The Art Spirit

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign-posts on the way to what may be. Sign-posts toward greater knowledge.

Robert Henri

Monday, May 9, 2011

Spring: New Birth

I love Spring.  My birthday kicks it off officially every year.  Easter comes around, and with it, images of baby chicks, cadbury eggs, and wonderful sunday school lessons on Christ's Resurrection.  The trees bud and blossom, the grass shifts from brown and brittle to neon-green and lush.  And the Sun.

Let's take a moment to reflect on the great spring gift of The Sun.

...

With the sun comes new energy, more light, better running weather--> New Life, New New-Year's Resolutions, Pretty Magazines with lots of pretty covers and pages about organization and Spring Cleaning.

More thoughts are coming, but I have some cleaning I started and need to follow through on before I'm late for work.

Hopefully I won't be so long returning this time.

A visual representation of today's theme, c/o Audrey:


Monday, April 18, 2011

It's A Blog!

Bejeweled Blitz is the fruit of the evil one.  I'm wasting my few discretionary hours each day on Facebook, playing one-minute games of rearranging gems into groups of 3 or more of the same so they'll explode and make room for more gems to rearrange.  This earns me points, and my scores are automatically recorded, so I can keep track of my "accomplishments" and even measure my performance against how well my other Facebook friends are doing.  It's mindless, pointless, never-ending, single-skilled-unchallenged gaming, and its nails are in me, deep.

I'm in the Salt Lake Valley right now, visiting my family and spending 11 or 12 days resting, trying to put myself in order, re-center, heal, and strategize on ways to side-step a messy break-down.  I think it's working.

On the 26th, 8 days from now, I return to New York City.  I moved there on September 9 of last year and, before even seeing my new apartment, enrolled at the Art Students League on 57th Street between Broadway and 7th Avenue.  I left my family and job on a leap of faith to pursue a dream I previously thought too selfish and undeserved to give any attention to.  I gave away, threw out, stored or sold everything and, in two weeks, planned and executed a total life change 2,000 miles away.

It worked.  By the grace and goodness and will of God, it worked.  But I'm just as dysfunctional and ineffective in New York as I was in Salt Lake.  And, wherever I go, I'm simultaneously responsible for feeding, sheltering, resting, exercising, and properly medicating my body and mind, before any consideration can be made regarding what I might mean to do with that body and mind.  Essentially, I somehow managed to make it into the unlikely position where everything I need and desire for myself is available to me, but I feel too tired just maintaining my existence or too afraid and uncertain about what I should do with these opportunities, that I play Bejeweled Blitz (something that I have no confusion about how to interact with) instead.

For someone who has a tendency towards guilt, this isn't something that sits peacefully.

My proposed solution?  A blog.  Perhaps by documenting my art- and new-york-city-living- related experiences, I will be motivated to create more such experiences, and my need for some kind of measurable progress can be satiated by looking at past blogs, thus ending my dependency on Bejeweled Blitz Beastliness.

More likely than not, I'm just creating one more thing to overwhelm and stress me out, to then send me inevitably straight back to Beelzebub and his bleak world of Bejeweled Blitz.  But that will put me exactly where I am currently, so I figure, what have I got to lose?