It’s the time of year when my neighborhood is filled with shiny new NYU students, all decked out in their Fall fashions…even when it’s dripping hot outside!
I’m having fun making some pictures of fashion and places, focusing on body diversity. It’s been interesting for me to notice the vintage feel of these images…I do love vintage, and it really does show.
*Not as bad as. you might think!
I periodically get interested in totally random things, and read a ton about it.
In times gone by, I would think about pitching an article about it — writing an article usually satisfied at least my initial interest in a subject. But for various reasons that’s not compelling to me right now, so I give you this. I have a few more of them coming soon on totally unrelated topics that have caught my eye.
(Also, on IG, I have to post in square format which drives me totally bonkers. This is how it was meant to be seen. It was made in a 5x7 inch sketchbook with markers, and tweaked in Photoshop.)
A new painting I’ve just completed — 12 x 12 inches.
On my mind was this city I theoretically have been living in, continuously, but that I have barely seen during the pandemic.
I’m pretty certain I’ve never logged so many consecutive days and nights in these boroughs, in what rounds to a lifetime of New Yorkerness. And I know for sure that the only times I have felt more detached from this place are the intermittent times in my life that I haven’t lived here at all.
But I do live here, have lived here, skulking around the neighborhood in my mask, making surgical strikes for necessities. Now, despite the rising R nought, I’m venturing out more because I’m vaxxed and masked and honestly I can’t stand my world being the size of my apartment anymore. As lucky as I am in all respects, which I am.
So all this on my mind this piece emerges. The figure is a stencil I made, based on a drawing I made, based on a selfie I took in the mirror. I think it’s so weird that we never see ourselves accurately in our lifetimes, or the way that others do. That we only have these reflections that are flipped and distorted in weird ways, depending on glass and angles and lenses.
We string paper lanterns to glow in the night, romantically, recklessly.
As if above there wasn't a wild sky with its gray clouds racing below the plum, at the very least.
The steady observer, almost concealed by darkness, looking in and looking over.
I am watching you. I have come to focus on you ferociously.
(A series of four monotypes, with additional acrylic paint and colored pencil, each 8 inches by 10 inches, on paper.)
It becomes more and more of an effort to post on Instagram, to even open the app. I’ve set time limit on my phone to interrupt any glazed-eye scrolling, just 15 minutes per day. At first I was constantly hitting it, but there are now some days when I don’t even reach that.
At the same time, I want people to see what I’ve done — especially you, if you’re reading these words.
Some new work, then, which I’m posting here first instead of on Instagram, at least initially. (There is more on the home page.)
Of course, edited into the square format because you and I both know it’s going to end up there eventually. If not immediately.
Almost every night, we watch the news. And almost every night, I sit with my sketchbook and draw some of what I’m hearing. I draw the words that I hear, sometimes the people I see on the screen, sometimes just things that pop up into my mind. (Usually because someone on television will use a noun or a verb that I decide to draw.).
Last Spring, when the morgue trucks and moving trucks became a fixture on the streets of New York City, this practice was a way for me to hold on to sanity. When the US death toll went over 10,000 in early April, I decided to start noting the ever increasing number every night. (At that point, the US death toll was virtually indistinguishable from the New York City death toll.) And when the death toll hit 100,000 on May 28th, I stopped.
Then, I was using simple materials — brush pen, black ink. (I have a neat hack on this that I’ll share below.) It was all I could manage in that moment.
I took a little break from this practice, roughly between the election and the insurrection. I was mainlining news at that point nearly constantly and didn’t want to make any art about it. (There are a lot of flowers and cats in my journals in that period.) Also, I’d started weaving. Any repetitive fiber art is an enormously soothing activity to do while watching upsetting things on television!
Anyway, the news hasn’t gotten any less upsetting, really, but I picked up the practice again.. Now, however, I’m in the mood for color, which maybe is a hopeful sign? Some then and now images from the sketchbook for your viewing pleasure.
Materials: The 2020 journals were made with black ink in a brush pen. I love Kuretake brush pens, but I try to stay away from anything non-refillable.(Because the environment, and also because I’m cheap. ) These waterbrush pens, or anything similar, can be filled with any kind of ink. (They’re not really meant for this purpose so if you’re moving around with them, I’d keep them in a plastic bag in case of leaking. But this wasn’t an issue in 2020.) After extensive trial and error, my favorite black-black ink is Noodler’s X Feather.
The journals themselves are 9x12 Artist’s Loft sketchbooks from Michaels. They are also totally affordable, good quality, and get the job done. The 2021 journals are on magazine pages, which I cover up totally with Posca pens and then Copics and Tombows.
You can add me to the list of people noting that time itself has gotten so weird during the pandemic. It's true: My sense of time has become totally suspect!
I've long had routine of reviewing a month's worth of journal entries, at the beginning of a new month. I make some summary notes of what went well, what didn't, ideas I want to pursue and so on.
It was through this process that I started to realize over this plague year that my sense of time was getting a little...hinky. As I read through my daily journals at the end of the month, I've been startled when I realized that events that happened only a couple of weeks ago, felt like that they happened much longer ago.
It's so disorienting! As best as I can figure it, events have become pretty unattached to their correct chronological time in my mind, after roughly 48 hours.
For example, I'm writing this at 9:45 a.m., and I can easily remember what happened yesterday and when in time it happened: exercise class in the afternoon, what I photographed and edited in the morning, what I had for breakfast. I can pretty much do the same with the day before.
