Okay, I’m opting to post 5 things about myself that I’ve never posted ala A Dress A Day. This probably won’t be hard, since I just started blogging!
1. I didn’t drink alcohol until I was 23 and coffee until I was 25. Honestly, I can’t stand the taste of either of them. I have now completely switched over to tea!
2. I am apparently related to Ronald Reagan, although not directly. Its something like my great uncle’s cousin married into the Reagan family, although I used to say he was my fathers-uncle’s- sister’s-cousin’s-brother. I realized when I got older, that statement made absolutely no sense. Now Reagan was born in Dixon, IL, which is half an hour from my parent’s home town of Sterling. So even though I would probably be denounced if I started claiming to be related, every time we go to my grandmother’s we drive through Dixon. Perhaps this is why I feel obligated to defend the guy every time someone slams him.
3. Speaking of towns and famous people, I have been to Cody, WY several times and I am always amused by the fact that they do not advertise their very famous once-resident Jackson Pollock. He was born there, he lived there, but you really couldn’t tell it. He might have stolen his “cowboy mystique†from Cody, but they haven’t stolen a single thing from him.
4. I live on a street in town that has not one, but two abandoned houses! Well, not completely abandoned. People own them and keep them locked up…I’m dying to go inside both of them. I have to make an effort not to think about the interiors of the spaces day in and day. But, ohhh, the possibilities for photographs! I am pretty sure that someone has been going in to the house on the end of the street. Since I’m constantly dreaming about them, that one in particular, I notice when something changes. A door opened a little more than yesterday, a hole in the wall, a couple window screens popped open at the bottom. I think what also interests me about the house on the end of the street is that the garage is full of boxes of belongings of the woman who once lived there. I guess she died 2 years ago and her children can’t bear to part with the house. They must not be too attached to the boxes in the garage, since there is a big hole in the wall and it rains and snows on the boxes. But, I always wondering what exactly is in there….
5. I’m going to be late for work today!
I am currently working on a bookmaking project with a grant from the Indiana Arts Commisssion. The project combines photographs with objects in a book in box format. There will be 6 seperate boxes, seperated into 2 related series of 3 books each (got that?). I am posting the 1st mock-ups for the project that illustrate the image/object pairings.
The goal today was to figure out exactly what objects should go with what image, why, and how. I still need to sit down and determine exact dimensions for everything, which I hope to do over the weekend. But for now, mock-ups….
I have decided to attempt to make Fridays my work days. By my work days I mean: no school work can occur, no busy work, no cleaning, no nothing! Since I seem to have a problem finding time to work on artwork since I graduated (and its getting to the point where its a little scary and a lot frustrating) I am going to set aside Fridays specifically for ME and my on again, off again bff art. Afterall, I have come to discover that unless you give yourself time to think, let alone actually work, you can’t get a thing done. I am hoping to make a weekly (at least) blog posting part of my Friday routine. Hopefully the posts will hold me to an update on my work process. *fingers crossed*
I constantly work on sending out old work for shows, but since I’ve been getting nothing but rejection letters lately for everything (it seems) I think that is telling me its time to get down to business. (I think this is a good thing)
I think that I also might throw in some grad school research/breakdowns. I have my list, now I need to dig a little deeper and find out what these school’s art programs are like. So, I think I might also like to post my findings on this topic, although hopefully not on Fridays!
Since I seem to constantly find myself either, a. totally without insurance b. with crappy insurance c. with awesome insurance that I become ineligible for in 6 months time d. without insurance again, I have been poking around insurance sites to find the best options. This site seems to have some good info. It even includes insurance for artists!
There are a few other plans that seem good, although not available in my area. I guess Indiana wants me sick and dead.
A few years ago while I was pretending to write a thesis about my work, I kept running across the name Virginia Woolf. Neither I (as a literary incompetent) nor my instructor had any good idea as to why. Enter my curiosity. Last year I finally picked up my first Virginia Woolf book Moments of Being. Right now I’m partway through The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf and I am also starting to read A Room of One’s Own (although I haven’t gotten past the whole Virginia Woolf = silver spoon intro yet. At any rate, I made note of some quotations, that may or may not be insightful or helpful. I would say both insightful and helpful.
From Moments of Being and the introduction:
“She believed the individual identity to be always in flux, every moment changing its shape in response to the forces surrounding it: forces which were invisible emerge, others sink silently below the surface, and the past, on which the identity of the present moment rests, is never static, never fixed like a fly in amber, but as subject to alteration as the consciousness that recalls it.”
Concerning “A Sketch of the Past” expressing the present and past self: “Virginia Woolf’s present self is conveyed in the fragments of her daily life that preface each entry and in the reflective, mature consciousness which is continually searching and probing the past for meanings that could not have been evident to the self who had the experience.”
“If life then is ‘a blowl which one fills and fills’, each new experience added to the existing ones displaces them ever so slightly and alters their previous meaning by forcing them into new combinations.”
“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
“One such belief is that the individual in his daily life is cut off from ‘reality’ but at rare moments receives a shock. These shocks or ‘moments of being’ are not, as she had imagined as a child, simply random manifestations of some malevolent force but ‘a token of some real thing behind appearances.’ The idea of a privileged moment when a spiritually transcendent truth of either personal or cosmic dimensions is perceived in a flash of intuition is, of course, a commonplace of religious experience and in particular of mystical traditions of though, as well as a recurrent feature of idealist philosophies from Plato onwards.”
“To convey these two levels of being–the surface and the spreading depths…the rapid passage of events and actions; the slow opening up of single and solemn moments of concentrated emotion.”
“Implicit in this approach to the past is the role of memory: for the moment of being is most often a ’sledge-hammer blow’, a shock; the meaning unfolds after the experience.”
“Thus memory, itself the test of the enduring quality of the moment of being, is invaluable in extending the dimensions of the moment; memory is the means by which the individual builds up aptterns of personal significance to which to anchor his or her life and secure it against the ‘lash of the random unheeding flail’.”
“She kept herself marvellously alive to all the changes that went on round her, as though she heard perpetually the ticking of a vast clock and could never forget that some day it would cease for all of us.”
“Let us make the most of what we have, since we know nothing of the future…What does it matter? Perhaps there is no future. Encompassed as she was by this solemn doubt her most trivial activities had something of grandeur about them; and her presence was large and austere, bringing with it not only joy and life, exquisite fleeting femininities, but the majesty of a nobly composed human being.”
“The strength of these pictures–but sight was always then so much mixed with sound that picture is not the right word–the strength anyhow of these impressions makes me again digress. Those moments–in the nursery, on the road to the beach–can still be more real than the present moment….I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen. In certain favourable moods, memories–what one has forgotten–come to the top. Now if this is so, is it not possible–I often wonder– that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact sill in existence?”
“A great part of every day is not lived consciously.”
“I am making it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.”
“It would be interesting to make the two people, I now, I then, come out in contrast.”
“I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream.”
“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present.”
“It was not a large room; but its walls must be soaked, if walls take pictures and hoard up what is done and said with all that was most intense, of all that makes the most private being, of family life.”
