Big City Survival Guide from a small town girl with big ideas.

RULE #1:

ALWAYS assume the people around you are crazy, until they exhibit some obvious form of coherent thought.

i.e. people sitting next to you on the bus, that guy drinking his starbucks, those annoying guys that hand out coupons and follow you through times square talking about your eyes, the crazy fucks that post random personal bullshit on your professional blog...



RULE #2:

Just because they write "homeless" or "veteran" on their ridiculous pieces of cardboard, doesn't mean they don't have a perfectly lovely home and beautiful family they go back to after you've coughed up your pity change. *

*please see the section referring to stepfathers

anyway my dear little phoenix, feel better soon and try not to have so many regrets

invaded. i feel deeply hostile and invaded that my tool for accessing the collective, my creative discussion with myself that i have used to define my writing style and direct a professional body to consider my writing as a skill set i have to offer has somehow been misunderstood for some tortured desperate plea for a hero, in the shape of a figure i exorcized years ago.

Awareness. it begins with self awareness, a most elusive creature. the fabric of the universe has fallen into a most compelling pattern, bringing the sewage to the surface, laid bare and unapologetic before all of us. these times are not for the fragile hearted, and i hope the country comes out scrubbed clean of delusions and more sure of our priorities. love is not enough to sustain us. it can fill us and invigorate us, give us purpose and passion and joy, but its very existence demands a glaring awareness that when it is gone we will be empty, bare, less than we were before we knew it. so we hoard it. we try to bottle it up for a rainy day, build a fortress of jealousy and questions to protect it from an atomic blast of reality, and in doing so, like a flame, we take away the very oxygen it thrives on - spontaneity, freedom, lightness of being.

i always knew my past would bubble up and threaten to eat away at my sense of wholeness. I have been stocking up for that time, building an elaborate defense against a villian and a vanity that i barely remember. similarly, in love, i found the minute i stumbled gracelessly and passionatley upon it, i began the terrified countdown for when it would eventually eradicate my sense of self, and with that , my existence.

i believe this is a love letter. the love letter of a cynic.

i don't believe in forever, words that made me cringe when they fell so easily from her perfect, unappreciated lips. i know forever is a joke, a ploy, a simplistic human creation to hopelessly define the smallness of our existence in the universe... but quixotically i fathom the intensity of my passion in that same term; something i feel i could never find a match in, the depth and breadth of my emotional commitment. part of me can see the dance of our souls and see her for what she truly is: my soulmate in so complete a form that lifetimes and human lovers and simple words will never have the capacity to define. that part of myself knows no fear, and has unending faith in the truth of that fact... but some deep unapproachable, illogical part of myself that i have refused to acknowledge reacts to the reality of my humanity in so sharp and fast and painful a voice, i am helpless to the tidal wave of my hideously human emotions like a thing possessed. jekyll and hyde must have been written by a similar soul.

i've been caught in a psychological mirror for the first time in my life, presented with the reality of who and what the world was seeing... what the love i had so vehemently protected... i finally saw the fortress of my love for the cage it had become. i exstinguished the flame by which i was trying so desperately to see by, and the voice of an equally strong and powerful woman fell deaf on my ears. i didn't know i lost the light, because i was blind.

so maybe the mirror was there the entire time... but what good is a mirror to the visually impaired? what good is words of love or hate to a person who cannot hear?

that elaborate fortress has served me no purpose. i sit here broken and empty not from a lack of love, since i had long since lost it, but broken from what i finally saw when i opened my eyes and gaped in horror at the reality of my fears manifested. like an alcoholic in a 12 step program, i want to reach out and ask forgiveness to those who were swept up in the deluge of my obsessive, controlling destructive love, more powerful as its own entity than i could ever have guessed. i have somehow missed that this romantic misanthropic beast had filled my form and consumed all of my relationships, its hunger and greed deeper than an uncharted ocean, fathomless. it seems everything i touch crumbles away, receding like a nightmare, like light from the day, turning into night horrors as the words fell from my lips.

