art vs craft

About a year into grad school I started a latch-hook pillow based on the famous photo of Georgia O'Keefe by Alfred Stieglitz.

The in-progress pillow wasn't exactly met with approval or encouragement during group critiques that fall semester, as I wrote about here. About a year later I finally finished it and listed it in my Etsy shop.

It finally sold several years later (I kind of wish I'd kept it but I'm happy it went to the good home of an O'Keefe fan). I'm still not totally sure where I was going with that project, much like I'm not sure where I'm going with these felt copies of mid 20th century oil paintings by Mark Rothko that I've been sporadically posting to my Instagram account since mid-summer.

I'm just going to leave these here for now. Because I can. Because I'm no longer in art school.

work less, make art

I consider this post part 3 (of ???) of my "I got a day job!" series (a series approaching 2 years in the making). As I wrote in part 2 (ish), I've become increasingly weary of the advice around keeping/justifying one's day job (usually, ironically, from creative types who long ago quit theirs'). On the one hand, I can see the potential disadvantage of having too much time on one's hands to write or make art (I can't really ever imagine that being a problem, but I get it). Indeed, I'm most productive when I'm fairly busy; I manage my disposable time better when I have less of it. And most of us need to make at least some money. But there's a limit to how much you can do with so little to begin with. You do, after all, need some time to make art, if making art is important to you and something you'd like to do. And if you're like me, you might also require a little solitude/space to think about making art. Instead of that whole "pick any two" thing (my three things being time, space, and money), I'm trying to claim a little piece of all three.

To that end, earlier this summer I began negotiating some changes at work that, ideally, will both enhance my creative fulfillment at my day job and allow for more time to fulfill those needs outside of work (mostly the latter). Like Amazon's pilot program announced last week, I've reduced my work hours to an 80% FTE schedule effective this week, which for me translates to about 30 hours per week (based on a 37.5 hour work week). And while I'd like more time with my kids and more time in the studio, rather than work six hours a day so I can pick them up when school gets out (knowing I'd get little done with them in tow two extra hours each day), I'll have one day per week, while they're in school (that's key) to squeeze in all the things I have precious little time for right now: studio, chores, errands, and yes, family, on the random Friday school closures and picking kids up early when I can swing it (but prioritizing studio time as much as possible). Fitting in some non-studio tasks each Friday (without letting that take over the day completely) should free up some family time on the weekend as well.

So far I have a to-do list with 5 categories of projects, each category including 2-5 tasks. Not just for this Friday, of course - I've highlighted my goals within that list for the first Friday I have off. And as a good artist friend shared with me once, you should always take your to-do list for the day and cut it in half, regardless of how realistic you think it is to begin with. So, as hard as it will be to cut my existing list in half, that's what I'll do. Chipping away at an iceberg, to be sure. I'm just thrilled to tackle the tip!

so I think I can dance

Okay, well, sort of. If you follow me elsewhere you may have noticed I've been sharing evidence of my latest obsession. While already a self-described "dance enthusiast" in a more passive sense, I recently became interested in learning the choreography to some of Britney Spears' songs. I don't know why, midlife crisis maybe? Why waste time trying to answer that question when I could be dancing? I figured there must be some video tutorials out there, right? I've only tackled one so far: Brian Friedman's choreography for "I'm A Slave 4 U", as seen performed by Spears, of course, in the video for the song. This uncut version is on her collection of videos (which I own, obviously).



Say what you will about her singing, but girl can dance. This is one take, people. Anyway, here we are practicing, kids more or less cooperating in the background.



Why time-lapse? Well, one answer is that we are practicing the tutorial (I'll get to specifics in a sec), which is over 10 minutes long. The time-lapse version is under a minute. Another answer, and this may explain why I continue to document myself dancing in time-lapse mode, is that my dancing, for now, looks better sped up. Don't worry. I'll post some regular videos at some point.

