July 2004 Archives

Sonic Youth, Ogden Theatre, Denver CO - 07/26/04 11:03:03 PM

Sonic Youth, Monkey Mania, Denver CO - 07/27/04 01:54:50 AM

And that's all there has to be said about that.

This is a paper I wrote as a reaction to reading, Art and Fear. It's not my best writing, but it's here to be shared nonetheless

by alex Simoni

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.

- Blaise Pascal

I've read Art and Fear  a few times now. A fairly odd book. I decided not to write a bland report on the book, but write down my insights on the same topics that the authors write about. I will disagree with them quite a bit. This is not to prove my  own skills as a smartass, but to show that what works for one person, may not necessarily work for another person and that we all have different perspectives on how we deal with anything; be it art making or just getting out of bed in the morning.

I will say one thing: it is very odd to read a book full of advice on art making from two people whom, as artists,  haven't produced art well enough known for myself to be familiar with. I will give myself the credence of being at least partially  coherent of the Art World's; in its current state.

In Art and Fear's own example, it seems better that if you want to learn how to make it as an artist, you ask an artist about themselves and learn from what they say, and not from such a scatology like Art and Fear. Given that I am a complete unknown in the Art Word - Bayles and Orland know as much about me as I do of them, I encourage you to give my voice as much credence as theirs. The only thing they seem to have more than me is their age in years - and when's the last time you were told to trust someone over thirty?

"But I can hear the music so much better in my head than  I can get out of my fingers"

To which the master replied,

"What makes you think that ever changes?"

- Student, lamenting to his Master, Art and Fear, pg 14

This is not something that I'm very  much accustomed to. Rather, it's more the reverse: what I see in my mind has a curious characteristic to actually come out of the canvas exactly the way I envision. For example: CU Boulder, Painting 1-

I have an idea for a painting that I will in fact do, before the class even began, before I even for the first time purchase big kids oil paint, before I know the assignment that I'm going to take great liberty in changing the guidelines of. *Poof* - it comes out like nothing.

There are many ways to explain this feat, none of which makes me a superior genius to anyone else. I probably keep many, many Ideas in my head at all times, on the backburner, and they only come out when they are fully cooked. It's almost like my greatest sketchbook is my subconscious, diligently working away at this problem or that, until it knocks on the door of consciousness with its findings.

It does this knocking at that weird time right before I awake. Pieces start to fit together and I react. I react, because, if I don't, it'll recur to the point of a nightmare.

I have a problem with sleep, it's not that I necessarily have a hard time acquiring it, as if I'm a insomniac, there's just this big part of mw that's actually afraid of sleep, or rather, afraid to not be awake, not working on something; like an overblown workaholic. My poison is caffeine and this has ill affect on my sleep performance.

But still, Subconscious alex knocks on the door even more as I restlessly try to get some sleep. It is, as if this time He comes with questions that I'll then hash out. Questions on form it seems: "Does this color go with this?", "Where should this go?", "How should this connect with that?" It's like my own personal decorator - but for concepts.

Some other times, things come out exactly as I envision, because, well, sometimes it's the point, example:

The Original, "sketch":

The Finished,"painting"

So if I can come to a fairly similar manifestation of my Ideas, what's the point of manifesting them? Well, the point for me is not to see what I create to be exactly as I envision, but to be delighted, scared, feel rapture by all the stuff I didn't envision!

It has to be understood that the outside stimuli that approach our sensory organs are massively compressed before they meet our minds. If they weren't, we'd all be going crazy with onslaught of everything that goes around us. It's called perspective I guess. My perspective is different than yours - and they're both flawed - both are wrong and in a sense fake and one shouldn't trust one's senses at all times. One should learn to lean into what you have inside, and value that window. Very Eastern thought I know - but dig this,

I have an idea. I go forward and create said idea, and let's say I created it, exactly as I envision. What I didn't bet on is that there is so much else in the creation than what I envision. If it's a painting, let's say, the physical properties of paint in a concrete world makes my head spin - ooooh!

