a funny story that happened today

You will recall that we're building a stage set for Bethlehem. So we manhandled the school board into letting us take over yet another warehouse for the comings and goings of the art department. The building they gave us for this project is full of junk like old furniture and all manner of old randomness. We had to clean it out ourselves to make way for the all consuming slabs of foam.

Before I go on with that part of the story there is another character to be introduced. His name is Jeff, and he sounds exactly like Elmer Fudd. He is in charge of something at the college, I'm not actually sure what but whatever it is, it apparently gives him license to haggle man and beast when they step outside of his wake of acceptable behavior. His special interests are Wayne and Maria. Specifically Wayne and Maria's large destructive dog. Ok, so Ellie chewed through the wall, knawed through a telephone line that put someone on campus off the wire, and then urinated all over the bindery, it's not like anyone skipped a worship or walked on the grass or anything. This guy just seems to be down on us a lot.

So back to the present circumstance. Wayne, and "the twins"(two mexicans who don't have to pay for school cause they're just that amazing) proceeded to clean out the warehouse for the project. Now Jeff, bless his heart, alerted everyone on campus that they had two weeks to excavate all valued items from the place and then everything was getting thrown out.

So the time passed and the deed was done.

This morning while Wayne and I were happily painting, me on my brand new homemade easel doing a copy of a Van Gogh and he on his homemade canvas whipping out a wicked landscape, Jeff walks in and greets Wayne like he's trying to be nice but really you know Jeff is about to blame Wayne for something. Sure enough, somebody broke his antique table, specifically, somebody ripped the legs off the antique table and where was the table? In the warehouse!! Hello! the two weeks were up!!! Anyway, he claimed to have left a sign on the table saying to cautiously circumvent it, but I don't buy it. So poor Wayne had to apologize and then Jeff started blaming the twins and then left leaving Wayne and I in amazement and sour paint.

Later that day Megan trolleys in with a a bundle of wood under her arm, kind of like she was going to start a fire with it. When she got closer I noticed the nature of the wood, hmmmm...table legs. I didn't know whether to be deliriously amused or exhumably jollied.

What was Megan doing with the table legs?

I think the real question is who will save us from the wrath of Jeff?!

Foam drifting...proceed with caution

Hmmm... which to post first, the project that has a six figure budget and has nothing to do with school and everything to do with real world opportunities in the workplace, or the pictures of my homemade earrings and other seemingly random and comparatively insignificant items from around my room that I took pictures of because I didn't want to sketch or crack eggs anymore? A little thing that is important to me like the ring that Megan bartered for me at the flea market and a big thing like tons of people counting on you to come through and build them a perfectly magnificent stage set, are vying for first here. I will relent and say that the fact that other people's time being on the line makes the big project somewhat more significant, but please don't
forget about the little antique costume ring that made my whole day cause it's really cool and Megan got the lady down to $5 from $$! That's my handy dandy Meg!



Ok, so these pictures show our first day sculpting foam! We're making Bethlehem right now and the large foam wall is going to be a gate that cars can drive through and several camels I'm told(do you even know how expensive it is rent a camel in D.C.? Do you even know?!). The foam is drifting, I wonder what it would be like to ski in... Hmmm.. corn snow?
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Now for the peanut gallery that is my life. The eggs are for an art project that is due Tuesday next, more on that later, all I'll say is that I have to drain 100 eggs and right now I have 76 to go. The ring is so cool, you can flip the center stone so that it's either black or white, so I figure I can take advantage of this handy dandy ring and indicate without having to explain whether it's a good day or a bad day. Black means bad day, don't give me homework, give me ice cream, white means good day it's almost the weekend and we're going to the city soon so lets go have some ice cream. And that is just how simple life can be.

There is very little motivation until you see someone else doing a better job than you....

You Make Me Feel So Young......?

Don't we all want to feel young? Well, I've found the way to feel oh so young and bouncy, just have everyone around you act like you're not old enough to make your own decisions and presto! Years will fall away like chaff.

Having a hard time coming up with ideas?

Here's a few I found particularly mouthwatering: instead of making your college dorms quiet and apartment-like, put speakers in all the rooms so that the office workers can announce to you any time she wants, day or night that there is a male in the dorm so stop running through the halls nakedly screaming. Also a good strategy- make the seniors have to go to the same exorbitant amount of worships as the freshmen who actually are unruly and ungrounded teenagers-that's a good one, also have lots of academy style class night parties to boost school spirit on saturday nights, that's the fountain of youth right there!

Feeling young again is an itchy rambunctious trip to neverland, if only I actually was as young as I feel with all of these commodities, at least then I wouldn't have all of these years of growing wise to waste while dissipating in unnumbered required worships.

I'm actually not bitter about this, I think it's fine, of course when I realize how many worships I've missed later this semester, then we'll talk. I could actually number many more good things about this little Walden of mine than the silly bad things that I've pontificated, this place is like the unpopular kid in school who ends up saving everyone from an avalanche or something and things turn around for him and everyone starts to see him in a different light- anyways, AUC is a tender delicacy for the connoisseur of eccentricity.

Wasn't this blog supposed to be about me being an artist!?

Squirrel is our newest addition to the delicate food chain being housed in several buildings under the protection of the art department. Every time we try to let him go, he runs back to us and climbs our legs like they're trees. We've got to get rid of this squirrel, but it's almost winter and he's still pretty small so we may keep him for awhile, Lord help us.