So how did we learn the core choreography? Via this tutorial by Girltalk:



I'm not sure why they stop where they do since the original choreography does continue beyond where their part 4 concludes. You can see it in the uncut version of the video, above, and in Brian Friedman's workshop/performance, below:



Isn't he incredible? Anyway, clearly I've got my work cut out for me. On a related note, my son and I in particular have also been fairly obsessed with playing Just Dance 2016, after he was introduced to it in the "dance studio" at his summer camp. Here we are practicing Calvin Harris' "Blame":


Ironically, here I am dancing with my kid when adults dancing with kids is the primary reason I'm abstaining from SYTYCD this season. Indeed, #danceswithkids is kinda my new thing. But I'm a mom and an amateur, you know? And I'm not pushing my kid to compete, I'm selfishly more interested in learning to dance myself!

Katy Caboose, Hopeful Romantic

As I’ve mentioned more than once, juggling kids and creativity with the need to make a little cash is challenging, to say the least. But there is one small advantage to having less time to make art: I have plenty of time to think about and mentally edit current projects while I’m wrangling kids, between the elusive and fleeting moments of productivity. This frequent experience forces a somewhat impulsive and impatient person like myself to, as my coworker regularly reminds me, “hit the pause button.” Spending time at work and, more importantly, with my kids, also opens me up to sources of inspiration I might not come across otherwise, like the book that’s been on recent rotation in my toddler’s bedtime routine: The Caboose Who Got Loose.

Katy Caboose is, simply put, disappointed with her life. She dislikes being jostled and bumped at the back of the train, not to mention the endless cloud of smoke caused by the engine up front. Her journey as caboose takes many turns and bumps that cause her near-constant fear and anxiety. But it’s all relative, right? Maybe she just needs an attitude adjustment. Indeed, one night at the train yard, her situation is put into perspective by the sad little shack of the switchman, who envies Katy and tells her that. Taken aback, she doesn’t have a chance to respond to the shack before being re-hitched to the train, but the experience gives her a new outlook on her lot in life, albeit only temporarily. After a short time, she finds she’s still not happy being a caboose at the back of a train, wishing instead to be a tree, or a house, or a little cabin in the woods, with a view and fresh air. Simply put, Katy cannot deny her deep dissatisfaction, no matter how many sad, little shacks tell her she doesn’t really have it all that bad.

I don’t want to give away the ending for anyone who hasn’t read it yet. It’s a great little read with wonderful illustrations by Bill Peet. I recommend you read it, even if you don’t have a kid to read it to. But I will say, following up on something I recently posted on Facebook about how disappointment gets a bad rap (courtesy of the always great Brain Pickings), that I can really identify with Katy at this particular moment in the book, conflicted between her overwhelming feelings of unhappiness, self-doubt around the legitimacy of those feelings, and the fear that comes with making a change. Disappointment is what we risk when we strive for more (not unlike the relationship between loss and love). And that striving is at the heart of what it means to be an artist.  As Geoff Dyer writes in White Sands, “When I am no longer capable of disappointment the romance will be gone: I may as well be dead.” Indeed, I think it’s not only okay to admit disappointment but perhaps even embrace it as a catalyst for closing the gap between the work you do for pay and the work you do for love.

And indeed, oh indeed, yes indeed I really do. At least, I hope that’s the case and that my story ends as satisfactorily as Katy’s, hopeful romantic that she is.

I got a day job! (Part ... 2?)

Last spring, a couple of months after landing my current day job (after a nearly seven-year mix of staying home with kids and self-employment - a transition I wrote about here), I struck up an online conversation with Abby Glassenberg of While She Naps about the atypical (and generally less publicized) move from freelance to full-time, not to mention the added puzzle piece of juggling a family on top of working for an income and more general creative fulfillment. After almost a year passed, she picked the thread back up with a phone chat a few weeks ago for an upcoming article on this very topic in the Craft Industry Alliance journal. We had a lovely chat about the challenges of juggling a day job that’s not necessarily as fulfilling or flexible as running a creative business, versus the endless, exhausting hustle that is being your own boss.

In the end, however, my comments were not included in the article, which took a generally more positive attitude toward the kind of thesis put forth by folks like Austin Kleon (who doesn’t have a day job) and Jen Hewett (who doesn’t have a kid) that the work you do for pay makes financially possible your other creative pursuits and that quitting your day job should not necessarily be the end goal of those efforts. Let’s just say, after almost 18 months of exploring the unique work-family-creativity trifecta, I don’t agree.

