There’s an artist’s residency at the San Francisco Dump. Really. I don’t know how competitive it is now, but I applied and got a six-month residency. Paid! That was a big deal for me in 1992. The studio is huge, maybe a thousand square feet, just the other side of the pit. City garbage trucks […]
By seventh grade I could scratch out a Peanuts character; now that would be Spiderman or anime, Disney, Pixar. That kind of graphic confidence and mimicry passed for drawing in grade school and high school. Copying and drawing aren’t the same thing. I didn’t know that, so drawing looked like magic to me. High above […]
In the edition of Janson’s History of Art that was assigned my freshman year, Lee Bontecou was one of about three women noted. She made steel-and-canvas sculptures that I loved, and exhibited in New York before I arrived. There was no word of her in my world until a retrospective at the Hammer in LA […]
What kind of idiot would move from New York City to San Francisco to become an artist? Me, as it turns out. I moved to San Francisco to become a person. Being an artist, and its attendant poverty, takes a huge amount of ballast. I got that in California. Which let me be an artist. […]
My college days seem like a small and far off planet from here. It mattered so much at the time. Now it seems like I wasn’t even asking the right questions.“Where are you applying? Where did you get in?”when my impressions of these places came from a friend who went there or the status or […]
Have you ever been hated? White hot hate when the source of enmity makes a hobby and social event of it? Turning your every word and action into an opportunity for scorn? I have. It happened in graduate school. It started on the first day. I was managing my wobbly entry to a new situation […]
Sometimes I need to make a thing just to understand. An idea isn’t real until I feel its shape in my hand. Grade school, high school, after school, college: clay was my first love. The pliant, responsive squish of pressing my hand into clay assures me that I exist. When I went off to college, […]
I am all about words. They spill out of me. It can be annoying. Words and letters show up in my work over and over again. The Evolution of Trust and Distrust was an early series where I used words as an elemental material. The first time I shopped for my own towels, my hand […]
The best artworks don’t necessarily come from the happiest times. Think Manet’s Dead Toreador or Picasso’s Guernica. Mine started with a phone call. The man I lived with said, “I think I like the receptionist.” He never came back. Alone in an apartment filled with his crap, I was unsure how to move forward. Other […]
I always wanted an entry to visual artmaking that worked like running scales works for musicians. A first thing to do in the studio to warm the hand and breath towards making while suspending the question of what is worth making? What is the equivalent of running scales for visual artists? Working towards an MFA, […]