Category: My Art

Doing Art

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Bed at 10:30. An odd sort of mood. Like being really agitated without being agitated. Blank. The emptiness of doing when all there is, is doing. Neither reward nor recognition, and such reward is reward for the wrong thing, and such recognition is nothing that matters. Not a bad state–it just is.
That fantasy of peddling a cart and never coming back… or going anywhere. But that’s where I am. What I’m doing. Not going anywhere. Standing in one place. Nothing moves or changes but the things I make, and if I stop I won’t exist. That’s the tricky part. Stop doing what? Only if it’s the right thing… the right doing. And no one can tell you what that is. And you can’t stop.
I glued and nailed to the stretchers of a canvas I’d primed: roofing. rusted mettle. shattered auto glass. Dirt. String. Art should show the world truly.
I need large needles with large eyes, large enough for some lovely, fine hemp cord I bought. I want to darn and sew stuff to a canvas.
Pointless. But do it because doing is all there is. Make and give the stuff away. Or paint over. Free art. Free. But it costs… everything.

Personal note: Goby’s Journal

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It’s difficult for me to work at more than one thing at a time. 2007-2011: poetry. 2012 to end of June, making art. This last phase isn’t over, but low energy from gastritis—no new work since end of June. Distressing.

So now I’m reading 8 hours a day.

This made college difficult, with its 4 and 5 different subjects to study. HS not so much, cause I mostly didn’t need to study. Could coast off my own reading. If you don’t fit the cookie cutter pattern in school, you learn to assert your own way or perish. I would never have made it even to a B.A. today. Too expensive. Managed to get a decent education while it was still possible—not being rich.
This is so … I don’t know the word. Young people coming up are caught in this horrid capitalist net–privatizing their very souls. I have tremendous admiration for those who manage to make space for themselves, and who keep learning any way they can. No wonder fantasy fiction is so popular. The worlds described in books like His Dark Materials, come closer to evoking reality–that is, describe the psychic/affective conditions that shape our lives–connect the dots of this otherwise fragmented disorienting hologram we live in more powerfully, on a gut level, than anything in conventional fiction.

Breakfast:
2 slices multi-grain toast, buttered w. honey
small bowl of applesauce
8 oz OJ
1 cup coffee

Not likely to have much more rest of the day.

This is not a diet. I have no appetite. Above, enough to make me feel full.

An artist’s manifesto

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Up from the basement studio–preparing a block for a woodcut, and began a painting that will be 20 in my Pavement series. I may do this to the end of my days. I see years of possibilities in this–and the metaphor of broken foundations is exactly where my head has been. Who knows what may grow out of the cracks–what we can build from the rubble.
All our high culture (especially “high culture”)–white Euro-American, grew in the service of kingship, empire, and from there–slavery, war, capitalist economic colonialism and expansion to the end of life on the planet. What is there to do, but renounce it–all of it. Build a new world from the ruins.

(reworked) #355 Missing pavement block, 2nd Street

#355 12x17cm

12×17 cm watercolor, ink, acrylic on paper. Pavement Series 19

Reworked this a bit. I was standing there, gazing at this… the missing block of sidewalke,  and noticed the guy selling photos near by. I explained what I was doing… how beautiful that missing pavement block, the patterns of stones and cig butts… I think he thought I was an hallucinating homeless dude. I told him, I saw this in color… like, ya know?