#uncoffeed...

The deed is done; the art is hung. I'm officially live and public. It's weird to see my ugly babies outside of home. I go to my usual weekend hangout and they're hanging out, among strangers and draped over tables, no looks of recognition toward me. Like teenagers. I wonder if they smoke and drink with their friends when I'm not around. Pieces are numbered 1-14 from the front door to the back corner; Jennifer had me call out titles so she could write them down for pricecards. This was weird, too.  Titling is exceeding difficult for me. I had to take ownership of what I'd assigned to my babies, call them by their names. It gave me a feeling of...legitimacy, maybe?...something I haven't yet digested. Definitely I've done a real thing here, and I will do it again. It'll be easier next go-round. In the meantime, I'm at the laundromat doing what's amassed while I made decisions and wrangled hardware for 3 weeks.  A lady here is wearing a shir...

buy Deconstructed Corvid 1 - Fibonacci Putting together an art show seems very much like putting together a music album.  Some of you-all may  not remember albums. They told stories and wore cool jackets, sometimes smoked. Dark and enigmatic, glistening in the dim light of somebody's basement while the needle danced over the grooves. God, I miss analog.  An exhibit needs to tell a story. Our brains seek patterns but like surprises. We want the A-HA! Like the words I write, my paintings blurt images in quirky detail, narrative a little jumbled like that last dream before you wake up.  As I compile my varied works to hang on the walls of Beanetics Coffee Roasters , I may find a piece doesn't fit, quite, between its compatriots. I can bend the narrative by reordering the pieces so one nuance leads gently to the next. This project wants editing like any other. A good whisky and a good perfume are the same way. The first impression may be bold; you're not sure...

My daughter was born the day before my 27-week prenatal check-up.  Her father noticed at 1:00 AM in a hotel room on Airline Highway in New Orleans that I was literally crawling to the bathroom every half hour because, I said, I had to pee. "No, you are not having that baby now," he muttered into his pillow. But I did. I went by ambulance to Charity Hospital , got stuck with a needle, and held the nurse's hand so she could tell me when to push because I was no longer feeling contractions. By 3:00 AM, Baby Yaya slid out and screamed at the world - not fearful, but annoyed. She was cold and wanted people to stop messing with her. She's still that way. I knew she would be okay despite being early; that she was a complete entity of her own, not a part of me. I was just the vessel. There's a moment like that in the creative process, if I'm lucky. Sometimes I'm focusing so hard on the details of my work that I am absolutely dumbfounded by the final p...

My work-space is currently a poetry lab, but the poetry's not mine - Peter Kidd sent me some-odd pieces by priority mail so I can see what art may manifest to accompany them. I fixed the pages like butterflies* with long pins to my U.S. map, around and over the Presbyterian Migratory Trail where each generation of Ewing is marked with a different shade of plastic head. The ancestors will have to wait and support this project - every choice they made was for me, was for now , after all. Right?   Take the risk. This assignment coincides with the emotional birth of Deconstructed Corvid 3, which I saw in the rocks and moss growing between the carpets of my driveway. The carpets are not allegory nor metaphor. I'm not sure why they were laid out there initially, but as I move them throughout the winter to cover iced-over puddles I think I get the idea. When Pete said he'd be mailing the pages, my first thought was that I should send them back illuminated like Medieval...