work, work, work

Now that my youngest kid is in (public) kindergarten, I have more time and money, which is why I continue to be unemployed-by-choice (spending about half of the traditional work-week with the kids and doing SAHM-type stuff). With more time, I'm certainly getting more done, and it's very exciting. I continue to plug away at two different bodies of work in my studio (here and here), am hoping to finish my screenplay early next year, and have finally started work on the "artists in offices" podcast!

Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor (if you read this, thank you; you know who you are), I got all the gear I wanted to get started about a month and a half ago. I made a couple of practice audio...things, one of which you can listen to here, in order to familiarize myself with said gear, using Adobe Audition to edit, etc. Interviews for the podcast began a couple of weeks ago. Not surprisingly, it's been challenging to find time that an artist with a day job is willing to sacrifice to talk to me for about an hour instead of working in their studios, but I'm on track to record about ten episodes for the first season into February of next year. The full season will be released by May 2019, hopefully sooner in the spring.

If you'd like to follow along, I have Instagram, Facebook (it's a closed group but feel free to join if you're into this kinda thing), and Twitter accounts created to socially mediate this effort. Eventually, the website will forward you along to where the podcasts will be hosted, with info on subscribing and all that good stuff. And if you're curious about podcast content beyond the title's summarization, this recent Vulture article by art critic Jerry Saltz is pretty spot-on (and hints at the podcast's second season, which will focus on parent-artists). The title of this post is taken from lesson 5 (of 33) about how to be an artist. You guys. It is so good. And validating. Stay tuned!

Damn I Wish I Was Your Kitty

As promised in my 2017-18 round-up post this past May, I finally finished a pretty silly video to accompany the cat-themed parody I wrote of Sophie B. Hawkins' 1992 song 'Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover'. I have this habit of singing my own lyrics to a variety of songs, made up on the fly, usually while trying to get my kids to do something when they're stalling. It's very improvisational and they're usually pretty corny. But sometimes it works. And singing is a proven stress reliever, so if nothing else, it helps me refrain from yelling at my kids all the time.

This habit overlapped serendipitously last spring with researching pop songs of the early 1990s as part of my screenwriting prep (yes, I'm still writing a screenplay). I wrote the lyrics, loosely dedicated to the plight of the adult shelter cat, in March or so, but finally finished and posted the video just yesterday. It's a little embarrassing and I put this project off many times due to utter absurdity, but always felt compelled to return to it (like my lice-themed parody of Hamilton's 'Wait For it' - video for that is up next! And by "up next" I mean in six months or so). A video of me singing along, featuring the newer addition to our cat family, Wolfi, is cut with shorter videos of mostly adult cats at Oakland Animal Services, where I volunteer every weekend. Give it a watch, share it if you have any (crazy or sane) cat ladies (or dudes), and most importantly, adopt your next companion animal from your city shelter and by all means, spay and neuter your pets!

Ja, it's redundant!

Yesterday was National Chocolate Milkshake Day. Yeah, it's a thing. There are multiple, random, mostly food-related holidays every day. When my midlife crisis flares up, I tend to look to these daily reminders that we're just making this stuff up as we go. Like the Indigo Girls sang it best, they "help me take my life less seriously."

That's about as deep as this post is gonna get. I was thinking about where in Oakland to get a chocolate milkshake. And I can think of a few (off the top of my head, Park Burger is probably my favorite). But, frugal as we have to be right now on one income in ridiculously expensive Bay Area, I didn't want to spend $20-25 on milkshakes for the fam'. So my holiday approach went bargain as I fondly recalled Arby's Jamocha shakes. Specifically, they remind me of summer vacations as a teenager spent with my maternal grandparents in Winnemucca, Nevada. My grandmother was retired by then but my grandfather was still working full-time. He'd come home for lunch most days, occasionally bringing take-out with him. I always looked forward to the oddly satisfying combination of roast beef and coffee-flavored chocolate. It's right up there with a frosty and fries from Wendy's.

