art slumping

after i sent you that novel of an e-mail response, i've got some posting to do.

i like michael borremans--I hadn't seen his work. and i like the can you posted. that caption on it cracks me up. have you been mostly focussing on the still lifes lately?

i've been avoiding artmaking lately because i'm afraid of it...doing craft projects are a lot easier--there's a much clearer beginning and end point to them. whenever i get really involved in art, so many emotions come up.

however i've been trying to snap out of that, because crafting is not intellectually satisfying; it's more instant gratification.

anyways, here's a rapid fire of stuff i've made

Here's a drawing I made that looks like a sweater I'm knitting (for my little nephew for xmas)

Here's a crappy iphone picture of some mountains I drew--I already sent this in an e-mail. I'm trying to loosen up and be less uptight in my markmaking.

And here's a crappy iphone picture of my drawings that i've tacked onto my drawing board:

I really like this drawing from the 1800s, and early depiction of sun spots

And this drawing/collage, by Richard Artschwager

I've also been drawing icebergs, which I will probably make into a repeat pattern

I'm trying to think more about mass and volume-- rather than line. I'm realizing I tend to use line as a crutch in my work. I really like the way Georgia O'keefe works with mass and color in her landscapes:

I was just looking at some of her writings, and I found this excerpt from a letter she wrote to a friend very comforting

"I am really quite enjoying the muddle and am wondering if I'll get anything out of it and if I do what it will be. I decided I wasn't going to cater to what anyone else might like, why should I, and when you leave that element out of your work there is nothing much left. 
I'm floundering as usual" 

also, this kind of cryptic, lofty letter to writer Sherwood Anderson:

"whether you succeed or not is irrelevant. There is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing and keeping the unknown always beyond you, catching crystallizing your simpler clearer version of life only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead - that you must always keep working to grasp. The form must take care of its self if you can keep your vision clear. I some way feel that everyone is born with it clear but that with most of humanity it become blasted one way or another. I can never show what I am working on without being stopped. Whether it is liked or disliked I am affected in the same way - sort of paralyzed."