"Fortunately, I am a member of an academic community where I enjoy (not suffer) the privileges (not rights) of rank and tenure. While I never think I have enough time for my own work, in fact I am able to go about painting on a fairly regular and intense basis. I am paid well enough to stay a bit ahead of my debtors, to travel, and to give modest support to causes or projects which seem important.
Moreover, as an artist in an academic community, I have the opportunity to rub ideas daily against the ideas of colleagues and students. Despite the burdens of administrivia and the irritations of committee work, I teach courses in subjects I value. At least a certain amount of my time can be given honorably to the preparation of material for those classes, for thinking about interesting problems, for looking at paintings or sculpture that i find compelling. in short, I am able to earn my living doing something I like very much to do. Be it bias or faith, I believe my lot in life a good one, a pattern that might be equally engaging and stimulating for other artists."
In the University by Lee Hall
Art and sexual politics; women's liberation, women artists, and art history.
Tonight I'm starting a new painting. I've made new compositions that are closer to what I was doing before when I was working on the round paintings. I'm trying to make them so that they make more sense as "landscapes". By doing this I hope that they will give the viewer more of a sense of how (I think) microtexture images can look like the landscapes in which they [the rocks] might make (at any given perspective, close or far). I hope this goes well. I think it will. I feel like I'm lacking some direction with all of this this, however, it seems like my feet are appearing closer to the ground now. This is all just trial and error.
Over spring break I finished an acrylic drypoint of a Jade plant dad's growing in my room. This accomplishment made me feel wonderful, and strengthens this longstanding idea that I work best if I'm working directly from life and not from a freaking photograph. I think I'm going to do more drypoints of plants, but on zinc... maybe. I do like the ability to have a fractured matrix, and using acrylic makes that easy. Anyway, more plants. FUN. I'm going to hit up the greenhouse on campus. This week I'm attending a screen printing demo--we'll see where this goes, if anywhere (could be exciting).
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