In the Middle
Just a Speck of Cosmic Time
Cosmic Sliver
In the evenings, my nine-year-old and I have been watching a new dinosaur documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman. Aside from Freeman having the best narration voice, this documentary has been enthralling us with its timelines. We find ourselves gasping as the we jump backwards and forwards (1,000,000 to 3,000,000 to 5,000,000 years) between what they call dinosaur dynasties. The context of these not-so-rapid growth, changes, and evolutions of these dinosaurs amazes us. We keep saying to each other: I can’t believe humans have only been alive for 300,000 years!! (Dinosaurs emerged around 230–252 million years ago and went extinct around 66 million years ago. Compare and contrast our growth and footprint)
Personally this show and the facts within it have had an unexpected calming effect on me. It helps me zoom all the way out, to a coexisting truth that everything and nothing matters at the same time. My partner finds this dark but qualities of this giant cycle feels wondrous and good to sit with.
LA Love
It’s been fun reading the polarizing opinions on the new LACMA wing and its Erewhon. We finally went to see it and I love it. The concrete walls, and the rooms stained indigo and wine make for a beautiful contrast against the art. It was a relief to experience something other than a white-walled museum. I think it’s a great addition and I’m so proud it’s in our city.
The Middle
I’m somewhere in the middle of my exhibition timeline. My show opened a couple of weeks ago and is up at Night Gallery until the end of May. With a couple of walk-throughs still to do and my print release with Ollin Editions happening on May 23 at the gallery, I’m still very much consumed by the idea of time and the making of this body of work.
Serendipitously, a few days ago, I picked up Meeka Walsh’s Malleable Forms and found myself wide-eyed by her essay, Painting and Time. So many of her points echoed thoughts I entertained while making my paintings for It’s About Time. Walsh writes about how time is what we no longer seem to have, or aren’t impelled to take, how we’ve become victims of what Baudrillard called the ecstasy of communication. We are consuming an overwhelming amount of images, media, information, and skimming the surface of things quickly and moving on. Ultimately encountering and creating less meaning. She reminds us of Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and how even the most perfect reproduction lacks one thing, its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. Walsh goes on to enumerate what a painting holds: the time it takes to make one, months or years or Picasso’s apocryphal few seconds and forty years, the time a painting takes, meaning its insistence on seizing and holding the moment, the time it lasts, the time it creates by its presence, and the time we need to look at it.
So much of painting, the thinking about it and the living inside it, feels like time traveling, backwards and forwards at once. Creating meaning and memory works this way too, creatively, non-linearly, finding meaning not in sequence but in resonance. The act of painting seems to exist at many points in time simultaneously.
Lunch Breaks
Fairly religiously, in an obsessed manner, I’ve been eating Gjusta’s spicy feta soaked in olive oil with the freshest tomatoes from LA Home Farm for lunch. Paired with sesame crackers and Bon Bon sour candies. Every flavor is delightful and addictive. All my studio mates are also obsessed about these candies.
Mixed Tape
My 12-year-old is getting into making playlists and we share a lot of joy trading songs with each other. Last night, while driving alongside the mountains on 210 fwy, we sang Le Tigre together while driving home from a sketch comedy show her friends put on. I was so happy I thought I’d burst. Inspired by this moment, I made a mixtape to encapsulate this feeling.
I hope you enjoy: SPRING FORWARD
Good Reads
I recently picked up How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves by art critic Megan O'Grady. In it, she focuses on four artists and works of art, diving deeply into their histories, weaving her own personal narrative throughout. O’Grady moves through it with the kind of attention that is really, underneath it all, attention to oneself. It made me think of Andrew Berardini’s Colors, a beautiful, LA-inflected book you can open anywhere, the way you might flip through a record collection at a friend’s apartment, and find yourself somewhere unexpected. Berardini’s chapters accumulate into something like a worldview, art, experience, existence, the whole of it, and so do O’Grady’s. Autobiographical at their core, I find them heartwarming. It's clear art is a vital touchstone to their understanding of the world and themselves. And even when their criticism feels hardened, it's more exposing more about the writer's deep belief in what art can do, and that's a beautiful thing.
Get Away
Next week I leave for a small reprieve- seven days at a private residency in Big Sur. This invitation came like a dream out of nowhere- thank yo Alditi House. Time to reflect, draw, make watercolors on bluffs, hike in the woods, cook, and be with nature… all alone! I’m not even bring my dog who is basically an appendage these days. Excitement is coursing.
Between books I’ve been reading Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch on and off for the past year. I pick it up for tid-bits of humor and insight to Miller’s creative process. There is something about his deeply loving and cantankerous humor that I’d like to invoke a bit of this spirit while I’m there hammering out ideas.
I’ll try to write something here while I’m there. Until then, be well and warm
