black and white waves

I love pen and ink drawings of hair.

J'aime beaucoup des dessins a l'encre du cheveux.

found via the wonderful etsy shop, No Side Up.

Tara Donovan

So Monday we didn't have school and Tuesday we had a field trip which means that today was my first day of school. It sucked so bad. I'm not quite sure why; we got our grades and mine were all A's except an 89 in art. It was that my average was a 91.2. It was so important to me that I got a 93 average, the cutoff between honers and high honers. God I just want to go to sleep.

Anyways, the field trip. Mum [my art teacher] took us all to Boston on the train to see the Tara Donovan show at the ICA and draw at the aquarium. It was raining cats and dogs and we had decided to walk everywhere, twenty minutes from the station to the museum and then another twenty to the aquarium. By the time we reached the ICA we were soaked to the bone. 

Anyways, about the art. The show we saw at the ICA [a very small museum] was of sculptures by a thirty something woman who has just won the MacArthur Genius Grant, Tara Donovan. It was insane. Katie was being cynical as usual but it bugged me more than usual because I really loved the work. The entire day I had to hear "It's just not art, it's just not!" 

So Donovan's whole thing is using ridiculous amounts of everyday materials to make sculptures are anything but. The picture above is a close up view of this rope/seaanemone/cell form that's made of paper plates. It's one of the only pieces held together by any adhesive. 

Oh god, it was so insane. 
Then there was this giant hanging piece made of Styrofoam cups, illuminated by florescent lights within. 
My god it was insane. There were no cameras allowed in the museum because her work isn't copyrighted yet and I can't find any decent ones other than these three. 

Well anyways, the overall feel of her work was of another world created by the manipulating the multitude of mass produced products. My mum once said that, generally, 2D work is holding a mirror to the world and showing the artist's perspective. 3D work, on the other hand, is creating a world. I think I want to make sculptures. Actually, I've already started on some. The show was so inspirational that I think we're gonna go back sometime soon because we didn't get to see the rest of the museum. 

Oh god, I almost forgot! The most incredible piece took up the entire floor and was made of Mylar paper [I believe] twisted and bunched and formed into these giant black spheres that popped up from the concrete. Some were huge and some were tiny; the biggest reminded me of a jetson version of an adobe hut like the ones described in this book I'm reading about Albanian gypsies and their overwhelming poverty and forced cultural degradation. There's one passage where she describes an entire city, or maybe a town, of handmade adobe spheres some too small for a man to stand or lie down in, all of which are the sole dwellings of these gypsies ostracized from the culture they were forced to join.

Anyways. I'll make another post later specifically about the aquarium.

green and gray and blue and black

(port2portpress)

sea glass and extinction and plastic and america and italy and sunlight and broken showers and the great unwashed and five euro water and hard cement and melting gelato and we never saw the sea and god i missed the sea and a pool down the gravel path and cold water and skinny dipping and chingale and olive trees and hidden kittens and exposed kittens and exhibitionists and scorpions and tears in the kitchen and tears in the car and tears in the garden and tears on the train and god i missed the sea

orange and gold and teal and gray

(My Funny Eye)

blind contour drawings and ginkgo leaves and sleeping eyelashes and sun on my face and lucy's house and mushrooms and fish scales and hallways

Lolz

(for me for you)

I'm gonna send these out to my estranged loves.

So there's a Penguin and a Polar Bear

And the polar bear says to the penguin, "hey man, it looks like you're wearing a tux."

Praise Jesus it's the weekend! Today was hell, total and complete hell. It was the last day of spirit week so everyone at school was in head to toe blue and white, that means socks, finger nails, face paint, you name it. Then after lunch we had the second pep rally in three weeks. Oh god, it was torture. Second graders screaming in my ear, quasianorexic 12 year olds dancing around like little sluts, hockey players running around and barking in time with their entrance music. Then Rose sitting next to be going on and on about how I don't appreciate things and I should learn to respect and love my school because I'm lucky to be here. She was still pissed from the other day when I told one of my friends visitor not to come here because it would make him want to jump off the bell tower of fogg.

So today I had study hall first so I went to the art room. It was just me and Shaun started joking around about the Berwick Academy Community. He went off on Saliba (the dean) and how his head is too big for his body (which is pretty damn big). I sorta spaced out writing the word community. Common Unity if you break it down enough.
I can't even being to comprehend what someone could consider common unity here.
Then during the pep rally I fell asleep on Ollie's shoulder and had a dream I met Quentin Tarentino. He asked me to be in his new movie about a teenage runaway. I asked him what the plot was he described the protagonist to me. She was a hauntingly beautiful and incredibly skinny with black hair and pale porceline skin. Her name was violette and she lived in conetticut to incredibly rich parents. I stopped him there and told him that sucked.
I told him she wasn't really rich, her mom teaches at her school. She's fifteen and she's being going to the same school since she was five. She had the same two best friends till she started high school and then one of them left. She went to a different school, a better school. The other one stayed but wasn't the same. She started talking to boys and having sex. She got boobs and an ass and suddenly all the guys loved her and the girls hated her. She was the school slut and she had all the adoration to give her the selfconfidence she needs to get through the day but no respect. She realized this and now and wants to leave. She needs to leave this cycle of bad boyfriends and find people who really love her.
I tell Quentin that his girl, the runaway, is totaly alone. Her friends have left her behind. Or maybe she drove them away. She's found a new girl to tell her what to do and fill the space they've left. But now she's seeing this girl for who she really is, a selfagrandizing, manipulative, sociopath who only befriended her to get to her guy friends and entertain her.
She realizes this, and now realizes that she has no one to talk to, to comiserate with, to relate to. She needs to find someone who understands her. Someone who can comprehend her misery. She tries to tell her last friend but she can't understand. She love the school and she loves education. She loves the path that has been preordained for her and she accepts her fate. She tries to tell her mom but all she does is try to talk her into seeing a shrink and going on happy pills. She tells her that she wont go on those sedatives, those suppressants, those numbing agents. So feeling alone and regected she runs away looking for a common unity with someone, anyone.
I stopped. He asked me to go on but I couldn't. I don't know what's next. I know where I am but I don't know where I'm going. They announce that our plane is ready to board and I bid him adieu. I'm flying above to ocean with Rena and Rose and Sarah and the in flight movie is 300 and Sarah and Rena are playing checkers and Rena's listining to her I-Pod and I'm looking out the window at the ocean speeding by, indistinguishable from the dark night sky.
And the penguin says to the polar bear, "what makes you think I'm not."

I wrote this on an old blog a year or so ago. 

I still don't know what to think.