The only real choice is to be pleased right now.

My Disney weekend plans got cancelled, about as cancelled as they could possibly be without at least a local apocalypse. As in, if any of the reasons for the cancellation were fixed, it would still be cancelled unless three other reasons were also fixed. I am a bit disappointed, but I have plenty to do in town. I have an art show to go to and maybe be in tonight, a paper due at midnight, and open studios in one week.

I found in my browser tabs a video of glassblowing that I was saving, and I watched it. And it seems like nothing could be as perfect and immediate and zen as glassblowing. And I need to at least take a glassblowing class but preferably become a glass blower. It's such a siren call. I have worked with glass before and loved it, but that was dry cold glass. I want to blow an hourglass; a whole series of hourglasses whose titles are the exact time they take to run.

OurGlass of Cockington from Danny Cooke on Vimeo.

So I took a step back. All I have to do today, and indeed this weekend, is make art, talk about art, look at art, read about art, and write about art. Also I am going to the beach. In my entire adolescence I would have died of happiness to have the weekend I am about to have, and here it is, waiting for me, and all I can do is think about trying new things that I don't have the studio for. So, I am going to get my art out of my car, leave it with my artist statement where my roommate can find it, dress for the beach, have a short swim, buy an hourglass, and get started on my paper, then go to Fiery Femmes of February.

Are We Not Endotherms?

Today I did a sketch of a performance piece, "Are We Not Endotherms?" Basically the piece is meant to remind people that living near the ocean is a great gift, and the water is no colder on a cold day than on a warm one. When I do the actual piece I will have someone with me as timekeeper and to watch that if I go under I come back up. I paid the meter for 21 minutes and came back when it had 8 left.

Secondhand Still Life

Working from the cover art of the book Decartes' Bones. In progress.

I have to totally redo the open book. The skull is off but I am happy with it the way it is. Here is my reference material:

A bit personal! A bit melancholic!

So there's this boy? And it's beyond over. I am not even sure if he is alive because he has not answered my last two phone calls and he likes to do very risky things. But I think he is alive, because in the past whenever this happens he has been alive. And I think that someday in the not too distant future I will again be welcome in the carefully tended, overflowing mausoleum that is his life. (It's not a mausoleum of death. It's a mausoleum of stasis.) So right now I was looking at a painting I made of him last year, and thinking it is not quite decent to have it up in my room because it is a bare torso and we are distant.

So I was taking it down, when I saw the other one I have up, which I made in color from a sketch I made (this is forbidden because it doesn't turn out) while he recovered from something- it looks like an abstraction and no one can tell what it is, but to me it looks so tender. And I can absolutely not bear to take it down tonight. It's not as though I even see it; I have a lot of my paintings all over everything.

Protein

For about a week I have been playing a game called Getting Enough Protein. I asked the USDA website and it wants me to get a bit more than 50 grams of protein every day. It is a challenge. If I don't meet my target during the day, I drink a protein shake after dinner. I tried to make a protein bomb by putting protein powder in soy milk but it was undrinkable so I just put it in water. Today I spent all morning eating and drinking protein, and I have had 33 grams. I tried to start my day with eggs (12g in two) but they were ghastly so I threw them away and had cottage cheese (14g) and black tea with soy milk (3.5g). Then for lunch I had salad with a tin of sardines on top (12g). And now I am having more black tea with soy milk. And I feel pretty good.

What I Would Save In A Fire (in progress)

Sitting in my parent's attic surrounded by junk I kept asking myself "weould I save this in a fire?" and the answer was no to all of it. The clothes in the attic that I spared in previous cullings are special only because of who owned them before me. There is a maternity dress that my mother wore when she was pregnant with me, but in twenty three years the medallions have bled their color onto the surrounding lace, and the collar has become dated. There is a shoulder padded white suit covered in fabric flowers that my step grandmother gave me (or maybe my grandad sent it to me after she left him?) that for some reason I wore to highschool graduation. There are the wonderful curtains my Nana made for our last house- victorian old world monkeys for our victorian parlor. My brother's impossibly tiny shirt covered in 15 year old food stains. And I cut them all up and am sewing them together into What I Would Save In A Fire.

Field Trip: Cream From the Top

I went on a really interesting field trip yesterday. We saw Cream from the Top, which was a show of recent mfa grads.

There was a little environment made of colored tape, and a video camera put everything on a monitor in the environment and projected elsewhere in the gallery. The artist is Aleksander Bohnak. I liked that it was chaotic and colorful.
Weirdly, I could not find the name label for these amazing unmilled wood strip boats. This is a picture I took from underneath.
The iron details were really nice.
My favorite thing was called Family Camp at dusk, and it was a lot of oozy figures on a grassy hill that were really tender and funny. The artist who made it is Brynda Glazier, and it was her only piece in the show.
Other things I liked but didn't get pictures of were Mara Baldwin's disarticulated bed sheets, where she cut the pattern out of a sheet leaving the rest intact, and the pattern in a little pile, and Dana Hemenway's video installation that was just artificial rocks. After a while, it got very funny to see how many kinds of artificial rocks there are. They were mostly the landscaping kind, but also the ones at Disneyland.

Fastuary is over!

Fastuary is over! The rule was if it got in the way of my real obligations it was over, and it did. I had two crits back to back yesterday, which are three hour sessions of looking at 20 student's art including my own, and talking about it really in depth. The second round of crits was performance pieces, so I had to perform something for everyone.

I woke up early and spent every minute of my day prepping and double checking. I paid to park on campus so I would be able to carry my props and sculpture and canvases and materials for my seminar class easily. And my whole day consisted of repairing the mistakes I made. My phone was a main prop for my second piece, and I made it to campus without it and had to go home. I was still on time to my painting crit, but I expected to have an hour to flesh out a piece that I'm excited about that is very unfinished, and i didn't.

Oh, it doesn't take an hour to get home and back by car. But when my first choice remote lot was completely full, I chose to drive the mile across campus to the other lot instead of driving back to the base and up the other side of campus. That mile took me 17 minutes. There are 13 stopsigns, which I knew, and two of them are tended at busy times by students in safety yellow gloves, and there were two delivery trucks on the main road which brought us down to one lane to share, and a bit of road construction that did the same, but at least that one had a guy with a slow/stop sign. I finally parked in the far lot, found I didn't have my phone, drove home, got it, drove back, parked, got on the shuttle (the art department is a long walk from East Remote) and found it was the wrong shuttle, but it got me to class eventually.

The whole time (in between reassuring myself that i had everything under control) I was telling myself that -of course- it was a horrible day because I had two crits. But, in class I realized that 3 other people are also taking both classes, and all three of them kept it together just fine. So between my second and third crit, I decided to get something hot to eat, which in the short term was an oily mistake but by the time I got home I was feeling good.