Portrait of the artist as a slob

Tonight was homework night. Despite that, I'm beginning to feel the itch to clean my house (which, if you know me, you know doesn't come very often). It's getting out of control in here, and something is going to have to be done. But tonight was not the night to do it. Instead, I drew my bitmap alphabet, finished up making type convey the idea of the quote, and wrote a couple poems follow William Carlos Williams' example.

(I also read about 100 pages of New Moon, the second of that teeny bopper vampire series I've gotten sucked into. Shhh, don't tell anyone. I can feel my literary snob street cred slipping away.)

Anyway, here's one of my attempts at a plainer style of poetry (no, they weren't all this short):

Broken Watch

It sits

dismantled


When I got to the second line, I stared at it for about 10 minutes thinking, what comes next? Then I realized nothing did. That was it. The poem was done. What more was there to say if I wasn't allowed to blather on with metaphors about lost time and frozen time and the freedom of the wrist from timely oppression? Nothing, that's what.

Last but not least, a couple self-portraits. Monday's is a drawing done because my camera was out on loan. The subject matter springs from a recent feeling that I am in fact getting older. Today's is my art/homework corner, plus my delicious dinner. Yum.

They're tearing the place down around me

The cats, that is. But it's okay, because I'm staring blindly at a computer screen, trying to decide just how to make a font really embody a quote.

How do you convey meaning with text? Particularly when you can only use one color and one font. I'll work and work, and I'll come up with something I like, but then I imagine my professor saying, "So, how is that you see this really conveying the quote," and the inevitable moment of silence before I confess, "Well, actually, I just like how it looks. And the scripty font, that fits the word 'love,' I think."

Design, writing, art, these are all subjective things, and when I sit down to write, or when I take a photo, I'm not so worried that anyone will tell me its wrong. They might offer suggestions, might tweak here and there, and I welcome that.

But with this assignment (which is UTTERLY subjective) I am feeling completely convinced that no matter what I do it will, in fact, be wrong. Bollocks. (I've been watching a selection of Irish and Australian films this evening.)

So, I have my five options and am no closer to feeling I've conveyed the quote than I did when I had zero options. I keep resizing the font, sliding it around on the page, increasing spacing, decreasing spacing, but it's all the same, and no matter what I do wind up with, my ability to explain why what I've done completes the assignment will be non-existent.

But that's enough whining out of me. I'm back to InDesign. I leave you with Sunday's self-portrait, taking while walking down North Charles, with the shutter speed set far to slow. Today's self-portrait will be up tomorrow, as I've loaned my camera to a colleague who needed to take some pictures for work.

A portrait of the artist as technologically incompetent

I have spent 8 hours choosing poems, laying them out in InDesign, designing a cover, and attempting to print said cover and pages of my chapbook to take to the reading tomorrow. But let's go back to the beginning.

The day started quite splendidly, with a shopping trip to Utrecht. I really do love that store. I like to wander all the aisles, even those aisles with supplies that bewilder and befuddle me. I pick things up, run my hands across them, set them down. If there weren't store clerks around, I'd probably smell them, too. Todays purchases included some necessaries for typography (remount spray, an art portfolio to keep my work flat and dry between car and class). Then there were the personal necessities: sketch paper (for use as a text block), coverweight paper, some new tubes of acrylic paint. And, as always, some items I just lusted after but, really, can't justify purchasing: dowel rods, a flat sheet of balsa, a medium weight exacto knife and accompanying saw blade, a sketch board, and brown craft paper. Ideas for books and sculptures swirled through my head as I handed over my money, then skipped back to my car.

Then came the hours of preparing my chapbook. All the design and selection went just fine. It's the printing that has utterly defeated me. I think I have burned through about a ream of paper and have only just now, at 2 a.m., figured out how to print this damn thing. It didn't help that with CS3, Adobe thought they could improve upon the build booklet function. What they actually did was make it completely useless (so far as I can tell) for anyone doing desk-top publishing who has to manually feed the paper in when they want to do a double-sided print.

On top of that, the printer itself just wouldn't cooperate, printing extra pages that said things like "jusAX05" and other such nonsense, deciding that I really only needed a quarter inch of my poem on each page (it thought it would be more fun to collage all the quarter inches together. apparently, it, too, is on a mixed-media kick right now), and stubbornly running out of colored ink.

Now, one printer driver, bazillions of sheets of paper, and a feeling of resignation/decision to do this thing in black and white later, I think I'm nearly don e with the printing. Now I just have to sew up all 15 of these little pamphlets and I'm ready to go. The things I do for my art. The things I do that, more than likely, no one will want. Sometimes, I don't even make sense to myself.

