Drawing _________

Pictures:

It’s hard to believe I’ve been working with my kids since July 8th, but there it is: nearly a month has passed and I am so attached to all of them. When I’m not laughing at the ridiculous and, occasionally, creepily insightful things they say and posting it on Facebook, I’m falling in love with each of them as they open up to me, bit by bit. While it’s true that there are a few I’ve specifically adopted (me as a vividly self-aware, self-proclaimed mentor: “Daylon!” “Yes?” “…I’ve taken an interest in you.” “Um, okay.”), finding new and special things to love about each one is the best part of my day. It was a personal triumph when Justin, the quietest and most reserved nineteen-year-old I’ve ever met, turned to me on the scaffolding the other day and said, “Do you read?” Oh my God, is he initiating a conversation with me? Don’t freak out. Act cool, I said to myself. “What, like books, or poetry, or..?” I said, playing it all nonchalant. “Yeah.” Then, an offering: “I’m writing a story about my life right now.”

The mural has almost become secondary. Though the first wall, and now the second wall, in which me and my team have hit our stride, are coming along beautifully, it serves largely as a metaphor of the growing and blooming interactions I see these kids having with each other and with me as their mentor. Gene, one of heads of the program, described me this week as my group’s “foster mom,” and I can’t remember the last time I bubbled up with such pride.

Conclusions:

Channeling my energy into my team and into the fast-approaching date that I get to bring my new Doberman puppy home (Sunday at noon! It feels like Christmas) has helped me give less attention to my own ever-present issues. Anxiety is still a part of my life. So is anger, which is harder for me to stomach.

I was never a person who held onto anger or raged until my two-year engagement to a man who was unable to express emotion, relegating me to expressing all of it, in one, big, messy ball of fury and instability. I thought, when I began to forgive him, that my anger would dissipate, but though I’ve forgiven him (as well as myself, mostly), the addicting and harmful habit of rage has stayed with me.

And under it all, a sadness: the man I now love, the man who I sabotaged a love affair with almost a year ago, has been back in my life since March, but not with me, not the way he was before. Though I know that he loves me, his clinical depression has taken a turn for the worse and he has asked me for space, which I have dutifully given for the last two weeks. The uncertainty of that situation hangs uneasily in the hallways of my mind, lingering in doorways, occasionally slipping into the main room that occupies my waking thoughts. A part of me wants to disconnect, to forget, to try to move on; while that part valiantly attempts a resolution, a certain song comes on, like Bright Eyes’ “First Day of my Life,” and the lyrics fill the space he usually sits and I feel haunted with unease once more.

Though I am getting this dog for many reasons — companionship; unceasing, unconditional love; protection and loyalty; something to do besides manufacture babies — I look forward to pouring my love and attention onto something that needs me as much as I need it. If I can learn to get past anger with selflessness, I will have achieved the most important goal in my life.

Blanks:

I have been twenty-six for nearly a month now, and with it comes uncertainty; certainly, every birthday before this has brought that as well. The difference this time is that I am pleased with the uncertainty. No longer does my Ego push and shove for certainly, for hard-edged lines. I know and accept that uncertainty is what it is. I have stopped planning my life as a timeline, and begun to treat it like a cork board. I post the dreams I have, the things I want to accomplish, the person that I want to be, and as I achieve these things, I pull them off, or I scratch out lines and make arrows to other pages, add my notes, generally shift and change what’s in place. It is a mutable surface, full of options and opportunities.

So I’m drawing a blank here and there. At least I’m still drawing.

Drawing conclusions, drawing blanks: on jobs, career, and my future.

I have been back in the country for just under three weeks now, and as I expected, my time in Ireland already feels like it was a long and fitful dream. The memories rush away from my present at breakneck speed, and the more I try to desperately hang on, the faster life seems to gallop onward. I feel very much like one of my drawings of bearded men, Rip Van Winkle types jarred from dreaming and forced to exist in a world that no longer belongs to them. I have only turned twenty-six since returning, but I may as well be two hundred. 

When I got home, I expected to be jobless and meandering for my first few weeks, bringing a few new works to fruition, lying outside and working on my tan, and being generally broke and pathetic, but wonderfully so. 

Some of this came to be: I am, in fact, broke, having emptied my savings to live on Euro-bought fresh produce (my diet tends so much to affect my mental and emotional health, so it’s a priority) for two months. And I am, interestingly, developing a complicated and multi-coloured tan. Am I jobless? No. My Type-A drive insisted upon searching for jobs extensively in my last week overseas, turning largely to Craig’s List and my new-found reckless bravery to rattle off cover letters in minutes. This yielded in a handful of interviews, during each of which I was essentially hired or invited back for a more intensive interview and shadowing day. Insane AND true: I am finally the prettiest girl at the dance.

Here’s the I’ve Gone Crazy bit: I turned down two jobs already. They were decent; one was for a marketing company, and the other for an environmental organisation. The first one smacked strongly of the job culture and milieu of Macy’s, a job in which I was a sales manager who hated my life and rewarded my masochism of staying as long as I did by regularly buying designer shoes and sunglasses. The other one required long hours of door-to-door canvassing, and essentially worked on a partial commission basis. A little bit too profit-y for my idealistic view of working for a non-profit. Also, in my opinion, not the best use of my talents. I realise, quite often, that my uncanny ability to make strangers say yes to me is a little bit frightening and manipulative. I rather hate being paid for that skill, and would like to turn to it only if I am in truly dire straits. 

