I started trying to write this blog post yesterday. I started with the line “It has become obligatory for me to start these blog posts with some version of.. "Wow it’s been a long time since I posted!”
I started slogging through the first few sentences. It wasn't coming naturally.
I’ve now fallen far behind on writing about the two sculptures that I built and installed this summer in Örebro, but I couldn’t remember how much I had already written about the sculptures on this blog and I didn't want to repeat myself so I went back over my last few posts to check. After getting lost for a few minutes reading some of my old posts, I came away thinking “Oh my God, the writing was so good and so thoughtful in those last few posts… And I’m really not in the right headspace to effortlessly turn out such beautiful prose. I should probably give up."
So I gave up.
And now it’s today. And I’m sitting in my hot tub, my thoughts totally lost in my next project, and I’m realizing that all my free headspace these days is going into this project… which I will tell you about in a minute… and a few other projects that I’m also keeping alive on the side… that I really don’t have the free brain space for the kind of insightful philosophizing that I usually like to build my blog posts around.
And that’s OK.
So I’m just going to tell you what I’ve been doing. It’s a lot.
In the month leading up to my last post, I was working feverishly to finish the two sculptures that were commissioned by OpenArt Örebro. One of them is called Emotions Are Like The Weather. This sculpture features three mask-like faces in different emotional expressions which are suspended on a three-way balance mechanism, allowing them to go up and down in patterns that are balanced and reciprocating and random all at the same time. There is no power source in this sculpture; people are invited to push the faces up and down as they see fit. The sculpture speaks about the impermanence of emotions. You may be sad one day, but the sadness will invariably be replaced by happiness, or worry, or elation, or surprise or whatever. The festival placed this sculpture in what might have been the very best location in the whole city, exactly in front of the castle.
The second sculpture is called Reaching Through Time, and this one features a male figure and a female figure situated opposite each other in a large stainless steel ring. They are reaching towards each other across the center of the space. The ring is suspended on bearings and is able to be spun by members of the audience. I was not so much a fan of the placement of this sculpture, as it is behind a little fence and in front of a visually busy building, which I think distracts from the strength of the sculpture. While In Örebro installing the piece, another participating artist asked me why I felt it was necessary to make the figures nude. I was so happy to receive this question, as if I had secretly been hoping somebody would ask. My rambling answer had many dimensions, but the core of it was really “because there is simply nothing better or more beautiful on this planet then a nude human figure." I think there must be something slightly wrong with people who don’t understand this basic truth. Or maybe there's something wrong with me, who knows. In any case, my answer seemed sufficient for her; there were no followup questions.
These are my first publicly displayed realistic figurative sculptures, of any scale.
As I write this, I am only one day away from traveling back up to Örebro to dismantle my sculptures and bring them back to Skåne. They have been installed for three months, and now I begin the process of casting around for the next place to show them. Of course, selling them would be best, and I have already applied to one municipality here in Sweden which is looking for outdoor sculptures to purchase. I will hold my thumbs (the Swedish version of crossing your fingers).
Not long after installing the sculptures I traveled to San Francisco with Kodiak for a week to attend my father‘s funeral and do my small part in the process of wrapping up his estate. San Francisco is always lovely to visit.
Upon our return from San Francisco, we had a series of houseguests, in between which we continued the never-ending process of working on our house.
In July my mother came to visit, which afforded Christina and me the freedom to attend Borderland, a Burning Man affiliated festival situated across a string of meadows and forests in central southern Sweden. Borderland was a wonderful surprise, and in many ways much more enjoyable than Burning Man. The main thing Borderland is missing, frankly, is big sculpture, but hat’s a small problem which I may try to remedy next year as I got inspired enough to propose a new idea. I built a tall bike in the week before we left, which was really fun and an easy way to stand out from the crowd… even if I did fall off it and injure my knee and ankle!
There were many highlights of Borderland for me, and I’ll briefly recount two of them. The first one is actually hard to describe. It was a 2 1/2 hour workshop in which 25 men were welcomed into a very feminine and maternal space and given the message in various ways, by 25 women, that we men were valued and needed. It was intense. There was a lot of crying. I think our culture understands on a certain level that women carry a lot of wounds around men, but what the organizers of this wonderful event understood is that men also carry a lot of wounds around women. I’m very grateful to the women who took part in this; it was a very generous thing to do.
Here is how it was presented in the program.
The second highlight was the circular dance after the main burn. At Burning Man (the original event in Nevada), there are two main burns, The Man on Saturday night and then the Temple on Sunday night. Once these two wooden structures have sufficiently collapsed such that they are deemed safe from further collapse, the safety perimeter is dropped and the crowds rush in and run and dance and sway in a moving circular mass of people around the fire. It’s very ritualistic, very primal. At Burning Man there are always a few people… Maybe 50 or 60 people in a crowd of 5000, who decide to strip off their clothes and run around this fire naked.
