Sweet Spots

I should confess, I still have a suitcase on the floor of my room full of clothes. It's not exactly still packed, but the stuff in it is that sort of in between clothing that you don't want to devote one of your three precious drawers to, but also, that you actually wear. I believe its a medley of athletic clothing and old t-shirts that are really only suitable for sleeping in, when you've run out of otherwise more suitable pajamas and shorts or ruffled bloomers I wear under dresses while bicycling and enormously bulky Russian socks and long underwear and the odd pair of sweatpants. They are things I don't need right now, but might need someday and the whole mix leaves me really uncertain about myself. Let alone what kind of storage solution I require.

So, yes, I haven't documented the state of things here, as they are still very much in progress. Sorry. I really need a dining table and I think all other negligence in my apartment sort of orbits around that main issue. And in my defense, I am almost never actually here. So never here, that my neighbor was shocked to see me in the daylight the other day. I actually startled him.

But there are some little spots where in between brewing coffee or reading or brushing my teeth, I've put down little roots and hung up the things I love. Sometimes, I've just used the nail that was already in the wall. But even the little wispy bitty roots we put down, they do help to hold things up.
















I've always been really attached to my house. (Nester, obviously.) But here in Houston especially, I realized that the things I've held onto, through all the moves and all the shakes, are the things that will always remind me of some very specific moment or person. And all these silly little things, tacked to the walls of this little apartment, is a way of surrounding myself with all of the moments and with all of the people with whom I've known love and felt life. To linger over them in the minutes between the usual, ho-hum everyday? Well, it just, it really helps.

Emily

Emily made a big diorama of her grandma in a garden of color that now sits in the window of the ATA space on Valencia St. in San Francisco. Emily's drawings are already really beautiful, and lately she's a talented jeweler as well, but I was particularly floored by her genius in this project. I'm not sure what's the best part--her drawings turned three dimensional, her grandmother looking out for the city or her impeccable sense of color. They're all the best part.






To celebrate this artistic feat, Tim's band played for only the second time ever. And they were very good! There were so many friends. Everything was perfect.

Still Life, in Camera

I wanted to post this quick series while it was still fresh in my brain, some shots I took yesterday trying to figure out how to do an inspired still life for my drawing class at Berkeley City College. The final drawing came out just as boring as ever and I'm now officially convinced that the Still Life as a genre is dead entirely, but photos are still alive and well. Thank goodness.












These are all from somewhere in West Oakland, but many from the intersection of 17th and Campbell.

Scientists make nice artists, yes?

A short movie by Will Hoffman, put forth by radiolab and inspired by a book.

Glimpses

Trying to find a subject for my drawing class assignment has turned out to be more difficult than I had anticipated, but sitting on the train tonight I caught these two subjects that would have been perfect.




The first, a woman named Lupe, who was mopping the platform at Embarcadero and the second, a man dressed to the nines in a long black evening jacket with red and green plaid trousers, patent leather shoes and even a flower in his lapel. You can see him striding away between the shoulders of those two girls in the foreground. I'm not quite brave enough yet for asking strangers to take their picture, but I am sneaky and shameless enough to take their pictures anyway however quickly through the car's closing doors. Someday I'll bring you splendid portraits, I promise.

A Record of Life

I don't know how some people have such capacity between their two hands. This is beautiful:

Use of Space

Recently on a visit to my local coffee hole, I went to use the ladies' room and found they'd recently painted the walls. If memory serves, they went from being dark, black maybe, to now being starkly white. While black walls might be attempting to deter graffiti from accumulating, white walls almost certainly invite it and certainly the transition from black to white sends some sort of message.

Added to this, they've attached a whole slew of paint markers to the walls, strung up by chains to make marking territory that much easier. As I was sitting in there the other day, I got to thinking about spaces like this, truly bowing to destiny by encouraging what is probably inevitable.



I wonder how the same idea would carry in less contained spaces, that is more public spaces. Surrendering control intentionally, allowing use to shape the form of a place and watching as (human) nature unfolds.