With just 168 hours in a week, if you’re working full-time, outside the home, have at least one child, and want to stay generally healthy (and/or maintain any kind of social life), there’s just not much time leftover to pursue creative efforts in any sort of substantial way. And I’m not trying to make excuses for myself. Having kids is a decision I made, fully aware it would have significant consequences on all areas of my life. But this is the specific demographic I find myself in (and it’s not exactly a niche, to have a job, a kid or two, and creative needs) and at the end of the day, it’s a pretty simple math equation. Adding kids to the mix makes the whole “keep your day job” thesis pretty shaky and very few people are talking about that (not to mention the fact that I’m a little weary of the advice to keep my day job from people who quit theirs’ years ago). People are talking about striking a “balance” between career and family. People are talking about fitting creativity into and around your 9-to-5 schedule. But very few people are addressing this: just how do you keep at least three balls in the air: day job, family, creativity? Is it possible to have a full-time job, one or more kids, and a meaningful, consistent creative outlet?

At any rate, Abby linked to my blog post that started this whole dialogue in her newsletter on Wednesday, then Tara Swiger tweeted it. I’ve been getting some decent traffic from those two mentions. And initially I was thinking, that’s cool ("let's get this party started, amirite?!") but, over a year later, people are kind of reading the optimistic “before.” And as it turns out I wrote about the transition at least two other times before I got a job, when I was trying to cover at least the cost of part-time daycare, and again after I decided to pull my youngest from childcare and my oldest from any sort of after-care (here and here). If those were collectively the “before” posts, should I follow up with an “after” post?

Well, I’m not really there yet, because I’m somewhere in that orange-blue-green intersection in the above Venn diagram and I’m not sure how I feel about it, to be completely honest. So it’s safe to say this is my “middle of the story” post. Part 4, if you will, of an at least 5-part story. If you’re in the middle of your work-family-creativity story, I want to hear from you. Tell me your story at becky [at] rebeccabirdgrigsby [dot] com. And if you come across stories like this one, from a fellow "freelance to full-time" creative type (with a kid, to boot!), send them my way, won't you?

national doughnut day!

Today is one of my two favorite holidays - National Doughnut Day, not to be confused with National Donut Day. I'm sorry, you're questioning the need for two days we get to celebrate dessert for breakfast why again?

Anyway, remember that time we visited three donut shops in one day in a quest to find the best donuts when visiting family in Bend, Oregon? That was fun. I think I'm still trying to lose the weight I no doubt gained on that trip.

I thought about doing something equally insane today - hitting up Dick's Donuts in East Oakland first for the best basic donuts in town, then Donut Savant in Uptown Oakland for the best not-so-basic donuts (their "cron't" is simply heavenly). I could've also made a stop at Doughnut Dolly for the basically-overpriced-but-okay-yeah-they're-pretty-good custom-filled donuts. But instead I stopped after Dick's because I needed a little time to craft a "tardinut" (that's a donut that looks like a tardigrade. Obviously.).

And, you know, work. Sigh.

mapping where you summer

With a second, smaller batch going out earlier today, I've now sent 36 of the total 45 miniature Adirondack chairs scrapped from this project almost 10 years ago. I had to send a replacement chair to one participant whose first chair broke in transit! So I may try to send a few more out, but I'll likely keep a few in case this happens again.

To celebrate, I made a map showing the first name, last initial, and city & state of each participant. Isn't it fun to see them all plotted out like so? At least a couple of these chairs will be traveling internationally later this summer, so I may begin to post pictures as separate map markers with a different color to indicate travel. The possibilities are endless.

Meanwhile, my little chair has been mostly hanging out with me at work this week. I have a couple of summer trips ahead, but on the other hand, that's part of the appeal of this project - to see the reality of summer for different people around the country. If you'd like to see what others are posting, search the hashtag #wheredoyousummer on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And yes, I'm aware this particular hashtag is associated with a Leisure Society contest. I'm a big fan of "hijacking hashtags" after all.

where do you summer?

Back in grad school, inspired, like so many students from elsewhere suddenly in this foreign land known as New England, I created one project inspired by travels there as well as back in California and Oregon. Miniature Adirondack chairs were eventually scrapped from what became a pared-down floor installation of many, many CMYK screen prints of sand, water, etc. I honestly can't remember what my original intention for the chairs was, but they've been hanging around my studio ever since. This spring I got the idea to distribute the freshly re-painted white chairs to artists, friends, family, fellow alums, and other creative folks as I posed the (it would seem to me, anyway) dated question, "Where do you summer?"

