February 21. 2011

Discovered the work of artist Victoria Gitman today.  She does these incredible paintings of vintage purses and drawings of vintage ladies.  I just read an article (http://danielweinberggallery.com/static/dyn-files/3/3215.pdf) about how she spends long periods of time creating these master renderings of purses that anyone else would find painstaking and meticulous.  Oh how I identify with that.  If you get a chance just read this little blurb about her.  I love the part where the variation in her daily routine exists in whether or not she takes a walk or goes for a swim in the morning or afternoon.  I feel exactly like this three to four days of the week. Sometimes there is a good monotony to being an artist, other times it can be a really intense experience to be trapped in one's head for long periods of time.  I think I have been trapped in my own head lately and now that I am again coming out of it, I can tell you all about it. 

 

First I have to lay out the internal agenda.   1.  Cupcake  2.  A piece for a group show for Self Fabricated  3. A Group Show called Circus  4.  A friend's project about the Iron Curtain  5.  Facebook  6.  The Vermont/Texas Conundrum. 

 

So let's start with Cupcake.  She is a great dress, but slow moving. I have a bag full of lace ready to fluff up her body, but I have been over thinking her.  She is kind of a free spirit, I am kind of not in that mode right now, we are having our conversations and she is making me want to be really flowy, spacey, loosey-goosey, She is losing a sense of formality, she wants things to just be placed, stitches, continued and yet here I am resisting; but odd things are happening while wearing her.  I want to loaf around, I want to day dream, I want to space out, I want to feel carefree... I feel myself fighting this, wanting more structure, wanting to be pushed to a more formalized place and yet Cupcake is on her own adventure.  At times I still feel like Wyile just wearing a weird dress, other times I feel like Cupcake just wanting to go on a road trip willing to go wherever the road leads.  Maybe she wants to be a lady of leisure?  

 

Tough cookies, Cupcake, Wylie has no time for that right now.   It is February Break and I am teaching this awesome group of kids a week of Art Extravaganza Camp. And Yes, I am wearing Cupcake and she is at the whim of little painty hands and endless disaster possibilities, but I feel that all of these possibilities are happy possibilities and will act as little reminders to my daily doings.  

 

So here she is, Cupcake right next to me on the couch waiting to be worked on and it is 8:30 at night and I am tired after a long day of work and a long walk at Shelburne Farms in the super un-human cold weather.  I am playing the parts of  part blogger, part artist, part mother ( my two year old son doesn't want to go to bed right now).  I have laid out an agenda above and yet I feel that the moment, each time it gets interrupted either by a restless child or my own restlessness to want to get to work on Cupcake, is getting further from the heart of the discussion.  Perhaps I can address each issue each night of this week?  There are still night time hours to work before bed time so maybe I will just end with this last anecdote about Cupcake and then leave the next item on the agenda for tomorrow. 

 

People want to touch Cupcake.  They want to feel her, to squish her, to pop her.  The identity between Wylie and Cupcake are beginning to blur out on the outside, on the veneer of the persona.  Wylie is beginning to take the sidelines, although uncomfortable with where she is at, Cupcake is pulling people in to her confectioned sweetness but also seeming almost too good to be true.  A story from a woman I just met made this all the more clear.  She and I had been scheduled to meet to talk about art related things and she had recently checked out my blog  and my website and thought this project was neat, and we had spoken on the phone but never met.  Then she saw me in the grocery store.  I was wearing cupcake and she was in awe.  A friend of hers urged her to introduce herself to me, but she said she was just stunned.  She said they followed me around the store for a little bit (me totally unaware, to my dismay) and couldn't believe that there I was in real life in the dress.  

 

Yep, it's true.  I wear the dress, even when shopping for milk at 9 pm at night.  I even wear it when I clean out the litter box for the cat.  I even wear it when it is colder than CUSS out there.  I wear it cooking, I wear it trudging through the snow to feed my cardinals outside.  I will be wearing it to teach 16 kids how to make abstract sculptures tomorrow.  Yes, folks step right up and see the woman who wears the same dress day in and day out, what a spectacle to behold!  (now we are encroaching on agenda number 3, you'll just have to wait til Wed. night to read about that one).