Today I received an email from a friend who works in academic publishing. She noticed that one of the authors of an article she was editing listed his affiliation as “Department of Luminescence, Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow.” Isn’t that beautiful? I don’t even want to look up what one might actually do in a Department of Luminescence, because I’m sure it’s much more mundane than it sounds.

I’ve been stuck lately in a cycle of pondering art and its role in the world, and my role within those ideas, which, much like the idea of a Department of Luminescence, is probably best not examined too closely. Every year after the spring/summer art-craft show season I expect to feel relaxed and happy, but I inevitably end up feeling drained and uninspired. I’ve been trying to figure out just why that is.

I think part of it is the vague uneasiness I feel around the intersection of art and money. Obviously I don’t entirely believe that art is something pristine that should never be touched by evil commerce.  I like making money from my art. It’s very validating. But I think it’s easy to fall into a mindset where I start to measure success and thus happiness in terms of sales completed and money made, which is ultimately detrimental to my happiness and to how I think about art and why and how I make it.

This was a pretty good show season- I sold a fair amount of items, but the totals were a lot less than last year and even in some cases less than two years ago. Which if you’re measuring things in a purely monetary sense is not good, and it’s easy to start thinking things like “What am I doing wrong? What can I do to sell more?” There are countless resources online dedicated to increasing profitability for your art business, and it’s so easy to start thinking “oh I should work on SEO, revamp my website, pay a consultant, try to do more shows, start a mailing list!”  I get anxious because I’m not terribly interested in pursuing the standard Artist in the Art World path (trying to get gallery shows, apply for grants, increase renown, get rich people to pay a lot of money for my work, etc.), but if not that, then what? I’ve managed to carve out a weird little place for myself somewhere between Art, Craft, and Design, and mostly it works for me. So why do I continue to judge myself by standards I don’t particularly care about or want to pursue?

I don’t really believe in living according to a More Money = More Success = More Happiness model, and I especially don’t know why I let myself get annoyed about declining sales figures compared to previous years, because I definitely don’t agree with the prevailing economic theory that everything should keep growing and growing year after year and if it doesn’t then something is wrong.

What I do believe in is that I am happiest and my work is at its best if I totally forget about the idea of it as a product to be sold eventually (even if that’s really what it ends up being), and also if I totally forget about the Art World and potential viewers and what they will think about my work, even though of course I do hope that in the end what I make touches someone else somehow, makes them happy or makes them think or remember something in their own life.

I think I’ve been feeling a bit stagnant and uninspired with a lot of my work this past year, like I’ve been just trying to produce stuff to sell and re-treading old ground because it’s been successful in the past. Particularly with things like the lens necklaces and digital collages it’s so easy to slip into a sort of mindless production mode, and it makes for bad work. Quantity over quality.  Yes, it’s nice when people think highly enough of my work to actually buy it. Yes, it’s nice to sit at a show and have people tell me “oh, I like your work!” But in the end, it’s not enough, it’s not why I do this. Acclaim and praise is not what drives me to stay up well past any sort of reasonable hour tinkering with projects. Whatever that drive is, it comes from within somewhere, and I ignore whatever it is at my peril.

I think it’s time to find a new direction, try some new things, while re-committing to some basic ideas. For one, just making the work that I want to make rather than worrying about what will sell and what won’t. If someone likes it and it makes them happy and they want to give me money for it, then that’s awesome. If not, then whatever. C’est la vie. I’m such an idealist, and such a cynic too. I love contradictions.

I’m more interested in the process of making art, the pleasure I get from it, art as exploration, art as fun, art as a way of living, than in anything else like making an impact in the art world or being famous or meaningful or making lots of money or whatever it is I’m supposed to aspire to.  This is why I’ve quite deliberately chosen not to try to make my art the sole source of my financial support. (I have a full-time job as a graphic designer, which I enjoy as far as jobs go, but I consider it somewhat separate from “my art.”) If that makes me a dabbler or a hobbyist or whatever other disparaging term there might be, then so be it. I’d like the word “amateur” a lot better if it were more commonly recognized as deriving from the French “from the heart” (or something to that effect).

I read an interesting interview today with a photographer, Phillip Toledano. He said some things that really resonated with my current frame of mind:

Well it’s interesting because I think about the art world a lot.  And I think about, you know, when you go to a gallery and read an artist’s statement. It’s terribly incomprehensible, right? It’s just kind of a simple club sandwich, layered cake extravaganza of references and connotations and words and people’s names, none of which means anything to me. And I feel like it’s almost directed not toward anyone, but the very tiny biosphere of curators and gallerists and the art world, right? So we’re all in this world talking to ourselves and it’s naïve. But part of me feels as though it would be nice if art makes things better for people, for the world in some way, if it shows them something that is possible.

…

I remember saying this as a kid. My father’s an artist and I remember talking to him about wanting to be an artist and saying to him if I can do art that changes people over time, shows them something for a second or a minute, changes their mind about something, that would be really worthwhile.

