Dream Revised

I'm trying to work at home again. Challenging. But I'm excited with the direction of this one... it might actually rock. Yeah. It does rock. I'm half tempted to try to sell it now for the cash, but I want my show to work and this piece might be integral to the entire show. Enough of the cute is gone that I can stomach it now. My friend, and one of the best full time artists I know, Karin Franzen, helped me solve some of the problems I was having with this one and the two other large ones I've been working on.

I wish I had more time to spend with Karin. Her best medium is fiber, but she's genius with virtually anything she puts her hands on. Go see some of her stuff here.

World Lit Students...

Good luck studying for the final. You can find the study guide on the left hand side in the "Box.net" folder. We'll review Monday morning and then the final, if you need a reminder, is on Friday at 8 am.

See you there. Aren't you excited?

It's Funny Because It's TRUE...

I wish I had been given this chart the last time I had gone bowling. It would have saved me from the despair brought on by failure that evening.


This next one is for my homies in World Lit, who just had to suffer through the genius of Borges... I'll have to make an overhead for next semester.

Letterhead Contest

So a few of the students in my technical writing course have created better versions of my letterhead for the course. There are two students vying for the 20 extra credit points if they win the most votes. Look over on the left hand side in my "Box.net" account, under the "314" file. There is one for "Azlynn" and one for "Valerie". Take a look and cast your vote by way of a "comment" to this post.

You may want to click "view" and then "headers and footers" in Word to really see what they look like.

Hope you're all surviving this god awful snow. I hate this place sometimes...

New Work

Here's another one going in the show. There's a bit of "cute" still hanging around and, frankly, I'm sick of it.

I've done all I can, however. I've started on the White Raven piece (I actually saw a white raven two weeks ago, which they say is lucky, but I haven't seen evidence of that yet) but it's no where near blogready.

I think this one is called "The Traveller".

A Horrible Case of Apophenia

I've been thinking quite a bit lately ("stewing" is probably more apt) about the problem of interpretation. Obviously, it comes up in class and I can see the exasperated expressions of a few students who stoically resist my insistence that there is more going on than meets the eye in a literary text. We're reading Kafka's Metamorphosis and Gregor Samsa's state is one of those playful symbols that just won't sit still, and it's good fun to postulate what meatmorphosing into a beetle (whom Nabakov claims has hidden wings - interpret that one) might mean.

My tendency to see meaning where others cannot is mostly a blessing- I cannot paint without it, I regularly experience epiphany and rapture when reading or looking at art, and I can be helpful to my students when they can't make heads or tails of a story. But a propensity for finding patterns can turn ugly. One can go too far in trying to interpret the language of others, right? Especially when that language is in the form of narrative- how far is too far when trying to decide what a symbol is standing in for? Where is the line? Does any of it mean what I think it means? It's enough to make me throw down the book sometimes...

Dream of the Red Wolf

I am sooo excited about the work I've been doing lately. I'm having trouble sleeping, which is always a good sign. I have two more pieces that are in the works and I can hardly stand the fact that I can't be in there right NOW.

I just allowed a couple of my colleagues to look at it and I got "cows?" and "ferrets?" and "three headed jesus?"

There is no place like UAF. My colleagues are brilliant, and I say that in all earnestness.

My friend James Harris just received notice that he was accepted to the New York State Writer's Institue. Word has it, he'll be working with the likes of Joyce Carol Oates. Oh, the envy. I love that woman. James won 2nd prize in the Playboy College Fiction Contest and is currently working on an anthology with author Nate Leiderbach.

I managed to get something published recently in Antipodes, a journal for Australian Literature. It's a review of Mark O'Flynn's novel, Grassdogs. He's a fine storyteller and the novel is tender, spare, and something of a gem. A book review isn't much, but it's more than zip.