i have met the beast finally. the doppleganger that robbed me of my joy, and consumed the love that filled me like oxygen. for fear of unleashing the monstrosity of my fear and jealousy, all i can do is walk away. walk slow and steady, ignoring the ache in my soul that i left with her. i can't look back or i'll lose my nerve.

all i can say is that i did it out of love. for love.

still love.

forever.

god, women and fairytales

wandering lost and heartbroken through the west village, trying to lose myself and this profound sense of loss in its quaint beauty, i walked past a shop window and paused. the cat statue in the window looked so real that i had to double back and really look at its suppleness. it was real fur, but had none of the stiffness of a stuffed creature. that is one skilled taxidermist, i thought to myself. then it blinked.

leaning back to see what the establishment was, much to my amusement, i realized it was a psychic's place. interesting, cause the word psychic was nowhere to be found. just the neon script in the front window that read: past, present, future. never has something felt so cosmic or meant to be. i rang the doorbell. a scrunched up old lady pushed the cage looking door open and squinted up at me. i asked what she offered and her prices, which were extremely reasonable compared to psychics i've encountered in the past. with nothing but a check card to offer, she sent me across the street to an atm. i took out 40 bucks.

the reading that i chose was a double palm psychic evaluation for 25 dollars. she spoke with a slightly foreign, but strongly new york accent and demanded my right palm and cupped gently, looking into its shadowed crevices. than she began telling me my life. my two crippling relationships, the seriousness of my feelings for my recent lover, the depth of my pain, the intensity of the baggage she carries with her, my recent decision to change my life and move to new york, the resentment towards my one parental figure, towards all my parental figures, my inability to connect with men so strong and clear that she paused to ask if i'd ever even been with a man sexually, my struggle to find a voice, that i opened myself up to the wrong people, untrustworthy people, my stagnation in the environment i was currently living in, even she saw a trip i had been considering the possibility of quietly in the back of my mind. she also had some intriguing comments about the next few months that are exciting to contemplate.

"she loves you very much" she told me. i know, and i don't know. "do you believe in god?" she asked. yes, in my own way. an answer to which she chuckled at. "you are so talented, but you are disconnected from your spirituality. you want things so strong that they come to you, but they always end badly and you don't really know where it is you lost the thread." i couldn't speak, i was too busy sobbing. "you have felt like you have no purpose, haven't you? you are happy on the outside, but on the inside it is not so."

"but i can help you. let me think and search, because i do not believe this bad karma to be your own. someone somewhere gave you there emotional scars, their negativity has damages some of your chakras, you know what chakras are? and there is scar tissue lingering still." funny, i grew up speaking of chakras and auras, tarot and karma, and it seems she can read my comfort with the language she speaks in. i haven't spoken these kinds of spiritual words since i started dating my last roman catholic girlfriend, and it was like greeting an old friend.

"i charge for this service only 75 dollars." amused, thoughtful, i could only honestly say i didn't have that much in my bank account. she told me, she would take what i could give her, and she would give it all back if she couldnt figure out how to help. so i left her the 40 i had taken out, and left with specific instructions. i was to locate a yellow rose, cut the stem short (the length of a pen), get in the shower, and meditate under the stream of water while i held the rose to my solar plexus. my sternum, the place in between my breasts where my girlfriend snuggled into when she woke from nightmares in the dark.

interesting, the revelations that come when you pause to really think about something, with no fear, and no remorse, when you hold out your arms and ask for help, to the empty room, the steam from the shower swirling around me, from the small piece of sunshine cupped to my chest that swooned open in the heat as it gracefully collected the rivulets of water and my burning, salty tears.

