Building Process

Most of my days are split between activities - I have not had a long, eight-hour workday in studio in a month. The transition of summer to fall might have something to do with it. I am able to carve out three or four hour blocks to make art: I park my car, open the studio door, close it behind me and set my phone to “do not disturb.” I open the cap to the gallon of matte medium, pour it into a yogurt lid and un-crust my brush. Sometimes I sit in a metal folding chair, but most of the time I stand if I am listening to music. I like the freedom of dropping my tools and dancing when the song is right.

If there is a leftover page from the National Geographic that I didn’t finish the day before, I will pick it up and start tearing half-inch pieces. Otherwise, I will rip the first fresh page off of the stack. I am halfway done with my first magazine: January 1971. It is built with layers of paper, plenty of words and a finger on the collective unconscious. It is hard work, sorting through thoughts and intuitive impulses.

Over Here Thinking About Over There (reprise)

I bought a new book as a reward for purchasing materials and tools for my workshop last month. It sat in my bookbag for over three weeks until I cracked it open yesterday afternoon. Two and a half articles deep, and this anthology suggests that the next tangible leap for art-as-research is within the realm of art therapy. The linear quality of such thinking makes me wonder if anything has changed since the book’s 2013 publication date. I spend another ten minutes looking at the same fifteen schools that offer PhD programs for studio practice.

Earlier that morning, I moved my loom aside and cleared a space on the wall for another magazine collage project. I took a National Geographic, tore off the first page and slathered smaller bites all over the canvas. I made it halfway through that page when I met a new visual research project. Quick, three thoughts -

What happens when the linear form of previewing time is flattened into the same plane of reference.

A simple collage project using a single magazine turns into an entire research enquiry on time travel…

A stop motion video of each page used in chronology! A time lapse of the overall picture field changing!

And a final, fourth thought: what does it mean to catalog the spaces in between?