Baubles, bangles and beads

Ever wonder where all those nice turquoise stones came from, the ones everyone around here makes stuff with? I'll tell you. Santa Fe Jewelers Supply.

I love stores like this. Art supply stores, hardware stores, cookware stores, anyplace that has lots of little tools and interesting, useful, yougottahaveone things. I wanted to experiment with mounting a drawing on mylar, to a piece of plexiglas, and then framing it. In order to do this, I needed tiny fasteners. So off I went to SFJS.

I was helped by a very nice woman there who did not blink when I told her what I was trying to do. In fact she had very good ideas and was totally supportive. You'd think that since I was clueless about jewelry supplies, and I wasn't making jewelry at all, she might have scoffed. But she didn't. So I bought these head pins that are used for stacking beads on earrings (I could choose between solid silver, silver plate, and nickel,) a tiny drill bit, an insert for the drill to hold the tiny drill bit, and a pair of needle nose pliers. It cost about $15 altogether.

I was fascinated by all the stuff they had there. You can see in the photo that there were many strings of semi-precious stones, but they also had cases full. They had mother of pearl still on the shell. There were large stones and small ones, and there was someone doing something with stones on a machine, but I didn't ask what he was doing. There was a nice looking man at the counter and I intended to take the photo while he was looking in the case, but he turned just as the phone camera snapped (which as you probably know if you have an iphone, is an eon after you push the button.) I thought he was native American and so I blocked out his face because it seemed wrong to put it on the internets.

This is the kind of thing you can find easily in Santa Fe. But try finding a decent dermatologist.

Uncle Miltie speaks wise

I came across something on Longreads, which is a great site for interesting articles on the web. I guess Milton Glaser has a website, well of course he would; and one of the things he posted is an excerpt from a talk he gave to AIGA in 2001. The whole thing is fun to read and makes a lot of sense. I always thought Glaser to be a brilliant designer and promoter of his whole brand, so much that we still see around NYC is his work or greatly influenced by it. The I (heart) NY campaign for one.

The piece is worth a read and I'll just quote one paragraph here that I thought was funny.


LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE.
Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else. However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’

Who you calling unconscious?

I moderated the panel "Why do Artists Make Art?" last week. It was crowded, standing room only in fact. I had an interesting group on my panel, painters, a photographer, a printmaker, and a psychiatrist who is now retired and making art. She was a lovely little person, very animated- and had some interesting things to say about her research into where creativity resides in the brain. Her opinion is that some people have no creativity at all, and their brains don't light up in the creativity spot. This area is the same one that causes self-criticism, and one of the audience members asked if there were meds to turn that off. I'm not doing justice to the points she made, but I disagree that some people have no creativity. I think everyone does, but we're not trained to access it because we're taught to follow what has been set out for us and what is the tried and true path. That's why Frost could write "The Road not Taken."

Then there's Joseph Campbell and his ideas about mythology and heroism. I think Rumi and Joseph Campbell are the two most misunderstood, or rather misquoted, writers and thinkers. Campbell is quoted as saying Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls. It's usually shortened to Follow Your Bliss. Lotta people doing that here. I read that Campbell was a little fed up with all the bliss followers and at one point changed the quote to Follow your blisters. That might be apocryphal. 

Since the exhibition that I'm in, which prompted the panel, is dedicated to Jung's Red Book, I looked up what he had to say about art and artists. Here is a quote:

 The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle [emphasis mine.] 

I don't know what to make of this. That the neurotic, poorly adjusted artist can't help but toil away in the studio, giving the work of art a way out and onto the canvas? It sounds pretty depressing to be a vehicle for something that was going to show up somehow anyway. I really dislike this concept, because for one thing it confirms peoples' opinions that artists are driven and crazed. Well maybe I'm overstating what Jung said. But people still think that art springs from some mysterious inner force, and that only the chosen few can create it. We're in the post-modern, pluralistic 21st century. Those ideas are so old school. 

nukes and fire don't mix

We've got a bunch of wildfires going on around here. On June 18th I had a party to celebrate my one year anniversary in Santa Fe. That afternoon on my way to buy ice, I saw a huge smoke plume in the mountains. This was the start of the Pacheco fire, 2 miles from the Santa Fe ski area. It was, and is, a serious fire, only 15% contained at this point. The road up the mountain has been closed at mile marker 9, and smoke has filled the air. The fire destroyed power lines and threatens the watershed.

I took a photo of the smoke plume on Saturday, a week after it had started. This was taken from the riverwalk that we walk on several times a day. Of course there's no water in the river but that's another story.

Sunday a fire broke out not far from Los Alamos and spread with lightning speed, tripling in size in one night. This fire is called the Las Conchas fire which apparently started on private land, and the size and scale of it are frightening. It's currently over 90 square miles, almost twice as large as a terrible fire that destroyed many homes and forest land in 2000, the Cerro Grande fire. That fire burned 47,000 acres at the Bandelier National Monument, and destroyed 100 buildings including some at the lab complex. The forest still hasn't recovered from that fire, which started with a controlled burn that quickly got out of control.

The town of Los Alamos has been evacuated- 12,000 people. And the nuclear lab in Los Alamos is less than a mile from the fire's edge. So far they've been able to keep the fire from spreading to the labs and burning toxins that are stored there. It's a big story, carried by media all over the world. Just enter Los Alamos fire into google or twitter and see what I mean. These photos are from The Atlantic:

The sunsets we've been having with all this smoke in the air have been both eerie and beautiful. Fortunately for us down here in SF, the smoke and fire are spreading north, but we've still got bad air quality. Today I went to the gym to run instead of doing it outside.

