in the end.]

I seem to remain on the periphery despite my conscious pushes to engage.  I'm more comfortable here.  Once again, Anne Truitt's Daybook offered comfort this morning, when she summed up a rich passage wth, "My natural focus is interior."  Her book is a gift to me, particularly with the turbulence in me now.


So I gave up on finding the panel and climbed up to the High Line (first time!), stretched out on a lounging bench, and graded exams.  It was beautiful and felt good, but also, still, separate.  There was no winning with this one.


Earlier this week I went to see Kate Gilmore's Walk the Walk in Bryant Park.  It was 8.30 am and raining, and the women were reluctant to start.  That's understandable, but when they did they looked miserable.  I'm not sure whether Gilmore was good with that (wanting nonperformers as she did), but I wasn't.  I wanted them to be less self-involved in that way, or maybe it was fine and I was just irritated they were late starting and I had little time.  The brilliant golden-yellow of the structure didn't sit right with me.  Blood from a Stone, at the Brooklyn Museum, and Standing Here, at the Whitney Biennial, were more successful for me.

So Of Course

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It was inevitable, I suppose, that I would come across my father's photos May 4, not long after my last post, while relocating some family boxes to a less visible spot in my apartment.  (My family did not create tidy photo albums but rather left piles, shoeboxes, and slide trays of unsorted, mostly unidentified photos, which can be an adventure or an irritant depending on mood.)  The one above is one my father took near Nassau Street in 1958.  The man in front of Nedick's is my Uncle John, one of the uncles who co-owned the bar with my father.

The one below is the interior of a bar and not very good, but I expect it was the one they owned in Harlem.  Why else?

This one shows the RKO Alhambra theater, which was at 2110 Seventh Avenue (now Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.) at 126th Street.  It opened in 1905 and closed in the 1960s.  The sepia tone is unique among the photos I found that day.

This one shows Watkins Quality Products, which has been in business since 1868.  My dad's note says "144 St and 8th Ave S.E. 1958."  An Internet search didn't turn up Jack Sobel the pawnbroker.

I also opened a box of my mother's drawings that I've had since her death in 1986.  It seemed like time.  I only looked briefly as I'd had enough time travel (and cleaning) for one day and it's emotional, but they're piled on my studio table so the only way through is through.

Housekeeping

In October 2007, I lost my live-work space in Queens when the city closed the building.  I knew we were living illegally but thought the studio aspect was legal.  Not so.  Our landlord had us in dangerous circumstances.  So I came home from teaching one evening and had no home.  While some people are nomadic and others don't mind where the furniture is placed, I'm not one of them.  Home is as essential as air.  I was in shock, and the recovery - artistic, emotional, and practical - has been lengthy.


Among the 200 artists who were displaced that night, I was lucky to have a cousin, Judy, with a lovely third floor in her Montclair home.  She hosted me and my two cats for four and a half months.  My third-floor bedroom was one of those magical attic-like rooms:  flowered wallpaper, slanted ceilings, throw rugs, cozy, up in the trees.  I had always slept long and deeply in that room, as did everyone who guested there.  And the bathroom had a clawfoot tub that forced me to sit and soak.  One of my favorite photos of the late, great Riley was of her sitting in the tub and watching the water drip from the faucet.

Judy is a voracious reader.  The first book I pulled out of my bedroom bookcase was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  Since my sights were set on moving to Brooklyn, it was a nice find.  Rereading it in that nostalgic little room reminded me of my mother and father, who were born in Brooklyn in 1931 and 1928, respectively.  My father, who owned a Harlem bar with my uncles in the 1950s, was very good with a camera, and Smith's novel reminded me of his beautiful black-and-white streetscapes.  As it turned out, I did land in Brooklyn, and only learned afterward that I live between each of my parents' high schools.  Both James Madison (mom) and Erasmus Hall (dad) are a mile or so away.  We are birds.


Another book I pulled from Judy's bookshelf was Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.  The cover is beautiful and the title certainly was relevant, but the first few sentences didn't catch me at the time so I put it away.  When I pulled it out again, it was exquisite.  Every sentence.  And the relief the novel brought me, perhaps especially as an artist, was like exhaling.  Robinson's narrator, Ruthie, so delicately and lyrically observes and accepts people and events:   her mother, place, home, family history, abandonment, loss, love, the quirks of personality.  Ruthie's outsider status and absence of judgment make her an elegant observer-philosopher.



