Since mid-July I have remained day-to-day connected to fragments of our own (with the exception of last week, the close of summer semester).  It's not about making things as much as about writing, thinking, daydreaming, running, walking, researching.  Most days come with a little breakthrough or two, as if the source of this work is undergoing (or undertaking) a stripping-away process that is subterranean for me, only making itself visible with conclusions.  Some may not make it to the installation, but they are conclusions when they are delivered.

I've felt low and worried the last day-plus, agitated and sad, overly tired.  I reflexively struggle against that - What's wrong with me? - as if any inner rumblings are the beginning of some kind of end.  Today those layers of emotion appeared in the work as if cleanly, exactly as I realized that the installation was at risk of becoming one-note.  So the internal shift was necessary, both to move the work and to recalibrate my expectations and wishes of life (and of myself).  These tiny openings snap shut quickly if I'm not hypervigilant, and always return to their starting position eventually, as emotional habits do.

I'm on vacation - started yesterday and go through Thursday - and trying to pepper studio time with not-the-usual things.  I walked the Park Slope flea market after the studio today, then sat in the open window of a Windsor Terrace pub-for-cool-ish-people and read the Sunday Times over niche beer, watching people in the street and intermittently making notes for the exhibit.  It's layers and layers and more layers.   Tangents.  It all just seems to make a return to this work.  So much of it will happen during installation in the gallery; I have to stay calm about that and remember that this is what I do; so much of it is trusting myself when that is precisely what it's taking me a lifetime to learn to do.

The work on the upcoming NurtureArt exhibit, titled fragments of our own, is coming along.  I'm surprised how much of the process is subterranean; I'm not making a lot, but a lot of ideas are surfacing that show the work is at work.

Moments ago, I was sorting through a random iPhoto collection that's long been awaiting sorting, and came across pictures I took at the Brooklyn College turtle pond in May.  They anticipate the floor drawings I started two or three weeks ago.  Below is one of each.

Turtle Pond at Brooklyn College, May 2013

Study #5, July 2013
Graphite on vellum; about 6.5 x 6"

This summer has seemed intent on thwarting my needs and hopes for it, though it has delivered a lot of lessons about myself and is - I hope - poised to improve.

Last November I booked a flight to San Francisco for vacation; I would stay in the Berkeley area with Robert, my brother and friend.  The pressures of the interim months made it hard to envision any type of break.  Once the NURTUREart exhibit came through I saw it as a retreat:  to ponder the show and catalog, to spend time alone in the Marin landscape, and to play with my brother, who would be working much of my visit but also taking time off.  I wanted to sail and hike and meditate and be quiet, punctuated by good food and good talk with my brother.

Between November and my departure, Robert's son moved home and another brother announced that he and his family would be joining us for July 4 from LA, overlapping the last three days of my stay.  My vacation had morphed into a family vacation.  I have a great family, but everyone sane knows that "family" and "vacation" are a risky match.  It wasn't that I didn't want to see them, it's that I wanted to see myself.  Unfortunately, less of that happened than I planned and needed.

Waiting for a taxi at JFK on my way home, I learned that the Asiana crash occurred 30 minutes after I took off.

Once home, I greeted Grace then went to see Glenwood.  The two were separated, as Glenwood had been struggling with an infection.  She was paralyzed: stretched out on the floor, eyes wide open and staring, utterly still.  I was at the kitty ER within an hour.  Glenwood spent two nights in the hospital, came home, had 24 hours of good improvement, then declined.  She passed away July 11.  It will be a week tomorrow, and I am just coming out of the haze of shock, grief, and emotional exhaustion.

So while I didn't keep myself company as I imagined, I did get to see myself in old and new lights.  For the old, there was some anticipatory acting out about family; I got all anxious about my boundaries and having my needs go unmet.  It's stunning how fast the regression happens; it's utterly reflexive.  It's also reinforced because everyone regresses.  For the new, in having to deal with the neighbor who cared for my cats in my absence and witnessed the worst of all outcomes, I saw the kind of person I have become.

Rest in peace, Glenwood.

Glenwood

June 1-ish, 2009, to July 11, 2013

A  weekend I thought would be in the studio and in the company of friends has become mired in a despair that has more layers than I can sort through while in it.  I am in a coffee shop, chased from home by the grinding noise of a garbage truck emptying the contents of my building's basement apartment, occupied until yesterday by our ex-superintendent and now abandoned.