It will then change my internal ideal of what painting is, applied in whatever way I applied it. The internal view gets sharpened, even though the external view is flawed. By materializing the mental, you tend to be blinded by everything that duplicates the mental picture, and what you have left is, well, everything else.

It's a way to say what gets compressed and left out of the physical stimuli reaching your brain. The next piece of art will now be seeded by what I didn't see in the last mental ideal. Pretty neat, huh? Maybe this whole idea is the exact opposite of say, Buddhism, which rejects the physical to understand what is Real (nothing!). If I keep training myself to only see what I haven't seen before, maybe I'll hit bottom and the ground will evaporate from my feet.

Just maybe.

[ 17.1 ] - The artist's life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because he images it to be fast.

I feel frustration. Sure. But it usually about other people, or things I can't control. For example: Buses. They kill me. If a bus is minutes late, I'm jumping out of my skin. But, when it comes to myself or things I can control, I show amazing patience.

I chalk this all up from being raised in a family that sailed a Catalina 27.

Sailing a boat under nothing but the power of wind teaches you a few things. For one, the absolute silence of running without a motor is magical. You hear the various system of the Earth: tides, trade winds, heat; just like if you pent yourself in a completely sealed off room. You don't not hear anything, like John Cage thought, but you start to hear yourself- your respiratory system; the movement of your circulation. Silence is electrifying. You become more sensitive with everything around you. You're using nature, not fighting against its frictions.

The other thing that a sailing a boat teaches you is that, although you travel slowly, you travel and the amount that you can take in - perceive, and examine, is the same as if you were travel under power - which is to say, you take in much more, since you are going much slower! If it takes you ten times longer to get to a destination, you take in ten times as much, or in another way to put it; you at least have the opportunity to not miss ten times as much. It's the same reason I like to walk to places.

So I learned that faster does not mean better, it just means you're traveling at a different plane. A destination is not the point of a journey. The journey is the point of the journey. I usually take the slowest means possible.

As a young adult, I have had to force myself, to keep slowing down. Not a very easy feat for Caffeine Boy here, who wriggles with nervous energy, clasping his Styrofoam cup of reheated coffee, but it's easily reachable, as long as I remember to realize it.

Quotas help me in this space. A very successful project of mine involved making a composition by folding paper; such simple means to complex designs.

I made myself fold hundreds of pieces of paper before committing a composition to canvas. I then did four "sketch" paintings and went back a step to my paper folds for even more fine-tuning.

I did all this, because the foreseeable apex (not knowing if this was a fake peak or not), was a 12 painting series so justly, I didn't want to Fuck Up.

I got the paper from the trash. I bought the paint at a store. I kept all the receipts. The paint cost a lot of money, more so than the time it took to nail my idea.

The Result:

Tortoise: meet Hare.

[26.1] - "Talent, in common parlance, is "what comes easily". So sooner or later, inevitably, you reach a point where the work doesn't come easily, and - Aha!, it's just as you feared!.

I don't have any talent.  I've learned how to at least perceive things as "coming easily" to myself: I keep my hands in many pots.

I like doing this, because if I get stuck painting, I pick up the camera, if I get stuck with the camera, I dance, and if I get stuck there I drink maybe a bit too much and I'm right back up dancing again.

But really, what I've come to conclude from my various Jack-of-all-Tradesmanship - a brief list:

writer, computer programmer, rock climber, jazz/swing dancer, sometimes painter, road tripper, graphic designer, hiker

 is that everything you do can relate to well, everything else that you do and feelings of being stuck is the feeling that you have nothing to relate what you're feeling to anything else. I haven't done a painting in weeks, and I'm not too concerned about it. I've been taking lots of pictures. I've been playing around with stamps. I may just take a road trip to Seattle - I've never been there -  sounds fun! Sounds more fun and exciting to take a road trip than to paint. That's not always the case.

