Greetings from inside the salubrious confines… of my studio! (That’s a reference to my friends’ genius comical and dark TV Show, Harrison & Wentz Presents. Some cool living life lust vida joie de veivre things to share. I visited painter Kate Alboreo‘s studio on a chilly rainy night and I’m sure happy I braved the elements because she/they is awesome and intense. I enjoyed hearing about their concepts, execution, inner turmoil, solutions, process and goals.
Kate is interested in professional wrestling’s fetishization of men’s bodies equally to the fetishization of women’s, and is writing an essay to accompany her solo show at Paradice Palace in December. I look forward to seeing this series. Kate said something like “art is for artists” and I agree, to a degree. I know that I look at art, listen to artist interviews, or read their bio’s to create a kinship or sense of relativity to them; some way to connect with their experience and to what it is that brings them to make the art they make. But I hope art is for more people than artists.
Having a studio has brought up a lot of things for me. In 2016, I read the Bukowski poem “Air & Light & Time & Space”. In the poem, he tells off a female artist for saying “I finally have the studio with light and my kids are grown and I have the time to make the work” because he thinks you can make art anywhere, no matter the time constraint or circumstances. I absorbed this anecdote as honorable and true for many years. Buuuuuuuuuut I think it’s different for women. It’s a safe space. No judgements. Freedom to play. And in terms of practicality, if you are making bigger work, you need a bigger space so you don’t poison yourself with oil paint fumes or get paint on your living room furniture… 😉
The decision and action of getting this studio happened in single a day. I just said FUCK I HAVE TO TRY THIS, and I did. It wasn’t a long, aching desire. But I’m glad I did. It’s like that instant you know you have to quit a job. You’re on autopilot and you just do it. Survival mode.
I’m super hungry and will go home to meet Joe when he arrives home from a long day art handling. I will cook him fish for dinner. I don’t want to ignore those joys in life by obsessing over efficient and adequate time usage in my studio. A girl who is in a studio down the hall keeps giving me the stink eye. When she does it, it makes you stare at her longer, out of surprise or confusion, and she gets more pissed seeming.
On my birthday, May 4, I am releasing the piano composition, “Coral’s Theme” that I wrote for my short film, and a sheet music booklet with video stills. Transcribing the song into sheet music felt like a fluttering joy, like an actual hobby.
I have been talking a lot with my artist friend Rachael London in Baltimore. She makes work for public spaces to build community. She is currently a “Bloomberg Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health focusing on qualitative methods, logic models, design thinking and other tools for enhancing programs that support health equity, public space and environmental justice.”
I MEAN… WOW <3