so i was there the next morning, to bring her the rose that meditated with me in the shower, and slept under my pillow, soaking up my tortured dreams, and handed it to her when she asked for it. "i will take it with me to church" she says, "and i will pray over every petal, while the wax from the candle drips, you understand?" yes. i am not about to question this intense, loving mysticism. "this weight you carry is not from god, if it were, i would not be able to help you. it is from a person, and i will find it so we can clear away the scar tissue." she's looking for someone who hurt me... but to be honest, there are so many sad insignificant instances that could lead up to the trauma she describes. she asked if something dark happened on my father's side, a suicide maybe, but i have no answer for her, as my grandmother with 7 different husbands in her lifetime, the gifted astrologer who taught my mother everything she knew is little more than fairytale to me, a myth i grew up hearing about. aside from her, there is a sister that ended up in an insane asylum, and my father who fancied himself a warlock and disappeared during the early years of my cognitive development. it strikes me sometimes, how bizarre and mythical my life sounds, especially when so much of my knowledge was fed to me in the form of glorified and emotional memories. it often seems that i've had to construct my early childhood from someone else's loves and disappointments, fears and romanticized way of dealing with their reality, so it didn't seem so lonely. i'm not surprised this scrunchy old lady sees other peoples hurt weighing me down. that is, in utter truth, the story that is my life.

she sends me away with more homework. she pulls out 4 sage leaves, pale and soft with a fine downy white coat of fibers, and instructs me to light 2 tonight and cleanse my aura, and to do the same with the next 2 the following day. sage was used by the native americans to chase away dark spirits and purify the atmosphere. the leaves burn like incense, and emit a strong herby odor, that is usually combatted with burning sweet grass at the same time (as my mother haughtily reminded me, a running critique that interrupts my explanation of my experience.). once again, i am struck by the familiarity of this act, like deja vu almost, and i am momentarily sad that i let so much of where i had come from get forgotten. for however fabricated my evolution and existence might be, and subject to the whims and memories of emotional and absent minded people, it is all i have that ties me to this world, and this lifetime.

the mormons have become my friends, and they stop by in their rounds and kindle my sense of being connected to some community. they broke up the loneliness and monotony of my first few weeks in richmond. recently in our talks, one of them asked a favor of me. he wanted me to ask god if he loved me. i immediately informed him that i had no doubt of the reciprocity of a greater power than myself, i do not fear a lack of faith in being a natural part of a powerful being. "no" he said. "please ask." ok fine. whatever. but later, in the stillness of my room, reading a book filled with jewish mysticism and kabbala, i contemplated that strange request. the room was suddenly filled with a stillness so deep i was falling into it, everything was saturated and every single texture was perfectly discernible... and i was so terrified i couldn't voice the words. so when this ancient and earnest little lady tells me i am not spiritually connected, i have to stop and think... i have heard this before.

just so stories.

oh sunshine. it has been a long cold winter. i dream of the beach, and curl up into a tight little ball without the warmth of my girlfriend to stretch out against.

exausted and overwhelmed, i've decided to lie low during my trip in NYC for this one decadent evening... responses from publishing companies, work i will be going home to... i'm just going to let it go. be just another human being for the evening.

hand somebody else the world i have on my shoulders for a few sweet moments, and just enjoy the fading sunshine.

girls and burlesque

breakfast and puppies.

sooo got a few things on my plate at the moment, but here are the pieces i sent up for a show in new york. i was kinda rusty, but i got it done and sent out. we'll see how it goes.

musings from santaland

what kind of childhood experiences lead a person to grow up and follow the path of professional santa?

not all santas take it seriously, often it's just a job that comes up for a few months every year... but not my santa.

the first few weeks after thanksgiving, we had children arrive in short bursts, with lots of spare time for coffee runs and chats with st.nick. it never ceased to be fascinating, watching a cantankerous old man making snarky comments to us and overheating in a vermillion suit suddenly become that jolly red cheeked man that haddon sundbloom painted into history on every coca cola can in the 1950's. he was santa clause, and bells on the roof, and gingerbread smells, and presents under the tree, and christmas lights, and he was Magnificent. reaching forward to take chubby little hands into his cheap white gloves, i was always humbled as i watched the children see past the worn costume and pretend leather boots to the crinkles at the corner of his wintery blue eyes the looked out over his wire frame glasses perched at the end of his pink nose and see the magic hiding within his earthly body. his ability to guess the children's ages accuratley as they stumbled, giggled, bounced, ran up to him was impeccable.

santa has a similar bizarre effect on grown ups too, coming to us through the touch and go of the masses. old broken men wandering through the mall came to tell my santa about their surgeries and survival, old women came out of the woodwork to flirt, and to sing to him, to make him bear witness to their age and the generations they gave birth to, adults found themselves confessing, touching, laughing to this crotchety old man from colorado.

he's magic.

sometimes, we get lucky. sometimes everything is ok.