He hoarded and also left behind a dog, two cats, and six kittens, roaming the basement hall.  I dealt with animal patrol in tears.  One Board colleague seems surprised and perhaps put off by how emotional I am about this.  I am reminded of my father labeling me "hypersensitive," and a therapist asking me what that even meant and I didn't know.  I still don't, but still feel vulnerable to criticism that I "feel too much."  In the meantime, I am paralyzed to do anything other than sort and re-sort my upset about how a human being can come to the place this man did and what will happen to him and his animals and how to ward off feeling criticized, patronized, and self-conscious for having and showing emotion about it.

Abandoned Belongings

During the semesters I pine and struggle for time.  When I have it, I do battle with myself.  I'm working at home for a couple of weeks.  (Heather is in heavy-duty gluing mode preparing for Crush at MOCA Jacksonville.)  I kind of welcomed it - thinking it might make things easier right now - but the first day reminded me why I have - and love - my studio.  Extreme measures must be taken against cats, for one, and damage happens anyway.  How is it cats always know where you don't want them to go and go straight there?

It's a roller-coaster - my moods, energy, ability to focus, entire life view.  I returned to meditation; it's brutal to get it going again.  I want what it does for me but don't want to do it; my distaste for that attitude is often what gets me to sit.  I'm running pretty consistently, so that's good.

The September installation is the primary studio focus:  research, writing, collapse, nap, breakthrough, relief.  And repeat.  Yesterday's breakthrough is below.  It literally took all day.  Even as I know that I needed the day to produce it, exactly as the day went, I keep myself on the hook.  Could I be any whinier?

Wood, paint
1" x 1/8" x less than 1/8"

My formal starting point, along with the wood sculptures, is the gallery floor.  In researching the building and its times, a network of historical reference points - personal, cultural, and architectural - is taking shape.  I have some understanding of the personal content, less understanding elsewhere.  I can feel how this work can - and needs to be - multidirectional and layered but can't yet articulate it.

NURTUREart Gallery Floor

My latex arrived yesterday and the new label - more craft-y looking than the serious MOLD BUILDER statement I was searching for - was ubiquitous in my searches.  Who knew?

In my studio visit with Maysey in March, talk of the Japan drawings prompted me to pull out my mother's pastels.  I have had them since her death in 1986, years before art school was even a thought.  In layers of synchronicity, my dear friend Ellen Eagle just published Pastel Painting Atelier.  Her mother's name is Roz; my mother was called Patty from birth (she was born on St. Patrick's Day), but her real name was Roslyn.  (She did not broadcast that.)  When I showed these photos to my cousin Judy (our mothers were sisters), she said they remind her of a Japanese sand and stone garden (karesansui, or dry landscape).  So much seems to be pointing to Japan.  It's a little unnerving as it is starting to feel like a responsibility.  To whom?

Mom's Pastels

Mom's Lines

I'm off to the studio.  One semester is done and the next starts Tuesday and there is a whole lot of family this weekend, but I will be there daily for as much time as I can.  Woo hoo.

This is the only latex I have ever loved, and I haven't been able to find it for close to a decade because all I could remember was the look and color of the label.  My interests had also turned elsewhere in terms of materials, so it wasn't a decade of high-drama searching, just sporadic efforts.  Today, a google search of images turned it up on artsuppliesonline.com, apparently the only art-supply store in the galaxy to carry it.

Recent purchases of plaster and wire also suggest that materials that I've not used in a long time are coming forward.  Now if I could only get to the studio.  I haven't worked in earnest in about three weeks; there's too much else at the end of the semester, and I am wiped out.  All my studio time is spent sleeping or, because Glenwood is sick again, driving past the studio to the vet, as I will be in a couple of hours.

Untitled (Aomori, 3/11), 2013
Thread, vellum
9 x 12"

Untitled (Aomori, 3/11) was accepted into "How Simple Can You Get?"  The exhibit will be at Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven, from June 28 to July 26.  While I'm loathe to pay an entry fee for exhibit opportunities, CAW is a non-profit and the juror is Robert Storr. Exceptions must be made.

