oh well.
oh well.
for anyone who’s ever used artist interchangeably with painter, photographer, writer, journalist……
“art is anything you can get away with”
that’s the distinction.
good day.
“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before”
Willa Cather
Perhaps the least original thing any artist could do is to devote vast amounts of time and energy into being an original. This time is better spent living one’s life. You’re never going to say anything someone hasn’t said before. The mere act of me writing this is an illustration of what’s is written above.
I had taken a break from painting in the month of May. I was sad for several personal reasons which I will not get into.
The past 3 weeks I spent in physical labor, stretching canvas, and reorganizing thoughts I had for paintings over the past two years. Sure it’s haunting when you have the echo of your mother saying “you always paint the same things, why don’t you paint some trees”, but I don’t have any stories pertaining to trees. I have no emotion about trees. There was one time my ex boyfriend from college skipped fences in San Diego and stole lemons off of trees, but that is not really a memory that i hold onto dearly, nor does that image symbolize any truth or interpretation of anything that happened in our 3 year relationship. Perhaps on second thought, it symbolizes his utter disregard for private things.
So after having gone through the process of assembling these canvases, I was faced with the reality that I now had to excuse to paint my trite paintings about women; mothers, friends, daughters. And sure, the painting of mother and child is as trite as a womb. And sure, my depiction is very reminiscent of Balthus. And yes, once again there is an emphasis on boobs. And yes, the body is angled oddly, arms protruding from central body, distorted, disabled looking, as if to imply “how can something damaged, incoherent almost, attempt to repair anything, or even have anything to try and repair in the first place”. But the truth is, in this image of a mother figure sewing the limbs of her child back together, I see the central dynamic of this relationship. The damage we see as pain is a mode of healing. Limbs perhaps stretched away from the central, trying to span something that cannot be enclosed by the regular scope. Perhaps it looks like puppetry.
Who knows. All I can say is this disjointed image, along with 12 others will be very exciting to paint, and I am happy for the first time in a long while.
Happy memorial day to everyone. Hope you enjoy Hangover II. I know I will. And I hope you won’t repeat the mistake of not sneaking in a flask.
xo,
a
People think Los Angeles is a city of concrete. A city of boredom. A city where people can bring their dreams and park them there. Add color to the grey. Add texture to the hard. Chisel in their everlasting home made goodness into the edifice.
See I even started this with a description that is trite. The sort of introductory paragraph that was become a staple of anyone writing anything about Los Angeles. I’m just one cigarette away from typing in lost Angeles and thinking I was the first person to type that and post it on the internet…
The truth is when I think about Los Angeles, I can only really use one image:
There is a yellow building. Yellow bricks made out of the hollogram paper that glistens when you bend it or look from another angle. The colors are chartreuse, pink and a periwinkle blue. The building has no windows and rises into the sky which is a darker, grayer periwinkle. There are pure gray clouds. The kind of pedestrian, every man gray that you get from mixing white and black.
There is a slot machine type billboard on the center middle of the building, which w are looking at from the left angle. The corner angle is prominent. The slot reads “666” in a bright cadmium/naphtol red. It blinks at you. It tells you you’ve won? you got 3 in a row… but there’s something undecidedly sinister about it. That’s what you came knowing.
Despite the lack of windows, there is an opening on the side we are looking from. Two openings. We see an old man with a monocle staring at something very intently. Trying to figure it out. This is the left opening on the left side. The side we are presented. The side we walked in on. We see stacks and stacks of stairwaying newspapers on the right side.
You can only imagine permanent things happening in this spaceship of a building.
Outside, there is a street, there is a curb. One old plum woman in a plum colored dress is stepping from the sidewalk onto the street, another old woman is sitting on the curb. She looks like the thinker. But we know by now there’s nothing to really think about.
We cannot see any other road.
This is the image i associate with Los Angeles.
Recently I parked my car in a parking structure. Quite a common, thing to do. And that’s what is troubling me. It is normal, everyday practice to enter your body (encapsulated by a box of metal that moves) into a concrete filing cabinet in order to go out and purchase things we need to sustain ourselves.
I got there in such a hurry, I didn’t even notice (or care) where i ended up leaving my means of transportation. I was simply glad to have found a spot.
I went. I ate. I bought. I smoked a cigarette on the way back.
When I entered the building which contained the only way I had of leaving this familiar yet unsettling situation, I realized I had no clue where I had parked. Not the slightest intuition.
And I was the one who had parked it….
This started a chain reaction of thoughts in my mind. In question form of course, since there are no answers (another Los Angeles trite thought)
1. How can a person who has no intuition about something they did themselves have any intuition regarding themselves in relation to others?
…. there goes a decade of unrequited love/ crush/ heartbreak situations out the opening of the hollogram
I walked around, lost. I walked up, I walked down. I wasn’t even really looking at the cars, just trying to get a feel for the building. Trying to feel like maybe I had walked there before. Clearly it would’ve been more practical to look at the cars I was walking by, but there was a certain reassurance in being ok with the whole ordeal. There was simply nothing I could do.
2. How could you possibly ever make somebody love you? How could you be convinced someone loves you in their heart/brain/soul when their arms/mouth are pushing you away? Do you really think your intuition can get you out of your own body?
So At this point I decided, “I am educated. I am smart. I cannot squander my precious time lollygagging about this stupid, man made shelf for cars like this in the middle of the afternoon. I HAVE SHIT TO DO”. And I got all scientific on this shit. I took out my car keys and started clicking the lock/unlock key to hear the distinct and annoying siren of a battle cry my toyota camry makes when I want to get into it.
walking. clicking. walking.clicking…. clicking… click.. bam. there it goes.
I was walking on the left side, but I heard the noise on the right, so I changed course. My intuition had been scientifically proven incorrect. See I never have been a scientist (degrees mean nothing, even if they are from Ivy league schools, yet another hollogram, but that is material for another day). The noise was also coming from a lower level, so I started walking down.
walking. clicking. walking. clicking… it went away. The noise stopped. I had been wrong. AGAIN. Even after employing logic. WHAT THE FUCK. I decided it was true. The world does hate me. Not everyone else. Just me.
TRAGIC.
Except this time, I actually felt bad. I had tried. I had expectations. I wasn’t just relying on my brain sonar. I had reason to expect that outside use of technology would heal my struggle to find my transport.
3. Does technology really just hinder the natural journey to find what it is we are looking for by giving us false hope? Does this false hope eventually lead us to settle for things we didn’t want but found?
So after 15 minutes of listening to joy division on my ipod outside the structure, and one cigarette, I went back. I went back in the way I came out. I clicked the button once, heard a noise. I felt I was in the right place. I walking down one level, looked to the right, and there it was. My knight and shining armour. By black toyota camry.
I went home.
I painted something called three bridesmaids.
I accepted the way it is for me in this ….
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