A deal's a deal

Megan thinks that pets have souls and perhaps that all dogs go to heaven (I assured her that my dog would be in the 7th circle of the inferno for all of her sins but likely the rest of dogdom)...

well, so my cat receives my best attention and I've regretted that I haven't invested my affections on a creature that has the hope of salvation. Salvation for all mankind.. regardless of the exclusion of my cat Alex from this promise, I know he knows the difference between right and wrong.

I guess the difference is that right and wrong for him is dictated by me, not God.

He's been missing since Thursday and not only does he receive my best attention, but finding him has been my most serious matter of prayer. So today I got up early to go circumvent the art building and premise I'm sure arrousing the suspiciouns of campus security and neighboring community members that I was probably a homeless crazy person trying to break in and steal industrial foam or something.

I repeat this exercise every morning because Alex is in a new environment and I worry about his kitty well-being. So since thursday I had not seen him at all, I was beginning to lose hope as I looked in all the usual places. As I was scouring the favorite hiding bush I all of a sudden made a hasty promise to God. If you bring back Alex, I won't sneak him into the dorm anymore. I won't ever again, I promise... Why did I do that! I think that must have been what He was holding out for because Alex popped out of a crack in the shed out back about two minutes later after days and hours of nothing. I'm so happy that he's ok that I don't even care. My joy outweighs my perplexity.

Who can be sure of themselves at any time. When there is always a voice saying it isn't right, what you're doing-it doesn't have a place. It doesn't have a function, it is child's play.
It is a child's pastime.
Well it is expensive, $70 on wood! wait til you hear how much the paint costs!
There is no place to leave behind the uncertainty. I thought I finally had, I love this child's game! art is liberating,So why is it so uncomfortable in a room full of science majors trying to gingerly avoid the subject of what I do in my spare time. I research colors, I research beauty, oh brother, how ridiculous! One of the quickest ways to make me uncomfortable has got to be surrounding me with inquiring left brained thinkers. How much more insignificant could I possibly feel in the midst of researchers of machines and industry and economics,
I research color. Oh Lord help me.

My first trip to Boston with Megan. What this street performer lacked in juggling talent, he definately made up for in weird psychological tricks he'd play on the crowd. He made two little kids race and he gave the dollar to the loser. Then he made two more kids race and they got really confused and neither of them moved.
Plans to dominate the freedom trail and fill our minds with ennobling american history, turned into lets eat boston creme pie and go shopping. The fog made for unusual pictures of disappearing skyscrapers and ghost buildings.

My cousin Erica's hot motorcycle

minute man shooting rifle

Not only are these two horses clydesdales, they're larger than most of their own kind. Redwood tree, dinosaur, supersize me!

this is the orphaned bunny that I took to the vet, who after assuring me that he would take care of my bunny for me turned around and put it outside to face the cruel collegedale wilderness without friends or family or triple A.

here is my final project from last semester, it needs some more work-especially the hand but since it looks a little nazi-ish I'm not going to bother

A new blog for a new state of the union

I thought I’d start a new blog this year and change the subject matter while I’m at it. Since I’m an art student and need to spend all of my time thinking about that sort of thing, why not have my blog be a running dialogue? I’m not sure what that all will entail, but it will most likely be about the things that give me ideas and about trips to NY and Boston and Maine.

I ask myself all the time what use it is to be a painter . I hate to say it but I don’t have much respect for the profession. There are many reasons for this, but mostly it just seems obsolete to me. It is especially discouraging when I realize that any given person who walks into a gallery and looks around, doesn’t really think about what the artist was trying to say. Because, in thinking about my future as an artist, after I get past the initial twinge of nausea thinking about how people regard artists, I eventually reach an unstable resolution that has a lot to do with having something to say. I had a thought that maybe filmmakers were the artists that dominate this age and painters have been passed by, but I eventually dismissed this thought because I decided there are far too many ideas and granules of information in a film for the author to be attempting to make the same kind of impression on a person as a picture would have or something that doesn’t change that you can look at and think about for as long as you have the time. That is why I wish, as a painter, I could leave the same kind of impression on a person as a word does. I think that the jump from a picture to a film is the same kind of jump as from a word to a picture. A picture has an infinite amount of possible words to describe it and thus it has too much room for distraction to really hold a person’s concentration or guide them in the same path as the author. But a word, or a description can lead a person through another world in exactly the way intended by the author. I guess that’s what some people appreciate about a painting though; it can sometimes be interpreted any way the viewer wants it to be. And that is good sometimes, I, however would like to have some control over the effect my work has on a person, and knowing that paintings don't bring you through the story thought by thought like words do, I wish I could use words or something in my artwork and accomplish that elusive feat of convincing a person to consider what I have to say.

Words are much easier to communicate with than pictures, even though the picture's worth a thousand words, those thousand words all come at once and you don't have time to make up your mind about any of it so you just go on and leave it all. But anyway, the lack of resolution goes on..my one consolation is that a fundamental attribute of God is creativity so I feel like I am sort of doing what God loves to do. Anyway, painting pictures is such a small part of the things you can do as an artist. I think I'd rather make furniture, at least then I'd know someone was benefitting from it.