sorry for the confusion

Hello!

For those of you who have visited before, and have been here recently, you'll see that I've been making changes, adding and deleting things, moving things around and then moving them again...it probably seems like I can't quite make up my mind.

Well it's true! This blog has suffered from a bit of an identity crisis since it's wee beginnings. An identity crisis I can trace right on back to the larger, more existential crisis of my artistic identity. The way I present myself as an artist/artist with a business/business person with a passion for art/whatever has been a little strained in the past. But in this *last chance in January before it gets too ridiculous to talk about new year changes* post I want to let you know that I think I have it figured out (as far as it can be figured out, anyway...right?)

So what do you do? That's the question I dread at parties. What I do is convoluted and multi-faceted. I call myself an artist. Just about every day of my life I wake up with art on the mind, and what I go about doing during my day is almost always art related. I make my money creating things with my hands and facilitating others to be able to make things with their hands and creative brains. But I also run a small business where I produce marketable items with the pure intention of selling them, and where I print and bind jobs for clients who may or may not be creative producers of things in their own right.

So, what I'm trying to say is that in the last several months I've become much more comfortable with the little compartments and nuances that make up my day as an artist and my day as a worker. The small business I run, Tiger Food Press, is as much an expression of my creative work as an installation or piece of strange art, but I have slightly different motivations and outcomes with Tiger Food Press than I do with that other work.

I write about Tiger Food Press over at the Studio Diary. Tiger Food Press is itself a multi-faceted business: under its umbrella I do small press publishing, custom printing, book bindery and box making, and also produce bits of ephemera including stationery and small prints. I started this blog because I felt like there were certain things that simply didn't fit in the Studio Diary, such as personal daily things that might be worth sharing, road trips, training for 10ks, my railings against the constant rain...and of course, that weird art stuff I was talking about earlier. Sometimes my own weird art, or that of others talked about here might become a publishing project of Tiger Food Press - that's just how interconnected it all is. But in my mind, there is enough of a division to justify an entirely new venue for thoughts.

Oh, and as for the posting and deleting. I hope to put an end to that. For the most part, the things I deleted were acting as place holders. Seat warmers, if you will. A lot of the photos from those posts plus many, many more are now viewable on my Flickr.

Now that I've explained myself, and perhaps helped to define this blog in my own mind as much as for you, my lovely audience, I feel better. Now, on to the fun stuff!

chasing fear and finding genius

I woke up today thinking of this talk by Elizabeth Gilbert I had seen on TED close to a year ago. Gilbert is the author of the much hyped, instant success "Eat, Pray, Love." I still haven't read the book, and despite the mixed reactions to it by my friends, based in this talk I'll probably pick it up one day. In the meantime, I really appreciate what she talks about here. Check out this link.

I don't know a single artist who hasn't experienced some form of the fear and dread Gilbert touches on in this talk, whether it's self-inflicted or projected onto them. "What is it about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health, in a way that other careers...don't do?" she asks. "Why? Is it rational, is it logical, that anybody should be expected to be afraid to do the work that they feel they were put on this earth to do?"

I get a sense that as artists we are expected to either exhibit superhuman resistance to the pressure to "live up" to our previous work, or that we are so delicate and fragile that we will certainly shatter under the presumed pressure. Like Gilbert, I often find myself asking why is this onus especially heavy on artists? However, thinking about fear and uncertainty as a nearly universal condition of being an artist puts my own fear and uncertainty into context, and helps me feel a little better able to sit down to do the work every day, knowing that I've got good company.

the erratic sleeping patterns of the sun deprived

My sleep habits have been atrocious lately. Atrocious, weird, and unpredictable. I'm sleep deprived and sleep saturated all at once. Last week I got up at 6 am several days in a row. Last night I stayed up until 4 am before finally dragging myself to bed, where I lay until at least 5:30.



I got up a little late, naturally, and puttered around the studio a bit before heading up to OCAC for my first day back to work after a week and half-long break. The work study students and I are involved in a cleaning and organizational frenzy preparing for the College Book Arts Association conference at the end of the week. I drove home with dust up my nose and starving.

The fog had begun to settle in the hills when I drove to the school early this afternoon. I thought about the suffocating nature of wet, wool blankets, still insulating enough to keep you alive. In the just after dusk hours of darkness the fog lay across the road and reflected my headlights back to me and I sped a little.



Tomorrow evening I start my first Iyengar yoga class. I am hoping to bring a calming, clarifying, and unifying element into my life. Yay!