And big fat kudos to Ave for putting up with my yelling, ranting, and throwing of paper while he helped me figure it out.

Now, for the requisite self-portraits. Saturday is me and one of my necklaces. Today its just plain me. I do believe I'm on day 22 of this project, and I have to say that most days (except those when I'm incredibly busy or very tired), it's been a lot of fun. Forcing myself to do this one thing everyday has also caused me to be thinking more about what other things I can do. I'm excited to think about what I'll have when the 365 days are over.

Binding and Portraiture

I spent most of this evening creating a new way to bind a signature. Yes, there are no problems, only opportunities for discovery. Think positive. Needless to say, I am not much closer to having any chapbooks made for Sunday's reading. Looks like Saturday will be a busy, busy day! I also had some fun with markers. Hence today's self portrait.

Saggy baggy elephants and tree huggers

First thing's first: I have finally fixed my internet. More or less anyway. I still believe it's time for a change of companies, but it's not so urgent now.

Now, onward and upward. Yesterday I walked into a tree. I'm not even kidding. What's important about this act of stupidity? Well, for once in my life, I just laughed. Yes, I was a smidge embarrassed, as anyone who walks into a large and unmoving object should be (particularly when they do it on a busy city street). But all I could do was laugh. And for me, someone who worries far too much what other people think, that letting go is an occasion worth celebrating. Here's hoping my collision jarred loose some creative thoughts.

It's had me thinking a lot about how ridiculous nearly everything is. It's inescapable, in fact. And it's far better if you can just laugh your way through it or maybe find the beauty in the ridiculousness. It will, I think, make life fuller. It's that, or just spend your whole life feeling red-faced. Which leads me to my self-portrait of the day:


I'm calling it Saggy Baggy Self Portrait. When I was a kid and my socks would fall down, my mom would say I had saggy baggy elephant socks. Now I'm an adult, and things haven't changed a bit.





Some new endeavors for this week. Thanks to my typography teacher, I'll be spending hours staring at InDesign. The assignment? Take this quote:

"Love is the extremely difficult realization that something besides oneself is real." ~Iris Murdock

And express it using typography. We are free to mess with its size and placement on the page, but we must use only one family of typefaces and no color is allowed. (There goes my cliche idea of putting "love" in red.)

My seminar in literature and writing has also charged us with a creative task. A writing assignment based on either Hemingway or William Carlos Williams. I haven't had enough time to decide which I'll be doing, but I'm definitely ruminating on one idea in particular. Both of these writers use plain language, and yet they achieve a crisp, evocative, emotional effect. Their subjects are, on the whole, not extraordinary, fanciful things, and yet they are made, perhaps, more beautiful than the most exotic of subjects. As my professor said, "For Williams, it is sufficient to write a poem in which you are just taking note of something."

In which the intertuberwebernets catch a bad cold and refuse to work

So, the internet's out at my house. As I write this, I'm sitting in the Mt. Washington Starbucks, listening to some wailin' harmonica. (Side note on Starbucks: They work their hardest to convince you that you're enjoying coffee out of a mug with character, even though you can see that it's clearly cardboard.)

It's been a busy few days. I joined Ave and his mom, sister, and sister's friend in some bacchanalian revelry at Great Grapes in Leesburg, VA. Truth be told, the only thing we had to drink was apple cider. Which was delicious. (Happy birthday Lizzy!) I also rode the train back to Baltimore (I love riding trains), did laundry, cooked spaghetti, painted a picture, and sculpted the silliest looking face you ever did see.

Now I'm playing catch-up with self-portraits and the like. Saturday covers my favorite part of the day: apple picking. Sunday is fun with photoshop collages and was inspired by my ride on the train/Wes Anderson's the Darjeeling Limited. Monday's I took because often I love the way the colors look on the palette more than the way they look on whatever I painted. Today's? Well, I don't smile often enough. (p.s. someday I will figure out how to get my photos to tile instead of just stacking on top of one another.)




You can see them (and some other photos) bigger here.