I don't do red meat anymore but I do do coffee and chocolate. So what does "jamocha" mean, anyway? It seems to be a hybrid of java (meaning coffee) and mocha (meaning coffee and chocolate). So the "ja" is redundant, especially given how mild the coffee flavor is. But who cares?! It's delicious and fun to say! Sadly (or maybe not), the nearest Arby's in San Leandro is now closed permanently. So if I wanted a Jamocha shake to celebrate National Chocolate Milkshake Day, I was going to have to DIY this project.

Internet to the rescue! I found this top secret recipe online. The only thing I did differently, since my kids would be having some and after dinner to boot, was use decaf coffee and freeze it in little silicone cups (an ice cub tray would obviously also work but our fridge's icemaker has made those redundant so we tossed them years ago).

Break up the coffee cubes in the blender for a few seconds first, then follow the directions from there. I couldn't exactly do a side-by-side taste test but if memory serves me, this was pretty accurate. Cheers!

always finish strong

I did it. I survived 10 weeks of summer break (just 9 weeks with the 10 year old, who finished school a week after the 5 year old, two weeks of which he was at day camp and then sleep-away camp). Notice how I don't use the word "vacation"? It wasn't easy but, like the experienced runner I am was, I knew how to finish strong. Before I get to how we spent our last week, however, let's back up to early June.

Unrealistically ambitious, as usual, I created a to do list that linked to a weekly spreadsheet, with lots of projects carrying over from my school year to do list, as explained in this pre-summer post. Additionally, I started a weekly project collecting the detritus from nightly sweeping in emptied out snow/glitter souvenir globes originally used in this project. I filled a globe every week so now I have ten of these, a few of which have started to grow mold or...something. I'm still working on painting the bases and I'm not sure how I'll display and document these. What should I call them - globes of domesticity? Souvenirs of staying home?

In mid-June my brother and niece came to visit for a few days. We had lunch with Neal at his job in SF, sought out the perfect view of the Golden Gate Bridge, showed off Oakland a bit, and spent a day in Monterey. It was a nice way to start the break part of summer break.

For the week of 4th of July we escaped the madness of nonstop illegal fireworks in Oakland and drove instead to Bend, Oregon to visit family via Lassen Volcanic National Park. After that trip we welcomed our second set of foster kittens from Oakland Animal Services, having returned our first pair in mid-June (see Rosie, above). After a particularly trying day later in July, it dawned on me that, though admittedly imperfect (we can't save every underage kitten that comes to the shelter), the relatively short span between input and output in fostering kittens versus caring for children 24/7 was key to preserving my mental sanity during this summer experiment, even when spending time with kittens meant getting less of my to do list checked off.

That was summer's low point, in the middle of the three-week stretch during which we had little more than morning swim lessons planned each day. Fortunately, about a week later I managed to plan for both kids to be elsewhere at the same time so I could finally see Sorry To Bother You (I caught an advance screening of Blindspotting - if you live in Oakland you really must see both). It was my first time seeing a movie alone and it was heavenly.

During the penultimate week of summer break (I've written before about my fondness for that word, right?) the 10 year old went away to his first sleep-away camp. He had a blast and well, yes, taking care of one kid is easier than two. It was also nice to have some one-on-one time with my 5 year old and having just one kid in tow made playdates much easier to schedule.

For the final week of summer break, I'd planned early in the summer, not knowing just how stressful the middle portion would be, for the kids and I to go glamping (that's fancy camping if you don't know). Just the three of us. And I'm so glad I did. Other than nasty air quality due to wildfires north and south of us, distancing myself from the seemingly endless domestic duties of daily life allowed me to truly focus on just having a good time with my kids, something that's tough to sustain for all ten weeks of summer. We swam, ate ice cream for dinner, saw a movie when the air quality gave me a headache, and brought out the iPads only in order for me to enjoy the campground's outdoor shower. Alone. After all our ups and downs throughout the summer, we ended on a really positive note. And I've already mostly forgotten the epic meltdown both kids had in Berkeley's Live Oak Park when we did not have ice cream for lunch earlier in the summer.

