KATHRYNARNOLD

8th Street Studio

My 8th Street Studio and its day to day, or maybe it will be week to week digression on my studio issues, art thoughts, and the duality experience between conceptual/rational and nonconceptual/intuitive. Grid and ground contained all within.

Studio Log

6-08-05 (to 6-13-05)

And now my brain is dead, exhaustion has set in. If you made it this far, it may be awhile before I put more up.

One last image that is going into the Salon Show - where everything is accepted, so finally I can show this piece, mixed media on paper, includes digital prints and traditional media, 54" x 54"

Titled: Stars in My Hand

The full text is:

The day I gathered the nastursiums, I felt I held the stars in my hand.

From a true and very real event. The green you see are the nastursium leaves with large droplets of water, after a heavy rain in April. In SF, nastursiums are very large, the leaves, each individual leaf can be 5" across, approximately 4-5" in diameter. And if you can imagine the flowers, truly intoxicating.

6-10-05

Have been in the studio but not really doing much. Contemplated bringing my studies home last night to peel off tape for silver grid and then determined not to. Today contemplating works up online, exploring those possibilities, viewed the CAC coalition site then went to Robert's site to see what he was up to. Idea of cookie plate and the prior entry of the sense of anger upon restacking all of his pieces from a show. I could feel.

Made me wonder at sorts of of sorts, how do we know we are alive. What is it that causes us to work with no understanding or the deserving kind of recognition. What is it that makes us go on and continue? Something comes to mind that one of my art history TAs said once in our discussion groups we had; she was showing us works from an artist whose time, whose main time of influence had passed, could it have been Monet or Pissaro, and brought up the question - why did they continue working, she was questioning style, meaning why did they not move on, me, I was seeing their decline of recognition. The TA was seeing art only in terms of style...If they were alive today, how would they feel. Not that any of us will live on through our works.

I watched the curator at the monoprint scene choose the pieces for the exhibit. And the things the various artists would say while she was choosing. Me, I can only say I do not know. What I like or respond to relates to me, my life, my struggles, my sensibilities. Hence my relating to these now 2 of Robert Stanley's 3 horizon pieces, somehow just only saw the second one, a vertical, strongly, in my feeling, oriental/maybe zenlike view of the world, where earth and sky this time have big gap between. How true is this, or better put, how true this is. My view of art I guess is to have this truth, no matter how it is presented, and whether it is truth for now only, is ok. What else is there if not the momentary, the passing of moment...to enter into that moment where one can experience eternity, how difficult it seems to be. But maybe that's all there is.

Out here, with all of the views, personal and social and recognition of diversity, and how that will eventually affect the US view of life, will there be any sense of truth left, unless one can enter in, identify with others. The idea that we have mirror neurons is fascinating; that they change shape as we experience empathy, and can share experience. And that we truly can read minds, or understand the minds of others in a real and direct way. Maybe not what others are after, but what is of interest to me. Can I share one's mind, can I experience one's art, am I able to share mine? Oh, I speak like an abstract expressionist today if I mention authentic experience, that transferrence of mind, that quality of being. One of my professors said in response to my work, Bob Brawley, that it was about shared experience, that is how he connected to my works. Then he told me the about the day he was living in SF then, was a student I think and in an upper level loft of sorts and his experience of the fog as it rolled in, a genuine direct real experience of the fog rolling in.

So possibly my words ineloquent, but yet I do know why i need the arts, to connect with outside of myself, or maybe more to connect with my self...and also acknowledge the idea of the new is still a large player as i come to grips with other media. This attention deficit disorder at times creeps in when i am distracted; but it might not be the real thing but a pattern from the shape and flavor of life out here.

Enough enough and back to work! What am I doing anyway!!!?

http://www.wetcanvas.com/Articles/GreggSimpson/painting_is_dead.html