So, that’s always been my intention. But ultimately I can only make the art that I can make. I just do the ideas that speak to me and I talk about the stuff that’s interesting to me. Hopefully that will be of value to other people.

…I could just be f*cking talking to myself. I mean that’s the thing that you don’t know. Am I just bullshitting? Am I just drinking my own urine and telling myself it’s the finest red wine available? I have no idea. You know what I mean? You don’t know. You just hope that you make stuff that matters, firstly to yourself and secondly to other people.

I love coming across interviews or blogs where people say what I want to say, but better. I can only make the art that I can make. I find the idea of art as primarily a business, a calculus of effort spent and resources gained terribly stifling, but the idea of art as a way to live, an ongoing experiment, an experience, a practice much in the same way that yoga is a practice, a way to find the beauty, the luminescence in the ordinary, in life as a whole, now that’s interesting. I think that’s why I was so struck by this email about the Department of Luminescence. It sounds like a good name for my art life, for resolving to refocus and move forward with some new ideas and shake off some old ideas that have outworn their welcome, open the windows and let in some fresh air.

The most difficult question that people ask me at craft shows is “how long have you been doing this?”  If they mean “selling stuff at craft shows,” that’s easy- since 2006. If they mean “making stuff,” that’s a bit tricky…

Even though I didn’t start making jewelry to sell until 2007, jewelry and I go way, way back. I’ve pretty much always been fascinated by jewelry. Here’s a photo of me at the age of two (1979), wearing a necklace of white and green plastic beads. I have photos of myself wearing that same necklace dated as late as 1982, as well as other photos in which I am wearing other necklaces.  I remember making beaded necklaces in sixth grade to sell at a school fair, and in ninth grade rummaging around in my dad’s collection of odds and ends in the garage and making a necklace from various washers. I also had a big wire-wrapping phase and would make necklaces of marbles and various stones wrapped in wire.

To this day, I am rarely without a necklace and a bunch of big rings. Oddly, I always take them all off as soon as I get home. But if I go out without them I feel like I’m missing something. The moonstone on my left ring finger I got from a new-agey store on South St. I had been wanting a moonstone ring forever, just a weird thing that kept floating up in my mind. And the day I quit a job which wasn’t making me happy, I went out at my lunch hour and bought myself a moonstone ring. It’s sort of a reminder to myself of good things coming from making changes and taking risks.

The giant silver tree ring on my left index finger is my proudest jewelry accomplishment to date. I made it during a metalsmithing continuing education class at University of the Arts. Here’s a link to some in-progress photos.  It’s all one big piece of metal that wraps around. I’d really like to make more like this someday.

The thumb ring pretty much never comes off except when I’m doing flying trapeze. I just got it at a craft fair from a woman selling stuff she got at estate sales, so it’s nothing terribly interesting. It has a wavy line etched in the middle of it, which sometimes serves as a good reminder that life has its ups and downs and it all comes back around sooner or later.

The big ring on my right index finger is from nervoussystem on Etsy.  I love it because it was inspired by radiolarians and it’s the kind of thing I wish I had thought of making. It was 3D-printed, which is super cool too. The metals studio at Tyler had a 3D/CAD-CAM printer but I never got to use it since I only did one freshman class in metals (more on that later!)

And lastly, the right ring finger rings- the bottom one came from a craft show, and the other two are from sirenjewels on Etsy (I love her slogan “modern jewelry for the vintage soul.”).  I bought those as a 30th birthday present for myself.

Oh yeah, my nose ring. I got my nose pierced in the fall of 1996, a nice silver hoop, and have never taken it out. I guess nose rings are a bit passe, sort of like dying your hair purple (which I also did), but I still love my nose ring so it stays.  I’ve always left it in for job interviews, because I don’t want to work in the kind of place that has a problem with a minor non-ear piercing. Contrary to popular belief, it was not really some sort of act of art-school rebellion. I just saw a couple of girls around with nose rings and thought they looked beautiful, so I decided to get one. It may well have been one of the first kind of big things in my life that I did purely because I WANTED to, not because I had to or there was some good reason for it or it was necessary. So maybe it was a kind of rebellion. I don’t know. I got it done at Infinite on South St. I was on South St. with a few friends, and not a one of them even went with me into the piercing place. They all went to look around Armed & Dangerous while I was getting my nose pierced. So much for moral support. I guess I should have realized that was a bad omen about the future longevity of those friendships.

Anyway, in high school I took one metalsmithing class, since I liked making necklaces from beads and wire so much. I liked the class but I didn’t fall in love with it. I was frustrated by my slow, unsteady progress with sawing metal by hand. (I’ll have to see if I still have the pieces I made around somewhere!) Also high school class periods just aren’t enough time to really get into a project. When I went off to art school, I had it in my head already that I was going to be a painter, since that’s mostly what I focused on in my art classes and I enjoyed it (and I had some ridiculous notions about painting being “real art” and everything else being slightly suspect).