Friends have started receiving the nearly 50 chairs late last week and today, with a second batch going out via USPS on Thursday. So it's early and I'm not sure exactly what form this project will take.

As images start trickling in (above are some examples over the long weekend of the chair I kept and will carry with me all summer), I'll share them by linking here in addition to writing about overall ideas as they develop around the project as it takes form. As I wrote in the brief statement for the original project, titled "for we are where we are not," I'm still very much interested in the distance in time and space in the dissemination of these chairs around the country (and, as the participants travel this summer, around the world), and in creating a setting for the possibility of narrative. What that narrative looks and sounds like is to be seen and largely dependent upon the project participants.

Stay tuned! And email me if you'd like to play along - becky [at] rebeccabirdgrigsby [dot] com

it must be bunnies

It's been an odd couple of months and this post will be a little odd, likewise. Humor me. As the busy-ness of my day job settles down, following the academic year as it does, I finally have a little bit of mental wiggle room to reflect back and plan forward. Let's start with the former and I'll get to the latter over the next week or so. Because I've been doing a lot of planning for summer projects and goals over the past few days, but I need another day or two to flesh things out a bit more, as they say.

A month or so ago, right before Prince died, I was thinking again about David Bowie. His song 'Fame' came on the radio one day while I was in the car, and that song always reminds me of Pretty Woman. And I just thought, how silly it is that all of these people I admire, from relatives to friends to artists and musicians, have these profound memories of Bowie, about how they owned a certain album - on vinyl, no less! - or how Bowie inspired them to be whoever they wanted to be, however unique that vision might be, male, female, whatever... And, me, I thought back to a movie that I watched multiple times as a budding teenager.



Then when Prince died I was struck with an almost identical memory, flashing back to the bathtub scene in that same movie, where Julia Roberts' character is singing along to Prince's 'Kiss', with Richard Gere's character secretly watching her, unbeknownst to her and her earbuds. "Don't you just love Prince?"

I do. Not that the two deaths need comparison, and I was incredibly shocked and saddened by the loss of David Bowie, but Prince's death, as far as celebrity deaths go, affected me a little more. I have so many memories of his music and the movie 'Purple Rain', all of which extend way beyond Roberts' brief bathtub rendition of a couple of lines from one popular song.

For some reason that I think has to do with my recent interest in serendipity and stuff, I found comfort in the fact that artist Amanda Parer's giant, inflatable rabbits (technically titled 'Intrude' which is appropriate if you didn't dig their presence then and there as much as I did) were witness to San Francisco's tribute, with City Hall donning purple lights for one night after Prince died. We had just taken the family to see the rabbits the weekend before and they were deflated a few days after the Prince tribute.

Because who's not cheered up by the sight of giant, inflatable bunnies, you know? (Well, everyone except Anya, I suppose. I can almost always work in a Buffy reference, after all...)

let's play polo: a long overdue recap

I have two new projects that kind of fall under my umbrella of "social practice art" in that I'm trying to get other folks, in one of the two projects other artists specifically, to participate in some way. But before I launch those here, I wanted to, at long last, compile a quick recap of #letsplaypolo as it unfolded on October 10, 2015.

In short, participation was light, as these projects tend to be for me lately. But a handful of folks went along with it, and I'm much appreciative of they're being game to do so. Here are some pictures from the day.

Locally, we teamed up with another family - so there were 9 of us in total, all in matching yellow polo tops - at the Oakland Museum of California.

I saw one other person, not in our group, wearing a yellow polo, but didn't act quickly enough to capture it on camera. And of course I have no way of knowing if he was participating intentionally or if it was a coincidence.

I'm still deciding if I want something like this to be an annual thing. Check back soon for those other two projects I hinted at above!

all sorts

It's been almost six months since my last post. If you follow me elsewhere, you'll see that I'm active as ever, just in bite size portions. But I miss writing more, so here I am. It's been a busy six months between the holiday season that followed my last update and non-stop day job action since the New Year. I've been thinking a lot lately about my "creative generalism" in the tiny sliver of time not consumed by work or family, and the seemingly endless quest to re-brand, so to speak, all that I do and all that I'm interested in without necessarily specializing in any one of those things. It's tricky. I'm cautiously optimistic that summer will provide a slight respite from the hectic pace of the last half-year, allowing me more time to work out some of my longer-term creative ideas here and elsewhere. 