Walking through the crumbling museum district today, on a crazed search for coffee in perfect temperatures and golden sunlight filtering through the lush growth of monument avenue... I've found the best cup of coffee in Richmond, at a weird, shifty corner, across from a 7-11. Nothing makes one's day better than being handed a beautiful cup of coffee with a delicate creamy foam flower floating on it in perfect shades of pale mocha and rich browns. I forgot to worry about the dingy atmosphere, cause it took me back to a memory much preferred:

I was in the young professional quarter of Washington D.C. a few months ago, on a road trip from LBI to Richmond, crashing overnight with a friend and her roommates. She doesn't shave anything, doesn't feel the need to, wears loose fitting thrift store finds, and has an obvious chest tattoo that escapes delicately out of her shirt. Everyday she rides her bike to work at a government office dealing with green design and environmental technology... I think she edits descriptions of the stuff that goes on, or something along those lines. She is hysterical, and it excites me to no end that our government is becoming progressive enough to accept nontraditional individuals into their workforce. She directed me and my travel buddy to a coffeehouse on our way out of town, before she pedaled off into the morning fog. We pulled up to a shack. A shack where we were heckled by a homeless person across the street as we walked up warped boards through a door... And it was heaven inside. An ocean of warm, shining mahogany flooded with morning sun, large white coffee cups all with intricate floating designs atop fresh brewed espresso. And we were the only ones there who weren't sporting a security badge on our hips. What a seductive, titillating atmosphere.

On my walk back to the apartment in Richmond, I walked past a jam session of the jazz kind, pouring out of an ancient row house, took a breath, smiled into my coffee and felt like all was right in my world.

let the sun shine in.

meet dudley and lucky. Two of the most spoiled, adorable and slightly annoying in a good hearted way dogs being raised in the west end. we very much appreciated spending a week in their multi million dollar house with them while their owners were away.

I absolutley loved lucky's long legs, but when the munchkin, dudley chose to roll around in slow motion on the carpet, in the sunshine... i couldn't help pulling out my new camera and snapping some glamour shots. in most of these pics, dudley looks like a muscular little badass, but in truth he has a droopy little whiner that liked to steal dirty underwear and chew the crotches out.



Santa was very against the idea of pets. he told me a story once of the neighborhood cat man at his home in colorado, and how all of his cats started using the sandbox he built for his very young grandson as a gigantic littlerbox. what did he do? he set up huge lobster traps and drove into the mountains and deposited all of the cats in the wilderness. when the catman came by looking for his cats, santa just shrugged his shoulders and told him to start keeping them in the house.

i guess pink cows make strawberry milk,

and that santa clause has to die eventually.

so finally i have a few sweet moments to recount how got to the here and now. i'm sitting at a granite ocean of countertop, surrounded by the trappings of a multi million dollar house, while its human occupants are away. we are babysitting the dogs actually. i can't remember the last time i was surrounded by so much quiet... and it is marvelous.

back in october, awaiting the return of my passionately unresolved and briefly estranged girlfriend, i was desperatley searching for jobs. having given up on the fancy corporate design jobs that the pedigree of my degree states that i deserve... i had resorted to searching temp xmas work on craigslist. yes, not only can i say it without flinching, i also check it on a weekly basis now. my work as a nude model for the plethora of art institutions was wonderful, but i knew the winter break was approaching fast, and i didn't want my relationship to suffer from my potential neediness of support in the winter months, but no matter how lowly seeming the jobs i was applying for were, the more the complete lack of ANY response was wearing at my feelings of being worth anyone's respect. until i recieved a craigslist forwarded to me by my girlfriendish.

santa clause? like, be an elf? um... i'm still young enough for it to be acceptable, and its potently ridiculous nature made it clear to me that not only was it something i should do be for i die, but that the time was now.

here are my exploits in santa land.

On paper, the universe should be empty. But it's full of stars and planets and charming French villages and so on.