And now I'm officially plugging myself and inviting you to come out to the Baltimore Book Festival on Sunday. I'll be reading my poetry, and if my plan works out as I'm hoping, I'll even be selling a limited number of hand-made chapbooks. Here's the info:

U.B. Hour at the Baltimore Book Festival
Featuring faculty Marion Winik, Jane Delury, and Steve Matanle and students Meredith Purvis, Lindsey Wittstruck, Natalie Minor, Amity Bitzel, Mary Bargteil, and Josh Murray
Sunday, September 28, 12:30pm
Mt. Vernon Square Park on Charles Street

You can get more information and full schedule at www.citylitproject.org or www.baltimorebookfestival.com

Juniper and citrus peel

are primary ingredients in London dry gin. I know because in the midst of the party Ave and his housemates threw, someone asked and I couldn't help myself: I had to look it up. So, yesterday was muchly busy and I didn't really have time to do anything artful, but here is my self portrait from the day of busyness and gin at parties.

Today, in honor of Ave's Mom's birthday, we're off to a wine festival in Virginia wine country, so I'm sure that there will be some lovely photos to be had.

Sketchy characters

I'm trying something new for a poem I'm thinking about. I've started a character sketch of, for lack of a better word, the main character. I've been thinking about random questions about who this man is, what motivates him, where he's been, and what he thinks. It's been an interesting experience, and I've put more time into it than I sometimes put into a poem. For all I know, this man may only take up two lines, but I do feel that I know him better. For this sketch, this man will fit better in those two lines then he possibly could otherwise. Here's a little piece of it:


This man's name is David. He likes brown leather shoes.

He likes to play checkers.

His favorite breakfast is oatmeal with a big pat of butter, a little dash of cream, a spoonful of brown sugar, and raisins.

He got his first kiss when he was 18 from a girl named Mabel. She had blond hair and smelled like lavender. They'd gone to church together forever and they were in the parsonage after Sunday school (she taught), and he pulled her into the stair well and kissed her. She slapped him, but she smiled as she walked away. He saw it.

And now, today's self portrait, in honor of boot weather, which I love:

Belated morning post

It's cold now, in the mornings. Watching steam rise from a mug of tea will become a favorite pastime. At least 20 minutes will be spent in the shower, letting the warm water seep into my body, equalizing my temperature for the first and only time in the day. Fragile light will dance through the windows and across every surface, so thin and so fast. It's a season of boots and sweaters, jaunty-looking scarves looped around my neck, and hair that stands on end with the dryness of it all. Extra blankets will emerge from deep in the linen closet, turn my bed into a nest of fluff and warmth, the cats curled up next to me at night. I'll buy new gloves, and for the third year in a row, I'll think about buying a new coat. Despite its broken zipper and the way it hugs my hips just a little too tightly, like a frightened child, this coat has kept me warm for seven years.

The voting booth linebacker

My brother and his friends from school made this for a class project, and it really cracks me up.

Your thighs are appletrees (WCW)

and the bags under your eyes are like pools of wine, purple and deep. It's funny how exhaustion can be so physical, the fuzzy feeling that's taken residence around my eyes, the way it seems as though someone has tied lead weights to each eyelash. The way my body curves and hunches over, refusing to hold itself up. The way caffeine trickles through my bloodstream, languidly poking at my veins, my senses, half-assedly telling me to wake up, be alert. (Today I only let myself have half a diet coke). The way it accumulates, like sandbags building up in your mind till you can't see over.

Today's self-portrait is of my sleepiness. A doodle done during class, it's not particularly sophisticated, but it just about captures it:

Writing excercise when I should be reading William Carlos Williams.

And I can feel the caffeine coursing through my veins. It was ill-advised to suck down that soda so late at night, and now the false energy has my hair standing on end, my eyes unable to focus on the task at hand. And I'm wishing that every fall of foot on the stairs was yours, that each jangle of metal was the sound of you, twirling your keys, over and over. But it's not, and so I turn back to these pages and force my eyes to track from side to side, taking in but not absorbing. [end writing exercise]

Last but not least, a self-portrait in words (see it on my Flickr page, formatted with line breaks, etc.:
Brown hair that started graying something like 10 years ago, cheekbones and eyes my favorite features, a nose that comes in second. The round cheeks and softened chin the product of poor eating habits and genetics. A part that readily falls in the middle of my head, the frizzy fly-aways from attempts at life as a professional. Eyebrows that would love nothing more than to spend all time together, and the hairline my father gifted me. And when I look at my profile in the mirror I see my grandmother, the arch grand dame. But this face, this whole face, is my mother's, and it is now as it was 23 years ago, a little more weather-beaten, a little more worried, but still the same.

