Go Forth on the 4th!
This Fourth of July I’m sharing a project that’s been slowly growing over the past, I dunno, 15 years. Go forth! I tell myself, even if I don't know what the end result will be. My aim is to find the art form that all this needs to take.A key launching point for this will be ideas around what it means to live in the United States, on being an American, and about patriotism, founding principles, that kind of thing…
Just Post It
On Social Media & Living a Normal Life: Part 5— I’m still participating in this spectacle by posting things, but I can't say I'm carefree about it.¯\_(ツ)_/¯Oh well! I miss the artist friends I made online. Being online let me stay connected to them and their work. Offline, I have just a few artist friends/colleagues. I have many true, deep, constant friends in my real-life circle, and I have life-long friends that I love who are just a phone call away from re-connection. But I don't have offline artist friends who, like me, are working at this artist thing..
The Unusual Suspects
On Social Media and Living a Normal Life: Part 4— They're invisible and inscrutable, intangible and insidious. Of all the characters I've dealt with in the digital world (myself, people I know, people who know people I know, trolls, hucksters, and all the other regular users) none of them frustrate me as much as the ones I can't name or even picture. Once they are let out into the digital world. they don't exist in any one place. They might be created by people, but as they act out, it's clear they are not real people at all…
Me, The Usual Suspect
On Social Media & Living a Normal Life: Part 3— There's plenty of evidence to support the idea that what's making social media so hard for me is not social media, but me. So maybe I am neurotic, and maybe at the same time I desperately don't want anyone to notice that neurosis. And maybe posting on social media makes it so I'm constantly having to face that and a host of other truths about my shortcomings. I want to be authentic, but I also don't want to be an idiot. Or at the very least...
What's On the Line
On Social Media & Living a Normal Life: Part 2— Why do I have to be so angsty and fraught with the ins and outs of social media? Ugh. I dunno. Can it really be as bad as it feels to me? I have really good friends who work at Facebook, Google, YouTube, all of the related tech companies. It's partly just because of living here in the Bay Area, and partly because of the expansive connections I have…
Oh, The Places We Post!
On Social Media Use & Living a Normal Life: Part 1— place post place post—I want to consider what the words place and post mean in their real life forms. Like: what these used to mean, before the internet, before social media. Because I wonder: If I think about place and post as the physical precursors to what they mean now for online life, maybe I might somehow grasp just what it is about social media that makes me feel that it’s not what it first claimed to be?…
Mindful Painting at CoG
Week 2 of my 3rd year at the Center of Gravity Preschool, here are the youngest kids getting a close look at their brushes and applying paint to their hands I mean watercolor paper. :) … As I placed the papers before them, especially the youngest needed to get a sense of paying attention to their paper where they'd be doing the artwork….
Basic Brush Skills at CoG
It's back to school week, and I've made a lot of new little friends at the Center of Gravity (CoG) where I teach two year olds through six year olds. I'm meeting mini-reflections of older sibs I've had in recent years :) so that I'll be looking at a child and thinking, isn't that ...? But ... ? And it turns out, yes indeed, she or he is the 2nd (or 3rd, or etc) edition of that particular family. Sweet!…
Memorial Morning
I went to the Lafayette Crosses this morning. It’s not something I’ve been able to plan ahead to do. I can’t predict how I’ll feel the morning of, which is today.
How Do I Know What I Know?
I'm listening to RadioLab's podcast called "Oliver Sacks: A Journey from Where to Where" and it has recordings of Oliver Sacks writing. That's right, the act of him writing, where one can hear the scratchings and his thought processes as he puts the words down, as well the conversations and verbal musings as he writes down his words. It breathes even more life into his work, more than he already put there through the words themselves. We get to have a window into the workings of his mind. He died August 30, 2015.
It's incomplete.
So, I've decided to just write a blog post, because how many times have I been on the cusp of posting something, how long have I gone not finishing what I've started because composing and arranging and editing what's on my mind have all gotten so very muddled?
The Most Unorganized Imperfect Thing
This might be the most unorganized set of thoughts I've ever posted on my blog. Ever since my minor brain injury thing that happened...
Unresolved Questions (+ more)
On Saturday I made a list of questions about the paintings I started last week, because what am I doing!? I ask myself things because I like charting the path forward in my work even when it's not clear what's happening. It's like I'm on a walk that seems aimless at first, but I pause and look back. I think, why did I choose that way and not the other way? I figure there probably is a preference in each direction I choose, and knowing how I got to each particular place informs my next choices for when I walk again. That way, the walk itself is fulfilling the intentions I didn't know I had. And wherever I get to, I will know where I wanted to be.