My mind gets bored easily with being pressed the same way all the time. I'm lazy for routine. But, switching gears is what I find works. I feel at ease when I feel not at ease.

I also like to be in many pots to not be, shall we say, an "expert" at one thing. I have a strong tendency to think an artist, by definition, should be an amateur at what he does. Somewhat like as the book calls it, the difference between an artist and a craftsman. It's much easier to take a risk if you don't know all the rules. Or put it another way, it's easier to fall of a cliff if you're driving blind. In fact, if you're on a mountain pass, there's more a chance that you *will* fall off a cliff if driving blind. Am I really the only person that draws with their weak hand... without looking at the paper... and not taking the pencil off the page... for a half hour at a time? I certainly hope not...

[33.1] - The Artist's Statement framed near the door is clear: these works materialized exactly as the artist conceived them. The work is inevitable. But wait a minute - your work doesn't feel inevitable (you think), and so you begin to wonder: maybe making art requires some special or even magic ingredient that you don't have.

I refuse to write an "Artist Statement" First off, I'm twenty three; what do I know about anything? Secondly, is an artist statement a tool to help communicate your ideas to someone else, or, is a crutch the artist uses in time of second-guessin"What am I doing? Oh yes, it's right here in my... Artist Statement!

My lack of an artist statement seems to reside closely with the amount of work I produce that doesn't really create a large series. Again, I'm twenty-three, not yet out of college, the idea of a series of work is somewhat laughable, but an Artist Statement would seem to solidify the ideals of a series. Is my art relatable to each of itself? Oh yes, I would think, because I know what come first, what came next and what came last.

Do I know what I'm doing when I'm creating the work, in other words, do my "works materialized exactly as the artist [me] conceived them"? Well, yes, I already said that most of the time, work comes out as I picture it - but, this does not mean that I know one damn thing about the work to begin with!  It seems that I know what I'm doing as long as I really don't know what I'm doing. Thinking of it that way, it's as if my work relates to more of a Surrealist method of taking shape. I allow almost accidents to happen inside my head and I extrapolate.

One day, I woke up and something told me to fold pieces of paper. And I did. Hundreds of them. I didn't understand why I urged myself to fold so many pieces of paper, but it came down to that my subconscious remembers folding lots of pieces of paper as a child - paper airplanes, paper snowflakes, birthday cards, origami, and I found that this very simple act was a very very early act of self expression on my part that I had utterly forgotten. This particular part of myself came up again, after more than 12 years under the surface, and personified itself in a most interesting way.

The closest I have gotten to writing an artist statement was a personal manifesto, and I only allowed myself to write that personal manifesto with the promise to myself that I would rewrite it constantly. I versioned it as you would software releases. Dating the month and time of day. The manifesto, when written, was what I thought at that very instance - tomorrow, I maybe would have thought much different about everything, perhaps after reading a new book, or watching a movie, seeing a beautiful flower or finding out about a close relative's passing away. My personal view of reality changes rambunctiously, why not my "Artist Statement?" If that's the case, why write one at all? A hike is better without a map, I think.

[60.1] - Working within the self-imposed discipline of a particular form eases the prospect of having to reinvent yourself with eah new piece

The idea that one should stick to one medium or discipline is shear ludicrous. I would weep in depression if all I could tell that I did  involved painting at an easel. That's not an art form, that's a job description. Every time I switch modes or mediums, I would use this new medium as my answer to, "So, what do you do?" questions at parties. I now get too confused, and tell people simply that: "I play".

Some of my most successful pieces involve taking something from one medium and plopping it into a completely different medium. That's how I learned the difference of each medium, its strengths and weaknesses: it's history. I do this in a few ways: I'll take one medium and make it the subject of another.

For example: I'll do a film about a painting - that I created initially on my Macintosh, which started as a dream, three years ago in a different town while attending a different school dating a completely different girl.