In the meantime, today is National Licorice Day! As you may be aware, random holidays, usually celebrating food, provide me with a fair amount of inspiration these days, both when writing about where I live and when thinking up weekly adventures for a particular felt tardigrade duo. Whenever I think of licorice, I think of Allsorts, the perk of weekend trips to the UK's equivalent of Home Depot when my family lived in England, circa 8th grade until about halfway through my sophomore year of high school. We owned the house we lived in "off base" in the town of Bedford and it was a bit of a fixer-upper. I could write about how it was a good experience in some way, in hindsight, helping out with projects around the house during my formative years, but mostly what I remember is happily adding a bag of Allsorts to the caulking and the backyard tiles upon check-out, a sweet ending to an otherwise pretty boring weekend outing.

happy 10th blogiversary to me!

Ten years ago today, I wrote my first post on this blog. Back then it was called Wazo Cafe Gallery ("wa-zo" is the phonetic notation for the French oiseau, which means bird, which is my maiden/middle name). We had recently moved from Oakland, California, to Boston, Massachusetts, where I was about two months into the MFA program at SMFA. Rather than wax poetic about how much has happened in those ten years (or bemoan how quickly they've gone by), I thought I'd make a simple list of 10 of the topics I've enjoyed writing about between then and now, in no particular order.

1. The Makery! For awhile, this series of posts was "fresh on Mondays!" with crafty projects posted weekly. It started as a way to sneak creativity back into my life after the birth of my first kid and eventually spawned a different kind of offspring in the form of felt Android phone cases that were featured on Mashable, Geek Sugar (now POPSUGAR), and Apartment Therapy. Then I got wicked carpal tunnel syndrome and had another kid.

2. The MFA Thesis. The whole shebang. The convoluted thought process leading to it. The travel writing via Athens, London, and Nashville, Tennessee. The digressions that occasionally involved tasks such as re-watching The Last Unicorn. The exhibition itself. And some reflections since. In my mind, at least, this is still very much a work in progress.

3. The cats. The now geriatric cats, Sophie and Xander. We adopted them a little over 16 years ago, so they've been with us the entire 10 years this blog has existed. I've written about them quite a bit, in one way or another. And they've inspired at least one crafty project.

Today is National Cat Day, after all, so they had to make the cut. They've earned it.

4. The TV show. The all-time favorite reality TV show. So You Think You Can Dance, of course. I'm not as committed to watching and reflecting on the show as I used to be, but I will get to see the live tour in San Francisco in December (this will be the second time; the first was in 2007, when this blog was just 2 years old).

5. The jobs. All 15 of them. Well, I'm up to the two jobs I had right before I started this blog, anyway. How fitting.

6. The family. I have another blog devoted to this topic (wait a second, am I a "mommy blogger"?!) but it's woefully outdated. Seriously, the toddler was a baby last time I updated it. Even so, occasionally, that part of my life spills over onto this blog. What can I say, it's messy.

7. The travel. The travel that was/is not thesis-related (or paid for with travel grants, sadly). I'm particularly nostalgic for the sightseeing done during our first summer in Boston, which coincided nicely with reading and listening to Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot.

8. The handmade marketplace. No, not that one. You know what I'm talking about. The one where I ran my micro-business for 4+ years until sales tanked and I found myself stuck between a rock (stay-at-home-mom) and a hard place (day job).

9. The running. The first marathon took place before this blog was started, but I wrote all about the second one, the 2012 Oakland marathon, here. These days, I'm content to run the 3 mile lap around Oakland's Lake Merritt two to three mornings each week, so there's not much to write about.

10. The food! Last, but certainly not least. The food, you could say, is what ties it all together, don't you think?

I was hoping to turn at least one of these topics into some sort of book, if for nothing else than to satisfy my own archival desires, but this'll have to do for now. Here's to 10 more years of writing. Oh, and I have a newsletter/mailing list sign-up box to the right. I'll start a newsletter as soon as I have 10 readers signed up. Deal?

Thanks for reading, guys. I cherish each and every one of you.