As I read, I used napkins to bookmark passages that were too rich to let go of, also knowing I'd read the book again under different circumstances.  My second reading, finished last week, prompted this post, because the novel was as moving, comforting, and illuminating the second time.

The Statement and the Wall

As content as I am to have written a statement that doesn't sound inflated or stupid, I've since realized it doesn't apply to all my work.  While that might sound like a big so what?, the realization disturbed me, as if it marks a problem with consistency or focus.  What it actually marks is a difference between my three- and two-dimensional work.  That difference, I now see, is between work that responds to the external world and work that is of my inner world.  The collages relate to my private narrative and sensibility while the sculpture is my social and political voice.  When my work lets go of the wall, it enters the world literally and metaphorically.  When it uses the wall as a support or an element, it stays home.  That form and content can so nicely align themselves without any conscious effort from me is part of the joy and miracle of being an artist.  My work knows more than I do, and it will tell me in its time if I bring myself to the process of making it with honesty and rigor, get out of the way, and have faith.

At the same time, I trust there's substantial overlap.  Writing a statement for the 2D work should bring it out, but just to take a stab at it now, I'd say that the sculpture is a public appeal that references the emotional content of the collages.  I'll leave it at that, but return to it soon.

The new Web site may be closer to completion than I thought.  I also reviewed my contribution to the upcoming issue of Ekleksographia this morning, so it's in the final stages of revision before release.  That's more incentive to get the Web site done.  Happily, I don't need it.  I'm finding myself energized and determined.  This sentence from Anne Truitt's exquisite, inspiring Daybook: Journey of an Artist ran through me like a current yesterday:  "It occurred to me that I could use the energy I had been putting into endurance to change my life."

As Promised: Accessibility

Had I revisited this question closer to my March 20 post, it would've been forced.  In the interim, I've realized that the question is moot:  my work is my work, and it's going to be this accessible no matter whether it's in a gallery or on the Web or anywhere else.  The point is to get the work out there and establish myself (not least in my own mind) as an active artist in the broadest sense - not just in the studio, but in the world of art and commerce.

So if the question is not accessibility, what is it?  It's relevance.  In a way it's the same answer - my work is my work, and those who experience it will decide whether it's relevant or not - but my urge for it to be relevant is another matter.  My doubt runs, How can a little scrap of wire or cloth or an uncurling ball of Cling Wrap be relevant?

This morning I wrote a new statement.  I started fresh rather than recycle earlier statements and wrote directly, as a person in the world rather than as an artist trying to ... whatever.  The words came easily (considering the torment this task usually involves), and they actually explain why my sculpture and video are important to me in plain terms.  By just saying it, I'm laying a path for a broader audience to find the work relevant (or not).

And I now see that this is accessibility - to offer information that demystifies my work rather than withhold it or write for an insider audience (probably the same thing).  I've resisted this.  Why?  It reminds me of graduate school, when I was so unwilling to reveal myself.  Why?  Because of the exposure, and the risk of that - of being judged, of being labeled, of being dismissed.  Evidently, I'm ready.  The new statement will launch with the new Web site.  My progress on it has been good.  To receive an announcement of the relaunch, please join my mailing list.

Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present

I took some students to see Abramovic at MoMA Sunday; it was my second visit. I'll return. I'm not ready to put words to it yet, but one of my students, Codi, sat with Abramovic in the Atrium and described it in class this morning as "transcendent." I won't dilute the intensity of Codi's description by paraphrasing it, but here she is during (above) and after (below).

The photos are courtesy of Nina Meledandri, an artist who stood on line with Codi and is blogging about her repeated visits to the performance.

I understand that the catalog for this exhibit is excellent, with an essay by Arthur Danto (who I enjoyed immensely in a conversation with Robert Storr at the 92nd Street Y some time ago) though haven't looked at it yet:  Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present.

Just a Moment

The struggle I'm having with how to develop a Web presence and sell work without giving up something that's important to me parallels the struggle I'm having with the work itself. Hmmm. How do I say this?

In my day job, I work with underprepared college students from diverse backgrounds, most underserved in some way. Some are on welfare, some live in shelters, some have done time, some are ill, some have a lot of kids and no partner. I adore them. I love working with them, love what my team gives so generously to them and all that we get back in results and gratitude.

My history, education, and character emerged from - and still largely exist in - a parallel universe. The audience for my artwork has been others in the club plus people not in the club but who live lives that would have them come upon the work at all and have the character and capacity to experience it in some way.

