Bumps in the Road

I was driving in a mini van with a bunch of friends through a tunnel near LAX and there was a graffiti on the wall that said something like “IN LIFE there are bumps in the road.”

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I was on my way back from San Diego. Rochelle Botello gave an Artist’s Talk at her show Dog Days at HB Punto Experimental. It was really good and she was very well versed in her own work. I wish I was that eloquent talking about my own work. Art critic and artist, Eve Wood was also there to facilitate the conversation, which made it more compelling and more like a conversation. She also invited the guests to ask questions and exchange their ideas too. It was very cool. Eve wrote the essay inside of Rochelle’s catalog that I was helping her with a couple of weeks back.

Marion Lane was there too. I love Marion’s work. I got to see her place on the way to San Diego when we picked her up. She lives Downtown and her work is strewn everywhere – all over her live/work space. It’s alive and beautiful, like her.

She was making tamales and black bean soup when we got there so we would be fed for the long trip, and let me tell you; it was a long fricken trip. The traffic was insanity. It took us all day to get there. Eve and Rochelle did the talk and we turned right around and came back after only about an hour of being there. I didn’t get home until 10PM and the talk was in the early evening/late afternoon. Crazy.

So in life, there are bumps in the road. I quit smoking on May 27th, but then I started smoking again last week. Now I have stopped again. Stress will do that to you. I went a couple days on, then a few days off, and so on. Now I’m back on the patch. What can I say? I’m trying. It’s the stress. I’m going through a bunch of stress lately. I wish I could talk about it, but I can’t yet. I’ll let ya’ll in on it soon enough though.

In the meantime, I’m getting back on the horn and working again. I think smoking got me to start working again believe it or not. Or maybe that’s not all that hard to believe. Although, I haven’t much worked on the watercolor still. I have been really stuck on it. I was in a very bad depression for over a week, maybe two, and I couldn’t make art at all whatsoever. I’d sit at the watercolor for 15 minutes, maybe a half hour, and that’s about as much as I had in me, so this is as far as I’ve come on it.

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I did finally get all the materials for the collage construction that I am doing for the Jerusalem Biennial though. Curator, Anne Hromadka went there to check out the venues for the exhibition and also did a tour with a few other couples. They all gathered ephemera for me to use for the collage and I got a bunch of great stuff to use.

My idea was to do the whole thing on top of paper grocery bags. I wanted to use both Israeli and American bags, but I wound up using all bags from LA because all the ephemera is from Jerusalem. The theme of the show is the exact mileage between Los Angeles and Jerusalem: 7,567 miles. I wanted to use things in both cities and attach them with threads.

The problem however, is that I have to have this thing done by July! I know, right? I just got the stuff the other day, so I am working my ass off on it already. I had to configure the bags first. That took some time to figure out, just composition-wise.

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Then yesterday I glued it together and figured out all the placements of the collage while taking multiple photographs so I could remember where everything will need to be glued down.

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Today I actually started to glue stuff down, but I didn’t get very far because I was pulled away with running a bunch of errands this morning.

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Once I glue everything down, I’m still going to be stitching – hand stitching a lot of the papers together, but I don’t know how much I will have time for and I don’t know if I will be doing it before or after I paint over it. Yes, I’m going to be painting over the whole thing, but in a transparent baby blue and white. Then I think I’ll be using an opaque red to do an outline/line drawing of the wailing wall and then there will be poetry over all of that in black. Poetry by Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai translated into English.

So lots o’ layers!

I also have been working on that “therapy” painting that’s been sitting on my easel for God know how long now and I “finished” it in Photoshop, meaning I played around with what I want to do with it in real life for the most part and how I would like to finish it. It’s finally right side up now.

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I don’t have the Photoshop file because I accidentally closed the program without saving it, but I printed it out before I did that at least, so I have a reference to paint with. You just don’t get to see it. Hee hee. But here it is so far and it’s really not all that far from finished. It’s about 3/4s done now. It’s a little strange and out of “series” but it might go with my “This” series. Maybe I will call it “Out of Body Experience.” Ha ha ha. The working title for it has been “Purps,” but that has to do with what it’s really about, which is very personal. I have been trying to “cover up” the true meaning ever since I pulled it out of storage and started working on it again.

Well, that’s all for now.

Still working on the new website. Might still be a week or more before I can launch it. Stay tuned. 😉

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