In the past couple weeks, I’ve been feeling anxious about a lot of the drawings I have online. I’m not sure exactly what prompted this anxiety. I suspect that what happened is that some part of my brain feels that many of the themes that were coming out in the drawings need to be laid to rest.

A lot of the drawings are about feeling sick (from lupus), having migraines, feeling lonely, searching for artistic identity, and… I get this overwhelming sense of explosive artistic energy that needed to go somewhere… and never really found outlet in those drawings. Ultimately, I stopped the project, because I felt like it was too much of a burden to have to come up with something daily– especially when the drawings usually turned out so poorly.

I started the “sketch a day” project on December 16, 2007. On September 7, 2008, I didn’t do a drawing, and noted the excuse, “sick sick sick”. On September 15th I didn’t do one– the note was “malaise. incurable malaise.” On September 18th I put the project on hold indefinitely.

I respect the impulses that led me to do that project… but it no longer feels appropriate for many of those drawings to be public. I have a much stronger sense of artistic direction now. I have very concrete ideas about what I want to do. I continue to work on those things when I get a chance (which isn’t much). In general, I like some things more, and some things less.

I remember that when I was a young adult I was very confused about the concept of “preference”. I wondered how people could have such strong preferences for things. (Food, clothing, music.) I realize now that I was so afraid to assert my own personality that I just assumed I didn’t have any preferences or personality at all. What strange times…!

Anyway, I want to sing those times a lullaby and put them to rest.

Here are the sketches that remain public.

Moth, 2008

I have been feeling down lately, and I think it is during these times I want to pull inward, withdraw all my feelers, and make myself invisible… Someone who has 15k photos on flickr can’t really do that. (However, should the federal government or the FBI ever need build a psychological profile on me, they will have ample pre-existing material, and I will have done them a service by being so transparent.)

During the times when I want to hide, maybe it should help me to remember all the times when I have been helped by a stranger’s willingness to “donate information to the Internet”. Usually we think of contribution in terms of technical facts or artistic techniques– but information in memoir form is also helpful. Sometimes I forget how enormously useful it has been in the past to realize that I am not alone.

In some ways, I think my willingness to be share information on the Internet is a reaction to how my parents viewed information. For example, my stepmom believed that all personal information could and would be used against her, and so she guarded it carefully. Even from me. She also snooped through my room and read all my personal diaries when I was a child. Nothing was really mine, and I was allowed no personal boundaries.

A few thoughts on how this experience affects me as an adult:
- Preemptive sharing may be a way of protecting myself from someone taking
- I really understand that information is valuable, and so when I share it, I’m making a gift

When I was in the Scientific Illustration program at the U of Washington, we learned that it’s wise to share information about the “artistic experience” when marketing our art. Non-artists like to understand what artists do. They want to know what the artist was thinking, what their life is like, where they got their inspiration. They want to know how the piece was made and what the process was like, from start to finish. Of course, not every consumer of art wants to know these things, but… I think it’s safe to say that artists of all kinds can increase the value of their work by being more open people. An artist gains much by sharing! And since we’re all artists of some kind… well, you get the picture. :)

Tiny moon, 2010

This type of abuse still doesn’t make me as mad as the abuse of antibiotics by doctors themselves. (Until recently I didn’t know that doctors will actually prescribe antibiotics for viral infections.) It’s hard to blame the public for something they don’t really understand… but doctors have no excuse.

This is actually supposed to be a post announcing the start of a “Thing A Day” project here at the Beemouse Institute. I’m going to be writing about my Things over here, on a posterous blog, so I do not risk offending the casual Beemouse subscriber (no doubt used to my chaotic, haphazardly spaced updates), with regular posts about Things every Day for an entire Month.

What thing will it be today? I have no idea! I love mysteries.

Mission San Juan Capistrano, January 2010

I just have this for now– a photo I came across from the archives.

Luna the Innocent, 2007

She is straight out of a religious mural, as far as I’m concerned.