The third job roped me in literally the day after I came home. I had submitted a couple of mural proposals for communities in Pittsburgh, and got chosen for two. The organisation, MLK Murals, is run by a few guys in their thirties who are all a pleasure to work for/with, if a bit lacking in communication sometimes. Essentially, my job breaks down as such: a nine-to-four, in which I spend an hour or two every morning teaching “at-risk” youth art classes based on a general curriculum with room for edit and addendum, followed by a day of working on-site to complete my mural designs (hence the multi-level tan: probably not the best idea to be on a job site in a bikini). The only thing about this job that is heart-breaking is the fact that it’s contracted.

Two places that this information hurts:

1) my heart. As it turns out, my sailor mouth, love of hip-hop, and general whimsy goes over pretty well with teenagers, and my ability to actually listen to what they have to say and encourage them makes the job fulfilling on many levels. Add to that the massive exposure of having my designs on huge walls in the city, and it’s a win-win-win.

2) my wallet. Because it’s contracted, I don’t see a dime of the money until the project is done. This results in a lot of begging and borrowing (Oh, hi, credit card. Let’s be friends.), including batting my eyelashes at bank tellers to deposit checks as cash so I can pay my exorbitant student loans, as well as eating only one meal a day and limiting my love of extravagant grocery runs to once every two weeks. On the bright side, due to my partial starvation, I look fantastic naked. 

I’m a little bit worried about my decision to turn down promising jobs that assure me an income, but I went with my gut each time. During my last weeks in Ireland, I kept pulling the Four of Cups out of my tarot deck. See what the next opportunity has to offer; if it’s more of the same thing, don’t take it. I (perhaps naively) believe there’s something great on the horizon for me. I don’t want to commit to something I don’t feel excited about — that’s why this mural job has turned out to be such a blessing, despite the unusual nature of compensation. I know they’re good for it; I just wish Sallie Mae and American Education Services would chill the fuck out until then. 

Graduate school is still very much in the forefront of my mind. It’s part of the reason I’m shirking the types of jobs that want me to come in entry-level so they can train me up to follow a runaway career path. I wonder sometimes (okay, often) if I’m being a brat, or arrogant, for feeling like I’m in a position to turn down a job. I’m certainly not there financially. I just don’t want to waste any time being unhappy. I want to go back to school and make more art, and learn more things, interact with people who are like-minded, forge a life for myself as a creative, have the credentials to teach college or high school, make beautiful works, and be a real artist. (A humble list, really.) 

Life is trotting by and I’m trying to make sense of it all. So the blog continues. I’ve redesigned a bit, changed the name, and swept out the corners. I like to draw all kinds of things. This will be my space to do so. 

I encourage dialogue; so, you know, talk to me. 

A sketch.

Timothy Emelyn Jones told me, “Make a list. Title it: ‘Words That Apply’.”

I look through my last three series: the work I’ve done in residence at Burren College this spring; the drawings in Returns (2012), a joint show with other returning Pittsburgh artists David Grimm and Mia Henry; and my work in my first solo show, On the Threshold, from the fall of 2009. I try to explain myself.  

“Words that Apply.” Dreams apply; so much of my work is based on dreams. Animals, sleeping human figures; hauntings. I draw animals in combat, and the quiet of the Himalayas from memory. In another drawing, I face off against myself, with opposing animal natures as my cast shadows. I tell stories; I illustrate fictions that I don’t quite know or understand. Folklore is a word that applies. So is mythology. So is memory. And through all of it I try to tap into a realm that’s “in between “– something between waking and dreaming, between dreaming and dying.

Formally, I work in monochrome. I like charcoal for its messy nature, for its expressiveness. Its bold, undeniable presence is felt in kohl sticks; it evokes ghosts on the page in willow and vine. Ink, and ink wash serve to blur the lines, to leave drips, to remind that it’s not quite real. It’s still a drawing. It’s only pretend, like a dream that you swear is real life, until you wake. The edges blur, the image begins to drip until it’s washed away by mid-morning, swept under by the logic of daylight.

Mark Rothko once described the way he would like his viewers to see his work. Ideally, one stands no more than twelve or fourteen inches away from the canvas, so as to have one’s field of view engulfed by the work.  I was so taken by this when I read it my freshman year of college, that even though I was making small things, that description lodged itself into a crack somewhere and began to emerge years later. For the last five years I’ve been making exclusively large work, for the same reasons as Rothko. I want my viewer engulfed, captivated. I want my viewer to go home haunted.

In my work, I try to describe my dreams. I see beautiful visions and dark shapes when I sleep. I think the unconscious mind is a fascinating thing; I think we know much more than our conscious mind would let on.

When my mother became ill and underwent a series of life-threatening operations, I had to face the truth of her mortality. I had never thought of it before; in my lifetime I had only ever had three people die, and my parents had protected me from the reality of death by leaving me at home for the funerals. Seeing my own mother nearly gone on a hospital bed was a rude introduction to Death and our tenuous grasp on this world. So I escaped into sleep. Twelve, fourteen hours a night, I dreamed vividly, feverishly, just so I wouldn’t have to be awake. I saw prehistoric horses, and wolves, and jackals. I saw the Virgin Mary, and dark shapes that crept into the room, and demons.  I began to understand, and come to terms with all of it.

I don’t know what it means to write the perfect artist’s statement. I’m twenty-six; I have only just begun to verbalise my intent with my work. I, like every other creative who has ever lived, make work because I can’t help but to make work. Figuring that out is the easy part. I will spend the rest of my life explaining my intent as it takes shape, and then, five or ten years later, razing it and starting over again with a new one. The core will always be there.