"A theory called supersymmetry could account for this: It states that every fundamental particle had a much more massive counterpart in the early universe. The electron might have had a hefty partner that physicists refer to as the selectron. The muon might have had the smuon. The quark might have had ... the squark. Many of those supersymmetric partners would have been unstable, but one kind may have been just stable enough to survive since the dawn of time. And those particles might, at this very second, be streaming through your body without interacting with your meat and bones. They might be dark matter.

By smashing pieces of matter together, creating energies and temperatures not seen since the universe's earliest moments, the LHC could reveal the particles and forces that wrote the rules for everything that followed. It could help answer one of the most basic questions for any sentient being in our universe: What is this place?
Most physicists believe that there must be a Higgs field that pervades all space; the Higgs particle would be the carrier of the field and would interact with other particles, sort of the way a Jedi knight in Star Wars is the carrier of the "force." The Higgs is a crucial part of the standard model of particle physics—but no one's ever found it."
- national geographic article on the god particle

remind anyone of golden compass?
it's the facilities to test this kind of theory that aid 2012 fears of creating a black hole- high powered particle collision. to try to reacreate the conditions of big bang seem similar to eve partaking in the apple: she was reaching for the knowledge that god had... and the vanity of that craving according to the bible is why they were expelled from heaven. is that a simplified metaphor for the audacity of recreating big bang conditions? punishment for seeking forbidden knowledge?

so we backtrack to our most original conditions to see if we can't recreate those reactions that have brought us to where we are... i wonder if that doesn't somehow find its mirror in popular culture as we are reconsidering the stories that lead our childish, early cognitive brains and fears to where they are now as we are adults, by recreating things like "Where the Wild Things Are"... which promises to be a deep discussion about the reason and psyche of a child, which we all have been at some point in time, it is impossible to imagine that something of this nature wouldn't affect absolutely every audience who experiences it.


in other news, i really want to make gourmet truffles.

she's so thirsty, she'd even drink my tears.

what can i say? life is pretty f'in sweet right now. modeling makes me feel strong, and feminine in a way few other things i've felt can. bossa nova jazz speaks to a sexy place in my soul, and now that i have my mac back with its new hard drive, i can play the radio stations of my choice through the miracle that is itunes.

i can feel my rapport with the artistic community growing, my life is now filled with a myriad of momentary critiques and random conversations with illustration giant, sterling hundley. it was interesting modeling for his class yesterday, but i am hesitant to say i agree with his approach. like my feelings on the illustration academy, i feel like his approach is one that works for some... but i wonder if his methodology doesnt put the cart before the horse, so to speak. the class was focusing on silhouetting the human figure, to really be sensitive to the nuances of the form one is looking at, you have to be able to SEE them. when looking at the figure, in traditional figure drawing classes, you begin by drawing the large shadow shapes, and learning what muscles lie under the skin to create the peaks and valleys, the bony landmarks and such. the longer you look, suddenly the more you see, the BETTER you see what is really there, that the human figure is rife with so many subtle variations of planes that give birth to thousands of subtle shadows. but how do you know what to look at when you haven't been asked to look for those things? the illustration academy is a stronghold of already accomplished artists with a firm grasp on what they are asked to look at, so i could well understand how people like hundley's approach could be an ultimate experience of freeing the learned from the constraints of their schooling, but like any language, one must learn the structure and rules before they can make poetry.

i have found a lot of the students on this campus really focusing on the contour, the outside line, as i have commented before... i suspect that more than one teacher is communicating the importance of the shape of the outside.

in other news, i might be teaching some workshops at the virginia museum of fine arts in the spring. we'll see what kind of curriculum i can pull together and submit. it's interesting that i've managed to avoid the economic implosion by latching onto the one part of america that will always exist: the school system. there will always be parents who will pay whatever it takes to get their kids a degree, as one final lesson before kicking them out of the nest. so i can always bank on a modeling job for that reason alone. it is big business. i walked away from school with a tremendous amount of skills under my belt, but not a lifetime of life experience or a shiny new job handed to me. i have to fight and dance for it, get lost and rediscover myself, but thanks to the security of the american university and their often useless art degrees, i will be secure in their need for figure models.

ever since i met you on a cloudy monday, i can't believe how much i miss the rain.