The students I meet who are inclined toward creative work don't know about the Museum of Modern Art, the Met, or the galleries in Chelsea. Coming from the Bronx, most don't know where Chelsea is, yet the college is just blocks away.

I've been struggling to reconcile these situations for months. I recently put together a proposal with two artists, Yoon Cho and Priscilla Stadler, and, in naming the show, was able to articulate this for the first time. We were coming up with these insider names (along the lines of the presence of absence) and I couldn't do it. I didn't want to separate myself so fully from the people I spend my days with. Priscilla works at LaGuardia Community College and knew exactly what I was saying. I needed a title anyone could understand. We went with her suggestion: Just a Moment.

To bring it back downtown: Pushing myself into the virtual community means giving up some of the elitism that I've needed to be taken seriously as an artist. Part of my need is to avoid being lumped in with Sunday painters, craftspeople, flakes, and the hipsters who call themselves artists but really just have a knack for looking like what they think one looks like. I'm equally cautious about being associated with the postmodern anything goes and the postpostmodern surge of youth worship, egomaniacal celebrity artists, and spectacle.

That my work would never put me in either category is a logic that doesn't matter; this is emotional. I've needed a certain kind of separateness for me. If I were to show up on Etsy and Facebook and even, God forbid, start tweeting, what have I conceded to? Why do I see it as conceding anything? If it's so important for me to name the show Just a Moment, what's the leap to making my work accessible? Now there's a word! I'll think on it and save it for my next post.

NYFA Workshop: Selling Art on Line

I signed up for this NYFA workshop without giving myself the luxury of defensiveness about selling work on line. I've been thinking about making a for-sale gallery of drawings and collages on my Web site, but need to find a way that matches the spirit of the site (and its owner). What I learned at this (great) workshop is that it's social media sites and larger marketplaces that can deliver visibility and traffic, and so I need to venture out into the bigger virtual world.

I have work coming out in the next issue of Ekleksographia and am starting to rework my Web site. Joining new sites where people can find my work (myartspace seems to fit) and me (Facebook, though I'm not done resisting that) is the next move in the marketing arena.

I'm showing five photos in Ekleksographia, plus a video on the cover. It's all home-based work, not the property lines photos I thought I'd include (as of my last post). The property lines don't work with the video cover, so they'll go to the Play section of my Web site.

It's all gratifying. Taking the photos is quick and casual; the work of cropping, editing, and distilling them on the Mac is where tension and particularity come into the process. It might be the most conceptual work I've done, and yet the most literal.

My artwork is active, finally, and got that way when I wasn't looking or trying too hard. Good.

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.

Acknowledgment

While my previous words are entirely and deeply accurate, and not just lately but every day, I didn't acknowledge (in true form) that in the midst of my immersion in Glenwood and lemons I did prepare a grant application for the New York Foundation of the Arts with nine videos that I'm quite happy with. And I'm eager to continue working, with video and other mediums, and appreciative of the deep need that keeps me working in some form (even when it feels like I'm not) no matter what.

Solace

Immersed as I am in the care of Glenwood the miracle kitten, I'm finding that solace - creative and personal - comes in the teensiest of gestures and observations. That entirely matches my work; I want to capture the pure, visceral joy of placing a lemon in a purple bowl on my countertop; the act and the visual result are utterly satisfying. The spirit of Alison Knowles's Make a Salad keeps occurring to me; the urge to exalt the most mundane of creative activities into Everything is persistent. Those little acts - and their accumulation - are all we have.

Mind-less

I've been pretty mind-less since June 8, when Riley's heart condition was diagnosed. From the awfulness of her last month to my sadness since her death, to the external focus of my day job, and now to the drama of little Glenwood, my emotional state has been so reactive to outside events that what's going on inside me is remote. I'm so distracted I don't even know where I am. (I tried a new subway route to work today and ended up back in Brooklyn before realizing I got on the right train in the wrong direction.) And when I do have the opportunity to sit with myself, I've been furthering the disconnect rather than risk being with myself. Not good.

I've continued to make work, but it's like talking out of the side of my mouth. That's not a comment on what I've made, but about my experience making it. It's like when someone asks what I do and I describe my jobs then say, Oh, and I'm an artist. I treat myself like an afterthought or, worse, habitually deaden myself in the very act of trying to enliven myself (ironically).

Stuck?

