Art and Text

I will be forever grateful to Pamela Lanza and her brilliant “Voice and Vision” class at SFAI in summer 2010. This class was a catalyst for embracing myself as an artist and discovering my love for text in art. Since then, I’ve artistically played with single words like Oops, SHH, and multiple ones, often repeated and layered. This has been and continues to be a fascinating, expressive exploration.

The words spawned from a moment when something was bothering me and I wanted to release it. Someone advised to just “flick it away”.

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Basketball And Officiating

Watching the Warriors/Clippers playoff game last night, at one point early on Draymond Green, who typically contests each ruling, angrily confronted a referee. Later, Patrick Beverley from the Clippers did the same. Now, I do believe that Stephen Curry gets knocked all around the court and doesn’t get his fair share of calls in his favor; however, it really is tiring and scary to witness the friction.

A couple of weeks ago while driving, I tuned into a local sports radio show just in time to hear a conversation between the host and guest, Mychel Thompson, an L.A. radio commentator and father of Klay. Mychel was asked what he thought about the relationship between players and referees. His response was to say that years ago when he was a rookie player, there was a well-known, undisclosed star player who disputed a call. The referee then retorted, “Shut-up you big baby and play the game!”

In addition to being right on point and humorous, hearing this has served me. When I periodically slip into reviewing my history and/or complaining about something, I tell myself to shut up and deal with it. And, then I laugh and laugh hard at the absurdity of life as a human and sometimes weird ways we each try to figure it out.

Synchronicity

Admittedly, this seems to have been dormant as of late. Perhaps because of winter and being more sedentary, perhaps because of the positioning of the planets in my chart, perhaps because I’ve been in judgement of and resistance to conditions of my life and/or perhaps because I’ve been in impatience of reaping “the fruits of my labor” after a transitional and often grueling 10 year period.

I’m reflecting on this as a result of what happened yesterday morning. I hired a new handyman and, after greeting me with a big smile, upon entering, he took notice of the art highly praising it and asking if I was a collector. I said yes and also I am an artist and what he was looking at was my art. We diverged quickly from the list of items that needed fixing and engaged in a conversation about art, music and the topic of salons. Turns out his partner organizes monthly salons for musicians and artists and, unexpectedly, I readily received an invitation for this weekend. So, in addition to getting my place in tip top shape, I was offered an opportunity to widen my network. Very cool, and I feel grateful.