The Monkey Mind

We're reading Gene Yang's American Born Chinese this week. Yang's graphic novel is a heroic look at the problem of identity in America. It's been interesting thinking about American Mythology in the context of mythologies from other cultures in other time periods, and the American individual is continually at a crossroads of identity in a way that isn't present in the literature of other cultures. Even the ubiquity of the Orphan in American cinema points a pretty obvious finger at the central role of loss-of-heritage.

I don't have time this morning to really hash out my thoughts on the subject, but I'll just give a shout out to my fellow ex-pat Southerners and my Southern friends who are still in ATL and nearby. Being a Southern woman can be complicated. My own problems with cultural identity are visible in my shameful lack of a Southern accent. I identify with Yang and the characters in the respect that I "lost" my Southern accent when I moved away. I remember consciously "correcting" my accent so that I wouldn't appear stupid. Think about it, if you want a character to appear stupid, bigoted, or as a Fundamentalist Christian, what do you do? Give them a Southern accent.

My students seem to be enjoying the novel a great deal. It's definitely going on my permanent reading list for World Lit. next semester. I should give Yang a call and see if he's willing to give me a percentage of his profits... As far as storytelling goes, I wonder if Yang even knows how truly brilliant and gifted he is?

Voted Best Last Line of a Poem

It was unanimous among those of us who heard Jill read that dark night in February...

Fuel

You are so far away now, so small, that today is already long ago, and our story in other people's hands. A man crossing a channel is reading the galleys, passing each page to his wife. All night they sit close, as if on a single bench for warmth. Oh, little bench, you will burn.

--Jill Osier

Don't Be Cute

After all that business about the problems with "cute," Studio 360 decided they would do an entire show on my ideas. I didn't realize they were reading my blog... Eric Molinsky must have also overheard a conversation I had with some friends about this word, kismet, that keeps showing up. The word usually makes me think about the ubercute robot, Kismet from the early 90s. Aww... Isn't he precious? The Sound of Young America also did a show on Japanese Robots in January.

Wikipedia reminds us that the word kismet comes from the Arabic, Turkish, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi word meaning "fate" or sometimes "luck". There's a word that gets around--it's philologically promiscuous in a manner of speaking.

Here's a video clip of the cutest robot ever from the hands of Cynthia Breazeal:

But there is a theoretical line, apparently, where cuteness crosses into the realm of creepy, or, at the very least, the realm of roboporn.

If you're interested, have a listen to the Studio 360 episode:

Bad Instructions, Good Art, and Break Dance Fighting

The week before spring break, I had an amusing time with my Technical Writing class while discussing poorly written instructions. There is plenty to know on this topic (David A. McMurrey has provided some good advice for writing sets of instructions), but it's much more fun to discuss how the endeavor goes horribly wrong. Check out some very bad examples of the international variety. I didn't know "vomitive" was a word, but its use can apparently get you a first place medal in the "Worst Manual" competition via TSI.

This morning, in my World Lit class, we perused the work of Sanford Biggers while discussing some of the ways that contemporary artists use ancient symbols to refigure urban life in a new idiom. Biggers is adept at connecting the contemporary with the antique. In an interview with the poet Saul Williams (aka Niggy Tardust), Biggers says of his work:

I use a much coded language in my work, but at the root, I think all of my pieces are basically autobiographical. The Black Madonna project, for example, goes from Atlanta, to Warsaw, to questions about faith, origin and Afrocentrism. So do I. The Mandala break-dance floor series refers to my childhood as a dancer and my studies of Buddhism while living in Japan. It’s just a way of dealing with things in my life through symbols. I was a figure painter when we were in school, but I got to a point where I just didn’t want to represent the figure anymore. I wanted to create more metaphorically and symbolically and explore how symbols operate within the mind and that visceral affinity humans have for symbols. That comes from an interest in, for lack of a better description, the sacred societal approach of using symbols and coded geometries to speak to the inducted; to other students of Afronomics.