A friend visited some months ago and, hearing my anguish at finding a way to work in this new-ish life, said, "It's all here," referencing the place I inhabit as home and studio. Her observation was good, as it's slowly allowed me to see the potential in the minute but precise actions that ground me, that keep me from stalling out or sinking, that are a making-order-of that sets the foundation. Metaphorically, the dishes have to be washed before I work in the studio, but that brings the dish-washing and the studio into a shared space of activity.

I'm contributing to an on-line journal that'll be published in early 2010, my first invitation to show video. Wonderful timing.

The Little Videos on my Web site are like moving photos. The new photos in the Play area suggest movement as much as the videos suggest stillness. And they're not photos of anything that persists; the image on the computer is their sole existence.

Riley, November 1, 1999-July 10, 2009

Her strangely squared-off and graceful paws. The little flash of white fur at the end of her tail. Her stripes, like pajamas. The orange in her. Her tough little shoulders. Her bow legs. Her with-me-like-a-puppy-ness. Her night-time wails, carrying her little dog-doll around by the neck.

How she ran to sit between the curtain and liner while I showered. How dripping water mesmerized her. How she'd abandon breakfast and beat me to my meditation spot knowing she'd get a good rub. How she'd roll onto her back on the keyboard when she was starved for attention.

She stands in for me in my profile image, and I can't bear to change it. Rest in peace, Riley.

Michael Ashkin at The Sculpture Center

Untitled (where each new sunrise promises only the continuation of yesterday).

Untitled (where the wind carries from afar all but that for which one has yearned).

Untitled (where transcendence appears as a drone sent from afar by men with thick torsos).

Untitled (where too much significance is attached to the debris of a single airplane).

Untitled (where angry men search through the wreckage of a plane for the pieces of a pilot).

Untitled (where one is hunted in direct proportion to one's remoteness).

Untitled (where the value of life contracts as the value of territory expands).

Untitled (where one still walks tall, but feels with each step the onset of a stagger).

Untitled (where one scans the horizon with eyes that can no longer focus in the distance).

Untitled (where one waves one's stick toward the idea of an object).

Untitled (where one only sees one's object when its presence blocks all view of the horizon).

Untitled (where one tires of the same sentence expressed in its endless variations).

Untitled (where one exhausts oneself with the same idea said a thousand different ways).

Untitled (where one aims words at the sky only to immediately kick through their debris).

Untitled (where the horizon feels like walls that are slowly collapsing toward one).

Untitled (where the daily repetition of one's motions defeats even the idea of escape).

Untitled (where one believes in a silence that one cannot help but articulate).

Untitled (where one lives for the poetry for which there is no longer a vocabulary).

Untitled (where one tries to imagine the last words ever said).

Untitled (where truth reveals itself in its seeming disfigurement).

Untitled (where hiding places are many, escape only one).

2009

Recycled corrugated cardboard

76' x 6.5' x 3"

Sorting

All is cliche; I'm bored, frustrated, and disappointed - three streams of anger! No wonder all I want to do is sleep, and most of what I do when awake is berate myself.

This midlife crisis (the overarching cliche) has started its sixth year. If I have to live this thing that us aware types can be arrogant enough to think we'll sidestep, can it at least wrap up?  Can I at least bounce back to tolerable levels of dissatisfaction, despair, and self-criticism?

The studio is demoralizing.  No idea or experiment - no thought - has more than fleeting possibility. Yes, this is the "normal" cycle of the studio:  periods that feel excruciatingly nonproductive that are often periods of gestation that end with an outpouring of new work and gratitude, and leave behind a film of amnesia.

Still, this feels like a double hit - probably because of a seeping awareness that I have less time and fewer chances or choices to improve things.  It sounds morbid, particularly to friends in their 20s and 30s, and it sounded morbid to me then.  Now it's real.  My father and mother died at about my age, so the possibility that life can end well before we're done with it is not abstract.

I've been sorting through family stuff - photos, letters, childhood drawings and essays, report cards, baby clothes, passports, newspaper clippings, receipts, worthless stock certificates, recipes.  It's impossible to let go of even scraps of paper with cryptic notes when they're a way to meet my parents.  The timing is no accident, of course.  I can construe that poetically, or more ominously.  I always knew my 50s would be complicated.  I read an interview with an Irish novelist whose father died at the novelist's (middle) age, and he said he felt a kind of recognition.

Should I be making practical changes?  Or is this internal state only loosely related to my day-to-day?  Much of my frustration is wanting to do something to kickstart myself - as if one right action would unlock me - when possibly the only thing to do is not do and wait, actively.