Sick day

So, I was sick yesterday and today, hence the lack of posts. However, I've got self-portraits for today and yesterday, and if you check out my flickr page, I've uploaded some photos from over the weekend. This one I actually took on Saturday, but I'm counting it as Sunday's portrait:


Today, I was a bum all day, but then, I decided to change it up and paint my self portrait:


Now I'm off to crash so I can get plenty of sleep and feel all better tomorrow.

Self portrait day 7

It's almost 3 a.m., and I need to be asleep, but here's today's not-quite-self-portrait:

My thanks to Rick--at least, I think that's his name--for letting me pose with his bike! Del-Mar-Va bike week's amazing.

A room with a view

Tonight I'm in Ocean City, Maryland, in the Dunes Manor Hotel. Every room at the Dunes Manor has an ocean view, and right now I'm listening to the sound of the waves as I type this. Of course, it's too dark to see much right now, but this is the view down the beach:

I've been snapping photos all day, at least when I'm not locked up in the student leadership retreat (useful, but I'd love to be out exploring). I did get a couple funny shots today, and I think this is by far the most hilarious:

I saw this guy in the 7-11. Note the beads.

Otherwise, I have nothing worthwhile to offer for today. I did manage to snag a copy of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, a left-over, left-behind beach read that was floating around the hotel. It's a memoir, so I'm going to be dragging that around for lulls the rest of the weekend.

I'm hoping to have some more time tomorrow for photowalking and some journaling or sketching. We'll see how that goes. I had really wanted to spend this weekend with my hands in glue and paper, maybe making a book or two, or possibly even work on that painting I promised Ave for his new apartment. But it was not to be. Now I'll leave you with self-portrait in yellow, day 6 (maybe 7?).

New York's got nothing on Yonkers.

It's been a long day (long week, even), and I am about to keel over, so I'll make this short. There is, of course, the requisite self-portrait:



Given my exhaustion, I don't have much to say. I spent my evening in good company, taking in a play at Centerstage. It was Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. There were so many funny moments and lines worth quoting. I really enjoyed all the actors, especially Pamela Payton-Wright who played the role of Flora Van Huysen, and Caitlin O'Connell, who portrayed Dolly Levi. The cast left me wanting to read the play, and I am not especially a reader of plays.

I think that's about it from me for the evening. I'm headed out to a retreat this weekend, so I'm not sure what type of time and internet availability I'll have to post, but I'll definitely be trying to do some shooting and sketching, at least. I leave you with this quote from The Matchmaker:

"There's some people who say you shouldn't have no weaknesses at all... no vices. But, if a man has no vices he's in great danger of making vices out of his virtues. That's a spectacle. We've all seen 'em. No, no. Nurse one vice to your bosom. Give it the attention that it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. I took to whiskey - whiskey took to me. Then I discovered one important rule that I'm going to pass on to you: Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your 'combination sinners' that dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute. There's nothing worse than for a man to be a drunkard AND a thief. So, now you know why I want to get rid of this money. I want to keep my mind free to do credit to the whiskey that it deserves. And my last word to you is this: One vice at a time."

Consternation and consideration

I am having a cranky day, and have let myself get needlessly worked up over a variety of things from my weekend plans to parking both here and yon, so, instead of being creative and drawing or painting my self-portrait of the day, there's my cranky-face photo. I promise that I will soon come forth with more diverse efforts in this arena. In other, semi-related news, I found a website that deals with this type of daily project, which gives further justification to its completion. Click and read.

Given that it's a Wednesday, I spent my evening in classes. I should note that I love school. I adore sitting in a classroom, discussing whatever the topic may be or simply listening to a teacher unfold a lecture. I crave learning and knowing. One of tonight's classes, a seminar on literature and writing, gave me some really great things to think about.

Firstly, a writer's style is a reflection of their way of looking at, thinking about, and making sense of the world. I started to think about the poems I've been writing in recent months, and I can absolutely see that. Many of these poems and writings have been motivated largely by news stories, and I can see in my style a sense of looking for what's beneath the surface. What aren't the news stories telling me? What is omitted? What facts are left out, sacrificed because of a lack of column inches and reader attention span?

Further, our professor encouraged us to look for our sensibility as a writer, to identify it and understand it in how and what we choose to write about. In doing so, he said, we would better understand the effect our sensibilities have on our writing and how those sensibilities change throughout our lives. It does not matter if those sensibilities or views are correct, simply that they are ours.

Secondly, the more you know about the story you are writing, the better. I know that may sound out, but the point was this: the writer should fully explore the story she is telling, to know all the details about her characters and setting, because then she will be better equipped to tell their story. This is why people do character sketches. They may never use all the details they record, but knowing those details will make the characters fuller, will make the writer understand how those characters work, what motivates them.

