march miscellaneous
I’ve been on a little printing kick. I made these valentine’s-ish prints in early February, inspired by this photograph I have taped in front of my desk in the studio.
I also made this chaotic salt print - I have all these salt box stamps I carved. They are really too big for my little stamp pads, which makes printing with them really haphazard, hence the mess, and then I just rolled with it. I have a few really simple and stark prints of these individually. Sometime I will properly print them neatly with the right box colors.
Tonight, I carved two small stamps and made this sampler.
I’m having this idea that Monday nights will be a new dedicated studio day. Trying to recommit to my practice via having regular dedicated time. Last Monday I felt brilliant in the studio, which is when I decided Monday nights were it. It snowed on the way home and I took lots of abstract videos of the snow falling against the street lights, the light and water reflecting off each other and creating orbs in the sky.
The world is full of delights.
I’ve been using Bernadette Mayer’s Writing Experiments as prompts ( “write a series of titles for yet unwritten poems or prose” “ Write a soothing novel in 12 short paragraphs” “Write five short expressions of the most adament anger, make a work out of them” “Write the poem: ways of making love. List them”)
This podcast series on Simone Weil via Philosophize This! is a really compelling listen (and honestly the whole podcast in general, but Weil has been of particular interest to me, I have some books on hold at the library to crack into). On the necessary steps to cultivating attention (aka being engaged with life and the world!) (my summary notes):
Feel love for beauty of the world
Feel love for your neighbor
Orient yourself towards transcendence via religious ceremony (judgement free zone to be committed to something with other people)
This could even be something like a concert, for non-religious people.
I went to see Big Thief last week with my friend Alex, at Radio City Music Hall, which was a really phenomenal venue. Grand! The sound felt so large. There was one particular moment in the show that was so raw and intense and surrounding I was overwhelmed to tears. Alex happened to be filming at the exact moment, which I was so thankful for. And then the beautiful thing of the internet also existed, and the room full of people had a similar transcendent experience of that moment, towards the end of Sparrow, and so it has been beautifully captured. (WATCH!!)
I know Big Thief needs no more hype, but I also have to shout out their new song which has a tremendous lyricism (“Reeling feeding feeling filled by everything you fed/I see you as you see yourself through all the books you read” “I wanted to kiss your skin and your everything/ I wanted to be your woman, I wanted to be your man/ I wanted to be the one that you could understand” “You turn me inside out and then you want me outside in /You spin me all around and then you ask me not to spin”) - just endlessly giving!! this song needs to be released!!!
Thats all for now !