Or another example: I'll take a design of the creases of folding paper and make a painting out of it - which will then be displayed as a sculpture; being on the floor as well as the walls.

Matthew Barney took his Sculptures made a Vaseline and created a mythology out of it all - and then filmed 9+ hours of footage. He then took the sculpture he made specifically for the movie, the props if you will, and showed them at the Guggenheim, right along side projections of the movie.

Tim Hawkinson took a drill, put a pencil in it instead of a bit and drew on the walls. Liking that so much, he took the same idea, but instead of a pencil, he drew with sheets of plastic wrap, that would whirl around into tight bunches of cellophane - perfect 3d version of his intestine-like wall drawings.

This is nothing new. A drawing and a painting are vastly different. But, you can transfer a drawing to a painting, a painting to a lithograph, a lithograph being  (in my opinion) a form of sculpture! Changing mediums is a wondrous way to make accidents happen.  If we didn't slip around mediums willy-nilly, we would all be Joseph Bueys, writing our conceptual thoughts on pieces of paper and handing that in as or work.

But, what is the fear lodged in this book about changing disciplines? I change my personality sometimes to attempt to gain a different perspective on things. It's not as psychotic as it sounds. It's called a Nom de Plume - it's also a cheap license to act a way that "you" really aren't, to both yourself and your critics and friends. I take on a different persona when I write fiction, a different persona when I get drunk with friends, a different persona when I'm on hour 23 of a road trip somewhere I've never been to. To say that a personality is this concrete ghost is quite silly.

One of my favorite artist/performers is David Bowie (which isn't even his real name!) But, Bowie could not go from singing about Laughing Gnomes to Moonage Daydream, Cracked Actors and Rock and Roll Suicide. Bowie created an entirely new character out of himself to express this entire new part of himself. And it worked.

It takes more balls to change, even when on a path that seems to reap rewards. Isn't, as stated in the book, art different from craft because it takes more risks?

[70]  Competition

I like competition - I'm a competitive guy. I was always the shining hope in my high school sports outings. Not just one time has, "You! Your are the new Messiah!", been uttered about myself and its foreseeable future, as I have been hand-picked to keep the torch, whatever that torch is, lit and alive. The problem is, I hate teamwork and I hate knowing what the future holds. I usually end up quitting the team. That's why I took up art. I can compete with myself, not with other people really. I am that motherfucker that's working on Sundays, breaking into school to paint away as you get over your hangover. I'm the one that breaks that rules on what's allowed. You win by - well not by cheating, but testing the rules.

An example of competition with myself: One spring, while living in Boulder, I received a postcard about RMCAD's annual student show. Bedazzled, and in a rut myself, I decide to call up the school to arrange a tour. You know, just on a whim. My personal goal, however cloudy it was at the time, was to go back to school after a slight break and become a Writer. I thought I had a knack and it was all I was doing anyways.

I decided to check out RMCAD because I had just gotten back from San Fransico. While in San Fransico, I checked out the Academy of Art and Design, SF - again, just on a whim. I traveled to SF with two punk rockers I barely knew in a jalopy of a broken down van. If you haven't understood yet, I enjoy whims. Checking out RMCAD seemed like fun! and I was going to be in Denver anyways, so what the Hell.

I liked the school enough to apply, turning in my application on my twenty-first birthday. I got accepted and promptly found myself in Drawing 2 class, completely scoobied on what exactly I thought I was doing in this class.

To say I felt like I was less than adequate is a gross misunderstanding. I felt that everyone around me was seething with energy and talent and charisma. Doodles on the desks around me looked better than any of my best work. I silently panicked inside. I was crashing with a friend that was living on Logan and at night I must have made a decision with myself.

 I knew that I was not at the level of any of the people in my class, but by the end of the semester, I decided that I would do the absolute best that I could have and see how far I could get.

Here's what a drawing of mine looked like before Drawing 2:

This is the next pastel drawing I ever did, in Drawing 2:

Quite the improvement!

