The only real thing I feel like shit about these days is that the balance between friendships, being social, work, and my job is a tough one. I often feel I don’t give my friends enough time, and then at the detriment to being alone and working on my pieces. I’m (currently) trapped between the guilt of doing either because I run into the (flawed) emotion of feeling as if I’m ignoring the other. It’s hard to say no to people, especially ones that you love and want to be with, but it crushes me that I’m so focused on working and trying to make time… but I keep saying yes to hanging out or going out on a date (to get laid & wake up with a guy.)

See, I feel better talking it out now.

Honestly, I get, more and more each day, why artists are often recluse and independent, self-sheltering and censoring, singular and single. It’s lovely and convenient to our trade.

Now, where is my muse?

I can see Sutro Tower outside my picture window, and this is how I judge the weather in San Francisco.

Partly cloudy. Bright. Hazy.

San Francisco has been very hazy lately, and I mean this to be meteorological as much as metaphorical, visual. Wikipedia starts that haze “is traditionally an atmospheric phenomenon where dust, smoke and other dry particles obscure the clarity of the sky.” This description, however, does not conjure an image comparable to the titanium-hued haze that has been laying upon us.

It has been a fine mist, a diffuse lens, an amplifier of the sun. After the greyness of the rains, the doldrums of energy that crept through town as everyone slowed down and sought shelter, this brightness is violent and shaking.

It’s too bright to work. And, it’s almost too bright to go outside. We lower our eyelids and squint, little umbrellas deflecting the radiation.

Well, I have six panels in various states of priming. This feels great. In fact, everything that surrounds these new panels is radiating idea. It’s pretty powerful, actually… when I work on new panel it really takes me into the future. It’s an immediate fresh-start, a compass to everywhere, a radioactive boomerang… I just feel like there is so much beyond that starting point.

I also think about the life of my art, both in terms of the longevity of my ideas and the durability of the objects I create of those ideas. Each idea is its own structure. Built one on top of another. Adjectives, wallpaper. There is significant time, effort, and forethought into building a work space or a surface to work on. This time placed into preparing to work, yields time to work. It is a birthing process, literally.

Unlike organic creatures, though, the gestation periods are indeterminable, and the species of spawn a matter of calculated roulette.

A new piece is complete.

Of the body of work I have been working on for the past two years now, tonight’s completion makes me feel most celebratory. It has been named, like a child, and ready for rearing. Seal, affix, mount, frame and share; a new process in itself.

It was the second piece I’ve began in the past three months. It is the largest piece to date. I am incredibly proud of the accomplishment as I think it was a product of both inspiration and perspiration. And, perhaps, healthy frustration.

For all those waiting in the wings, your patience has been appreciated. Now, I am ready to begin sharing.

I have deleted my personal Facebook account for a variety of reasons.

It’s an incredible waste of time.
I didn’t really care about 80% of the people who were my ‘friends.’
Privacy and personal information storage and appropriation.

However, I respect that many use it as a ‘tool’ to aggregate feeds from the net and keep tabs on our ever-growing social circles. Makes you wonder whats going to happen to traditional social interaction… will it all be filtered through a piece of technology as time progresses? That makes me sad.

When I was 11 years old, I was obsessed with computers. I wanted as many as I could have. Game consoles, large grey Apple boxes (back when Apple was Apple, and more dependable than a PC,) beepers. I had them all, too. And, I played laser tag at the local mall.

Now, I am 31. It’s all lost its flair. I romanticize smashing my iPhone, watching the screen explode into tiny shards as I kill it and its slow, buggy platform. I find that I set the brightness on every piece of technology I use to the lowest setting possible, and it’s still too bright for me. (Mark my words, there are significant eye maladies coming down the pike because these excessively pre-programmed bright screens cannot be healthy for us.) Why does it feel like I’m staring into the ballast of a 4-tube fluorescent light fixture when I’m using a Mac? I still prefer to throw a CD in my stereo and listen to it over a quality sound system instead of four-cent earplugs. I’m long over the “next Apple release” hype, and I haven’t excitedly played a game console in over a decade. I loathe that I am considered “the tech guy” at my job.

I will maintain a business page on Facebook if anyone cares to add it to their profile… again, out of respect that some people use it as a bona-fide tool to maximize their social interactions/tracking in their daily life. I don’t see myself submitting more than this blog’s feed, though, as content.