Now to gesso these wooden dollhouse remnants for the second portion of my summer souvenir art project!

book deal dreams

As I near my final week of kid-free time (and by week I mean roughly 16-17 hours) to make stuff and write, before spending the summer with both kids in tow nearly 24/7, I wanted to take a little time to recap this academic year of unemployment-by-choice. First, a round-up of the posts I've written here about that decision and throughout the year (I didn't blog as much as I thought I might, only averaging about one post per month):

• The announcement.
• A lice-themed parody of Hamilton's 'Wait For It'. I include this because I'm a parent, and the reality is this kind of stuff happens more often than you might think, sabotaging hours, sometimes days, of your well-laid creative plans.
• I had planned to elaborate on the articles included in the initial announcement to quit my day job, above, but only wrote about a couple, here and here.
• My first day of unemployment-by-choice included a field trip to The Color Factory. I was not overly impressed, despite the price tag and hype, and, in hindsight, shouldn't have been spending that kind of money on that kind of "experience".
• Now that my most recent office gig was behind me, I could finally write the complete "artists in offices" chapter of the Burning Bridges series, a series of blog posts about my many day jobs over the past 22+ years.
• I made a few things in the fall before I really got to work in my studio, including this Day of the Dead altar for my past cats. I've also spent much of this year volunteering with and advocating on behalf of Oakland's cat population, through my work with Cat Town and Oakland Animal Services. I volunteer with cats and kittens more consistently at the latter, but have done some administrative work and fundraising for the former. I was even interviewed by KQED and NBC Bay Area about the shelter's staffing crisis. So this post is key to taking total stock of how I spent my year. After all, I wanted to be a veterinarian throughout most of my childhood and for the first couple of years of college, before I switched my major to art. I won't say I haven't researched the cost of vet tech certificate programs.
• I also saw a lot of art, mostly with my kids accompanying me. I wrote about the first half of the year here. We got out and about a little less in the second half of the school year but I'll write a recap of those field trips eventually.

Waiting for Daphne.

• A little side project this year has been this Instagram account dedicated to mostly bathroom selfies I take while waiting for my daughter. I spend more time with her than my older son, as she gets ready for kindergarten (because preschool is expensive). I also wrote about these images here.
• Finally, in January this year, I started making progress on my recent collection of mixed media...stuff, collectively titled 'Heavenly'. I wrote about the beginnings of that project and other stuff I did in the fall to "warm up" here.

• In late January/early February I began applying to - and getting rejected from - various, local art residencies and exhibition opportunities. I wrote first about my generalist tendencies - problematic when you have so little time and really need to focus - here. Later I wrote about my frustration in the face of said rejection and my decision to pivot to screenwriting here.
• I've been really into reading memoirs lately, perhaps because so much of my own art and writing are autobiographical in nature. In April, my last post before this one, I singled out 5 reasons why creative folks should read Felicia Day's memoir.

Day writes about her experience with Geek & Sundry, "the more mistakes, the better the story afterwards, especially if there's a happy ending." I feel like my starts and stops make one helluva story, but I'm still working on the happy ending. After all, nobody wants to read a story about a string of mistakes, do they?

Anyway, that sums up much of how I spent the past nine months. But in the spirit of checklists, let's see how much I accomplished from that initial to do list in my announcement last June:

• I’m writing a screenplay. I need to finish it by next March so I can submit it to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. 

Okay, so this is not finished and was not submitted to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. And the story has changed a lot. But! I did manage to write over 40 pages and I feel pretty good about that. The trick will be finishing it, especially if I find myself in another day job situation at the end of summer. Which is likely.

