Category: Art and Photography

Not a Painter

I use paint on canvas (and other bases) but I am not a painter. You may think this comes down to talent. I may or may not agree.

The truth is, I am not a painter because I don’t make paintings. I don’t believe I have ever made something that I would want to sell or hang on the wall. That’s not the goal. What I want is an image. I love the painting, but I don’t feel fulfilled until I get a really good photograph of what I made. Then I throw the painting, or rather thing covered in paint, in the trash.

If I ever were to even attempt to sell my better, more successful work, I wouldn’t sell the thing with paint on it. I would sell the photograph.

Maybe one day I will do that. I will go on Etsy or one of those photo selling websites, and I will attempt to sell my art that way.

I am getting into some exciting new stuff soon. I bought a book about abstract painting with mixed media collage, and I am stoked. So much to learn, so many materials to try. Meanwhile, I am making digital art too as a sort of journal. Sometimes I might pair the images with words, with verbed and nouned feelings.

Experimenting With Novellettes

Recently I ordered some experimental novels I found in articles online. I believe I wrote awhile back about dabbling in fiction.

I dropped that for awhile. Now I am back. In desperate need of a sense of structure, I wanted new novels to read. However, I don’t want to write a regular sort of novel. As a poem writer, I want to break things down. I also want a shorter story. Can a story with no plot be good? Can the color orange be my protagonist? Can I structure my book as a series of ekphrastic poems? What does it mean to structure a story as a scrapbook? Can I include footnotes, to-do notes, and playlists?

I want to find out. I have a lot to learn. I am a voracious reader, but this is stuff I haven’t really touched. It is time to leave the familiar terrains of my mind and map a new world.

Minibios

A long time ago, when dial up was how you accessed the internet and bell bottoms were cool, my parents used AT&T for internet and email. A free website was part of the deal. My parents had no use for that, so it was passed to me.

I used it to create Minibios, a place where I wrote miniature biographies about people I had tesearched. What really grabbed me then, and what grabs me now, is studying people’s childhoods. Childhood is often barely touched by your average biography. Yet it is fascinating to look at someone’s childhood and see how it influenced them. Can you see a glimmer of the person they would become?

The other night I had the idea to start a blog where I do that again. I’m on entirely sure what the point would be. Thanks to Wikipedia if someone really wants to look up some basic things about someone they can do it in a second. Perhaps what I can do is add more information about the childhood specifically. I will not be doing my research on Wikipedia. I would be using books, scholarly articles etc.

On one hand I don’t wanna make a commitment to another project. I’m already dabbling in a lot, and setting off to learn sign language. At the same time, it is good to have a goal to work toward and it would be nice to write about some of things that I research. I use The Great Courses to watch lectures, and I use an app on my phone to take notes about what I learn from that. But it might be good to wrap my mind around an entire subject and really write about it again. I’ve considered this before, but now had Angelica is in school all day things are really different. Before it kind of would have been impossible to do a website like that. I was already doing poetry, art, reading, and photography while taking care of my daughter. There was no real room for anything else. Plus, I research a lot of different things and taking time to focus in on just one would have been hard.