spending quality time with Frank

Breakthrough...breakdown. That's the way of grad school, especially art school, it seems. This week was a whole lot better than last but I think I blogged too soon. Not long after I started the drawings I was initially so excited about I quickly recalled how much I hate drawing, hate charcoal, hate portraiture. Who needs lines when you can use shapes and color? In other words, I want to destroy these drawings, which I guess is a good thing since that's what I'll proceed to do this week, documenting the whole process, of course. Anyway, I managed to crank out five of 'em, so we'll see how step two goes.

After three or four torturous hours in the studio I called it a day and headed home to spend the rest of the afternoon scanning stuff. God bless the flatbed scanner, you know? Now I have two contact sheets' worth of "new" material to investigate and, even after the first of six mid-semester critiques, I'm still feeling pretty good about it all.

Unfortunately, I can't write the same for my art history class. I'm still scrambling to catch up, which entailed driving to the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham this afternoon to take a tour of the exhibition "Post and After." I have to write a paper comparing the solitary Cindy Sherman photo to Matthew Barney's five Cremaster series images. Something about self and identity and postmodernism and stuff. I'm not really looking forward to it, though I'd still rather write that paper than continue ever so slowly making my way through Baudrillard's Simulations. I just have a hard time making sense of phrases like, "It was against this hades of paradox that the ethnologists wanted to protect themselves by cordoning off the Tasaday with virgin forest." The what-a-day?? Anyway, I stopped reading yesterday just when he was starting to write about Disneyland, so I think it'll get better...

Also at the Rose right now are a bunch of paintings by Brooklyn-based Dana Schutz, one of the "hot young artists" to get her MFA from Columbia back in '02. Schutz is one of those artists who keeps creeping into my life. I first read about her in a W Magazine article a few years ago and most recently found myself enthralled by her "Frank from Observation" series. In this series she, the last painter on Earth, paints Frank, the last man on Earth. The show included some more recent work, including some political leaning stuff, which I wasn't as excited about, but still very much worth the trip.

In website news, if you visit the poorly maintained site anytime soon, you'll see a lot of construction going on. There's actually little to no construction going on in the café, gallery, and reading room, but there will be...just as soon as I have a little free time on my hands. I might tear down those virtual spaces altogether for a leaner, meaner, artist website kinda space, focusing a little more on my portfolio, maybe throwing in a couple of virtual gallery shows here and there. On the other hand, I could easily devote an entire page to coffee, so we'll see.