Nothing like reading smart books under big trees in September. Thinking. Listening to other people's projects. I've even been reading scholarly essays with all their footnotes and fine points (some, not so fine). My couple of grad classes started the other day and gave me a burst of energy I needed to start to put some ideas together... Somewhere in the bottom of my backpack or under my painting table or misplaced in the cabinet with the plates are a few good ideas about the what, where, when and why of art. The questions are swimming around my head like so many tadpools in a murky swamp:What sticks so much about drawing and painting for some? Where do all the people who start art schools go to when they drop out? Where are all of these art communities and why don't they intersect more? Why can't there be truly documented and described stories of art outside cities like New York and Paris and London? When did artists start sketching in city streets and could anyone sketch? When am I going to have time to answer these questions? Why do we have to keep going back to the same small pool of dead French thinkers for truth? Why draw? Why so many divergent questions?
This is just the beginning again of what will probably be another long course of study but one in which I will also continue to do the good practical work in the footservice of arts education and in the making of my own art...which this week consisted of endless swirls of lines of every color, not unlike the stuff in my head...

take care,
Rachael