(painting by Bend, OR artist Mark Rada)

He had bought me a painting of crows and power lines when he was in Bend recently for the national cyclocross championships. I burst into tears. I haven’t done that since he proposed to me. Crows and power lines… two of my favorite things!

If you guys think buying jewelry or clothes for a girl is risky, imagine how risky it is buying art for an artist. But he did it anyway! And I freaking adore it!

Bew hew, I still want to cry whenever I look at it… I don’t know why. I feel humbled by his love.

When I talk to my friends about how dumb/disappointed I feel, a lot of them say things like “you’re being too hard on yourself”. This is so strange to me– especially because I am privy to the original data of how truly, truly hard I used to be on myself. Right now I feel like I’m just setting reasonable goals, and then failing them, without expecting it to happen. That’s not being hard on myself– that’s just a crappy life experience that makes me doubt my ability to plan and succeed at the things I want to do.

One of the very dark places I went this autumn had to do with humility. I learned to talk about things that were horribly embarrassing (granted, probably only embarassing to me). I learned to be more vulnerable. I learned to be vulnerable to people who had absolutely no idea how vulnerable I was being. I started off the quarter feeling like I was learning something about failing with grace– that I didn’t have to be perfect, that I shouldn’t expect perfection in the first place, that it’s possible to deal with the ill opinions of others and just do my own thing…

And yet here I am at the end of the quarter, failing, and feeling horribly ungraceful. My self-image itself seems to be degrading in ways I have never felt before. Some part of my brain feels like I have spent so many years failing that I should just accept that I am a failure and be done with trying, and move on to easier things. Ironically, I have enough practice now to recognize that these thoughts are typical of how I think when I am depressed and anxious, and so I’m not sure if I can use them to make decisions.

Even though end of this quarter has left me feeling truly, fundamentally more stupid, and less capable in my ability to maneuver through life with grace, I suppose I am still better off. I see the “character building” benefits of failure, but I just wish… that I didn’t.. experience so much of it. For the crap I have put myself through these past months, I’d better have a fucking stellar character that provides me with some real benefits in exchange for my misery.

And I can talk and talk to myself, and try to sort it out in language, and end things on a happy note about a silver lining– but that still doesn’t really soothe the deep feelings of failure. I can only assume they will end up going away, the way feelings do when you can leave them alone for a while.

Lot for sale, 2009

I am heading into the last week of finals for this quarter’s Medical Assisting classes, and today was the first day in a while I got to sleep in as late as I want. I had the following dream (much, much edited… if I included all the details, it would bore the living daylights out of you, even as it fascinated me):

I dreamed I was stuck in a world much like our own, but it wasn’t the same, and I wanted to get back home. Occasionally random people would appear in this alternate world, like I had, disorientated and not knowing how they arrived. The people who lived in this alternate world had eventually accepted the appearances as ordinary, as they had been happening for a long time. After my arrival, I had begun to make friends, but I was still a strange outsider (I couldn’t stop talking about all the things I remembered from home, or all the things that surprised me in their world), and I was very lonely.

This world was governed by a distinguished couple, a beautiful man and woman in their 40s, maybe a King and a Queen. They were always accompanied by two albino twins, conjoined at the neck, also male and female. The twins were young, about 6 years old, and they always gazed on the King and Queen with these beatific, loving, innocent child smiles. Those little twins scared some of the residents. I found out that the twins had actually given birth to the man and the woman, but no one would tell me how. The twins never spoke.

In their world, they were under a sort of martial law, and I was drafted to help protect some assets. I was trying hard to keep up with everyone, running drills, lifting things, following orders, but I kept falling behind, and desperately wanted to be back in my own world where I belonged and I was good at something.