I guess I can only say that being one of the first young kids on the internet back in the early nineties (remember paying by the hour for data access? Remember when your internet bill was over $200/mo? Remember 2400 bps?) that I’ve just reached internet burnout. Yes, I read the news, examine my checking account, and pay my bills all through my web browser. But, I still find the world itself entirely more fascinating than alerting the world about itself through the medium of a status update.

I really don’t care that you just farted on Muni, or that you’re hungry. We all fart, we’re all hungry.

Facebook, for me, has elevated and amplified the boring and mundane, the banal and the unnecessary of peoples’ lives. It has revealed too much about too many people I don’t already know, removing much of the mystery of meeting people sur la rue, blindly vis-a-vis. It has made me dislike people long before I ever even had the opportunity to like them. It seems that through social networking tools, the worst in people trumps their best. At least, it rises higher on a news feed.

If you want to know what’s going on, go outside and talk to someone. Even if they are not your ‘friend.’

I spent a few days in Los Angeles, one of the world’s unique centers of light.

There are many incredible traits of Los Angeles that I have experienced, and I think for the most part, many others experience those same marvelous moments each day there, too. However, this trip was not as exciting as I wanted it to be. It was my fault, really, with haphazard and delayed planning and too much delayed rushing up until departure.

The light of Los Angeles was incredible. It was exceptionally bright, almost blinding, after arriving from the vivid grey skies of San Francisco. It was so bright, in fact, that the smog was also exceptionally vivid.

Though the weather forecast predicted cooler temperatures and rain, the day always felt just a touch warmer than was comfortable. I kept thinking to myself that my underwear was too sweaty, a remark I rarely conjure.

Ace Gallery was remarkable, astounding, overwhelming, and wholly satisfying. John Millei was pretty much hanging in the whole span of the gallery, save for a few areas where other artists working with Ace were hanging for private viewing.

Millei is an incredible genius. His works of the Woman in a Chair series defy explanation; his simultaneous use of color and texture is so deft it silences you into emotion. The Maritime series is touching and well-thought, and leads the viewer to an amazing finish into the following chronological series.

At this point, having just been visually raped, my lovely host for the day and I trucked over to MOCA’s 30th Anniversary Exhibition. And, you know, if you ever feel like getting raped twice in one day, this exhibition makes the perfect choice for sloppy seconds.

By the time you’re in the second room of the exhibition, you’re already bleeding. (The chronological first half of the exhibition starts with a Mondrian.) Then there are the six powerhouse Rothkos, only to precede the two rooms of Rauschenberg, and then the Johns’… thank god they had Pop Art after all that because I needed to come up for air. My brain went comatose somewhere halfway through the remainder, and I pretty much drooled on the rest of it, taking it all in because I came to town for it.

I found myself listless and drained the next morning. I didn’t get out of bed until 1pm and then only out of hunger. I had regretted not figuring out a way to bring materials with me to work on art. There was no way I would be having any sort of experience with TSA disposing of my $84/gallon archival glue, even if it were accidentally more than three ounces of it. Since my head was still sore from the day before, I scrapped my museum plans while in bed because, frankly, I couldn’t absorb anymore ideas into me. Even the simple appreciation of viewing was absent myself. I suddenly wanted to be home working.

Of all the stimulation I went through, I must say that Rauschenberg was what really twisted the knife. Johns then poured salt into the wound; those two men were so brilliant in their youth, and my love and understanding of Jasper’s work just continues to grow… to think I once disliked and spoke unkindly of their works… I can be an asshole sometimes.

Mr. Rauschenberg was just an over-the-top artist. I feel very fortunate every time I view and understand his work, to understand the beauty he created for all of us, and see the arrows-of-direction he left for future artists.

Now, I am home. It has been raining intermittently since last night, in various volumes and weights. Drizzle, downpour, foggy blusters buffeting the window. It is beautiful. Here is beautiful.

I went to Los Angeles full of reservation. Admittedly, I pondered canceling last minute. I spent most of my time there thinking about San Francisco, my studio, my work, my direction. My recent personal triumphs and epiphanies, my newer pieces awaiting completion, the next works.

I’m glad I went to Los Angeles. It made me realize how much San Francisco is my home.