I've not been to the studio for two weeks.  With the end of the semester, family in town, and an urgent vet visit with Glenwood, it's been out of reach.  But ideas for the Japan drawings as well as the NURTUREart exhibit are percolating, and I'm headed there today.

The floor at NURTUREart is my point of departure; it relates to the wood pieces that exist and the direction they are headed.  Interestingly, that floor echoes photos I took in Memphis before "Parts to the Whole."  I have an appointment to visit NURTUREart on May 21, when the gallery will be empty and I can soak up and map the space.

NURTUREart Gallery Floor

Main Street, Memphis

Main Street, Memphis

Untitled (Kesennuma City, 3/11), 2013
Thread, vellum
12" x 9"

The lovely Memphis couple who purchased Untitled (Sendai Port, 3/11) just purchased Kesannuma City.  With the strong response to this work, this series seems to be tapping something Out There.  I'm partially baffled at the work's strong pull, not so much on others but on me.  On Friday afternoons, determined to finish my work for the week, I instead sleep for hours if I get anywhere near a couch.  I just woke up and found a collection of Japan-related thoughts in my head.

My father did business in Japan in the early 1960s, traveling there frequently for weeks at a time (much to my mother's ambivalence with four small children).  He died long before I had an adult's curiosity about what he did there, but those trips are connected in my mind to "grow juice," a potion in an umarked plastic container that made our plants grow at an alarming rate; a storefront called Golf-a-Tron, which was an early version of indoor golf; a Humber, a British car that was shaped like a yellow cab (in black, with a red leather interior and burled walnut dash and little tables that pulled down from the front seats to cater to those sitting in the back, like on a plane) and christened Becky by my mother; and then a bigger house, Mercedes, and sailboat with assorted support boats.  He brought me a kimono and the accompanying gear for a complete outfit.

During those years I got caught up in a wave at the Silver Point Beach Club in Atlantic Beach; I didn't even know it still existed until I just googled it.  My family rented a small cabana there for several summers, and there I had my first adolescent crush, on Everett the Cabana Boy.  He kindly let me visit him 983 times a day without ever making me feel like a pest.  I remember my mother suggesting I leave him in peace, but he insisted he didn't mind.  In any case, I got caught in a wave and distinctly remember the world no longer having an up or down, seeing sea water whorling in all directions, and not being able to breathe.  It spit me out before I got into real trouble, and no one even knew, but the physical memory of being in the wave remains strong and unsettling.

I have thousands of frequent flier miles from a previous life of business travel, as Continental's club never had them expire.  Now that United ate Continental, a recent statement noted that my miles will expire in August 2014 and that I have enough to go to Japan.  I have started researching residencies there for next summer.

When my eyes opened this afternoon, these thoughts (except the frequent flier miles) were organizing themselves toward catalog content for my upcoming exhibit at NURTUREart.  This series isn't the work that will be featured in the gallery, but it may be exhibited in the office or another "secondary" area.

Trash Can in Grand Central Station
4-5-6 Subway Platform
April 16, 2013
One Day After the Boston Marathon Bombings

Two Japan tsunami drawings are newly finished.  Untitled (Sendai Port, 3/11) sold in Memphis, and I sent 10% of the sale price to the Japan Society for tsunami relief.  The check just cleared, and I would like to see that happen again.

Untitled (Tamura II, 3/11), 2012
Thread, vellum
8.5 x 11"

Untitled (Miyako City, 3/11), 2012-2013

Thread, vellum

8.5 x 11"

Untitled (Sendai Port, 3/11), 2012
Thread, vellum
8.25 x 11.75"

It is an enormous luxury not to be pressured for time, then a greater one not to feel rushed.  The pressure of the semester ended December 22, after I slogged through a month of exhaustion and very low spirits.  But the habit of working against time is engrained, and my internal motor doesn't just reset once my grades are in.  Oh, no.  Rather, I enter an even more painful period of transition.  The imposed structure is gone but I haven't replaced it.  I don't have the energy to but feel like I should, so the time I need to replenish is haunted by the calendar and pervasive doubt.  It wasn't until after Christmas that my energy returned and I could go to the studio with anything to draw on.  This pattern is as old as I am, yet the despondency of the transition blinds me every time. It doesn't even matter that I can often label it while it's happening; I still collapse and believe I may never get up.