Representing Places

LOVE THESE geographic sorts of pieces. Especially the St. Petersburg one, which is a unique, geographically accurate map of Russia's literary capital, created entirely from quotes by Russian authors writing about St. Petersburg. It would look lovely in any room of any house.

"The Literary St. Petersburg" Illustration by Vera Evstafieva and Andrew Biliter, 2009.

"The Fifty United States and their Mottos" Emily Wick, 2008

Hallway Project

The day after Thanksgiving, for those of us who don't flock to shop, can be somewhat disappointing. Leftovers and movies can be nice in a big cozy house, but this year we stuck around Oakland for the holiday and the day after was spent in our little house all by myself. Don't get me wrong, it had its advantages but I didn't feel like doing normal holiday things, so instead I made caramels, wrote some blogs and decided to do a project. For some reason I only seem able to relax enough to engage in experimental projecture when I'm home alone. I'm not sure what that's all about.

When our friend Lauren visited several weeks ago, we went to the local junk store and sort of wandered around. We both emerged with some treasures: useless bits of things that are mostly good for giving, important to the composition of a thoughtful package but not significant on their own. The sorts of things that you accumulate as a detail oriented person because they are at their core, aesthetically sound, but can easily fall into a box and be forgotten. In our combined brown paper sacks: tiny glass vials, envelopes, labels, rubber stamps, pieces of paper, a sticker. And for me, lots of old photographs. The day we went, the store had amassed many different families' photographs into three boxes, all jumbled together. Picking through them, I managed to find documents of travel by car, new houses, holiday mornings, friends in high school, pilots and dozens and dozens of landscapes. I picked thirty or so of these pictures because on their own, they were so interesting.

Technically, the photos fell into the category of anonymous art. I've been wondering at the relationship between photography as family hobby and as fine art, inspired by the increasing frequency of moms with very expensive SLR cameras slung over their necks taking pictures of their childrens' every move. And then again, here I was pouring over other people's pictures with infinite fascination. On the one hand, to have other people's such emotional records can be creepy, dead people's faces taken out of unknown context. You can't help wondering what tragedy sent these family photos to the junk store in the first place, and how unlikely it then seems that anyone in them is still alive.

But anyway, it all still rather fascinates me, these photos. Much the way of old letters, and I decided to put them in our hallway. Using some long straight, rather sturdy pins, I picked several and put them on our wall and after some thought, added several of my own photos which depict ambiguous subject matter. To these, I filled in the gaps with some small things that I've kept, for lack of an ability to throw them away when the opportunity presented itself, and which make me rather happy to have on display. So here is the photo with a rough legend:



Clockwise, from upper left:
1. Envelope with Ink Drawing by Joel Chartkoff, given me by the artist, a friend, on my birthday.
2. Photo by anonymous, figure on hillside
3. Photo by anonymous, Historic Paramount Theater Benefit Premiere bill
4. Photo by anonymous, Salt Water fish
5. Photo by anonymous, landscape
6. Small plastic astronaut.
7. Photo by anonymous, out a car window of some California roadway, evident by foliage.
8. Photo by anonymous, industrial park
9. Letter & Envelope, sent by best friend July 2005 from Alabama. Typed.
10. Photo by anonymous, from Russia of androgynous ballet dancer.
11. Photo by anonymouse, tree branches
12. Small plastic astronaut
13. Photo by anonymous, four friends presumably in high school or college



Additionally:
1. Dinosaur mobile, my own photo but can't remember from where.
2. Butterfly wings made from free circular in Tucson, AZ. Given by a small boy in a Pep Boys, unprompted as we waited for our car to be fixed en route to Los Angeles.
3. Photo by me, unknown road in Alabama.
4. Drawing by John, of yeti. Now famous in certain circles.

Across from these, I hung a drawing that a homeless man gave me last week upon seeing me unlock my bicycle. I hung it in a frame that had been lying around.



Anyway, it was a rather nice way to spend the day after thanksgiving, I'd say. I love gathering things together and then planning how they fit together; in this case, associated in their diversity rather than by anything shared.