And it's because I dared myself to do something that I felt myself to be impossible. Isn't that what Art is all about? Daring to do the impossible? Did Michel Angelo have an inkling that perhaps- just perhaps, it would be impossible to paint the Sistine Chapel? (The Tomb of Medici was found to be impossible!) Didn't people think that the Impressionists were completely batty for using only primaries and their compliments in landscapes? Or for even, say making blue shadows? The impossibilities are only in our perspectives, it seems.

Back to my story: Come the next student show, I find that a painting I had painted, in a medium that i had never used before coming to the college, had won the Painting category. If that wasn't a sign to myself that I had worked at what I wanted to - that I was now winning the very show that had first attracted me to the school, then I don't know what this all was. It just felt good. It felt like an accomplishment. I felt satisfied.

Competition with other people and myself usually only happens with one other person. Mostly now, it happens with my best friend, and it's a very friendly competition - I'm almost false at calling it a competition, but it's more of a working off of each other kind of feeling. Our styles do not overlap and our work really does not go together.

But, I see him at the studios, painting huge paintings, and this drives me to stick it out, and be in the studio too, painting just as large paintings as him, working at least as hard as him. It's a good thing to have a personal barometer I think. At the end of the day, we say goodbye, or meet up later to see a music show. We don't care, because we both have self-humility and are grounded.

Just last week, I told him about a juried show that I was entering and told him that he should enter as well - not that I wanted competition, but I was certain that we would both get in. In stead of being my adversary, he became my Picasso/Braque mountain climber duo.

Competing for art is quite silly; if anything, Art needs a strong community to survive. Take the Book's example of how many art students stop producing art after the support system that is School is no longer there! Art is both a lonely "profession" and also something that needs constant reassurance.

[14.1] - making art and viewing art are different at their core.

I agree with this, but I add a stipulation. The reason I go and see art in galleries, see performance, do whatever is that I have an interest in is not just to  be a passive part of all this, but because there is some part of myself that wants to do what I see.

I go to art openings, because I want to paint, or perhaps, I want to be the one in that art opening. Good paintings make me excited to paint. I very rarely see good paintings, granted.

I guess because I'm more excited in the doing of something, I try to make my own art The Doing of the art itself. I can't make these two separate things, doing and viewing the same, but I can at least hope to make the person experiencing my artwork want to do their own artwork. 

In a way, I want to be Pornography; I want people to want to have sex. I guess most people just masturbate, and maybe pornography isn't the best way to get people to make and fall in love - I keep the discipline of not being a tramp about it. Isn't that what some bad artwork is? It's just trampy by being too... shocking or conceptual or, well, not from your own heart, similar to (on topic!) how Art and Fear talks about needed to make art that is true to yourself, something that's not empty and superficial, something that has a storyline or a Reason, even if that reason is to be just absurdly silly - absurdly silliness is sometimes good to do, just to remember it's Real.

I guess what I'm walking around is that it has been my experience that doing something is a whole lot more fun that viewing, and that's why I'm in the position of my life that I am. I think it is a beautiful thing to try to be viral about what you're interests are in a passive way.

There is a good story in Walden, where he talks about two people; the man who works as a banker or a lawyer in an attempt to save up enough money to retire and become a poet and the man who just becomes a poet to begin with. The retired man is too old and doesn't have anything to say as a poet, and the other man *must* be a poet. I guess I'll have enough time later to just view things if I need to.

[30.1] Imperfection is essential

This is most likely the finest point of Art and Fear, but Imperfection is a bit more than essential; it's inevitable. It's a very fine day when you realize that you're completely and thoroughly flawed. It makes you the exact opposite of a God and that I equate with freedom. A perfect being - a God - needs to answer to someone, if it's just himself. Perfection is a difficult song to follow, since how do you know when you are in a state of imperfection?

