Bring it on, Mack truck.

(Drawing: My First Tattoo, Age Twenty-One)

Because I have spent the last ten hours documenting and mounting in my web archive every single print, drawing, painting and doll I've ever made that I want preserved there. Hundreds of images, neatly categorized. My whole life's work, back to juvenilia. I am covered in charcoal, pastel and paint, and a white sheet may be ruined, but it's done.

I should feel a huge sense of accomplishment, but there are still all those blasted photos to scan. And scanning is much less enjoyable and more time-consuming than tacking huge drawings up and photographing them. But those will be next. And then, finally, I will be caught up with my own artistic output, except for the performance part of my career.

Now I am going to sit outside and enjoy a well-deserved cup of strong coffee!

I'm touched that people are so kind to me.

I decided, since I was buying groceries anyway, to go ahead and order the cake for the Anti(dote)Wedding today. I explained very briefly to the nice baker that I was doing an exhibition and performance on the day I probably would have been married as a ritual end to this chapter of my life. He was a man in his thirties, and his eyes got moist and he told me how sorry he was and that the cake would be beautiful, he promised. I told him not to be sad, that it was fine, really, that I'm an artist and this is just how I have to process my life. But he was genuinely sympathetic and it was so touching!

Same thing happened when I talked to the florist about the wrist corsage I ordered. She promised me it was going to be exquisite and exactly as I had envisioned originally when X and I were making wedding plans.

And when I told a co-worker about having gone ahead and bought the dress I had picked out and that I'm going to wear it anyway (not just for the show, but afterwards, too), and about "performing" my vows for the witnesses gathered just as I would really have done to X at the wedding, she teared up, too. She's getting a divorce, so, of course, she's probably super-sensitive about affairs of the heart right now.

It's all fine! Really. And I am just fine. In fact, I'm more than fine. Look what a period of creative output my heart-ache has fueled since January. But I am so deeply, deeply moved at how sweet, kind and tender-hearted everyone has been with me as I plan this show. Thank you. Vous êtes très gentilles.

Most of my favorite ghastly dolls...

are now photographed and up on my flickr portfolio.

I love to photograph them in atmospheric light; it's a kind of "playing" with them that I enjoy. And some of them are fairly scary, even if I made them myself.

Now that I have a digital camera and a scanner that works...

I've been spending quality time with my flickr portfolio and my writing archive site on blogger, Somnambulit, for the past couple of evenings. If you're interested, take a look. I've tried to embed slide shows of the photographs and drawings that go along with various written pieces and travelogues.

I'm not there yet, since all the photographs prior to 2006 are prints and will have to be scanned. And we won't even speak of the hundreds of 36" x 28" drawings that must be tacked up outside in natural light to photograph them. Or the lithographs. Or the hundred scary dolls that need special, atmospheric lighting to document.

Bob's death has definitely driven home the lesson that this is the year I must catch up with myself documenting my own work. I resent it, since it takes time away from making new work. But, slowly but surely I will work through the backlogue, and, someday, it will be done.

I must admit it makes me feel a little better about my productivity as an artist to start to see my written and visual archives come together. Once I finish the making of something I'm no longer interested in it and just shelve it or store it as I move "on, on, on to the next one." This archiving process makes it clear to me that I really haven't suffered any long periods without artistic output. While I'm not as productive, say, as Picasso, I have managed to crank out a fair amount of work considering I've always worked full-time and that I raised two children while making the work.

Finished the first doll for the show.

I really like it. But I won't entirely document it until the show. It "does tricks." And it is really, really brutal and scary.

Those German Expressionists should have made dolls. But I guess they were mostly men.

Damn! Look what I found...

on some French guy's blog!

Jane Birken and Brigitte Bardot in bed in what appears to be some kind of soft-core vampire porn movie. I have no idea at all what movie this is. Will have to consult imdb immediately.

http://bonjourplanetearth.blogspot.com/2009/06/il-etait-une-fois-brigitte-bardot-et.html

Can't figure out how to embed from the site he nabbed the clip from.

****

Wait! It's (English title) If Don Juan Were a Woman. I've seen it, but forgot this segment of this epistolary movie. And it was Brigitte Bardot's FINAL movie.

Making a Ghastly Doll.

She has a jaguar mask.

Up early,

my dear old friend having departed at the crack of dawn to retrieve her beloved dog and help her adult son move today back home. I had walked Buster by 8 and so sat down to re-read Senso, since I now have done.

Yes, definitely, this is the new series: Senso Furs, somehow combining both Senso and Venus in Furs to make the drawings. Yep, I can definitely get into this. And, much to my surprise, the two boxes of sharp, new pens required to draw and ink another series had magically materialized in my mail box yesterday, when I hadn't had time to check the mail.

I'm going to make two or three new dolls for the August 14 in-house show, make one textile/embroidery piece for the show, and then, the paper for the drawings gets torn down. I'll fester thoughts and ideas while I sew this week, and then, I hope, start drawing the next week.

And I also know what I'm going to write next, which has nothing to do with the drawings, but that I'm not tellin' yet.

Yay! Art ideas!

But I still have to scan all those old drawings and photographs for the archive :(