Friday, January 29, 2010




J.D. Salinger died, and after reading his obit in the Times, I've been thinking about the difference between solitude and being solitary and that I should probably be more social and do some thinking out loud here every day.

My friend Ida sets up her easel every morning in the same place in her studio and paints the same view from her window on a daily basis. She's been doing it for 20 years. No two pictures the same.
I notice the same thing about my images of Hockey Pond, even though I do not go there on a daily basis. It is my place of solitude when I feel like there is nothing else locally that fits my skin, and a place I look forward to coming back to when I'm out west.

Which is where I'm headed in 5 days. My tasks now include gathering in the threads of January and weaving them into what I hope will be some kind of recognizable cloth that I'll be able to pick up and use when I return in a month. So I'm doing rather than contemplating--finishing the paper due on March 1, and looking at art made by others, reading, researching, putting words in my mouth and images in my brain for the spring to come. Every fiber of my being now only longs to be where I can switch gears from current theories of artmaking to currently making lots of art.



Sunday, January 10, 2010

Tonight I am beginning my contribution to the plethora of words floating like autumn leaves through the unseen universe. Perhaps some of them will find themselves tumbling along the equally unseen ground, pressed against a chain link fence along with other discarded and unread words, rearranging themselves with the help of the wind to spell something new, perhaps. Or possibly they may get caught in tree branches and shred themselves into individual letters, where untethered, they will be free to recombine in their own way. At any rate, I set them all free, as Prospero did Ariel, to do their work.