Saturday, May 4, 2019

Sketchbook clearout, and thinking about future

Gonna do a quick one to hopefully clear out some notes from a sketchbook. I wrote a page in prep for an artist talk. The notes kind fo went through a life arc, then had bullet points as follows. I didn’t get to the bullet points in my talk, but I think most are things I would like to expound upon sometime hopefully here or at another artist lecture. The artist lecture is the ultimate dream for me in a way, it’s immediate, performative, and can codify some thoughts, and potentially enlighten others. I hope to have many more.

rules of studio life
Habits
Don Quixote (to become oneself) 
Loneliness
Plans for the future
On roommates
On money
On dating
On eating
On sleep
Meditation
Bitterness

_______

Boats, looking down, skittering on the surface. A metaphor for dreams. 

_______

That’s it. There’s some vague thumbnails to decipher, but that brings us to the current to-do list page, which is medium sized and mixed up between short and long term goals. I’m graduating next week. My family will come up. I won a travel scholarship yesterday. Come spring of next year I will hope to go to England for a couple months, paid for by the school, though I am yet to know the amount that was allocated for this year. 

Since I’m graduating, I’m moving into my apartment more heavily, screwing things into the walls and bringing in all of the surfaces I’ve been working on, and the surfaces yet to be worked on. I’m going to scale down, which seems the obvious choice for a grad. I’m going to be proactive, but that’s a little later. First I have to wrap up what I’m sitting on, which is a ton of student work. My task is to photo-document all of the work I’ve got in good natural light, and edit and compile the images into a folder and or pdf. I will import these to facebook, and maybe make a link on my website for a download of my ‘student work’. From there I aim to either ship it out if someone requests it, or destroy it via painting over it, or cutting it up to use for collage. I am excited for the possibilities of color collage. It is a place where abstraction reigns, and imagery emerges, with the obvious positive side effect of giving some of these classroom paintings a second life. 

All in all though, I might do well to pursue some more poignant projects. I can think of a few. I’d like a receiving end, so that I’m not collaging into the void, or painting into the void, as one is apt to do. Does having an audience make art better or worse? 

In short I should finish this thing up, then reach out to some informed older people with questions regarding life after school, etc. 

I’ve got about four thousand dollars left in my primary account, and my rent is 800/month.