A friend who listens to Amy Goodman (I do sometimes, but find it so depressing) said that today a guy who serves as a watchdog of sorts for the lab was on the show, and he said that if New Mexico seceded from the US, that it would represent the third largest nuclear power in the world. That's how much we've got in nukes around here. Of course, LANL is where the bomb was invented. They still employ thousands of people, toiling away at various ways of hitting atoms together to do stuff, good and bad I suppose, depending on your POV. They developed the metal for Nambe objects there. I don't know what else goes on. It's very very mysterious.

I worry most about the 4th of July coming up. We have fields behind our houses where kids like to set off fireworks, and this year that could be disastrous. Not sure what to do about it. Our esteemed governor says she doesn't have the authority to make fireworks illegal- this has to be a legislative act, and the legislature meets for about three days in May I think.

An unanswerable question

I'm in a show opening this weekend here in Santa Fe called Mining the Unconscious. Here is the digital invitation.

This was the result of an open call to artists who are working with the idea of the unconscious and is supposed to have something to do with Jung's Red Book, which is an amazing piece of work. There is a new reproduction of it (the original is sort of a sketchbook he created) and it's way expensive, otherwise I'd buy one. The link takes you to Amazon to buy it if you want. It also has some images from it. I decided to enter my burned Freud book pages, since they are his Interpretation of Dreams, and these were accepted for the show.

They've decided to have some panel discussions on the show themes and they asked me to moderate one called "Why do Artists Make Art?" Why DO artists make art? It's a crazy question. I wonder if people really wonder about it. Because artists sure don't. I was telling a friend about the panel and he said artists sell art to buy beer. But not all artists sell their work. In fact I read that only 20% of the people who call themselves artists (this must be on a census or something) make their living from it. I think even that is a high estimate.

I'll have to do some research on theories. I used to live next to a psychoanalyst who had a lot of artist patients and who had written books on this. He said that artists are mastering form to work through past traumas. I do know that for me, just making stuff makes me feel better, even if it doesn't work. And another artist once told me his son was just like him, always "making stuff." So I think my former neighbor has a point, it's about mastering form, but maybe it's about control in general and the feeling of accomplishment when you end up with something fine and interesting.

I may have to post the question on Facebook to see if I get some answers.

procrastination

I closed up the blog for a while. Reason was, I got a little mired in indecision. And also, I created a blog for my class, and I could barely keep up with that, as my students would attest.

And then there was the matter of my website, which hadn't been redesigned in four years. When I did it back in 2007, I hardly knew what I was doing and I designed it in the clunkiest way imaginable. It drove me crazy to see all those files from divided up slices in Photoshop. No wonder it loaded fairly slowly. So I intended to redo it and the months went by. Basically, over a year went by. Finally I got the newest version of Dreamweaver two weeks ago and set to work.

In the interim, Dreamweaver and web design in general had become far more complex. I won't go into the specifics, but a shortened version is, I didn't understand what "box model" meant. I really struggled with trying to figure it out from reading and experimenting but I finally went out and bought Dreamweaver CS5 for Dummies. I don't love those books but at least it got me to the point that I understood the concepts. And so now, after many many hours, it's finished. And linked to this here blog, so I'll be leaning toward the arty from here on in, though I still am so surprised and amused by life in Santa Fe that I'm sure I'll continue my outsider status for a while.

I got my studio organized, thanks to getting a shed built outside to put the garage type stuff in. Here are two photos:

 

The light is from two solar tubes that I had put in before I moved, during the renovation. It's nice and bright in there. It's really quite pleasant. Even Maya seems fairly comfortable, after hoovering the floor first. I have to constantly check for pushpins or other sharp objects so she doesn't get them.

Now I'll be heading to Miami for a few days, but when I get back, with the website finished (hoorah) I can get back to work on my NY Times series (see back wall) and my Frieze series.

It's Memorial Day. Think kindly of our men and women in far off wars and hope they come back safely to their loved ones.

Trees of gold

//

Of all the beautiful seasons here in Santa Fe, autumn is the most beautiful. Colors seem to distill and increase in saturation- strong contrasts of yellow and dark green, softer palettes of lavender, gold, sage, sienna. Fall colors in New England are beautiful, too- the reds and oranges of the sugar maples reflected in lakes. But fall here is breathtaking. From down here where I live, I can see the wide swatches of aspens in the mountains. At sunset especially, they glow. But to really be surrounded by them, you need to drive up towards the ski area, about 15 miles above the plaza. It's about another 2500 feet up, but it feels like more. The road is long, with switchbacks that take you up and up. I hadn't been up there for many years, not since I used to come up and paint up there, just as many people were doing today. That was maybe 15 years ago. Now the altitude and the windy road are a bit much for me, and happily, my friend Tina offered to drive us up there.

I learned today that the reason there are so many aspens in the sangre de christo's is because of a monumental forest fire that occurred around the turn of the century (the last one.) It burned down the fir trees, and the aspens, loving sun as they do, were the first to come back. Eventually, the firs could take over again. Meanwhile, this is one of the largest groves of aspens in the country. Also, aspens are connected by roots underground, so they keep spreading. I had some in my backyard, but they weren't watered and they died. One "orpan" grew in my next door neighbor's yard. They don't really love it down this far, but they will grow if you baby them.

Photos can't capture what they look like. The small coin-shaped leaves flutter in the slightest breeze. So when you're up there you see this shimmering golden sight. Even Christopher Hitchens might call it God's country.