I am persevering. I have nerves of steel. Bring it on.

Two new paintings, casually shot with my iPhone, under godonlyknows how many temperatures of light and lacking sharp focus. Both untitled as of this post. I still want to refine/f*ck with the top one, so consider this an in-progress peek.

One of the most difficult things for me to do is keep positive without thinking I'm perpetually out of fashion. I am braced for rejection* and in fact, received one today. I've also heard that one of the grants I am in the process of applying for is notoriously difficult and complex. WTF? Wish I had better news.

*Addendum- I realized after writing that I was "braced for rejection" that it might appear as though I am expecting rejection. What I meant was that since I'm in the process of applying for quite a few things that are rather competitive, there are statistical odds that I will receive some rejections. Wow. I don't even care to write that word anymore. Okay, no more talk of rejection. Still, no growth without trying.

I'm working out again. Two days in a row. Knocking out some reading while on the recumbent. In particular, I'm still reading The Beat and The Buzz: Inside the L.A. Art World. Time just flies and at end of 45 minutes, I feel so unconnected I can't even tell you, but that’s okay because I'm still fascinated by all the cogs in the machine. I personally know one of the artists interviewed and my catawampused path has bumped into a few other names mentioned in the book. (I know the previous sentence is grammatically impossible, but I needed an excuse to use catawampus, and a verb form at that, today.) A couple of other names are people I met briefly in the Chicago art scene some years ago, and one is the person who wrote the introduction. I met Ezhra in real life for about 5 seconds this past summer as we were waiting to have our portraits taken for Heather Cantrell’s project. She complimented me on my hat and in the course of conversing about props, she decided she should pose with her neck pillow that was in the shape of a cat. I didn't see her final portrait, but just knowing someone posed with a neck pillow in the shape of a cat was good enough. She keeps a blog called AWOL and I stumbled upon her writing before I actually met her. It's over in the links section. I like her writing.

The book is relatively fascinating if you're interested in the Artforum art world or according to the film noirish editorial review, "The book deals with the art world that Artforum is likely to review, the moneyed art world of hope and hype where Basel Miami, the Armory Show, or Frieze may or may not be the holy grail, depending on whom you ask."

It's really a patchwork of mini-narratives about how people connect. Several people had parents who collected art. Some people had famous parents or relatives. Some people chalk it up to being in the right place at the right time. There's quite a bit of self-education involved and lots of determination and cross-pollinating.

One of the artist interviewed is James Hayward, a painter whose work I first saw a Mandarin Gallery a few years ago.

I liked what he had to say about painting.

"I wish someone would address the difference between painting and art. Art is this all-encompassing megalith, without an edge. Painting is a tradition with an edge that is quite specific and hasn't changed in five centuries. Painting is much less susceptible to the authority of theory than art. Art needs theory; it needs a theoretical paradigm Painting doesn't. We know where we're located. We know our history. We're playing a different game."

I picked up the habit of combining reading with cardio while in Chicago at the New City YMCA located just around the corner from the Cabrini-Green housing projects. There were a few of us that showed up around the same time every day to work out. Dana was working on her PhD and used to burn through all sorts of texts on pedagogy while cycling. She'd be on the cycle for like two solid hours reading super dry theory. I got hooked and I haven't looked back. I highly recommend it. It keeps me on the cycle without getting bored and oddly enough, my concentration is stellar while cycling.

Reportage

Complete sentences are not my friend. I don't feel like crafting words and dealing with sentence structure. Reader beware.

I worked on some oil paintings yesterday. Three. I started them at the end of last year and then left them in various stages while I dug into making some new works on paper. As I work on the watercolors and gouaches, I sense I am neglecting the paintings. For some reason I always consider the oil paintings (or whatever other mixed media stuff I use on canvas) more "serious" than the watercolors. They're not. The watercolors are as serious, but there's a lightness to them that is in direct correlation to the heaviness in the oil paintings. The canvases have their own gravitas- oil, sludge, opaque murky hues that in a watercolor seem counter instinctual. Water flows, Paints sticks.

Two of the paintings are 20" x 16". I like this size. I feel like I am now understanding these dimensions. I have a relationship with the canvas that feels like what a portrait might include-head, bust, partial torso. I'm suspecting that they're self-portraits. The third canvas is 24" x 30". I wrangled one of the 20 x 16's into a good place yesterday. I can leave it alone for a day or two, I think, without feeling compelled to attend to it.

I noticed I used the word, 'feel' and other words dealing with intuition 7 times in my post. This is telling.

Some notes on The Gift, the book I'm reading. I have trouble reading sometimes. I tend to scan, even when something's riveting. If there's any kind of a speed bump in the reading, I go into extreme scan mode, quickly looking for a sentence or concept or something to latch me in again. Then I feel guilty and try and re-read every word I scanned over. You'd never believe that I wrote poetry in my 20's. I barely believe it.

I'm getting a tad tired of wading through the all the anthropology, yet every page has some gems. Last night I came across his reference to the folk tale of "The Shoemaker and His Elves." I've always loved that tale and had forgotten about it at a conscious level. Hyde has mentioned more than a couple of times the uncanny concept of the artist disassociating his/herself from the making of the work, so that after the work is complete, there is a strange feeling that the "I" did not make the work. I do this all the time. I look at things I've painted and although I am fully aware that I did indeed paint them, (Proof: there's still paint under my fingernails this morning.) I feel like the shoemaker's elves have come in and finished them. I lose track in the gap between some moment in the thick of it when everything's a mess, to the moment they reach the other side.

Fang's asleep in my studio. He's been content to hang out and sleep in here more and more lately and it's comforting. I tell him he's got the day off from guard duty when he does this. (He's a shepherd mix, so he's usually by the gate playing sentry during the day.)

I have downright lied today.

I have not worked on my cv (okay, I did open it up and add a couple of things) nor have I put my nose to the grindstone to look for additional work outside the studio or more classes to teach. Why? Beats me. Money's tight, so it would seem that throwing myself in front of a real job would appeal to me, but I wasn't able to focus on that today. Instead, I had a nice studio visit with a former student this morning, sold one of the grab bags, talked on an apparatus known as the "telephone" to two people, cried, brainstormed about some studio ideas with one of those people, walked Fang, ate an entire jar of pickled beets for lunch and stared at my Linked In account, not really understanding what to do next. It's so IBM looking. In fact some guy from UIC hunted me down as my first contact. He's in software, Enterprise Development. (I'm making the 'over my head' gesture right now.) I composed some emails and here I am.

I have a meeting tonight at 7pm and then afterward I intend to sit down and READ one of the two books that came in the mail yesterday:
The Gift by Lewis Hyde, a book that has escaped my radar for 25 years, which is about how long I've been calling myself an artist, and The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton.

It seems like a good time for me to read both of these books.