Nearly every day I write an imaginary blog.
For months I have written, considered, edited, deleted. It’s frustrating. My imaginary blogs are excellent, then, when I make them real, not so excellent.
I draw. I see my therapist. I putter about.
I am working on a series of drawings almost no one has seen. They aren’t ‘pretty’. The working title is Tally Drawings. It started like this; I read a long article in the New Yorker about Babi Yar, a ravine in Kiev where one of the most effective, efficient erasures in terms of time, and amount of people murdered, took place near he start of WW11. 33,753 (approx.) in two days by two handfuls of soldiers. I had never heard of it. That led me to a book called Art After the War, which led me to an installation commission in Rome at a small ‘prison’ where mostly Jews were detained, tortured, killed. The artwork, in the 1970’s, was by Mel Bochner, an icon of conceptual work. One of his creations was a drawing of tally marks, in chalk. I was so moved, so overwhelmed by the simplicity, grace, and power of these marks and started to sketch my own tally marks onto paper.
Mostly, I draw, and listen to audio books as I draw. Just now I am almost finished with Companion Piece by Ali Smith. I wish I could write like her. Before this I listened to The Years by Annie Ernaux. I also wish I could write like her, and Tolstoy (why not dream big?).
The tally’s, one of the oldest and most widely understood ways of counting, represent everyone, every species killed, destroyed, obliterated by humans, and sometimes natural disasters. I have no idea if these strange drawings will find a place in the world. I hope they do.
I still make work like this:
And this:
I still walk my dog, weed, jog. I think I still have an eating disorder. I smoke.
This summer a tree limb fell into our yard but did not destroy anything.
I applied to the McDowell Colony, and was rejected. It perplexed me. My work is exponentially better than it was in 1999, when they accepted me. I lost confidence (did I ever have confidence?), especially in my writing. I do love making my Tally drawings.
But, confidence.
Thus, start, stop, delete. Start. Start.
Lonely artist. 