I think Biggers' point extends beyond Afronomics, however, and therein lies the success of his work. By fusing symbols found in Afronomics with those of Buddhism or Sumo wrestling ceremonies, he opens up his own personal dialogue so that virtually any language a veiwer brings to the table is validated.

We also checked out a few videos related to the martial arts of various cultures. Brazilian capoeira:



One of my students introduced me to the art of "Parkour," which I've seen in movies and had NO idea that it was for real... This is a great little documentary.



If you want some Parkour with an Eminem soundtrack then check this one out:



I love my job...

Hidey Holes and Resonance

Tuesday's painting has me thinking. I've been looking at it and wondering if I have it right. The signature is on it already, which is my method of keeping myself from going too far, but I'm concerned about a couple of things. The two owls and the tree branches ended up in the idiom of cartoon--their proportions are such that they're kind of "cute" (maybe this is coming out of me as a result of having two small children). But cute can be dangerous (try reading Daniel Harris if you don't believe me) and I don't want someone to look at my work and walk away thinking that I''ve aspired to create whimsy. Bleh.

But I fear that Tuesday's piece is overwhelmingly whimsical. The question is can I, with minimal revision, go back and edit out some of the cuteness? Or maybe the question really is should I edit it at all?

I'm not interested in making political statements with my art, nor am I interested in creating work that forces people to ask questions about the nature of any of the following things: painting itself, the two dimensional plane, the role of women in the plastic arts, being and identity, the status of the artist, or any other postmodernist intellectual status-quo-challenging tet-a-tet with the cooler than thou set. Ok, I'm interested in those questions, but only as a writer, not as a painter. But this negation of identity seems to leave only its opposite: that I'm to aim only for something pretty, something to hang above the couch (incidentally, not a bad place for one of my paintings). But I reject this notion too, since my aspirations are to create work that is more than just a design element that coordinates with the color and proportions of your living room. I think I might be edging toward some Judy Blume-like epiphany here about a girl's right to be pretty and smart, so I'm going to move on...

Let me not forget the real issue at hand here: to revise or not to revise? What's really stake here is the unknown. That which we hide or that which is hidden from us has become a fundamental theme in all of my creative ventures. I'm completely obsessed with the secrets we keep--the things we hide from others and from ourselves. The Postsecret books (garnered from the self-titled website) are well edited peeks up the skirt of American culture. I remember reading the first book cover to cover sitting on the floor of a book store in Berkeley next to the shelf where I found it. Couldn't put it down. Since then, I've gone to darker, less refined places where people divulge themselves: cavecanum, droppedthebomb, and the "personals" section of craigslist. These places are often ugly, perverted back alleys of human desire, but sometimes a confession will operate as a flashlight rather than as a grimy shadow ("I cry in my office sometimes when my colleagues go out to lunch and don't invite me." #37295 on cavecanum), and I remember why compassion matters. It's like that moment in Bruce Almighty when Bruce finally listens to all the prayers... the facades we put up, the conventional behavior, the public displays of affection, the polite things we say. It's easy to think that our darker sides should be amended, saved, corrected, expunged, tried and hung, or simply ignored, but I'm with Nietzsche: “Be careful when casting out demons lest you cast out the best part of yourself.” What we hide should be examined, considered for its worth and worked into the whole as a necessary element that helps a great work of art to resonate.

I contemplate these dark little hidey-holes of humanity and I'm alternately scared and inspired. This is what I want out of a painting. I want there to be a few small places that are not safe, a spot or two of something dangerous. Confined areas of honest admission, you know. The most brilliant art critic on the face of the planet, Dave Hickey, said,

Danger makes us see more sensitively—anxiety—the prospect of the gallows. But you either see or you don’t. I think you want to learn about art because you had an experience of some sort—a totally nonredemptive but vaguely exciting experience, like brushing up against a girl with big boobs in the subway. It’s about that level of intensity. So you want to find out more about it since its sources are so mysterious, and these sources reside in you as well as in the object.

