This big bad new year is off to a smart start, I hope. Ours began in a little bar in Toronto talking to a musician about the red state/blue state debacle and W. We couldn't say a damn thing about Canadian politics because we are Americans and simply don't know jack about our neighbors to the north. Arrogant sons-o'-bitches that we are, yet, we resolve to change. We will get to Canada more, we will check in on doings more important than hockey, we will tune in on the CBC and pay attention to the arts scene next door. With help, no doubt from Sally and Marja-Leena and other Canadian artists and bloggers (feel free to comment if you know some, I'm hunting down more Canadian art knowlege sources). What do borders mean in the arts anyway? If something interesting is happening within 300 miles (or 482.80 kilometers) I wanna know about it. I am truly convinced that creativity, resilience, and resourcefulness (art habits) cross borders even if specific national or local situations are different.

And since it is the new year I am getting nostalgic about old friends, old haunts, old ideas, and old sketchbooks, I'm hereby linking to an interesting show coming up in Ottowa which feautures the work of Rachel Echenberg (an image from a performance of hers is below).

Rachel's haunting one-minute monuments, empathetic public performances, and interactive performances worked their way into my brain when I first met her way back when she was at Sculpture Space in Utica. (Which reminds me to urge you to add "apply for and go on a residency" to your resolution list if you happen to be an artist of any flavor. Not only to residencies give you amazing, magical time to create but they also take you from your everyday and plant you in a creative community where you will invariably influence and be influenced. This is creative cross-pollination and without it we get...forgive my bread metaphor here...stale. End lecture, begin searching this list of artist run organizations for places that would have residencies.)
Oh, and Modigliani at the AGO was a disappointment (although the Albright-Knox's Servant Girl ( you can search her out here) looked stronger in context and the drawing area was/is an absolutely fabulous idea) but Henry Moore is rich and rewarding to stare at and the new-ish (new to me, but I haven't been there for 10 years) installation is well lit and made to be drawn, seen, and felt.

Actually, forget the whole 300 miles thing. I want to see it all. This country, that country, the more art being made, more art being seen, more art being discussed the better. On this I am resolved.

Take care (of yourself of others),
Rachael

I'm absorbed, upset, and bewildered by the enormous loss of life in Southern Asia and have been seeking news on the latest on the Tsunami . Hard to know that while we are comfy cozy in our lives, so many people have had their worlds turned on end. So many gone, so many uprooted, so much destroyed. Not that long ago I was bookstore browsing Simon Winchester's book about the 1883 explosion of Krakatoa and the subsequent tsunami that killed 40,00 in Indonesia. I shook my head and headed towards the cafe and the shiny art books...

We don't have a TV (haven't for years and well,if you ask me the decision to not have a TV is one that helped me find more time to focus on painting) so I have not had as many images of the tragedy in my mind as I have had the stories (heard on the radio or recounted by my husband from his web searches)> I don't necessarily want to see images of the tragedy (selfish? how easy is it for me to avoid?) I simply want to help. So, I'll give cash and try not to forget in 6 days, months, weeks, years. Whatever the current span of attention is for comfy Americans pondering far away world tragedies...

What I picture is the kind of chaos in paintings like Pavel Tchelitchew's Hide and Seek (below from artnet). Hide and Seek tends to make people nervous (Robert Rosenblum wrote an interesting bit about it ) and uncomfortable, and it is a bit over-the-top, but it's also one of the few paintings I've ever seen that seems to react viscerally to tragedy. Maybe I interpet too much, but I could never see the painting outside it's historical context (1940 to 1942), painted in America by a Russian immigrant, while the Holocaust raged in Europe. (By the way, it is essential that educators teach honestly about history, I'm strongly impressed by the work of Facing History .)



Truly facing history is knowing it. My limited knowledge of history is pretty-damn art related, my degrees after all are in art history not, as my mother would say "real history". The ways in which we make and understand art might always be the center of my interest. As shallow as that seems, it's true. And will probably be so still for this next new shiny year.

