Since I typically work Saturdays, I have Mondays off and so Tuesdays are my first days back at my desk, my work-day reality, and the normal-ness of routine. I like my work and I tend to miss the place a little when I'm not there but the back-to-it-ness of a busy week is so busy, so full of details, so disorganized, and so phone-ringing and problems-to-solve that I needed cookies when I came home. So a couple of chocolate chip cookies later, I'll sort it out in a somewhat helpful way (I hope).

The more I read about other artists making at times they shouldn't be able to make (when in exile, after learning their father had killed himself, when they couldn't eat), I realize that I have no good reason not to let myself make the artwork I need or want to make.

I'm supposed to give a talk on Thursday about balancing work and painting and so I'm thinking I should work on balancing. The women I'll talk to have kids. I don't. I went upstairs and visited my attic studio tonight. I was surprised by the stuff on the floor (paintings in a first stage of mess and muck), by the big brushes I could have used yesterday, by the magnetic pull of potential energy.

Ten hours of work and 30 minutes of painting isn't much of a direct balance but I will sleep better an dtheoretically when I wake up tomorrow I will head upstairs and pour more drawings, marks, and meanings out of my head.I'm still chewing on Kozol's ideas, scary that there is a rubric for walking in lines. Especially since all the kids I know and live zig instead of zag when they're in lines. It's the teachers I work with who tell me that they love their noisy kids on a saturday morning because they know those kids are learning as they draw, thinking as they talk/tell a story, getting excited as they get creative...
So, maybe there is some balance here...
sleepy me, headed upstairs to fight the good fight in paint and pencil...
Rachael

We need an educational revolution. We need to treat kids better and wake up to the unbelievable segregation of our current public schools. When a kid like me hears two amazing and inspiring critics of our current educational system speak in a span of one week, she is (I am) inspired and ready to fuel the revolution. I walked about 4 miles today and my feet are blistered but I am still ready to walk 25 miles in my bare feet if that will help stop the stupid testing, the unbelievably racist assumptions, the number of kids we are ignoring and warehousing and refusing to respectfully educate...If someone walked into your office tomorrow and took away your toys, told you what to do when, made you take tests and had you take your lunch in a crowded, smelly room (oh yea and took your lunch money away), you'd be pretty angry, right?

Well, my sketchbook is half full of drawings and notes from these two lectures, one by Geneva Gay (who has written and researched multicultural education ), the other by Jonathan Kozol that have refired me up about educational advocacy, child advocacy, and the call to action.

I have a new set of heros and some reading to do.


But also time to rest my feet for a longer march ahead.
goodnight,
Rachael

Today the sun was shining and the sky was blue, tree branches are still bare but boldly they starkly stand out against a now almost setting, almost settling sun. It's all making me think about life and death and old friends I oughtta call.

We wandered around today and spent some time in the bookstore when I bumped into a used book of the collected poems of Frank O'Hara.
Now, I don't know much but good old Frank O'Hara was an amazing poet. His words tripped off his tongue and the images in his poems make me smile and think and dream. His poems made him great . It's the way his language flows and his colors glow and his friends and all keep hanging around with the right amount of smart sophisticated subversion in black and white pictures with tee shirts and cigarettes...Nothing makes me think more about the New York in the 50s I missed than O'Hara's poem about Lana Turner.



Damn the dune buggies that kill America's best poets...

Rachael

This one's gone.

It's ruined. It was a fire casualty and as we are doing our taxes now I'm learning (like a bazillion artists from the gulf coast I bet) what I can and cannot deduct as an uninsured loss. To sit down and write up an art obit (but now I can't find that project!) would be a really good process for me because I still find myself pissy that the painting is gone. It's been blurred, and wet, and worn and is so different that it won't again be the Vermont painting I made in a month of serious thought as the world went to war and I made breakfast for a group of strangers that soon became friends. It won't again be the painting that was as much about being where I was as missing where I could have been (with my aunt, with my husband, with the marching protesters). Color. That's really what's mucked up in the painting now. But then lots of things aren't around anymore.
Ms. Mabel Dwight is gone and her portrait of Roderick Seidenberg strikes me as stronger, more passionate and important as I read more about her life, her loves, and her social convictions.
I have more of the busy and less of the loose time to relax and create but I ought not to complain, so I won't. goodnight,
Rachael

I'm not the only one. I have a couple of friends who (like me) are trying to make stuff, to work, to read, to work, to think, to work, to play, to work, to learn, to make more stuff (drawings and paintings for me, thanks), and to do a little work. Day job or freelance or whathave you, the income producing projects are a big pain in the neck only because, well, I seem to keep thinking about them long past the paid-point. I have ideas about things for work while I'm taking the garbage out. I think about all these things that I ought to be able to leave at my desk but my desk leaves with me and I don't really have good separation skills.

So one of the things I'm doing lately is reading up on the American art made in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. The heyday of the John Reed clubs and the time when all of Ben's print collection was coming together and when Davis and Benton (how bout them eggs?) were having pissing contests and Isabel and Mabel and Peggy were making art. This is really the stuff I've been interested in a big fat long time, in part because the images (like this Mabel Dwight print, orginally captioned My God, Maybe There's Something to it...) reward lots of looking and in part because the artists had to figure out how to make art when everybody was careless, then everybody was broke, then everybody was headed to war. I've been lugging a good book around about the federal art projects. Stuff I'd learned a smattering of when I was in grad school and am happily re-learning now. But there's a delicious irony that the work I'm working on when not at work which is leaving me less time to make art was a make work project which in a time of need gave artists time to make artwork that made them a little money, gave them a little confidence and reassurance, and filled a helluva lot of post offices.

Yep, and there was an artists union, too.

I'm back to the books and then the studio and eventually sleep but a couple of nights ago I swear I dreamed about Sacco and Vanzetti...yeesh...I wanna know how this is all gonna come out when I have a couple of weeks to paint and draw and connect art and social meaning because I'm going to Penland. I got in and got a work study and I'll have some time to make art with meaning and some meanings to make art about...

maybe,
goodnight!
Rachael


More about:

the federal art projects

the New Deal Network is a very good place to start

This is a smart site made by a schoolteacher and his students

Here's alittle piece about the resources at Case Western thanks to Karal Ann Marling