Does this most recent painting of mine approximate boob brushing? I don't know. I think I put something dangerous there, a little mugger trying to take your watch before you can walk away from the painting and dismiss me as whimsical. But is the mugger big enough? Are the owls so cute that they elicit a trite response? Cliche robs us of epiphany. Revelation can only occur to the blind (metaphorically speaking, anyways).

Susan Sontag, in a 2003 interview with Kurt Anderson of Studio 360, illuminated this point while discussing Jeff Wall's photo, Dead Troops Talk. She said, "Jeff Wall, with his image of war, was giving us something horrible, but not allowing us to go to the obvious or clichéd response to it. So the image guards its power. It keeps its power, and that is really the question. How do images keep their power?"

Good question, Susan.

Owls Eggs and Masks

This is a 30" x 40" painting I did yesterday. I got into the studio around 8 and finally left 12 hours later. I just couldn't put the brushes down. I have 3 other big surfaces that I'd like to get prepared tonight... There just isn't enough time. I'm the White Rabbit.

Maybe that's the animal for my next painting.

The Benzene Ouroboros

While discussing the concept of Apotheosis as it appears in literature in class this morning, I recounted a story I heard years ago about the German organic chemist, Friedrich August Kekule. I've always remembered his name because my mother's name is the same as his (she's Augusta Friedrich), her uncle, Gustav Friedrich helped create the food additive MSG (if I have my family lore right), and because the story struck me as profoundly literary although it's from the realm of 19th century organic chemistry. The story goes something like this: Kekule was trying understand the structure for the benzene molecule, which was known to behave strangely. Until Kekule, no one had been able to describe, or draw, the structure of benzene in such a way that explained its odd duckyness (Kekule was circa 1850's--prior to electron microscopes and such). The poor chap couldn't see the answer to the problem. He sits down to take a nap one day, and has a "reverie", a vision, and he discovers the answer to his problem.

I'm no chemist. Of all the sciences, chemistry is the one discipline I could never crack. Which is odd, since I think I have a great uncle who invented MSG or something. Physics I loved. Math. Even economics seemed to reveal mystical insights on a fairly regular basis. But the chemistry nut never quite opened. That one pecan I could never get clear of the shell unless I turned the whole damned thing to dust. I could extend this metaphor into pistachios, too, but you probably get the picture.

But Kekule has this vision, this flash of insight that led to the answer. He saw a snake eating its own tail and this time-worn symbol revealed the shape of that which he'd been seeking. The carbon molecules of benzene share their electrons as I understand it. The electrons rotate within the outer shell of the molecule or some such thing.... My understanding of the chemistry is less important to me than the revelatory function of the symbol of the Ouroboros--the snake devouring its own tail in an eternal cycle of death and rebirth.

Kekule decides that this is the crux of the benzene structure. The benzene molecule is a ring, and the atoms share electrons within its outer shell--they rotate within ring, the "benzene ring". Royston M. Roberts, author of Serendipidty, Accidental Discoveries in Science, recounts the story told by Kekule regarding his "reverie":


I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.


Brilliant. A mythological image answers a modern conundrum. It's fitting that Apotheosis and the Ouroboros symbolize the human problem of living in the field of time--how do we shed an old skin to be reborn to something new without stepping outside the circle?

Portrait of a Nephew

Here are two pieces I did for my sister while I was in Georgia. A sketch and a mixed media piece.

I'm finding it hard to return to painting after having been away. At this point, I understand my process well enough to know that in order to produce, I need my plate cleared of EVERYTHING other than painting. I'll be teaching this fall to make ends meet, which means that I probably won't paint much, if at all. I have two commissions to finish, but other than that, zip.

That being said, my goal this fall is to ensure that in the spring I have enough money to do nothing but paint and get ready for my show in June at New Horizons. Apparently, painting is a jealous kind of lover and won't let me have it unless I forsake all other professions. I'm just praying that I can hang onto my sanity until I'm safe and warm inside my studio.