In the minutes leading up to the main burn at Borderland, which this year was a Temple to the Sun built by a crew from Latvia (or was it Estonia?), I was standing with my friend Malin talking to an older fellow who had attended many times. Malin said she was considering running around the fire after the structure’s collapse, and this fellow replied that if she was serious, she would have to be ready to take off her clothes. I thought to myself "Come on, no one NEEDS to go naked. This guy is just being a lecherous old flirt." However, as soon as the temple collapsed, something like 2000 people from the crowd immediately stripped off all their clothing and ran towards the fire. I was absolutely not expecting this, and it was absolutely amazing. I considered joining them, but I couldn’t figure out the logistics of where to put my clothes so that I could find them again! Two thousand naked people swarming in a circular mass around a huge fire, chanting and howling and singing and dancing. It was fucking amazing. It was really something you just never see. I plan on joining the crowd next year. There are no pictures of this, anywhere... which seems correct.
The burning temple, before the crowds swarmed in...
Why was Borderland better than Burning Man, you might ask? Oh, so many reasons. It was smaller; the difference between 5000 people and 80,000 people is significant for the experience. It was green; there is grass and forests and it's a lush and nurturing environment. The Black Rock Desert is many things but it is not nurturing. There are several lakes where you can swim. I swam every day, in lieu of a shower. It was so lovely. There are other reasons but these are my big takeaways.
As I mentioned I got inspired to propose a sculpture for next year's festival, and I am currently working on prototypes. I have in mind a motion which is actually kind of hard to achieve mechanically, so it's a bit of a mind-bender.
After Borderland I was contacted by Burning Man to create a series of 12 graphic designs which would be CNC (computer) cut out of wood panels, and which would decorate the staircase of the base of the Man. The timeframe was tight and 12 panels was ambitious, so I split them 6-and-6 with Christina. The assignment was that the panels should depict the progression of the universe from "the beginning" (however you want to interpret that) through to the cosmos. I chose to put a drawing of a woman at the center of each panel and that became the unifying motif for my 6 panels.
Here is one panel. You can see all 6 of them HERE
The biggest project I am working on, though... the thing I mentioned at the beginning... is a graphic novel. Yes you read that right. A graphic novel. A long-form comic book.
I have never thought of myself as a storyteller. In fact I've always thought of myself as quite bad at it. In my 20's I decided that I was so bad at storytelling that I needed to take a class in fiction writing. I dropped out after 3 classes; I couldn't hack it. And then, for 30 years or so, I just worked with the idea that narrative fiction was outside of my wheelhouse, like playing a musical instrument or surfing.
Over the last several years I have been kind of obsessed with the idea of a beautiful nude woman riding a flying shark. I couldn't really explain why I liked the idea so much, but I couldn't get it out of my head. I proposed this idea in the form of a sculpture to Burning Man (rejected), I've drawn it many times, and I've tried to turn it into a tattoo design.
And then my dad died. And an almost-fully-formed idea for a fictional narrative just sort of dropped into my head. The story is autobiographical, and uses my relationship with my father as the starting point for a story that goes off in some wild and exaggerated science-fiction directions. The main character is a beautiful, sexually adventurous lesbian who rides a flying shark. I am working out the story, day by day. I think about it all the time. I found a very good book about story structure. Every time I read a chapter in the book, I have a new idea about how to improve my narrative. The whole process is fun, and challenging, and totally engrossing. I live in my head all the time... working out this story, and that's why I forget to feed the cats and think up smart things to say in blog posts.
Although I draw kroki every week and consider myself an artist, I don't have a ton of confidence in my drawing skills, especially when it comes to people. I think there are artists who draw beautifully from their imagination, and there are others who need a reference image... something to copy. I find that my drawings are much better when I have a reference image. This is not to say that I can't draw from my imagination, but the drawings I make that way are usually inferior. So if I'm going to make a graphic novel, with potentially hundreds of individual drawings, how am I going to do that?
My god what a temptation it is for someone in my position to just use AI. I actually wrestled with the idea of simply using AI to generate my images; it would be fast and easy and look amazing. (Can you see how tempting that is??) But at the end of the day I talked myself out of it... for two reasons. Firstly, everyone hates to look at an AI image which is purporting to be "art" right now. I know I do. I prefer to look at a hand-drawn image, and so that's what I'm going to do. And the second reason is something that the singer Nick Cave articulated better than I ever could, which is that the WORK... the STRUGGLE of making art is actually where the value lies, for the artist. The value is not in producing the slickest, most flawless result (which AI can do in a few seconds), but rather in the BATTLE of making the work. That's where the growth happens. I could certainly argue that I am struggling and battling to produce the writing part... the story, (and I am definitely struggling and battling in that regard... and I have not even been tempted to use AI for that part), but I'm supposedly an artist, and artists draw, so I need to draw. If I produced this graphic novel using AI, I would not be a better artist at the end of the project. But if I draw every single panel, I absolutely will be.
So to answer the question of how I will make these drawings, I will use many tools. I will use reference pictures from the internet, I will use photos that I make of posable art-reference dolls, I might end up taking pictures of a live model if I really need to, and I'm sure that I will occasionally use AI as one tool among all those others. Try not to hate me.
If it's really true that learning a new skill is the secret to a youthful brain, my brain is going to live forever. I'm learning Swedish, wrestling with the difficult mechanism of this new sculpture I want to build, writing a fictional narrative, and trying to draw in a way I never have before, on a scale which is unprecedented for me. And also, I draw kroki every week, another thing I always feel I sort of suck at.
Oh, and I went to see Anna Von Hausswolff the night before last in Lund. (Do yourself a favor and click that link!)
She is SO GOOD!
And so nice!
Until the next time... Bye!
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