Even though I knew this, somehow seeing it in writing is disturbing.

Due to severe budget cuts to the California Community Colleges, Ms. Hackett’s teaching assignment at El Camino was terminated effective fall 2009.

***
On the bright side, the art consulting firm that commissioned the recent project loved the painting and approved the shipping & packing fees I inadvertently omitted.

Game face on, people. Game face on.

Please, Let Me Sleep And Hey, Look At This New Painting

Please, Let Me Sleep
I should be uploading some hi-res images for someone to look at, but I'm so frigging tired that I'll have to do in the morning, plus I misplaced the titles of two of the paintings which happen to be in storage, so I'll have to wait until tomorrow in order to check the titles anyway. Movers adage, "Touch only once." I also need to take better photos of a couple of them.

This is what I get for slacking off on my office work and not being so anal about documenting every single thing right after I make it. It's also what I get for procrastinating on titles and pretending I can live in general chaos while I focus only on painting.

I bought Aperture® a couple of years ago and although it has proved excellent for quickly resizing multiple images, it crashes every other minute, sometimes seconds and no, I am not lying or exaggerating; therefore, I do not trust it to be THE database for all my images. I wish I could, but until I have a few hours to kill with tech support, I have another really crappy database system in place. It's called, Folders with Tiff Files And The File Names Are Sometimes Too Long to Store All the Info, So It Too, is Imperfect. Functional, yes, but barely. Expedient, no.

Since I paid good money for Aperture, I intend on one day leaning how to be a power user, along with forcing it to not crash, but in the meanwhile, I'm curious what software or system others use to track inventory. Please share.

And Hey, Look At This New Painting


I'm stumped. It's a freak of studio nature and I don't know what else to do with it. I'm mesmerized by how it doesn't remotely look like anything I've ever done. It just somehow appeared like this. I swear. It's like it followed me home or something. Normally, I would call this an in-between stage and continue to muck around, but I'm letting it ferment in the studio until I have a solid good reason but overloading it. I KNOW it needs more, so the odds of me leaving it like this are 100:1. For one, the flower thing is bugging me how it just landed on the post thing. Two, I can't believe I painted a flower thing. Three, it's like, waaaaaay too representational for me considering it started out as some sort of geometric scaffolding holding up nothing. Four, it looks like wallpaper for a nostalgic greenhouse. A for Awkward.

Flashback Friday #5

[Couldn't locate the title]
watercolor, collage, coffee, 1989
45" x 25"

A pre-grad school work done while living in a loft on Halsted Sreet in the Pilsen Area of Chicago. It was a Pod place, meaning Podmajersky, the landlord czars of the Pilsen art community. I don't recognize the google map image. It's been rehabbed quite a bit in 20 years. I was having boy troubles at the time. I know this because the collage elements are torn bits of paper from a journal chronicling said boy problems in words and scrawly drawings.

Damn, I just looked at the prices of the lofts they're leasing. Damn Chicago for being so cold in the winter. dammit.

I am like a trained surgeon

It crushed me to leave a painting in such a disastrous state overnight in the studio, but since my studio time is broken up into mornings and evenings for now, I do what I do and have to let go abruptly in order to be at class or go to bed. Working through the night to fix a painting is not a solution; they need breathing time. So rather than putz around and take a coffee break etc. I simply wash up and hope that leaving them alone will allow me to get a fresh perspective. And it does. My role as Modern Prometheus, although questionable, has prepared me for these near death experiences and I'm happy to report I pulled another one back to life.

I'm tired. It's been a long day.

Art and artists and the people who love them.

My studio compound

Small works really don't photograph well from a distance, do they?
I wisely decided to open the garage door.
Me doing my usual introspective mental space out thing before I talk about the work. I've had this same expression since I was two years old. I zone out quite easily.

Lunch with Robbie Conal and some of my lovely hosts and hostesses. He doesn't live too far from me. I thought he was nice. He might do a studio visit with me.
This one remind me of Renoir's, "Boat Party Luncheon."

Charles Arnoldi's studio

Tony Berlant's studio

Part of my joy yesterday was reconnecting with that sense of comfort that comes through continuity and passion.

Flashback Friday #4

Here are some stills from videos I did while in grad school. One day I will take time to compress the videos and post them to YouTube. They're short, except for the bed-making video, which is about 11 minutes.

The image on the bottom is from a video done after grad school from found footage I copped while working in the post-production industry. I had a sweet collection of industrial videos. I love industrial videos. Work work work. Machines at work.

I enjoyed doing video and was quite engaged with that medium at the time. The 90's was a good decade for video art. During that time though, I came across the following paragraph in an essay by Juan Downey called, The Smell of Turpentine. The essay is about his need to communicate through electronic media, but as soon as I read the paragraph, I knew what I needed to do.