I've been tooling around the english version of the Bauhaus archive , which I've been looking around as I think about Feininger and buildings. What artists love about structures seems to be so different from what architects look for. A painted building does not need to protect from weather, offers no shelter, is only ever flat. The 1919 Bauhaus manifesto is striking to me for it's idealism and aspiration.

Speaking of idealism, I do have a hope for a groundswell of arts advocacy in the new year. I oughta shout more about the need for universal arts education, a call to free museums, and a greater access to the arts for all but that seems often a less important cause than getting fresh water and food, actual real structures (not just painted buildings) to those with immediate needs.

They are both important, I know. We make change in our own lives and in the lives of others in small and still powerful ways.

And so, at the risk of shifting gears, too quickly, I'll tell you that we (comfy cozy Americans that we are) are off to Toronto in a few days for a few days and I'm excited about looking, walking, drawing, and wandering. Happy avoidance of world events, happy isolation, happy spending of money, happy new year, happy new sketches, I hope.

Hope is, after all, what I do have and am happy to give.

May you and yours be healthy and creative, kind and helpful in the new year.

take care,
Rachael

It's cold in these parts. Our holidays were lovely and we overdosed a little on Turkey Joints , John got a fabulous bowling shirt from his buddies (we believe this will increase his average), and our niece saw Santa Claus flying through the sky. I got myself a lovely little cold for Christmas but am recovering nicely.

Maybe it's the cold medicine (hopped up on Sudafed as I am ) that keeps me from focusing but it's occurred to me that maybe you (dear reader) don't know aboutMichael Mandiberg's Calls and Op's list ? It's fabulous, very video and new media focused, really, really helpful and comes out often. Send him $, subscribe, and then send stuff in.

A big part of my creative energy right now is occupied with preparing a proposal for a project. The idea is one I have circled around for years, using a format I have missed and used to feel more comfortable with, for a purpose I think I know. It's one big question mark, and one unsure certainty. But I have to formulate these ideas, I have to make these formulated ideas into something tangible, and I have to at least try to get some support for it. There are still a few weeks before the deadline and I am committed to crafting the best proposal I can and sending that sucka out. In the past I've succumbed to my doubts and gotten far on an idea then wimped out when it came time to seek support, or apply for a show, or try to share that idea with the rest of the world but, ya know, I will send this package out. I will. I will. I will...

Now what about you? Are you gonna apply for that opportunty or what?

take care,
Rachael

oh, by the way:
The arts and cultural policy thinktank Cultural Commons has a pretty good arts newsfeed.

Thanks, warmth, eggnog bread , love, help by donating, and joy this season.

I have just a quick minute before we hit the road (driving across upstate, we love you Junius Ponds!) to visit my family. Just wanted to send some love in the form of a little pretty painting, enjoy and take good care. I smell more charity, kindness and giving than commercialism this season, but that's just in my little corner of the world, and, well, it's nice.



Merry!


Rachael

Reading

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope."

and

"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark." From Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1841 essay on Self-Reliance

helped me out today. I read this, ate a big chunk of cream cheese bread, and holed myself up in my studio room (it's in the house, it's become my studio, it's a huge mess, it has a heater and loads of still unpacked boxes.) I don't know what the hell I am making in there. Monsters or magic? Chi sa?

I do know that if I open the studio doors and close them, set myself as few distractions as I can, engage in the painting as fully as I can, and act upon the paint and react to the process, I am invariably happier with the honest results. Even if they suck. In this way, I am similar to the other artists I know even if we all work in wildly different ways.

I mucked around with the links to the side here.

This is a lovely holiday season for my husband and I, we don't have to fly anywhere. Miss those good friends in Atlanta and the memories of christmas shopping in short sleeves, but this is our home. So good to be here, following our own stars...

" Ne te quæsiveris extra.

Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.

—Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune."

take care,

Rachael

oh and this is a neat artist's opportunity, good luck!