I learned to harness imperfections, "wasted" time, writer's block - what have you, as just another experience to work off of; One just needs that one can learn a lot by just. Slowing. Down. Look at the grass grow, I don't think it's a bad thing to realize that it's all growing at the same time, as the author's of Art and Fear seem to think of as odd. Granted, they were talking about psychedelic drug users, but Leary's whole shtick was the idea that the quest to experience what you do on LSD off of LSD is a pretty worthwhile goal. I think reaching this childhood state of just observing what the adult world may seem as absurd is getting approximate to Leary's quest without dropping.

Just a little while ago, I helped someone with their imperfections. It was about 3 in the morning, my friend and I had just finished eating some yummy Cup-O-Noodles. She blurted out, in between conversation that, she wasn't going to make it (as an artist), I asked why and she told me that she just didn't have, "it", whatever it is, be it vision, talent, whatever.

I basically told her that she has everything that she needed; that to make an interesting change takes just a little more effort than breathing, but perhaps a bit more follow through. So I asked her, if she had all the resources of the World, what would she do tomorrow.

I gave her examples.

I told her I would get a 57 Chevy Convertible and just cruise up and down downtown, nicely dressed in clothes the same era as the car and ask people if they would like to take a ride. Or I would look at an ant colony all day. Or I'd find the highest building and throw paper airplanes off of it, with beautiful notes inside. Or I'd get together every single string of Christmas lights that I could find and see just how far you could string them. I told her she could have,  "all the resources of the world", in attempt to give her no limits - you don't have to use all the resources in the world, and I hoped her idea wouldn't, as that would show someone as being a little self serving - there are other people, they need the resources too. Willy Wonka had secret rules in his chocolate factory too, you know.

After a long pause, she answers: "I want to go New Orleans, and take pictures."

The next day we were gone. I thought that statement was beautiful, and as beautiful as statements can be, creating a reality is factors more valuable. The next day, we were on I-70, towards New Orleans.

I mean, she knew how to drive and she didn't have anything she needed to do in the next week. She had everything she needed, except she was afraid of an unknown, she was afraid of making a mistake. Did she (and I, since I was copilot) make a bad decision? Well, New Orleans wasn't coming to us anytime soon. I think getting out of a balanced state is a good thing, in doses. Being slightly imperfect should be a goal. Rocks are fairly perfect as being rocks.

I don't want to be a rock.

[79] - The Academic World.

Sometimes I think I go to school because I like teachers, but am not the largest fan of being taught.

My personal plan regarding the academic world is to one day become a teacher - not full time, but a class or two, when I'm ready. It's one of my personal beliefs that to learn something and then not pass the Experience over in some way, is a complete tragedy. I think it's a good definition on what a society is, or a culture: a group of people that exchange ideas for a common goal.

In a past life (as it seems to be now, but it's still very much in the present as it is in the past), I was a computer programmer. I have given away, at least a trashy novel's worth of computer code for people to directly use and indirectly learn from. I didn't need to, but I knew that I would benefit from doing this, as much as the person who may take advantage of it. It's a very Marxist ideal, but in cases of knowledge, it works.

In my artwork, I put most of my cards on the table, to show you exactly how something was created - this is twofold; one I believe that the idea of the artist as being "special" is ridiculous; if something is hard to understand how it is accomplished it is because the facts are hidden. Many old masters were known to have secret mediums they used in their paints that are now lost in time. We don't know what they used, and this lose is only a gain to someone who is now dirt. Although, we've also found that some of these mediums were merely linseed oil - being nothing special at all, and these searchers were just fooling themselves. This is a case of someone perhaps fearing the known, by creating a false unknown, like my friend that didn't know she could go to New Orleans whenever she wanted, but could with little extra added effort.

[110] Mushroom Hunting

I've had too many experiences in my life where what I was looking for was right in front of my face and that I just didn't know what I was looking for.