"I do not recall whether I read or dreamt that Marcel Duchamp had said that some artists continue painting because they are addicted to the smell of turpentine. Their activity is therefore not aesthetic but instead a biological dependency of the chemistry of that medium."

Soon after, I went back to painting, but I dragged some of these ideas with me.

Okay, I couldn't leave on a negative note.

I didn't mean so be so secretive about not posting the works. Titling them was killing me.

I want to blog about [deleted]
****
It took me 5 months to come up with 5 titles. When asked how long it took to paint these, I said something like, "I don't know- 3 days, 3 weeks, 2-6 months, something like that." (I'm not sure where I pulled 3 days from, because I'm on day 4 of one right now and it's still looks like I just started it.)

BUT, [deleted]


Anyway, I'm going dark for awhile, [deleted], but here's some of the newer work, officially and appropriately and happily titled.

Concerning Smoke and Mirrors and Manners of Concealment

The game is structured and extremely hard, like diamonds

The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered

Somebody's Luggage

Sneaker Wave Goodbye

GRRRR.

In lieu of venting about state budget cuts and how pissed off I am for being so flexible with my class scheduling for the last 7 years that I let myself be scheduled into an apparently provisional Saturday class that was cancelled, I'll just tell you that sulking in a double soy cappuccino at Pete's, plus a motorcycle ride home along the Pac Coast Hwy lifted my spirits ever so slightly.

I am thankful even though I made some mistakes along the way

Brand Library Submissions are due. The Brooklyn Museum is also looking at submissions. I'm still at the computer. That's the I-might-as-well-focus-on-shows-since-I've-never-concerned-myself-with-sales attitude that I've had all of my adult life.

Umpteen years ago, I quietly accepted the equation, day job=money, and I never tried to "sell" my art. Not only that, I've even (silently) taken offense when people from the civilian world who know nothing about the machinations of the ART world suggest I participate in art fairs, not Art Basel art fairs but like, you know, artisan fairs. This was so snobby of me. I almost did one once. Back in 1984, I was invited out of the blue by a woman who was in charge of the Art in the Parks thing in Nashville. It may have even been the first one. I had like a week's notice. I may or may not have hung unstretched canvases from trees. I have a brief visual, but am not sure whether I followed through. I was fresh out of college and unlike the smartypants graduate of today, I had no career navigational skills. I also have a poor memory of the 80's. Briefly remember having some appointments to show work with some galleries and then grad school wiped out any modicum of desire I had to make commodifiable work. Honestly, my grad program was such an ivory tower. It falls on and off my resentment list. But I digress.

Natch, I think my work is quite handsome, but I'll admit it looks best in a white cube where it's not competing with texture and patterns and furniture and people. Thus my dilemma. Even before I was groomed in the discourse of conceptual gymnastics, I made art for myself and have assumed that people like me, only wealthier and with climate controlled spaces would collect my work. It happens, but not enough. And what's more, I'm tired of being stuck between pretending like it doesn't matter on one side and on the other, the admission that my works sells at a snail's pace at relatively modest prices. I mean, when my plumber tells me he wants to be an artist because he has an artist client whose works sells for 100,000 a pop, I want to scream.

My goals are simple: I am happiest in the studio. I just want to keep making work, make enough money to make more work, support myself through the work, have enough left over to save for a future and spread the wealth.

I've decided the whole day job=money thing needs some retooling. So this week, I am rethinking my approach. Hard. Since I'm not independently wealthy, a tenure-track professor, or a kept woman I am coming up with my own plan. A while back, I almost got my Smaller Works site up and running, but bailed and did not follow through with marketing or even word of mouth advertising. Not out of laziness, but because I wanted to believe that some gallery sales might happen as the result of a couple of fine shows and good press. One check arrived. Actually two, counting a stipend for doing an artist talk. And in looking at the domino effect of gallery closings, this doesn't seem to be the time to find additional representation, though optimistically, that's still on the to-do list.

So now I am shameless. I have been inspired by others who are selling works on websites. I am going to get off my highfalutin horse and get the Smaller Work site up and running. The work will be affordable, and I'm looking at it as an opportunity to dig deeper into my bag of tricks. There will possibly be some slightly representational and P&D work, and I know it sounds crazy, but I'm also thinking FLOWERS. Specifically, I see designs from my mom's garden club fitting in here somewhere. I'm excited. It's kind of like my version of Michael Graves for Target mixed with the FAP, but you know, non-functional and probably still a little esoteric.

Whee. Off to get that paypal button.