January | 2011 | marizateria.com

Archive for January, 2011

art journal video: dream/art journaling

A few nights ago I had a dream in which a friend of mine was flipping through various books in some sort of library that smelled of rich mahogany. Much to my alarm, she picked up a book that featured some of my work and saw this image. Instead of being proud that I had been published, I was embarrassed that I had been exposed as an “artist.” I was particularly ashamed of how childish the style of the piece was. Sadly, I don’t recall the friend’s reaction to my piece, the dream then randomly transitioned into looking at examples of altered art made out of various found objects and carnival food. Which could be a delicious real life idea.

Sunday, January 30th, 2011 | 3 Comments »

wordless wednesday 1-26-11

It’s been snow and rain and lightning kind of all at the same time. Ballet class was canceled as a result.

Oh wait, those were words. Oops!

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011 | No Comments »

plateaus, fear, vulnerabilty, all the good stuff

Lately I’ve been extremely frustrated with my output – the quality, not the quantity. Of course after making X crappy things you don’t really feel like making more, so even my quantity is suffering. I made an art journal video on the subject but it was really self-indulgent (ha ha, as opposed to all those other art journal videos!) and cynical, and there was too much potential for misunderstanding (ie everybody would think I’m terribly depressed when really I’m just extremely discouraged).

I feel like I am holding myself back in some fashion. I’m afraid to be vulnerable (but does one have to be vulnerable/rip your heart out to make good or interesting things?) I’m afraid that nobody will like me (even though, theoretically, this is not for an audience), but most of all I think I’m afraid that at the end of the day there’s nothing interesting here at all. It’s kind of nice to be like, “ooh man, the MASTERPIECES I would create, if only I could get out of my own way!” and speculate over how awesome you could be, rather than actually try to be awesome and have it turn out that you’re horrible at everything. I guess the root of it is insecurity.

I want to make things I care about but I’m afraid I’ll be burned by it. I’m walking this fine line between learning how to dig deeper without becoming too schmaltzy or imitating others too heavily (but I may have to imitate temporarily until I get the hang of it). It seems counter intuitive that one would have to learn to be honest – well, now that I’ve typed that, maybe it’s not. We all have various defense mechanisms to disarm before we can be honest with ourselves, and being honest with others is a whole ‘nother barrel of monkeys and/or can of worms.

Well, what can ya do. I feel better after word-barfing this here (I apologize if it was totally incoherent). What do you do when you’re frustrated/bored with yourself and/or convinced you could do more but can’t make the reach? I am taking suggestions.

Monday, January 24th, 2011 | 13 Comments »

the street of crocodiles

Came the yellow days of winter, filled with boredom. The rust-colored earth was covered with a threadbare, meager tablecloth of snow full of holes. There was not enough of it for some of the roofs and so they stood there, black and brown, shingle and thatch, arks containing the sooty expanses of attics – coal black cathedrals, bristling with the ribs of rafters, beams, and spars – the dark lungs of winter winds. Each dawn revealed new chimney stacks and chimney pots which had emerged during the hours of darkness, blown up by the night winds: the black pipes of a devil’s organ. The chimney sweeps could not get rid of the crows which in the evening covered the branches of the trees around the church with living black leaves, then took off, fluttering, and came back, each clinging to its own place on its own branch, only to fly away at dawn in large flocks, like gusts of soot, flakes of dirt, undulating and fantastic, blackening with their insistent cawing the musty yellow streaks of light. The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year’s loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with lazy indifference.

From Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, which it taking me forever to get through because I keep having to stop and savor what I just read.

Although Schulz is “regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century”, I had only heard of him through The Quay Brothers film, Street of Crocodiles, which is conveniently available on youtube and well worth a watch:

/just sharing

Saturday, January 22nd, 2011 | 1 Comment »

goals made visible

So the thing that sucks about most personal improvement goals is that you can’t really do them all at the last minute; success is just an accumulation of daily decisions. AKA “You mean I have to do this ish every day?” I ask myself that before every workout (fortunately after the workout I feel good so it’s not too much of a punishment, but it sure would be nice to achieve fitness and then be able to stop! )

I started keeping track of my workouts on the calendar; then whether or not I took my vitamins and then if I did my stretching. Then my sweet LINES ballet calendar started looking like this:

Which was kind of stressing me out and precluded keeping track of like, events and stuff. But I really liked seeing the boxes fill up – the visual reminder of the stuff I’d already done encouraged me to keep going. So I made one of these:

The idea is that each shape is a Daily Thing (like taking my vitamin), and if I do it that day, I color in the shape. Ideally by the end of the month it will look like Lucky Charms barf. I’m sure somebody else has thought of this already but I figured in the time it took me to find one that I liked, I could just make my own.

Obviously I started this for fitness/health, but it could just as easily be applied to, well, anything else. Like the 15 minutes of piano is on there (I just added that on with the creation of this calendar, hence none of the piano shapes filled in to date). I picked 15 minutes because it’s so laughably easy to find 15 minutes that not doing it would be an insult to myself. I may print off another copy for a general creative endeavor calendar – in addition to playing my poor, neglected piano, I would also like to get back into daily writing and I should probably be meditating too. I need to quit my job to make time for all this stuff I need to do.