Change Default

My default thinking is about my jobs:  constructing a final exam for my art class in my head, making a mental note to talk with my boss about staffing.  While I'm fortunate to have jobs I largely enjoy, I need to be in my work when I'm not in the studio ... to have the studio be my default.  Getting traction feels nearly impossible.  I have to start up again every damn weekend.  I'm rarely building, and the pressure of time works against random experiments and having more than one thing going on, which is how I work best.

What to do?  I'm not writing just to bemoan or observe, but to strategize.

I've been thinking of taking my own photos for the collages for awhile.  My cell phone camera is too limited for anything more serious than Flickr.  I have a good, though bulky, studio camera.  And my sculpture?  There's no motivation to make it in the studio space I have without a site to install it.  The videos on my Web site are the form it's taking.  I want to keep that going.

I need to commit to (1) carrying the camera anyway; (2) finding the discipline and reserves to work one or two nights during the week; and (3) calming the hell down about being 52 and still struggling with identity and fearing the struggle won't be productive and I'll be writing the same blog five years from now.

OK then.

Of Postcards and Birds

I wait all week for time in my studio, and this weekend is a good stretch.  As it's turning out, a good stretch to be discomforted at not knowing what to do, at seeing every move as forced and superficial, at fearing there won't be any potency and it'll be Monday again.  The collages feel stale (again).  I signed up for a postcard show to nudge myself into working bigger.  Yet a 4 x 6" field offers no entry point, whether untouched paper or a piece of architectural drawing.  It's anonymous, like there's too much space for a small gesture to have an impact, yet a larger one is false and vacuous.  It's like going to a big new city and having no idea what to do, or even what there is to do.

I've considered an accumulation of small gestures and feel ready to move back to work; I'm just without a vocabulary - though birds now come to mind, given last week's events.  And my adoration of the Brooklyn parrots that live near me.

Tiny Catharsis

Perhaps it was inevitable I'd be tested. Walking on W. 55th St. a week ago with a friend, a baby bird had fallen onto the sidewalk. Its wing was wrong and its beak was hurt, but it was a chipper little thing. We kept it from scooting into traffic by using our feet as barriers; it cuddled against them. I made a circle around it with my scarf, and it settled down. I started to cry. There was no one to help and my friend had to go, so we gently lifted it into a bag and the bird and I rode the Q train home. I watched it and wept into the bag, knowing it wasn't going to live and that the quality of its remaining time was up to me.

My car was the safest place for the night, quiet and away from my cats. I settled it in its scarf-bed, brought water, and dragged myself home. It felt awful to wish for a death, and to know anything was so alone. But I was relieved when, the next morning, I found the bird had died during the night. Sobbing, I packed it up, drove to Prospect Park, and made a little resting place in the reeds.

This feels like a miniature adjustment to my history and sense of self. Taking on this helpless little life regardless of the emotional and practical challenge felt like a turning-to. I didn't stop crying (not for days), but I stopped looking for someone to save either of us or feeling like it was more than I could take. And since then I've felt a little stronger, a little more able to manage a strike to the core. The panic that I'll witness something too awful for words will probably always haunt me, but maybe I found a little more faith that I can exceed myself.

What's the Question?

I've spent hours in the studio struggling with the collages. Nothing makes any sense, though the cutting-out-of-things with my Exacto is soothing and satisfying. (The tip, however, breaks in 3.2 seconds. My self-healing pad heals itself, but at the blade's expense. How's that for a human metaphor?) The collages come in series and have persistently exhausted themselves and resurfaced, the same but different. The architectural/domestic subject matter continues, as does the implied but absent figure; the emphasis shifts (interior/exterior, decor/space, empty/waiting).

The nature of each transition becomes visible in retrospect, with just a vague awareness during the shift. I don't look for definition but watch the question re-form. And in that, the process clarifies and another series comes. The less cerebral my activity the more convincing the outcome. The work must be transitioning now, as my frustration has the quality of a forced silence, a distance from myself that is the being-lost before a new question can form.

The gesture of collage is to make sense of disparate pieces; the decisions within that speak to the particular experience of fragmentation. Mine has included trying to reconcile my interior life with the performance I give in the world to survive (not just monetarily, but as another part of my character) ... my enjoyment of solitariness with the absence of family ... my experience of the physical and aesthetic space of New York City with my love of open landscape, of sailing, of gardening.