finally, stilted and cringing, i drew yesterday. stiff fingers, and bizarre painful yearning, i wanted to. i wanted to record the poorly put artwork on the wall of the coffee shop, and the cheesy guy that wishes he could be a mac ad. it was too beautiful not to.

its been hard watching these students draw, and know what training and skill is inside of me, but i wonder now if a sketchbook was always an entire novel of images that could become the worst weight i've ever experienced: failure. i never drew for me, i drew for other people, i drew to remember things, i drew cause i had to achieve a grade, or study a form for later painstaking illustration, but never for me. just because i saw something witty, and wonderfully human, something that struck me with its wry sense of tragic comedy, to capture a moment, a whisper of mortality.

these art students have it wrong. the ones i'm modeling for are so concerned with the contour, the outermost edge, the vague outline of what makes a pose what it is, not the form, the sense of weight, not the power of a thoughtful, contemplated gesture.

its about looking for that particle, that line, the subtle crease that makes the whole drawing, the scene, the charcoal or pen on paper... finding the moment in a gesture, the shape of being human.

so its coming back. the discourse finding its way to my fingers, the truths i know about illustrating life awakening in my hands that have been numb for some time now. since i have no one to seek favor from, no grades to fight for, i can let go of my intense fear of failure, of not having the best, most skillful drawing to show, and think and observe through my hands, rather than my terrified heart.

a throne fit for a tyrant, a lost soul, a woman-child.

i feel a little like alice almost everywhere i go, but at this stage of the game i feel like i'm looking into a slightly warped mirror, where all the aspects of my schooling that were so rigorous and seriously approached, are still earnestly being sought, but by people with a slightly skewed aesthetic. i can't tell if it's comical or scary, but along with the shock of my personal life enfolding viciously on itself, i find this skewed viewpoint wherever i turn, whatever mirror i happen to glance in, warped in so subtle a way it feels like i have no control of any of the elements around me. falling, as it were, tumbling head over heels into my own rabbit hole, my personal version of hell, where i have been given responsibility like a poorly beaded necklace, and have merely tangled and broken the string that held the pieces of myself, and the aspects of my world around me in some vaguely organized capacity.

this is my life now.

on the floor of my soul, scrambling around trying to scrape all these lost aspects of myself into some cohesive place of organization and prioritizing.

somewhere there's my fancy new degree, trying so hard to feed my body and mind, to be a light in this stupid, blinding darkness. but that is not all of me. that is not even half of me. my creative expression isn't simply bound by the context of my fancy art education, and my skills are much broader than that curriculum implies. i open the windows and sing like a fucking disney princess as a way of calming my soul, i model cause my body has a rough strong grace and fluidity that always craved the freedom and control of dance. i write with a fierce coyness, and make sharp stinging points, but where do i go to entertain those atrophied parts of myself?

after four years of college, i have to find them all, express them all. and like any body part that falls asleep and is slapped back to life, it hurts. i am more than just my degree. i am me with or without it. i am more than my looks, i am more than my fears. i am not just part of a human being. somewhere, at sometime, i was a whole one.

plasma gasification facility

was asked by a not for profit group to do an architectural concept sketch of this particular kind of waste processt, in accordance with the sudan project, or some such group. was also asked to develop a concept for a school to be built in sudan, as well as some of the logos involved in branding aspects of the project. this was done wih the paint bucket tool in photoshop.

food for thought.

there are whispers of one in the works...

hello jack skellington, do you mind if i am nude?

apparently not.

an awkward life drawing class, to say the least, i found myself posing next to a worn down, sunken in and popping out skeleton like those from an anatomy class in the 70's. snickers from the students (exacerbated by my facial expressions i'm sure) were completely unnoticed by the professor as she struggled to twist the ancient skeleton into a vaguely human stance... the feet really wanted to point to the ceiling no matter what she did... and then she had them draw me, then superimpose the bones of the skeleton on their drawing of me. and she told them to start at the shoulders. THE SHOULDERS. not with large body masses, aka the rib cage and pelvis to establish proportion and correct body gesture, not to pick out the bony landmarks on my body that show you what bone structures lie underneath...