• I need more time to make art in my cozy little backyard studio. Preferably before I turn 65.

Yeah, I did this. Just not as much as I'd like and I haven't been successful in getting any of this new work out into the world anywhere, other than via social media. And maybe it's just crap, I don't know. I have also, if I'm being honest, been challenged by my lack of funds to go toward art supplies and any opportunities that require a fee. I've done a few and I've bought some supplies, but I have no money to put into my art practice. None. Nada. Zilch. Such is the paradox of making art.

• I’m starting a podcast (and/or support network) about(/for) other artists in offices.

I did indeed start a Facebook group and very sporadically post items of interest to it, with minimal but satisfying interaction. I'm also very slowly making my way through the book Artists in Offices. And, most exciting, I took a class, at CCA of all places, with Julia Scott, about podcasting!

Hello old friend.

Unfortunately, it turns out podcasting is a little more expensive to pull off well than I imagined (is it considered bad audio to use Voice Memo on my iPhone?) so my goal is to buy minimal gear I'd need to practice with my kids this summer before scheduling interviews in the fall. I have a handful of willing interviewees so, again, I just need more time to pull this off.

• I'm going to revive my boutique wedding invitation design business. But maybe explore platforms other than Etsy!

I did handle a handful of holiday card orders in November/December and continue to get the occasional ready-to-send card sale in my Etsy shop. But this one's tricky. I'm reluctant to officially call it quits, because if I could make some dough this way it'd be ideal in terms of schedule flexibility and parenting obligations and such, but the truth is, I do very little to promote my business. And there were things I didn't love about it, mostly the fact that, like a full-time job, it took over my life. I'm constantly debating "closing" the business so that, in the very least, I no longer have to pay the fees associated with owning a small business, regardless of income (business license, resale permit, checking account fees, etc.). But I'm hesitant to do so.

• I’m working on a kids’ book based on the Cosmos series, starring a cuddly tardigrade as Neil deGrasse Tyson.

This has officially moved to my summer to do list, in the hopes that I can work on this during the summer months. In the meantime, you can check out past tardigrade tomfoolery here.

• I’m planning to volunteer at the cat cafe until they just give me a job.

See above. No job offer yet, but I have been spending a lot of time with cats. Probably too much, if I'm really being honest. But I dig it. 

(Sweet) Caroline. Current foster kitten for Oakland Animal Services.

• I’m compiling a “quit your day job” bibliography that will eventually be turned into a manuscript for a self-help book with the working title: “Little Boxes: How to get out of the office and into the studio...” (or something like that).

As I wrote above, I only elaborated on two of the articles included in said bibliography. Not exactly a book manuscript. But a girl can dream about a book deal, can't she?

• I'm going to figure out how to make hand-stitched felt phone cases for Android, minus the carpal tunnel syndrome.

No progress made on this point and I'm 100% okay with that. I would, however, love to sell the handful of ready-to-send cases in my product inventory currently stored in my garage so if you know anyone with a really old Android device (and/or a really small smart phone), send them my way!

• I’ll be making videos for my YouTube channel “dances with kids” of me, dancing with my kids.

I've made a few videos, some dance-related, some not. I have a video currently in the works for my cat-themed parody of Sophie B. Hawkins' 'Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover' (Damn, I Wish I Was Your Kitteh. Obvs.) so be sure to subscribe if you want to be one of the first to see that! You won't be disappointed.

• I’m developing recipes for a cookbook called “Sweet on Oakland: Cookies Inspired by Oakland Neighborhoods".

I started a new recipe for the Dimond 'hood of Oakland in the fall but it flopped and I never really got back to it. This, like the tardigrade kids' book above, has been moved to the summer to do list. You can follow that project here. If you know anyone in the cookbook publishing industry, hook me up!

• I’m starting a food truck business that serves only peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. Each PB&J order comes with a free carton of milk!

