Looks like it’s back to work with me tomorrow. What started as bronchitis, and ended up as asthmatic flare up has had me home for more than a week. Two trips to medicos. The meds have kicked in and made me forget about breathing (trust me that’s a good thing!) and finally let me sleep. My sleep pattern is a little messed with, mostly due to the several sleepless, coughing nights.
There was the bonus of seeing the 3hbc (three honking big cats) watch and follow the new kitten. I tried to stay out of it. Better to let them come nose to nose on their own power. When you hold kitten up to boss cat, kitten gets slapped but good, and it should have been me getting slapped around for my own silliness.
On that front Archie and Razzie are up to a bit of ear-licking and nose to nose contact. I see Deirdre getting closer and watching closely. She doesn’t slap the little one every time she comes too close. Often just a flick of the ear sends the little one on her way.
So a week gone to being sick with a few moments of goodness – did a lot of reading, a bit of cutting etc. A lot of being climbed on, nibbled by, clung to by small black **unnamed** cat.
Part of my reading was in search of cat names. The bonus there was a fast overview of much mythology and many interesting names.
So hard to find a name that fits a kitten barely formed that will last into the time she’s big and honking too. Right now she looks like a small, elfin bat at times, chewing everything, climbing and leaping everything. But a silly name doesn’t seem fair to something likely to grow up sleek and elegant.
Naming things is just an awesome responsibility! I soldier on with a couple possibilities (one made up) tucked away.
Computer glasses come home! All is forgiven! No questions asked!
found two more black prints usable on both sides, and the back of one I already was using and a really dark olive-black that I’m willing to try out. Guess it’s time to go stick some more on the wall. Erm maybe after some dinner.
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case. — Chuck Close
Richard Serra, Close, Ann Temkin and Oliver Sacks all on Charlie Rose. Loving this series about the brain. Tonight – creativity. I could barely keep up with gasping and right-on-ing and we’re-always-saying-that-to-people-ing. LOL Turns out that Chuck Close and Oliver Sacks both have a type of dyslexia which keeps them from remembering or recognizing faces. Chuck Close says he cannot remember addresses but he sees the world as through on a plane below and knows how to get there. Ann Temkin is chief curator of painting and sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art and was quiet (as was Charlie Rose) most of the time but then leapt in with a bit of info about similarities in the work or education of these two. Dr. Eric Kandel, the scientist who has been in on this series all along is so open to making suggestions and yet so completely full of examples to prove or disprove connections being discussed. Oliver Sacks made a big point about Wagner’s music, allowing towards the end that it isn’t music he likes, but he went there anyway.
Richard Serra and Chuck Close were a year apart in Yale. There was some discussion of their shared experience there, nurturing teachers, the artist as part of a community that supports each members work and creative process.
The concensus of the group was that choosing a question/problem to work on was the important thing. Sort of like grad students picking their topics I guess. But if you choose a problem that isn’t easy, that there isn’t a single answer to, it will challenge you and take you places. Chuck Close talked about the process of putting restrictions on what you do helping that process too, both to get you over your habits and faults and to force you to see what can be done. That certainly takes a lot of self-knowledge.
There was also agreement that you can’t just have good ideas, you have to have absorbed the tools or the know how. This might come from some imitation or borrowing early on, but as Oliver Sacks said “you can’t have anything new until there is a lot that has become automatic” and someone else chimed in, “It’s not enough to have ideas, you have to have competencies. ”
At one point Chuck Close said that all his life, because of his learning disabilities (which he said impacted his whole life), he found things to be overwhelming, and so he broke them down into small parts that he could accomplish and this was also in play in his painting style. BLAM.
My head exploded about every 20 seconds. If you find any stray bits, please mail them back.
If you ever need a quick plumb line:
a washer of any sort will do.
