I’ve been hard on myself this week, watching myself spiral around the studio but finding ways to procrastinate. I finally sorted long languishing tools yesterday and took a very full car load to Value Village. Things I couldn’t tell what they were, things I would never use.

I am waiting I think. And this morning it has come to me what I need to do. It is picking up the thread from when I stopped making work. I want to make little forms in slip which in turn become their own objects and I use them as something to draw and paint from.

I am thinking of Lisa Yuskavage and her use of porcelain ceramics to make a body of work from, those luminescent paintings.

Lisa Yuskavage. Asspicking, foodeating, headshrinking, socialclimbing, motherfucking bad habits, 1996. Cast hydrocal with artificial pearls and artificial flowers.

I am thinking of course of Magdalena Abakanowitz and her Abakan forms which are forever etched on my mind. I am thinking of a this video I just watched about Jim Olson’s Treetop house, the first thing he ever built as a teenager and how incorporating nature and light were important to him. I am also thinking about Morris Graves and the gardens he folded into his artistic practice, which I still want to do with my own humble plot. To make it it’s own little world.

Magdalena Abakanowicz: Heads 1973-75

All of that gives me some hope that there are ideas to be mined out of all that. I became very sad and upset for a moment as I couldn’t remember the process of making the  slip casts for the sculpture forms. I can’t remember the timing even though I have it written on a piece of cardboard, as to what comes first? I had such a great mentor helping me. I guess I just need to look over his ghostly shoulder and take it from there.

Instructions, bad spelling and all

Last night, now that the room is finally in a state of being cleared I finally unrolled some of that Magnani Incisioni paper that I always dream about and taped it to the wall.