I've wondered whether the collages might be trying to get at the tiny surprises of city life that thrill me (an architectural detail, a kindness from a stranger, a glimpse of green or a flower). But the tension there is easy, superficial. The real counterpoint is my pervasive dread of witnessing the uncared-for (horses pulling carriages up Eighth Avenue, the dirty white cat drinking out of a puddle in the gutter of a busy street, parents crushing children with their words). I can't dwell there; it's too annihilating for me to function.

These words signal a defense, and another layer of dread. They may or may not point to where these collages head, but reveal the rawest place I know in myself: horror for those who are betrayed by the only people they have to protect them. What could leave a living being more alone, vulnerable, and trapped in pain?

Shaq O'Neal

I had a good solid six hours in the studio today. It feels meaningless for the first two or so hours, like every choice I might make is guided more by my good eye than any rigorous question. My impulse is to stop work since I feel like a lightweight, but this is how it works. I have to stay, or act like a lightweight and start my week at a deficit. If one gesture resonates, I'm through - and if not, at least I stayed. I get so little time to work, with a week between, and that loss of momentum.

I got through, with extra turbulence because what was fueling the collages now feels known. To keep with that would be to act like a lightweight without leaving - that awful gray mushy space of biding time.

I've been told that the things in the periphery of my studio can be more interesting than where I'm focused. In grad school, in an act of unbridled frustration, I dumped out my trash and installed it. William Pope L. paid a studio visit and, after looking at my work, moved to my garbage. "You know who Shaq O'Neal is?" "Sure, why?" "Because he's not the greatest natural player but he's learned to play to his strengths, and that's made him great." Got it.

One collage was different, and I allowed its rhythm to infiltrate the rest. It's a tiny architectural landscape, all exterior.

Attitude Adjustment

I've felt weird about my last post for a couple of weeks - so whiny! - and was tempted to delete it. But I won't allow myself, as it seems dishonest to edit my less shining moments out of this history. Plus, I finally got so sick of myself wallowing in my petty complaints that I decided to push out and get on with things. I've felt better ever since.

My emotional make-up and history have made depression the default position. Many days have to start with me reminding myself, point by point, that things are pretty good (especially considering the horrors this economy is wreaking on less fortunate people). I'm not a negative person, but can get stuck in a down position until I do a reality check.

Positive developments: It is officially a habit to make few if any plans over the weekend so I can work in my studio. The collages have become consuming. They pick up where the Interior series left off: tiny and architectural, but different. Some are less interior; the spaces are more ambiguous and suggestive than realized. The structure is edited to the minimum then layered over a rendering or floor plan. Others are tinier than ever, with dense layers and juxtapositions of walls and windows. I work wherever my attention goes for as long as its held. These collages take a long time, and many visits.

I'm stopping myself when I feel the worry about all that I'm not doing moving in: sending out packages, scanning, making videos, updating my Web site, adding to flickr. It is a poison in my system to feel I'm never doing enough or doing enough right, and I have to be vigilant. Working is working, and I'm working.

Is This It?

Today marks one year since I moved into my home. I promised myself I wouldn't let this milestone pass without painting the inside of the last closet, which I did. I only wish that the many other promises I make to myself - or wishes I hold for myself - were getting the same attention.

I start each day fresh, with hopes and intentions to end it with a sense of self, accomplishment, optimism. Yet, one after the other, days end in frustration, sadness, disappointment. It's unlike me. I've been tenacious - relentless, even - in trying to make things better, and have made things much better over many years. Now I feel like I'm giving up and can't stop the slide. Is this what midlife looks like? Do I want too much and lack gratitude for what I have? Do I need to return to the basics to reconnect with my own drive? Yes. Maybe. Yes.

So what are these basics? One is meditation. I'm sitting again; it's hard. I can't seem to land in the present even during practice, let alone the rest of my time. Another is exercise. With spring coming that becomes more possible. The third is the studio. I'm more engaged, and want it active whatever I'm doing. As I write, I see the seeds are here. I also know they've been here for awhile (a year?), but haven't yet taken root.

What's in the way? What's on the other side of what's in the way that is so frightening?

Flags?

At last, a substantial and productive studio day. Nothing is more satisfying and unsettling - both, inseparably both, as that's the only way for it to leave the studio with me as I go into the week.

I worked on new collages, "after" the 2007 Interior series in that they're architectural and tiny, but they're in another key. A new video is on my site too. It's good not to be precious with these "kinetic photographs" but to make, edit, and launch 'em. Like flags. Flags?