Reaching back beyond that though, my memories lose their "time stamp." Monday might as well have been a few months ago. I'm not going to say I remember events from earlier in the week in the exact the same way I remember things from college or high school twenty years ago — but more recent events have that darker, fuzzier, sepia-toned quality of a memory of a time much longer ago.
I've struggled to explain this, even to myself. This isn't an issue with my memory per se, I remember things just fine. (Or just has fine as I've always done — I remember conversations and events almost with complete recall, I've never had a good memory for proper names.) It's memory by chronology that's gotten warped. My mental filing system has gotten— and this is the technical term— fucked up. The memories are fine, but if feels like the "metadata" has gotten corrupted.
As I mentioned, a lot of smart people have been documenting the pandemic's effects on our mental health and on our very brains themselves. If I'm reading all of it correctly, we're experiencing collective brain damage. Our sense of time is all about how we encode memories, and that process is dependent on dopamine — and life in lockdown and/or stress and/or fear messes with our dopamine levels, among other delights!
If we’re all brain damaged in similar ways, I suppose that make it…the new normal? I don’t know. It’s a comforting thought, anyway. If you are also experienced corrupted memory metadata and want to feel a little better about it, I recommend:
This episode of On Being with Krista Tippet, “What’s Happening with Our Nervous Systems?” I listened to this as I was feeling the side effects of my second Covid shot, and it was very soothing and informative.
What is Happening to Our Sense of Time During Covid? One of the first things I read that clued me in that I wasn’t the only one experiencing the time warp, and that it was a real thing and not just more pandemic bitching.
This study on “Novelty Input and Novelty Output” during quarantine, if you like reading studies. (I started taking some steps to increase my novelty inputs, which I’ll probably write about in a later post…if I remember, ha.)
My latest series of work was inspired by wycinanki, or Polish cut paper art. It's pronounced vee-chee-non-kee. Before you get too impressed, let me say that the only other words I know in Polish are "thank you" and "grandmother," more on that in a moment.
Wycinanki are symmetrical designs cut from folded paper — pretty similar in basic process to the blend between origami and paper cutting that kids use to make paper snowflakes. The results can be monochromatic, or, with the aid of layered papers, multicolored. Generally, they're made in folk motifs. Here's a cool quick stop-motion animation on how it's traditionally done.
While I'm not super interested in the traditional motifs, I immediately wanted to try my hand at this. Because while I feel like my truest identity is "New Yorker," I'm inspired by/greatly interested in the arts and traditions of different cultures — Asian, African, Indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere. I have loads of books on these cultures, photos from museums, as well as from traveling I've done to places around the world inspired by this interest.
The issue here is that these are not my native cultures, so I'm well aware that this inspiration can only go so far in my art practice without creeping from appreciation into appropriation.
It's less problematic for me to more directly reference my own heritage, and I do have a grab bag of cultural ties to choose from. My grandparents, as either immigrants themselves or children-of, offer an interesting melange of possibilities. On one side, there's Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, and, if you believed my grandmother, gesturing at her almond-shaped eyes, Mongolian. (I mean, there was a lot of historic forays into the general region by Mongolians, so I guess it's plausible — if so, that gives me a little toe-hold into Asia. And if that's credible, then I think I can also find some link to the Caucuses.) And on the other, there's Poland, by way of Spain.
All of that made me feel legit entitled to explore and incorporate wycinanki which evidently has a long history in Jewish communities in both Poland, and several of the areas with which I have a genetic connection. Traditionally, these pieces were made with the intent of warding off the evil eye (of course!), celebrating holidays, commemorating the dead
For my wycinanki-inspired pieces, I used both the positive and the negative shapes of the paper cut outs. (This means I used both the design I cut out, and the paper I cut away.) I started with found papers which I painted intuitively, rather than working with plain paper. Once cut and glued, I painted on them some more.
I really enjoyed the element of surprise in this — you draw a design on the folded paper, or just freehand cut (I did both) and when you unfold it, you get something that's both the idea you had, and that unpredictable little something extra that the process creates. In this way, it's akin to printmaking — minus the ink fumes, which alas, led me away from my experiments in printmaking a few years ago. I'm looking forward to exploring this some more. You can take a closer look at these works right here.
This month in the studio, I’m experimenting with different shaped substrates — and really pushing myself on size.
Up until now, I’ve preferred for my work to be intimate in scale. Back when I was taking studio art classes, my teachers were always urging me to get larger paper, larger canvas, and I kept resisting. Eventually this led me towards making jewelry, where I was really working on a small scale. I was wearing magnifiers every day, and, for a time, I was in heaven.
When I set jewelry to the side, I returned to working pretty small — my max is usually 11 x14 inches! One of my friends pointed out that I like to work in book size. This is true. (I also like to make books.)
But for some reason, as the pandemic has worn on — for reasons I haven’t quite really been able to pin down — I’ve been feeling the urge to work larger and to take up some more space. So, when one of the teachers I admire offered a class called “Big and Little” — all about scaling up work, I was immediately intrigued and signed right up.
I didn’t expect that the first step would be to work in different shapes, but i felt very enthusiastic about that. This piece above, still in process, is six inches in diameter, so still pretty small. BUT, I have purchased 12 inch round canvas…and even larger square and rectangular canvases. (like…18x24 inches gasp!). So now I’ll want to use them. More as it happens!
Over on Instagram, I participated in a month-long collage challenge during February. I generally feel like I can make my own prompts — I even taught a class about that! But this challenge has been really really fun. Here’s what I made:
