Working a full-time job, taking a few graduate classes, and intending to keep painting and doing all the other things I do, I have been busy busy busy lately. The pace doesn't lighten for a few days but I am inspired by/encouraged by the following random things:

I saw Alfredo Jaar speak the other night. He took a commission to make a monument to a Chilean politician in Barcelona and instead of making a portrait out of copper, he put up a bunch of bright easels right next to a school.

As I continue to research a relatively unknown American printmaker, I'm excited by the care that the Archives of American Art has been putting into making information available online, such as these amazing bits of artist's sketchbooks.

"It's OK to skim." One of my professors shared this and truly, while I have not yet taken the bait, to know it's possible to pull the most meaning I can from a couple of once-overs instead of a fully thorough read...well, it's encouraging. As much as the phrase, "it's not the best you can do, but the best you can do in the time alloted" did for me the first time I was in grad school...

There's another sketchcrawl coming up soon and I've already called one for Rochester, NY. Wanna come out to draw?

Below is a drawing I made in the museum where I work when I had a delightful moment to slow down and draw.

I'm hopeful those moments will come again.
take care,
Rachael

Amos Lee

Elvis Costello

Bob Dylan


want more?
Let me know and I'll put 'em up...
Busily thinking, drawing and living,
Rachael

I've been awarded another opportunity to paint a traffic signal box, only I have to do that before the weather gets too cold. The paint won't adhere to the metal boxes unless it is over 55 degrees out. I'll be crossing my fingers for sun and warmth beacuse it's a pretty wild and wonderful thing to paint on the street in my neighborhood.

Somehow (well I know how) my life has become a mad-scramble of busy as I work full time, take graduate classes, try to draw and paint some and still maintain a relatively regular schedule of eating and sleeping. But this week I managed to get to a rock and roll show to see Amos Lee and Elvis Costello (aparently there is an orthodontist in Michigan with an Elvis Costello room...) and Bob Dylan. I brought along my sketchbook and will try to upload a couple of the images (only a few drawings managed to have some of the energy of the show).

I'll share more stories and images as I get a better handle on the pace of my life, all I know is that I am drawing, thinking, reading and writing with a more directed energy than I have had in a while, even if there's less time to do all that I want to do.

take care,
Rachael

Last night, Elizabeth Gilbert, the writer of Eat Play Love was in Rochester to give a talk through Writers and Books. It seems like every woman in town was there. I feel a bit shallow for getting so obsessed with the boots she was wearing, but the truth of it is that they were/are big, confident, high healed, Italian leather, made for causing trouble, speaking your mind, and being smart and sexy boots. She owned the stage, worked the corwd and read us a witty little, well writtten story about Rose who drove the bus filled with her old lovers. I took notes and have to share them in hopes you'll read her book, watch her on Oprah tomorrow and go on your own adventures.

Mine, are pretty pedrestian but no less fabulous, for being in flat shoes solidly on upstate new york ground....










alright then, stay out of trouble,
Rachael

So I haven't written much here but I've been writing a lot for the classes I started taking, for work, for my own sanity. I haven't been painting much but I have been doing some drawing. Priya's comment on the last entry is a good push to put some pictures up but we broke our digital camera and I can't find the scanner. Excuses, excuses.

I do at least have (thanks to John Boutet) some pictures of the traffic signal boxes I recently painted.





I have also just begun to get obsessed with an artist, Hugh Pearce Botts , now mostly forgotten but whose work mostly lives in the museum I work at. Botts it seems was a sketch-hunter, a WPA printmaker and a coffee pot patent holder. He's gone now but I'll get a chance to see his sketchbook on Thursday and I suppose, if I'm lucky, someone will someday say that about me.

Life is short, I'm off to live it.
thanks for looking, reading, and sharing car crash stories. I like to think I'm done crashing into the world, hope so at least...

Rachael