I was in a figure painting class. The professor asked me if I could see the blue on the model's legs, since there were none on the legs I was painting. No, I did not and thought of him as a loon, until I put blue paint on my brush and applied it to my painting. I looked up at the model and instantly saw blue on her legs and on her arms, on the bridge of her nose - I saw blue every-fucking-where.

It's not that I didn't know that blue was a color and had some odd blindness to it, I just didn't understand that red things can be blue, that green things can be blue; basically, I learned to look without the stereotype of Local colors.

Times like that are powerful enough to be frightening, because you walk outside and things don't look familiar. This all fades as you get used to it, but it's nice to look at a white wall even now and never see white.

I guess that's one of the keys to Looking; leave your knowledge of what you're looking behind, or you're just not going to be looking at all; you're going to be remembering and placing and being a good little mental bookkeeper. It actually takes some effort to not look and I guess most visual understanding takes this same effort to allow yourself not to go into autopilot.

This may make clear why it's easier to understand a painting, or Painting after you have yourself painted something. It forces you to become aware of the paint itself- and the process, and not just the surface. You can't get much from just looking at the dried-out finished work; to truly understand a painting, you need to get messy and work with the paint, get it all on your best clothes and see truly why it is that someone paints.

I continue to paint, as oppose to making an installation, or working exclusively with new media, or just make computer programs, because painting is just so damn fun. This will be the reason painting will never fully go away, singing hasn't gone away either I supposed, even though we've made instruments that do the hard bits for us.

This also goes for anything, not just painting. I wonder sometimes why people act the way the do; why is x dressed up in that silly outfit? To find out, I usually will shadow them for a night - I then understand them better.

This is why I don't stick to one thing, I find sticking to one thing is quite like stopping yourself from really looking: you're on autopilot.

As Picasso would say: 'Some artists make cake tins, and bake';

-alex Simoni

No one ever really mentions how difficult it is to hang up art for an opening. I was at The Assembly gallery for a good three hours today and managed to get only four incredibly precisely placed screws in total into the wall.

I entered this juried show by handing in a computer printout of what I wanted to hang. In this case, it was a group of 12 panels that all interconnect in any way that you wanted. Being lazy and a little crafty, I took a picture of only one of the panels and made a fake composition on a stock image of a wall I have for just such an occasion:

The very laughable thing-

and what I didn't figure out until trying to put together and hang up the piece is that I cannot make this composition given the panels I've painted using a design created by folding paper- it needs eight panels of one design and four panels of the opposite design; I had six and six.

This in itself would have been very embarrassing, if not for the fact that the hanging space was only nine feet tall, and the composition on the printout needs ten feet, so I needed to figure out an entirely new composition anyways.

This took a little time, but I came up with a killer composition that will be at the very least ten times as hard to hang, since I'm now hanging on the diamond, instead of, well, how you usually hang a painting. Think Piet Mondrian.

I did, since I saw a somewhat lacking (for twelve bones, somewhat lacking) show featuring De Stijl artists, at the SAM on the third. My Seattle trip is a story itself, which makes about four road trips I have taken in about a years time (Richmond Indiana, Ventura California, New Orleans Louisiana, Seattle Washington or even San Fransico a little earlier) that I haven't written in much length here. I always thought I would write prolix tomes about them, but I guess it's not time yet.

I'll find my way.

Here's something like what will be hung up

This time, it's done with physical objects on the floor, before being hung. A very necessary last step if you're designing on a computer.

It's very nice to actually hang something that's better than what you're submitted, although time is somewhat of a precious thing to me, I'm graduating in four weeks.

I found out today that my contact at the gallery was someone I met at the Denver Art Expo, which I helped the Andenken Gallery hang up and take down - and also was in. He was in very bad shape, completely tied in a wheelchair. I found out he had just recovered from a motorcycle accident where his leg was torn off. They were able to successfully attach it again. He can move three out of five toes. That's a good bar for success and I guess that's just about what we can all hope for:

three out of five toes.