Then I do.  Then I have to sort it out in words.  Again.

So I'm in the studio working; I reorganized the space yesterday.  The Japan 3/11 drawings continue, ideas are floating around, and I will be updating my Web site, sending out applications, reading, and writing.  I now feel a humming internal pressure, to accomplish for myself and reinforce my foundation.  I also feel grateful that I haven't sabotaged myself in the end, as some of the thinking, feeling, and behavior that fuel this pattern have caused that in my earlier years and the risk will always be there.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, and the day itself was lovely.  Leading up to and following from the day has been really, really hard, and I want to understand why.  Nothing has happened to drive these days to such a profound tiredness, and I have given myself hours upon hours of sleep and naps.

At Thanksgiving, Colleen noted how getting older brings cynicism; we have too much experience (and perhaps bitterness) to maintain an open sense of possibility.  I offered skepticism over cynicism; my idealism may be aging but I am not wired for cynicism.

What I am noticing more than skepticism is a growing remoteness.  My day-to-day emotional life is a vague internal jumble that I co-exist with more than examine.  (Remoteness is built into that sentence, like my emotions inhabit me rather than are me.)  Only an event seems to elicit raw, insistent feeling.  What was once an internally driven process now often needs an external stimulus, something to catch me off-guard and penetrate.

A parallel lull is emerging in the studio.  My interior life is not driving the work as it did.  Outside events tap the same internal concerns, but need to find fresh forms.  A search for the next way to work seems to be opening.  It's inevitable, but brutal.  It is being in the studio with no ideas, moving from place to place, doing nothing or doing anything, and (actively) waiting, for weeks or months.  It is finding reasons to avoid the studio to avoid the lostness, yet knowing I have to be there to catch the next shift.  Was it Picasso who said that inspiration exists, but she has to find you working?  I detest the word "inspiration" (I can be a cynic!) and think Picasso maybe did too.

My work from Memphis is on its way home, and I look forward to seeing it.  Timmy's remains came home with me yesterday, and that was very hard and sad.

A huge pile of tree debris sits in Prospect Park, part of the clean-up after Hurricane Sandy.  The park people keep trucking it away yet the pile was no smaller when I was by a few days ago.

Yet thousands of trees in the park kept their leaves.  On my block, tiny peppers still hang from their branches.

During a Brief Outage from Hurricane Sandy

I am still trying to approach writing about Parts to the Whole, and slowly, stupidly, realizing that under the circumstances - loss of Timmy, arrival of hurricane, ongoing-ness of the exhibit, a difficult semester - I am giving myself an excessively hard time about it.  Quel surprise.

The response to the exhibit was kind of ferociously positive, with visitors from Memphis College of Art, Rhodes College, the Medicine Factory studios, and Maysey's huge network of family, friends, and contacts.  In terms of conversations, the word to begin with - and maybe end with - is monumentality.  I had expressed to Maysey a fear that these tiny pieces would get lost in the cavernous exhibit space. (Maybe "passing insecurity" is more accurate, because I know my work can - exists to - activate a big space.)  So to have the word monumentality come up again and again left no room for doubt.  (Hmmm.  No space for doubt.)  People simply got it, viscerally and intellectually.  And so, in this vast space that in itself was far from neutral, there was small me with my 29 small sculptures experiencing the purest kind of visibility.  It defied the scale, or filled the room (space).  Most important to me personally, is that it came of its own, as a result of me just being me.

So there's the personal aspect:  the working-through that fuels the work, consciously or not, but is fatal if the work doesn't reach beyond itself to create a recognition in the viewer that is the start of a dialogue.  As much as I dislike writing artist statements, after a million iterations (or more), I see that the statement I have been using for a long, long time is actually acceptable.

My pieces are intimate records of activity that draw attention to attention – given, received, withdrawn, absent.  The visual and visceral impact of each tiny point of contact, overlap, or disconnect are what the work both reduces and expands to.  It matches my experience of the world as the accumulation and juxtaposition of small decisions and acts that seem simple but aren’t: they reveal us, define our relationships to each other and our environment, and open to possibility, stasis, or pain.  It is slight work with a big agenda.

I suspect this one will always be relevant, because it so fundamentally addresses what is important to me as a person and as a person in this world at this time.

Enough for now.  Here are three pieces and another detail from the installation views in my last post.

