One year of graduate school down so lets talk about failures.

        Graduate School is a strange phenomenon, it is a life consuming whirlwind that one devotes their entire being too and then some.   Don’t get me wrong I love making things and being committed to my art making practice, I love stretching my mind, my hands and my skill set to rise to the challenges I have set for myself.  But there are days when I miss rock climbing and nature so fucking much that it physically hurts.  

            My life right before graduate school was a glorious period of itinerant homelessness, camping and climbing.  I feel a bit burnt out, a bit broken both mentally and physically.  I take crap care of myself during school, often forgetting to eat or only putting one meal in my body.  I ask my body to preform obsessive repetitive processes that hurt my hands and my back.  I drink too much and don’t sleep enough. 

            Today I am going to write about failure.  Art making is a continuous, terminal and never ending exercise in failure.  Ever piece, even the successes have certain aspects of failure, there are always details that I can and do obsess over . . . things that are not quite right.   I worked on these two pieces for about 2/3rds of my first year of graduate school.  They consumed my world.  I was obsessed with bring them to fruition and I committed hundreds of hours to them and as of yet they are still failures.  One more than the other but humbling giant learning experiences just the same.  

So I guess I thought I would start by showing you a drawing of an imaginary and by now much over crowded gallery space.  I do a lot of my more finished drawings in a program called sketch up and this is the fastest way for me to keep a catalog of drawings in one place.  I can never quite remember what thinks are titled in the drawing stage so its easier to keep a bunch in one place.  

But the these are the two projects I want to talk about specifically, the water wheel and the line (also not there actual titles but how I tend to think about them in my brain)

So this piece wants to get a kinetic element so it slowly raises and lowers and creates multiple compositions and multiple line drawings allowing the viewer to choose the composition they like  best.  Unfortunately the kinetic elements are on hold at the moment.  For two reasons, one I got burnt out on the piece and two  I don't have a giant room to hang a couple hundred pound piece in to just muck about with but I will later this summer.  The gallery space lies unused over the summer so in theory I can get in there and get it working and get proper documentation.

Here is a picture before the glass went in and I had it hooked up to a chain hoist.

So that piece feels more finished and less like a failure than the Water Wheel but even after hundreds of hours it needs a lot of attention and tlc and probably installation in multiple venues to be photographed before i think I might be happy with it.  The next one I am pretty unresolved with how I need to change/fix it but it too wants to be kinetic and got there for a bit but not in a way I really wanted.   Beyond that I have not even gotten good documentation of it.  Probably because it has persisted in kicking my ass.