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December 9, 2024

Hi, I’m going to start a blog.

Here are some things on my mind:

I’m trying to brainstorm ways that my art can move forward now. I’m moving in several different directions at once: at work, I’m pivoting away from doing primarily UI support and accessibility research, and towards being an in-agency hired gun for digital strategy. I’m bouncing around: given an excess of free time, I’m trying to learn how to build actual, industry-grade websites from scratch, starting with my own site. This is– obviously—proving to be a massive undertaking.

I’m drawing regularly again and using more color this time, instead of just doing intricate greyscale graphic drawings. It’s hard and my colors are ugly. I will get better…but I’m still ashamed. I had a thought about why I was so resistant before to making large scale objects in undergrad. In part, I was balancing excruciatingly fragile mental health, and small-scale objects/digital work meant I could stay away from shops that might force me to overexert myself (on my 2021-22 starvation diet, too much physical activity might’ve incurred a humiliating public breakdown.) Also, I was scared and a coward. But to be fair, I think maybe another compelling(?) root of my stubbornness is the manner I learned to make art in. Drawing has usually behaved as an extension of my thinking more so than a method of my attempting to capture a discrete “idea”. I guess that’s why a lot of contemporary art rings as weak and gimmick-y to me. I know artists have always done what they gotta do to capture a market (IIRC the journals of Caravaggio and Velazquez et al. are full of accounts of bargaining, cooperating, and feuding with their market of aristocratic patrons), but I can’t help feeling the majority of art happening now is so reduced to hidden signs and secret contexts. Like, feeling that most of it should have just been a paragraph. Not true for everything—but I look at most sculptures and just see a boardroom or a bad tweet. So, journals and 8.5x11 scale work felt more “honest” as a means to think/process via line and figure. A book or laptop scale tends to be iterative and suggestive rather than monolithic and determinative.

Intellectually I have a festering wound of a theory about Balthus. Again. It feels pretentious to be obsessed with this painter as opposed to other (moderately) obscure artists (I guess because he was so self-consciously concerned with status, but his art for all his fussing really isn’t very elite or refined.) I got obsessed right at the end of college and graduated before I could do a more serious unpacking. Most of the feminist accounts of his work seem to use ahistorical theories to attach his work to the literal abuse of women/girls—which aren’t entirely inaccurate, but most feminist accounts don’t touch on the other really compelling complexities provided by his biography and his own stated intentions. I have something cooking about images of pedophilia, American culture’s mounting obsession/paranoia/moral panic about the sexual abuse of children (particularly young white girls), and Balthus’ own relationship to his subjects. By paying attention to Balthus’ childhood correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke and the triad of relations between Rilke, Balthus, and Balthus’ mother Baladine, I think there’s got to be a better feminist argument to be made about why this artist dodges accusations of eroticism + why that still matters.

Lately, before I go to bed, I try to read a few pages from a book about Zen Buddhism and it always makes me fall asleep. I have found this helpful. I heard a really great cover of Autumn Leaves at an open mic in Berlin that I can’t stop thinking about—it was clangy, akin to the way that early Joanna Newsom is. Wish I could find a recording. I also saw so many good patterns and interesting colors in the Gemäldegalerie/Kunstwerdemuseum that I hope I can imitate.