I've long looked at people who discussed their characters as real people as total cheese balls, but now that I consider it this way, it makes sense. Our professor suggested we profile our characters, ask the most ridiculous-seeming questions: what brand of toothpaste does the character use and why? what type of shoes does he wear? how does he wake himself up in the morning? As I began thinking about how I myself, a real person, would answer these questions, I saw how those details add up to be me, and how applying them to the fictional people I write about would create more realistic, three-dimensional characters with real motivations and short-comings.

Thirdly, we have much to learn from Hemingway.

An evening with Ernest

I've been working oh-so-diligently on my homework this evening, so my self-portrait of the day is, of course, of me and my friend Hemingway. Read like a writer, I keep repeating to myself. I'm not sure it's working. I've been so taught to read like...well, a critic, I suppose. I keep looking to deconstruct when I should be looking at how he did what he did and why, and what effect he achieved. Oops.

In other news, I can't stop listening to "You don't know me" by Ben Folds and Regina Spektor. It's like a ginormous slice of pecan pie, but in music. My two most favorite people singing together.

And now, since I've got to get back to Ernest (we've got 50 more pages to go yet), I leave you with one of my favorite quotes from another of his works, A Moveable Feast:

"You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason."

The muse striketh

I just wrote my first poem in months. Needless to say, I am pretty pleased with myself. I want to thank the Ai-Le brothel in Nantou County, Taiwan, for closing. I couldn't have done it without you. Also, thanks to Reuters for its impeccable reporting on all things strange and wonderful.

*bows*

Good night my burlesque baby

After a long day at work, I found myself at Dionysus (in Mt. Vernon) for a session of Dr. Sketchy's Anti-art School (of the Bawlmer persuasion, of course). I'm not so awesome at the drawing, but I jumped at the opportunity for a life drawing class for a mere $7. Best of all? The model was a burlesque dancer named Little Luna (she dances with Gilded Lily Burlesque).



I can't think of a better way to spend three hours. When I'm doing something like that, I'm so completely engaged. The hours slip by, my charcoal/pencils just slide across page after page (and get all over my hands and face), and my worries completely drop from mind. And this was particularly fun because there was beer to be had, prizes to be won, and costumes. Little Luna dressed up, albeit scantily, as a witch, Rosie from the Jetsons, and a mermaid. Since models can't very well be nude in a public bar, the costumes are a nice touch.



And, last but not least, here's the self-portrait of the day:

Northern Lights and Robotic Bears

I've always been told recording your dreams is important, so here I go. (Disclaimer: this will be poorly written, to be sure, because I'm just awake and writing rather stream of conscious so I can get it all out. Please forgive me.)

Last night I had a dream that I went to Alaska. Not even went, drove with two people...I can't remember who, not anyone that I know in real life. We left from a snowy Colorado, wound up quite quickly in Wyoming, slipped right through Canada, and wound up in a Silver-Cityesque town in my dream-version of Alaska.

Perhaps the most striking part of the dream was during the drive, part of it at night, when I saw the northern lights. I'm sure they weren't much like the real northern lights (which I think I've seen once, in Missouri actual. Rare occurrence, that.) They sparkled and danced, so many different colors. I grabbed my camera and was shooting out the backseat window of the car (the driver, whoever she was, wouldn't stop).

The second part of the dream was the "next day," when I woke up in a little storefront house, putzed around a little, was moderately distressed that I hadn't packed any clothes, and then headed out (again, camera in hand. I think there's a theme here) to wander.

I wandered into a catch-all store of sorts, and somehow, in this process, it was revealed to me that I was in Alaska to hunt this killer bear that had evaded every one who had come after it, and, as a result, it ruled this little town with an iron fist. Which sounds ridiculous, until the part in my dream when it comes stomping through the store, a giant robot, with blood dripping down its metal jaw. I had to hide because I knew it would know me if it saw me. It made everyone in the store gather it random things (I wound up part of a group of three who were piling up fruit for it. I was digging the tops out of strawberries).

Exit robot bear. Enter my dad? I'm standing there, relatively calm despite earlier dream happenings, trying to pick a souvenir. Then my dad's there, helping me choose. He somehow has inside knowledge that the store is closing or being taken over by some conglomerate or something and he lets it slip to the employees, who flip out.

And then I wake up. Very odd.

I'm never sure what to make of my dreams, and this is no exception. All I know is that I tend to have my most vivid dreams early in the morning.