Again, nothing. But I have made countless PB&J sandwiches over the past 9 months. I'm sure I'll make a lot more for my two kids over the summer. Maybe I'll get creative. 

• I’ve signed a NDA and I can’t tell you where I'm going from here.

This was never true, of course. I've signed nothing and I'm going nowhere. But if you want to offer me a super cool, creatively fulfilling, preferably not full-time but still well-paying day job I can do mostly from home, I'll sign an employment contract on August 13th, when my kids go back to school. Book deals also accepted.

5 reasons you should read Felicia Day's memoir

In August 2015, about seven months into my last day job, already miserable juggling unfulfilling full-time work, two young kids, and virtually no time for creativity of any kind (but nevertheless trying desperately to squeeze in "art" projects like this one and this one and this one), after dropping off my kids at preschool and summer camp, I heard Felicia Day on my local public radio station talking about her new memoir, You're Never Weird On The Internet (Almost). Despite a couple of decades of prodding by my husband (who, at some point a few years ago, gave up) I've never been one for video games (aside from Dance Dance Revolution, Karaoke Revolution, and most recently, Just Dance) but something about what Day said really stuck with me. I can't recall now the specific words that resonated with me then, but I immediately added her book to my Amazon wishlist and when a gift card coincided with the book being released in paperback, I bought it. Last night I finished reading it (it was a quick read but took me a few months to get around to starting it) and here are five reasons why you, creative person, should read it, whether you're into gaming or not.

For the record, I like reading "real" books AND e-books on my Kindle.

1. The mental health benefits of diversifying your creative portfolio.

After Day moves to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting, she counterweights the frustration of acting classes and auditions with what eventually turns into a World of Warcraft obsession. But before she spends twelve hours a day playing the game, she writes about how, in addition to bonding with her brother, "a part of Hollywood-defeated Felicia Day was 'fixed' by my double life as a tiny little penis-haired gnome." This is, I suspect, how many artists feel about their day jobs (and vice versa). I am not one of them. But this is how I feel about alternating between art-making (and the discouragement of serial rejection), and writing my screenplay (it can't be rejected until it's finished and shared - ha!). I guess this is to say it helps to not put all your creative eggs into one basket, for your sanity, if nothing else.

2. Sheer obstinate grit.

About halfway through the book, Day writes about her goal to finish the pilot script for her web series The Guild by the end of that December. "What drove me to continue? Sheer obstinate grit." This is really what any creative endeavor comes down to, after all. Write those words down on an index card and pin them to your mirror, bulletin board, laptop, etc.

3. An overview of #GamerGate and parallels to our current political climate.

Especially if, like me, it wasn't on your radar quite as much as it was for folks(/women) in the world of gaming, this is an important chapter to read. There are direct links between the #GamerGate "movement" and the alt-right, of course, but even without digging into that, the parallels to what's going on in politics right now under the "leadership" of President Trump are stunning (in a bad way). Day writes, "I think the same viral effect that leads people to share a crazy Korean music video a billion times is the same kind of phenomenon that helped give rise to #GamerGate." A few pages later she continues, when #GamerGate didn't quietly go away, "the issue somehow morphed from attacking a single woman over a messed-up revenge post to a quasi-conservative movement striving for 'ethics in game journalism'...They focused a large amount of their wrath on people trying to add dialogue about feminism and diversity in gaming, condemning them as 'Social Justice Warriors.'" You could plug in almost any social issue facing our country today and the dynamics of conservative media to these sentences and it would still be spot on.

Day continues: "#GamerGate as a movement created an environment for the attacks to flourish. Hell, it ORIGINATED with them. A great quote from a video series called Folding Ideas put it best: 'The use of fear tactics, even if only by a minority, creates an environment of fear that all members enjoy the privilege of, whether they engage in them or not.'" Um, hello, Trump effect?

