quick news: since it's been crickets around here lately, I've decided to just shut it down. I'm in the process of making a portfolio website, and there's no way I'll stop using my instagram or twitter anytime soon so you can always check on me there!
peace out blog friends!
A number of positive things about my year, in no particular order.
Going to pick up a book from the reserve shelf at the library and thinking of all the joy that will be felt by my fellow book nerds picking up their little gifts
Some songs I listened to on repeat this year:
I read over 50 books this year so I need to categorize my favorites here.
I had some memorable long walks this year: from the Whitney Museum to Midtown Manhattan on a cold bright February day. A long quiet turn around the marsh on the day after the election. All the trips with the kids through the pond park to the grocery store (that walk is probably the thing I miss most about our old house).
I started working lunch & recess duty at the kids’ school’s this year. That means I opened approximately two hundred Go-Gurts, cleaned up many dozens of milk spills, and told the same kids to “sit on your bottom, stop shouting please” at least a thousand times. Or at least it felt like a thousand times. I also got a lot of hugs, pushed swings every day, and once helped some kids build a contraption out of sticks to get a ball out of a tree. Happy memories!
My Studio Calico class was obviously a HUGE highlight. I still sometimes scroll through the #sccutandpaste hashtag when I’m feeling bummed about myself, art-wise, and it's always a little lift. I love what all the students made, and honestly, it really pushed me forward in my own work too.
And, of course, these weirdos, always:
I'm trying to keep my expectations for the new year low and empty so I can fill it up with good things without too much pressure, you know? However, I do have a few resolutions that I feel I should share here for accountability's sake:
Happy New Year!
Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler (not providing a link because I don’t want to endorse it in any way) must have had an amazing marketing team. I encountered it constantly this summer/early fall: I saw it on blogs, Instagram feeds, and featured at a few bookstores. So when I saw it on the new books shelf at the library, I checked it out immediately. I love reading books about New York City, I love food writing, so it seemed like an easy choice.
Guess what? This book was terrible. If it's supposed to be a love story, I pity the author and her conception of love. Almost everything about it felt cynical, bitter, and self-serving. None of the characters seemed to have any real regard for anyone beyond themselves. Also, I kind of feel like Maude Flanders talking like this, and I’m usually not a prude when it comes to the books I read, but all the physical relationships in this novel felt gross and gratuitous, not to mention completely empty of any real lasting emotion. Maybe it’s because I skimmed the last few dozen pages because at that point I was so pissed I was even reading this book… but it seemed there was no redemption, no clarity achieved, no satisfying denouement of any kind. And may I add: reading about endless days and nights of young people doing drugs/being hungover is straight up NOT INTERESTING.
After finishing, I thought about some of the novels I’ve read this year that I have enjoyed. (You know how I appreciate a good compare and contrast / turning everything in my life into a self-improvement lesson.) The common thread in all these books I love? Well... love. Characters who care for each other despite their flaws. Characters who overcome obstacles and their own personality defaults with the help of those around them. Messages of real solidarity within struggle. Spoiler alert: All those things were completely devoid in Sweetbitter.
So here are a few of my recommendations:
Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt was a nice surprise. A sweet coming of age story, quite free of cliches and just an overall pleasant read.
Lila, one of the Gilead novels by Marilynne Robinson (stories about 2 pastors in small town Iowa in the 1950s) is almost unbearably earnest and tender. Robinson writes with such force that each sentence, each word feels crucial, weighted, necessary. (I'm a very fast reader and her writing forces me to slow down in a way that feels almost mysical to me.) It's a story about love when love is not easy. I can't even tell you anymore because I can't do it justice. Read her books!
Last of all... and obviously this doesn't need my recommendation, but: I read the Harry Potter series for the first time as a 35 year old and I was completely surprised at how much I embraced it. It’s FULL of love in all it’s forms: friendship, romance, reverence, respect, fellowship. Harry and Hagrid, Harry and Sirius, Harry / Ron / Hermione, Harry & the Weasley family: each of these relationships demonstrate a different kind of love and make the series so enjoyable. Plus, after getting super into these books, I realized it's never worth it to dislike or avoid something just because it's popular, or look down on people who do.
So yeah, that's my literary lesson of 2016: Give things a chance! Don't be cynical! Never apologize for liking things that some other jerk may think is corny or dumb! Consume media joyfully!
I'm an admittedly lazy member of the Get Messy art journal community, but of course I had to do something for the past few month's Season of Dreams. My nighttime dreams are vivid and fascinating to me, and who doesn't have real life dreams too?
My pages are sometimes based on the prompts, but since I have a hard time following the rules, not everything is made to follow a specific project. As usual, I veer off into focusing more on color/shape/composition than expressing an idea or concept, but it's all for fun so... whatever.
The book itself was made from pages of an old french textbook that I cut down a bit and folded, then tied together with a simple piece of embroidery thread. No complicated binding techniques for me on this one!
Here we go:
I've posted this technique before & also showed some of this on my instagram but wanted to share a few more "behind the scenes"/process of my cut up collages.
The original collage. I usually start these on scraps of paper so it's not a traditional size, maybe around 8"x10" though?
First cut!
Second cut! Look at all those little cuties!
And a few of the final applications.
One other thing: after I finished this I was so excited about the results that I started another one immediately... and it was a total fail. No matter how much I cut it up, none of the pieces had that tiny composition magic that can be a product of this technique.
Of course, I always try to learn something from my art mistakes, so I did a little thinking about what I had done differently. First of all, I can NOT start these collages by trying to manipulate the outcomes. It has to be begun with just filling up a page intuitively, and really filling ALL the space up. Another is a variation of scale: there needs to be some larger pieces mixed in with tiny details. Part of the reason I take photos of all the steps is to evaluate what worked or where I might have gone wrong. Being able to refer to that first collage (even though it does not exist in that state anymore) helps me analyze what made this one successful. It's all part of the process (and you know I loooove process.)
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