wtf.

later, she brings out a blocky planar sculpture of a very masculine head/bust and has them draw it. are you ready for this? she then had them draw my sharp, feminine features on top of their drawing of the uber masculine facial structure... let me share with you one of the better renderings in the class of this exercise:


i grinned and took it all in stride, as the maniacal comedy that is my life, and waved nonchalantly to the people in the parking garage that is level with the huge open window i was facing on the third story of the fine arts building.

especially when i apologized for all the charcoal from the floor that had covered my feet and smeared itself all over my legs, because for some reason the professor was inspired by my annoying black soles, and asked me to scrunch up so the students could draw my black feet, face and hands in the same drawing/pose. i'm not gonna talk too much about the footprints i left on the wall, or the continued pinkness on my buttcheeks. at least you could tell i was wearing bottoms when i got sunburned.

cup of coffee and a calendar.

these are photos via the phone of the entrance, side, and inside of the sculpture class i've been posing in. thursday was an interesting amalgamation of experiences. from the starbucks people who didn't know what a latte was and ran around like chickens with their heads cut off while i described it, to the vegetarian burrito one of the kids sculpting my nude figure handed me, to finding myself at the PRIVATE opening of sterling hundley's first show where i conversed with inlaws and listened to crying babies, to ending the evening out with the gallery owner and a small group of close individuals...

i had an awesome discussion with sterling's grandmother, a tiny, proper speaking woman in pearls,clinging to a fancy teal walker. we discussed geneology and sterling's paintings, looked for faces in the random spatters and considered the beauty of grafitti as it continues to evolve. sterling's work was an interesting exploration of principles i've aways been fond of looking for and talking about, and our pointed communication followed those veins of perception and discovery, the abstracted study of design seems to be an interesting turning point, and i can't wait to see how it affects his commercial illustration.

too bad i came the night before a ringling reunion took place. sterling assured me he'd tell them how sad i was to miss them.

so i'm in north carolina for the holiday weekend, and promptly layed out on the beach and burnt my buttcheeks. it hurts to sit, but i'm hoping i'll have tan cheeks by tuesday for my next modelling session.

a pink hotel, a boutique and a swingin hot spot.

I was called in on the fly, cause a model bailed at the community college. cool. on it. until i shaved my legs with the crappiest razor on the face on the planet and my legs swelled into painful ridiculous things pretending to resemble limbs.

by the time i got there it was ok.

my first gesture class were i wasn't the one drawing, it was actually a lot of fun. the professor reminded me uncannily of my favorite teacher in college, but about 20 yrs his junior, you know, not quite to the tearing work off the wall and crumbling it up stage.

so this evening, after my sculpture modelling session, i was contemplating attending sterling hundley's gallery opening, and i've heard some whispers that a ringling compadre, animator turned inspired illustrator francis vallejo might also be attending.

sounds interesting.

we'll see how today turns out. i've been told that the sculpture class gets pungent, particularly since they use the same clay the entire semester and wrap their projects in wet t shirts that they take off for their once a week class... throwing up wouldn't be an attractive move on my part, so i'm going to try to refrain.

ta kids.

you and me should be friends.

tried the whole theatre thing, found the politics and the passions not to my liking. I come from a more subtle background, one where i was expected to be more conceptual than workhorse. let's just say i wouldn't recommend summer stock. so after having my fill of fake cowboys elusive responsibilities, i find myself here, in richmond, modeling for the virginia commonweath university whilst i reach out my feelers and see what this art scene has to offer me. Residing in a beautifully ancient apartment in the crumbling outskirts of the fan district which has since become the student ghetto, i find myself in a bizarre time warp where i am still running on school time, meeting with teachers, walking into clssroom studios...

My first class was sculpture, something that was never really explored in my undergrad due to its... personal interperative nature. a tiny room, stands on casters, the 9 students and professor circled me, never more than a yard from the small square i stood on in the middle of the room. if for some reason there was a blemish on my backside, or potential wiff of sweat from booking it across town midday in overwhelming heat, well, they were well aquainted with it all, i assure you.

i enjoyed it.

and i tried to keep my inner critiques just where they were, inside of me.