Finally, on the "good and bad" of the internet, she writes: "What frightened me the most about my #GamerGate experience was the possibility that this could be the future of the internet. That the utopia I thought the online world created, where people don't have to be ashamed of what they love and could connect with each other regardless of what they looked like, was really a place where people could steep themselves in their own worldview until they became willfully blind to everyone else's." It's so easy to let this happen, regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, and the consequences can be devastating.

In summary, this chapter in particular was basically my #GamerGate woke moment. And it's important for creative folks to be aware since so much of what we do is shared on the internet.

4. The importance of failure, blah, blah, blah.

When, in 2014, YouTube ceased funding for the Geek & Sundry channel, Day "immediately went home and wrote down the top things [she'd] learned going from naive actress to experienced web series show runner to world-weary start-up lady with Geek & Sundry." This one is my favorite: "The more mistakes, the better the story afterwards, especially if there's a happy ending."

5. Finally, start yourself a creative support group that discusses life goals and stuff...over pancakes.

That is all.

I'm writing a screenplay

It's difficult to ease into this, especially following up on my few posts of 2018 so far, in which I write about the visual art I've made since quitting my day job last summer, and the juggling act between studio time and, well, all the other stuff. But during the month of March I stopped painting, if that's what I was doing, and started devoting all of my kid-free hours (about 20 each week, minus a few for cleaning, errands, appointments, etc.) to finally putting into script format the screenplay idea I've been mulling over for about two years.

Let's back up just a bit. January was the first month of this academic year of unemployment-by-choice during which I felt satisfactorily productive in the studio. I finished three smallish, mixed media works on paper, accompanied by some three-dimensional/sculptural components (one of which is technically a diptych, and this doesn't include the first piece I deemed a total failure, so five works total if we're counting everything, which we are). I used that new work to apply to four different art-related items on my winter/spring 2018 checklist - a local residency, an exhibition proposal, a publication, and some digital exposure. The work was rejected in all four cases. Which is totally par for the course for artists. But I handled the rejection, something I'm fairly used to, not as well as I thought I would. I'm not exactly fresh out of college or grad school, after all, and after a decade of trying my best to keep my practice technically afloat while being genuinely busy with other aspects of, you know, life, I was feeling especially discouraged.

'Suckers' from the ongoing 'Art from Ephemera', 2016. After all, you can't win if you don't play, right??

Additionally, a couple of things happened that helped me focus my screenplay idea into something I felt I could finally translate into a script. First, Lady Bird was released. I've since seen - and absolutely loved - Greta Gerwig's directorial debut film, but I was apprehensive about it since there was so much talk of the universality of the mother-daughter relationship. It dawned on me that while I've been pretty into stories and art that explore that relationship most of my creative life, it's been from the perspective of loss, lacking, absence. What does that "universal" time in a young woman's life look like when the mother is not part of it? That apprehension helped me focus what my movie idea is really about in a huge way.

Secondly, I retrieved several boxes of childhood stuff from my step-Dad's attic in two batches: when we drove there almost exactly one year ago and when he came here last October. I've taken my time going through all the mementos, writing, and of course pictures. One item I came across was my 11th grade English term paper about Jack Kerouac's 'On The Road'. The process of using index cards to articulate and organize ideas came flooding back to me. I started writing out the various plot points and visual ideas - all pretty disparate at the time and mostly contained in a sprawling Google doc - on index cards and suddenly I had a lot of raw material I could quite literally - and visually (that's key) - organize into a story arc.

I should add here that there also seems to be something happening on a zeitgeist-y level around stories for and about girls.