I talked to the King and the Queen, and they told me in secret that there actually was a way to get back home, but few people undertook the journey and succeeded. What I would have to do was follow a road, made of yellow brick, for a long, long time, until I reached…

At this point, I interrupted them excitedly. “Wait– I will travel on this yellow brick road for a long time, and eventually reach a big city, where a special man with great powers lives, who can tell me how to get back home?” They were stunned, and I told them that in the world where I came from, there was a legend about this man– and it turns out he is a fake. I told them the story of the Wizard of Oz, and all the dangers that the characters in the story experienced, and then when I reached the end of the story– the part where it turns out that the characters really did get the things they were looking for, I burst into tears. I realized that I might never get home, but I would still probably learn valuable things alone the journey.

There the real plot of the dream ended, with some bizarre arguments between real-life characters, overflowing toilets, and strange animals– the standard– and I woke up at 2pm with a migraine.

The feeling that stuck with me the most was the astonishment I felt when I realized that a fiction in my world was a complete, serious reality in theirs– And the sadness I felt when I realized I may never make it home, but still had to make good with the lessons I learned on the journey.

Embroidered butterflies, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Chinese Garden, Vancouver, BC, 2006

This is a great opportunity to check out the space if you haven’t yet, and also have a chance to see other art at Capitol Hill venues (see a venue list here). If you come, I will show you my babies (I mean photographs) and explain my fascinating artistic process (it involves malfunctioning neural synapses) and tell you about the photos, and I will also tell you about creating plastic spiders with lasers.

Why? Because you see….

#10, 2007

He had to be eliminated, 2008

I am a jealous god, 2008

Of course, I took the idea from some found-paper artwork I found on the wall in an acquaintance’s bathroom in 2007, which was much better than my pieces and Austin Kleon’s pieces. I have no idea who the artist was.

*I don’t know if validated is the right way to explain it. It was the opposite feeling of seeing something and saying, “Hey, I could make that!” (much to the annoyance of everyone around me). It was, “Hey, I made that… and it was kind of boring.”

September 7, 2008: Little Mia having fun playing in the sand at Matt and Melissa’s wedding at Golden Gardens. This wedding was so heart-warming that I went into a depressed stupor halfway through because I couldn’t help but compare the event to my own wedding, mulling over how depressed I was at that time. But this time, looking at their wedding photos just filled me with joy. It made me realize I was quite depressed at the time of Matt and Melissa’s wedding (I think due to family issues). I am happy there is such a positive difference between the me of last summer and the me of the current summer. What an incredibly long way I’ve come!

September 8, 2007: Here I am hamming it up with a bundle of dried lemon balm and some found costumes. Richard took this photo. We were moving out of “deck house” and into “noise house” (our current residence). Strangely enough, these shoddy homemade tutus are still looking for a permanent home. They are on our hearth right now, waiting to be taken down to storage bins in the basement.

September 8, 2006: My silky morning glories were blooming.

September 7, 2005: I went to Golden Gardens with some friends (here Shawna and Katie are shown), and we were cold on the beach. Fall was approaching. We snuggled in blankets.

September 5, 2004: Richard stares out over the water as we ride a ferry back to downtown Seattle. He looks so young here. I believe we were out hunting for wedding venues.

September 6, 2003: Sylwia pretends to be a fish, swimming gracefully in the air. A group of us went to camp at a very civilized campsite (I forget where). I remember there was lots of pavement, lots of RVs, and a water main that was leaking at the base of our campsite, making a huge mud hole. Park maintenance had to run a pump in order to keep it from overflowing, and we were sad because they were rude to us. Eric and Elliot took turns heaving giant rocks into the river, making everyone laugh.

September 10, 2002: I was learning to make wire-wrapped jewelry. I was also trying to learn how to photograph it, which was harder than I ever imagined. I had so much fun playing with those minuscule sparkling gemstones

September 5, 2001: Wow. This is Richard and I on our way to Burning Man for the first (and only) time. We are so young here. This is eight years past! We were very much in love then, as we are now. It’s a happy photo. I can’t believe Richard and I have been together so long.