Wood, paint; 2012; 4 1/4 x 2 1/4 x 1"

Wood, paint; 2012; 4 1/2 x 3 1/2 x 1 1/2" 

Wood, paint; 2012
Left:  3 7/8 x 2 7/8 x 1 3/8"
Right:  4 1/8 x 2 x 1"

I have been hesitant about coming here to write, worried whether I could invest the time and mind.  But things keep building up, and it only gets more intimidating.  I have to thank Melissa Dunn and her Accordion File for helping me approach.  Hurricane Sandy has given me time, so I just need to come up with mind.  But first I have to air that I lost Timmy Saturday; it is coloring everything.  He was a big, gentle, funny boy.  There's more on my Glenwood blog.  I am trusting that having a cat blog - the cliche of it - doesn't compromise my seriousness in anyone's eyes (other than my own, evidently).

Timmy, 2000-2012

Not yet writing about Parts to the Whole seems like a disservice to myself; the response has been so positive it should be captured for the ages.  I have to assume I've not been ready; I have to confess I'm not sure I'm ready now.  Perhaps because the exhibit is still up?  I think the most I can do is share some installation views.  The heaviness of losing Timmy is preventing me from focusing here now.

At the entrance:
Left, sculpture, 4 1/4 x 2 1/4 x 1"
Right, drawing by Ben Butler

Installation view, with Ben's sculpture in the foreground

Installation view
Below are six close-ups, taken from left to right

Another room, with six works on a 48"-high table

Left, Untitled (Sendai Port, 3/11), 2012
Right, drawing by Ben

Ben, Maysey, and I began installing Parts to the Whole yesterday and got the majority up.  I went for a long run this morning in a beautiful Memphis park, and am waiting for Maysey to get back from yoga.  We'll head over to the Medicine Factory and finish it.  It looks very, very good, and I feel very, very good about it.  Images to come.

On another note, my family lost one of our dearest and oldest friends last Saturday, Joel Chinman.  It was sudden and hit us like a storm.  Rest in peace, Joel.

We (me and the work) leave for Memphis Thursday afternoon to install and celebrate Parts to the Whole.  Back in August, as I was sending Maysey images of the sculptures, I got this comment from her on the work and want to share and preserve it.

I know they are tiny, but they have a monumentality.  The ones toward the end that are starting to spread horizontally are really interesting, and a nice foil to the ones ... which are more clumping or dense.  It is like there is a magneticism happening, a way they are drawing themselves in, because, they don't feel singular.  Each piece feels like a gathering.  A gathering of fragments, of little souls, of voices, ideas, perspectives.  And each one presents a different conversation/outcome.  I'm SO excited about this show.

Well, me too.

GO Brooklyn

I am On The Other Side.  GO Brooklyn was a thoroughly positive experience.  Having real people walk into my real studio and engage was affirming beyond anything I could write.  I needed this more than I knew, and got more from it than I anticipated.  What a gift!  A circle of people who are motivated to experience and understand what I am doing and talk with me about it!  My confidence in this work is confirmed, and my understanding of the necessity of this studio is complete.  These sculptures have been waiting a long time to be made.  Next week they (and others, plus three drawings) hit the road for Memphis.

My God, the anxiety - about the work, GO Brooklyn open studios, the Memphis exhibit, other demands present and upcoming.  It feels like a full-time job to manage it.  No wonder I keep constricting the studio, to try and keep from being overwhelmed.  While I managed to overcome the last spasm and have been letting each piece evolve on its own terms, I've simultaneously been holding the expectation that I would "turn the pieces into something," that I would use them as material for more complex work.  I've translated having the large space in Memphis into a requirement to make site-based installation, and have been trying to force-fit these small sculptures into a collective form they don't want to have.  I saw this today, and gave myself permission to have a sculpture show.  These sound like small things in the writing; in the living they are exhausting and upsetting.

I need to become intimate with these works individually, not treat them as puzzle pieces.  That's the only way I will be able to see what each needs and how each should be presented.  The relief in this is terrific.  I have about 30 pieces, and each reverberates for me without any help from the others.  There may be more work on some of them, but that's their individual evolution.

I love this one.  It's like a hinge.

Wood, paint, about 2 x 1 1/2 x 2 1/2"