That quote, by Ian Wojcik-Andrews, who studies and writes about the less common bildungsromane (that's bildungsroman, or coming of age story, but from a girl's perspective) was included in Anya Jaremko-Greenwold's 2016 Atlantic article 'Why Hollywood Doesn’t Tell More Stories for—and About—Girls'. The article blew my mind when I read it, right around the time my story - about an 11 year old girl - began percolating in my brain, and I've returned to it many times since, most recently when 'Wrinkle In Time' was released. To boot, Jaremko-Greenwold also wrote about 'Wrinkle In Time', in advance of its release, in FLOOD magazine: 'Hyper-Girlish Sci-Fi and Trump Parallels in Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time”'. For the record, while I really enjoyed Ava DuVernay's take on the book, I felt the script was a bit lacking in convincing us that Earth could be the next Camazotz if we're not careful: "One of the scariest lines in the book is, 'Just relax.' Just give in, we’ll take care of you. Relaxing is much easier than trying to combat IT. That’s what happened to us as a nation..." But I maintain its importance as one of the rare, but growing pool of stories for and about girls. From the 2016 article, Jaremko-Greenwold writes, "Girls...tend to be slotted into a narrower range of character types (princesses chief among them), making it that much more valuable when films present alternatives young female viewers can relate to." I'm optimistic that this is finally starting to change. Exhibit B: movies like 'I Kill Giants' (directed by a dude, but still).

When not writing, I'm slowly rewatching all the movies Jaremko-Greenwold names in the 2016 article, the early to mid-90s being a bit of a golden age in female coming-of-age stories (I mean, it's relative, right?). So far I've really enjoyed Secret of Roan Inish while Harriet the Spy felt a bit light and generally lacking. Some titles have been easier to find (from the library, because it's free) than others. And not to be all, like, mystical and whatnot, but one morning in late February I woke up with The Sundays' 'Here's Where The Story Ends' in my head. I haven't listened to them in ages. Turns out the lyrics to that song sum up pretty well what I think at this point is the general tone of my story. "It's that little souvenir of a terrible year..." Domestic tragedy and grief aside, isn't middle school just the pits?

PS - I'm averaging ten pages per week so I'm hoping to have a first full rough draft (emphasis on rough) by early June. If I don't, it'll haunt me during the ten weeks I'll be spending full-time with two kids this summer. After that, between endless editing and filling in the holes, I do plan to get back to some visual art-making, but I need to get this story out of my head first.

diluted

The title of this post seems a fitting one to follow my last, pushing back a bit against the expectation that I commit all my waking hours - and maybe some of the sleeping ones, too - to being an artist. Along those lines, one thing that I've been mulling over quite a bit lately, as I transition back into the reality of establishing a more robust studio practice, is this idea of "diluting" one's "brand". Search the web for something like "artists dilute brand social media" and you'll find no shortage of how-to articles and cautionary checklists (I'm an artist - I will naturally question your so-called "rules") about how to market and sell your work without diluting your brand. One could write an entire essay (and I'm sure someone already has) about whether or not artists should even think of their work in the context of personal branding, but I won't do that. Whether you think of the images you share with the world via social media a personal brand or not, I'm here to argue for artists in particular not really giving a fuck.

A day (or two) in the life of @danceswithkids, one part artist.

I think about this a lot for selfish reasons, obviously. My social media handle is @danceswithkids, after all, fully embracing sometime in 2017, the many facets of my life as a creative parent who sometimes has to do boring stuff to make money and who, in her elusive free time enjoys dancing, baking, traveling, and spending time with cats. If I have a personal brand, it includes all of these things. I won't open a separate Instagram account for any particular area of interest (or obligation). I'd like to think, instead, that I'm part of an increasingly vocal community of creative folks who embrace the idea that being an artist, in particular, can include being all of these things, not just sharing images of one's work, studio space, other art we're looking at, and so on. Less so in my case, but I've seen a lot of artists wrestle with this lately for political reasons as well.