In freshman year you have to do a bunch of “foundation” courses in 2D and 3D design, and my second-semester 3D foundation course was in the metals studio. It wasn’t a jewelry class though, more like sculpture, which I had an especial prejudice against at the time. And I was totally flummoxed by the teacher’s insistence on having a “concept” before beginning work. This “concept” business would continue to be a HUGE issue for me during my entire art school career. At the time I thought it was because I was a shitty artist, but much later I realized that I just like playing with materials and developing a concept (or not) as part of the working process, rather than coming up with a concept first and then bringing it to life through the materials.  We did some metal casting which I thought was cool (I made a hideous sculpture with a fishbowl, wire, and cast metal leaves that were candle holders), and worked with some acrylic. I made a clock/lamp sculpture that’s kind of hard to explain and I don’t have photos of it unfortunately. There were etched poems on the base of it, and a blue lightbulb, and clear boxes that contained a shredded letter to a boy I had a crush on (cringe), and an analog alarm clock all wrapped up in a chain and suspended from the boxes. I didn’t wire the thing up right at first and it made a big bunch of scary electrical sparks the first time I plugged it in in my dorm room. It was all pretty awful. I really wish I had photos though! I liked incorporating a lot of words into my art at the time, and the professor asked me “why don’t you just go be a writer then?” which I took as a huge insult although in retrospect it was totally a valid question. Anyway, the whole thing probably unnecessarily soured me on the whole metals studio idea.

Sometimes I wonder how things would be different if I had majored in jewelry/metals instead of painting/printmaking…But here I am, finding my way into it,  in my own way, and I can really see myself starting to focus more on jewelry and less on painting…It’s gonna be interesting.

So, we’re doing a collaborative book exchange project. We’re each starting with a book, adding some drawing, painting, collage, whatever, to it, and then switching. Then we get to add stuff to each other’s images, and then switch back, and then we’re trading two more times so we each end up with each other’s book. Our styles are quite different (although there are some similarities perhaps- some colors? mixed-media-ness?), so it’s going to be a lot of fun to interact with each other’s work and see what evolves.

Marci came up with a theme for the project of “what I’ve been up to for the past 10 years.” It’s been interesting to actually sit and think about what has happened since graduating from art school in 1999. I never would have thought this ten years ago when I was FREAKING OUT about what the hell was I going to do with my life after graduating, but I’m actually really happy with how things have turned out.

I got my book already for the project. It’s a guidebook to Italy, which seemed right for a couple of reasons. Marci and I (and another friend, Liz, who I’ll add a link to when she gets her site up and running!) were roommates in Rome during spring semester of 1998. I’m the first to admit that I’m not a very good roommate, but we had some fun times, and the apartment we lived in was such a cool place. It was itty-bitty, but beautifully decorated, and it was on the top floor of the building and had this amazing terrace garden, and a ladder so you could climb up and sit on the roof, where there was an astounding view of San Pietro. I had to go and dig up a photo of it to prove how amazing it was- here’s me on the roof (good god I look fat but it’s just really baggy clothes, what was I thinking!) :

The second reason I wanted to use a book about Italy for this project is because the semester I spent there was really the first opportunity I got to explore making books, and I fell in love with it. I really think that semester was a huge turning point in my artistic development. I was a double major in Painting and Printmaking, but I never felt quite right doing just one or the other. I was always interested by the idea of mixing mediums, but that was (understandably) frowned upon- you were supposed to paint in Painting and make prints in Printmaking. But in Rome I took a class called “Sketchbook,” where we went to different places in Rome to draw. The professor (Gennell Miller- here’s a link to a recent show of hers, which is about all I could find online) encouraged us to do more than just basic drawing- she was really into making these crazy mixed-media collagey books herself, so we basically had free rein to do whatever. It was amazing. I also had a painting class that semester, and felt so horribly blocked, and bored, whenever I tried to paint the requisite large-scale oil paintings. But whenever I worked on my books all was right with the world and I’d stay in the studio for hours on end cutting and pasting. I accumulated a large box of ephemera and magazines and odds and ends, very much like how I still work now. I ended up with a huge pile of painted, collaged, etc. books by the end of the semester. (You can see some of them here: Lungotevere, Roma, Xray, Silver, Nuovo)

Last week I started tearing out pages from my book to make space for extra collaged things, and I spray-painted the cover gold. Of course looking at this guidebook made me feel super nostalgic for Italy. Is it possible to feel homesick for a place that was never your home, or only a very temporary one? I was only there for four months but it really got under my skin. I haven’t been back since then, and although I hope to get there someday I know it will be totally different, and probably vaguely disappointing. Because really nostalgia isn’t ever just about a place, it’s also about a very specific time and set of circumstances, and who you were and what you experience and think and feel, and you can’t ever go back to that or recreate it.

As the project progresses, I’m going to post in-progress shots, to document the evolution of the two books.