Now, I've been drawing feet and hands for a couple of months. Everywhere. These little walking lines have waltzed all over my notebooks, my drawings, they're the heart of my paper dolls and then they changed a little on Tuesday night. While sitting in the ER smarting from a fall I started drawing a golfball swelling in the left ankle.
Tuesday night, on my way to an artist's trade, I managed to slip on ice and fracture my left tibula. Aside from joking about my 'peasant ankles' and 'leg leg foot' for years, I never really thought about my ankle. Well, now, housebound for a couple of days and confined to moving around on crutches, I'm pretty aware of the broken little guy.
I don't have much pain and the extra rest is actually kind of nice, but I appreciate these short Poems of a Broken Ankle and the fact that I have health insurance. I can't tell you how many artists I know who don't and that's pretty scary. Sure, a broken ankle can keep me off my feet for a little and crutch hobbling around for a few weeks but what if it tanked my credit? Yeesh, I may have a little less mobility for a bit but I'm one lucky duckling. More soon, Rachael

It's not a simple dichotomy of quick and slow, but recently I've noticed that people are often surprised to learn when paintings take years or to see art made in moments. Right now my examples are all potters (Richard Aerni*, Julie Johnson and Molly** and Scott Oliver** had an open studio today and it was full of things they made 'quickly'). The time artists train is always invisible and nobody sits down at a wheel and makes a graceful and balanced bowl without first spending time putting in the practice...but what of the turtle and the bunny? Why do we think of art as a short sprint and not a long distance race***?

Quick muse is a chance to see what big shot poets write quickly and under pressure. While I loved the honestly and immediacy and humor of Marge Peircy's poem about how poetry gets taught, I cringed at a couple of misspellings. Watchman, not watchmen. The guy whose idea it was wrote a short essay in Fast Company which led me to a longer essay from Poets and Writers. But even with quick muse the improvisation experiment is tested with the sure bet writers not a bunch of joes off the street...

Maybe it is that most favorite poems are the slow-wrought kind. Made deliberately through the time testing process of scribbling and rewriting. Maybe that's how Piercy herself wrote her poem after September 11.

Or maybe you stop practicing what you will say when you truly find your voice. Experience and talent and hard work make artists and poets nimble enough to make magic quickly, though revision sharpens more than it dulls. And if artists keep trying, testing, changing, improvising, they can stay honest no matter if the work takes months or moments. It's a good think Frank didn't clean up his collapsing starlet) and Kandinsky didn't beat those early Improvisations to death (oh the later work is so restrained and sad it seems) but rather let them live, be messy, and exist somewhere between line and color, cannons and anxiety.
The great Improvisation #30 in Chicago is the one I'm thinking of...
None of this changes much my own preferred process or my appreciation of the slow projects (how much time did Fun Home take Alison Bechdel? and it is magnificent!) and I am maybe more curious than sure of how and why we make art but I do have some thoughts on how I'll be making bread.
Thanks to Jim Lachey's recipe from the New York Times, I made some ridiculously easy and enormously satisfying slow bread this weekend.

Take care and go as slow or as fast as you need to, following traffic regulations of course...
Rachael


disclosures:
* I didn't bring a digital camera and so this is an image I found on the web of a display by Aernie from a local art show a few years back. His studio looks even better.
** These are good friends as well as good artists. I'm not objective...
*** I think that was from Gregory Armeoff's letter in Letters to a Young artist from Art on Paper and now a book

I pledge to pay closer attention.
Watching Rivers and Tides with the students last night (and the night before to prep), reminded me of the crucial artist habit I admire/strive for/ appreciate and that's the solid discipline of paying attention. (since I never took a psych class, these notes help) I'm turned on again to Richard Tuttle for that reason, too. Listening to material, to the little devil's advocate voice that says "put the sculptures on the floor" and whatnot.
Ok so, paying attention and putting in the time and editing and making and trying not to be so sheepish about the whole thing.
That and balancing dayjob and teaching gig and maintaining a few friendships and reading books ought to keep me busy enough but I'd also like to try to keep up this story here. Typing into this box and sending it out into the world is a great way to get lots of spam and a fine vehicle for my talkity talk talk. It's a little thing I can do to pay greater attention to something other than my paintings or my projects.
That said I ought to head back up to my studio and stare at the mess that is on my table, see if I can breathe some more life into it or put it to sleep.
take care,
Rachael

For me the best part of teaching is finding ideas again, dusting them off, and passing them around to the class. But when one has been away from libraries and hiding out in the basements of museums, all the ideas are sometimes overwhelming. I started teaching the course with a real plan of a plan but it's now a much more improvisation. I spend the days before the class reading, thinking, absorbing, remembering, discovering huge slides in the middle of museums and generally finding myself getting pulling back in to the history and mystery of art.
Tonight is the last formal (certainly not formal) lecture and I've decided to scrap half of it and instead of talk talk talking too much, show my students Rivers and Tides becaues they need to know more about how an artist thinks, they need to smile their way through finals and they need to know that leaves and twigs are as important as paint.


It is after all, looking at art and that's what we'll do.
More soon, I suppose.
take care
Rachael

oh yes, and Pull my daisy is on the web...yea!