These ideas I hope will get some steam from the late, great Ursula K. Le Guin, whose passing a couple of weeks ago inspired a surge in rereading and listening to past interviews. I had no idea she addressed so openly her life as a writer and mother. In this Fresh Air interview (from 1989!), she tells Terry Gross, on the topic of "babies and books," "there are some of us who really need to do both and are perfectly capable of doing both.” And this, via Austin Kleon, from Le Guin's Dancing at the Edge of the World: "Babies eat books. But they spit out wads of them that can be taped back together; and they are only babies for a couple of years, while writers live for decades..." (emphasis mine). And finally, from this article via Jocelyn K. Glei's weekly newsletter, second of ten things Karen Joy Fowler learned from Le Guin: "There is no reason a married woman with children can’t also be a committed artist. (This seems self-evident now but wasn’t immediately clear to me.)" It struck me that the self-evident part isn't necessarily so for visual artists, at least not yet, and perhaps made worse by the convergence of social media and our multi-faceted lives being whittled down to "personal brands" that can be bought and sold. Even the artists I follow and admire who don't have kids seem, in my opinion, unnecessarily concerned with diluting their "art-brand" by sharing images of all the non-art in their lives. This unfortunate trend I find, frankly, a little boring. Being more transparent about the juggling act at the core of being an artist is important. It adds to our humanity, and we could all use a little more of that these days.

Diluted? No. Rich in a way that those with monetary wealth from their successful personal branding may never truly understand.

one part artist

As promised some time ago, this being my first post of 2018 (Happy New Year, by the way), I wanted to compile a recap of art/making that happened during the first four months of this day-job break. 

To warm up a bit in my studio, I initially started making mini "art from ephemera" collages on leftover business cards from my last office gig (a tongue-in-cheek response to the question people are no doubt asking when they find out I'm one part stay-at-home-mom, one part artist: what do you do all day?). You could say this ongoing project is "artists in offices" meets "art from ephemera," two themes I've explored in various informal projects over the past three years. As my time in the studio has increased, my desire to make these every day has decreased a bit. I'll continue this project when I have materials from the day and the time to do so, but I'm not forcing myself to commit to making one every day; they served their purpose in the transition from full-time day-job to part-time artist. You can see the 40+ cards I've made so far in this photo album on my Facebook page.

I don't want to say or post too much just yet about my newest body of work, Heavenly, except to summarize that, finally, as of this month, it's going well. To date, I've completed about 4 to 5 of the total dozen or so pieces (roughly 13 x 19 inch mixed media works - paintings, if you will - on paper), several with sculptural elements I hope to explore in an installation format at some future time (and space). You can follow my process on Instagram and see progress shots in this gallery on my Facebook page. I'm using this new work to apply to residencies and such so wish me luck.

Other than my own work done when both kids are in school, I spent much of the fall, during our significantly increased time together, trying to distract them from screentime with various creative projects. Here are some images from that effort (with mixed results*):

Made at Michael's weekend workshop. Time, space, money - pick two! On a very limited budget, my challenge is to find things to do with the kids - and ways of working - without spending much money. This workshop was $2.

Our brief interest in kindness rocks.

Halloween-inspired.

The 9 year old's diorama book report for 'A Boy in the Girls' Bathroom'.

This little nook was once a built-in DIY play kitchen. Since both kids have long outgrown it, I decided to convert it to a mini maker-space, so that they have easy access to a variety of art/craft supplies. Monday afternoons are devoted to making stuff, whenever possible.

This is also the reason why I'm in no rush to replace our 13 year old table!

Pirate turkey advocates for a vegan Thanksgiving.

The 4 year old's painted paper-mâché cat. Not creepy at all.

For the short-lived "troll in a bowl" project, and as the subject of a "maker-space playdate" the 9 year old had with one of his classmates, I made this mini longbow, courtesy of Sonic Dad.

Okay, yes, this is food but it's of my studio so it should be included in this round-up!

Nailed it!

More clay, this time at the awesome drop-in art studio hosted by the Contemporary Jewish Museum in SF.

*To clarify, I'm not anti-screentime. But, with multiple screens and a sudden, significant increase in free time, on top of a shoestring budget, the hours were quickly adding up. Making and movement are my main tools in this endless battle!