Update:

I drew the northern lights as they appeared in my dream. Here they are. I used one of my favorite mediums: crayon. There's nothing quite like the waxy smell of Crayolas.

Fig leafy

My typography homework for the week, meant to help me develop a better understanding of the spatial relationship between the letters on the page. I think it did its job.

Final thoughts on a weekend well-spent

I'm not sure that is any better way to end a Sunday of homework then with a nap, some Mexican food, and a couple beers. Delicious.

Narcissus Takes a Sunbath.

I'm going crazy for art right now, and ways that I can incorporate it into my every-day life, a space filled with excuses and not enough time. This morning, I'm considering one of those self-portrait projects wherein an artist/person takes a picture of herself each day (for a year or till she forgets). I'm not entirely sure what philosophical reason drives people to do this (googling it only gets you a list of blogs and sites* where people are doing it, not why they're clicking away), but I can come up with a few of my own:

Reason the first: Like journaling, it's a daily reason to do something, anything, that gets your hands, fingers, and mind going. It's hard to take just one picture, draw just one little sketch.

Reason the second: I suspect that if I make it through to September of 2009 with this project, it will be an interesting record of what the space in between was.

Reason the third: It's a project, self-assigned, an exercise in discipline and follow-through. That alone is reason enough to do it.

So, having come up with three semi-legitimate reasons beyond self-importance and narcissism, I now need parameters:

Parameter the first: More than likely, this will be a photo project, however, I am not going to limit my medium. I may opt to sketch, watercolor, finger paint, sculpt, interpretive dance, or poetize the daily self-portrait.

Parameter the second: I don't have one, but they always said if you had one, you had to have two; if you had a, you had to have b.

With reasons and parameters thus established, I embark on said project. And just to prove that (unlike the photo above) I don't always look angry (that's just my expressionless face), here's a picture of me and Nutmeg. Because we're cute.

*One project in particular that I'm drawn to because of the range and emotion in her self-portraits

Hurricane Weather on a Saturday

What with it being hurricane season and all here on the East Coast, mother nature was just beside herself with excitement, so she sent some rain and serious wind all the way to Baltimore. It did truly magnificent things for my hair (see self-portrait), and for my spirits.

After attending the new-student orientation for the MFA in Creative Writing and publishing arts, where I gave a more or less three minute talk on why peer support is important and stuff (and, as suits me, was so nervous I shook like a leaf and said things I specifically told myself not to say), I tripped on over to Utrecht to pick up some art supplies. On today's list were things for my typography course, including 3 different types of pencils, tracing paper, a kneadable eraser, and bristol (I'm still not entirely sure just what it is, at least in any more specific a way than fancy paper).

In my wanderings around the Mt. Vernon neighborhood, I did some shooting. Rain always produces interesting lighting, and this oh-so-temperamental rain was no different. The shot at left is one of my favorites of the day. I'm calling it "In the Gutter." I've been shooting a lot lately, because Ave gave me a camera. It's sure to inspire overshooting, and probably a little bit of that over-enthusiasm for what I shoot that comes with the heady excitement of having constant access to a camera and trying to figure it out. Oh well. I'm sure I'll calm down soon enough.

Tomorrow is homework day here in Chez Meredith; I'll be tracing the words "fig leafy" and reading Hemingway. I can't really think of a better way to spend a Sunday. Unless I can squeeze in a photowalk.

Well, aren't you just crafty as all get out.

I recently took my first expedition into the world of sculpture. It's on a small scale, and it's not terribly sophisticated, but I just enjoyed the heck out of myself.

As I'm quickly learning, artful efforts beget more artful efforts, and now I have several other ideas bubbling around in my mind, and if I could just get my hands on some power tools and my feet in a large enough area to do some smallish-scale (though too big for this apartment of mine) construction, that would be just super duper.

Anyway, here are the results of sculpture project numero uno. I'm calling it (for now) "That heart of yours."

Gotta start somewhere...

Blogspot: What are you intentions for my blog?
Meredith: Well, sir, I'm not entirely sure.
Blogspot: *shrugs* Well, okay then. Just have it home by 11.

So, obviously, I haven't exactly figured out my purpose for this blog. At the moment, I have random ideas about an art or photography blog, or perhaps just an online artist's journal. I'm always hesitant to post my poetry online, since I'm far too cheap (and clueless on the process) to copyright anything. At the end of the day, I suppose my biggest hope is to write/post often, since I don't do that enough anyway (at least not in a nonwork-related fashion), and they tell me any writing's better than no writing.

Here's to aimless blogging.