Day 360: Twelve.ThirtyOne.13

I really enjoy getting my nails done. The gel polish kind. I’m terrible at doing my own nails, and impatient, often impulsive, and not particularly dainty about my everyday life, so the gel thing just works. For weeks at a time.

It’s terrible for me and the environment and there are other things I could be spending my money on I know.

Today I tried my hand at recreating the last look I had done – one sparkly finger on each hand. Still left over from my Nutcracker days, this vile of craft glitter has come in handy on many an occasion.

Happy + Sparkles + All that good stuff

Happy + Sparkles + All the good stuff

Here’s to another day of creativity…

Advertisement

Day 358: Twelve.TwentyNine.13

Oh to be productive. I had such high hopes for this day.

Oh to lack the willpower to see it through. I had such low outcome on this day.

Here’s to another day of creativity…

Day 357: Twelve.TwentyEight.13

A facebook game:

Here’s a game: let’s fill Facebook with art. Those who ‘like’ this image will be assigned an artist, then they should post a photo of a work by that artist, continuing the chain. I was assigned Sarah Sze.

(Just my own note here, not part of the game itself… I LOVE THIS! I’ve already learned soo much about artists I formerly knew nothing about. Or at least, thought I didn’t. Turns out I have photos of Sze’s work from one of my many visits to The Highline. I just didn’t realize it was hers… Anyways, those of you who know me know this is completely the kind of thing I love to be a part of… Thanks for being so awesome Keila!!)
Hope you will want to play along, too, friends!)

Sarah Sze: Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Sze graduated Summa Cum Laude from Yale University with a BA in 1991. She then received a MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1997. Sze is an alumna of Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts, from which she graduated in 1987.
Career

Since the late 1990s, Sarah Sze’s signature sculptural aesthetic has presented ephemeral installations that penetrate walls, suspend from ceilings and burrow into the ground. The artist creates immense, yet intricate site-specific works which manipulate every space—be that a gallery, domestic interior or street corner—and profoundly affects the way it is viewed. Sze’s practice exists at the intersection of sculpture, painting and architecture where her formal interest in light, air and movement is coupled with an intuitive understanding of colour and texture. Sze utilises a myriad of everyday objects in her installations from cotton buds and tea bags to water bottles and ladders, light bulbs and electric fans. Presented as leftovers or traces of human behaviour, these items, released from their commonplace duty possess a certain vitality and ambition within the work. Her careful consideration of every shift in scale between the humble and the monumental, the throwaway and the precious, the incidental and the essential solicits a new experience of space, disorienting and reorienting the viewer at every turn.[3]

Her intricate works, each of which she constructs by hand, consist of unexpected and carefully arranged combinations of materials. Sze transforms these everyday objects into gravity-defying works in horizontal and tower-like formations that zigzag into the heights of gallery spaces.[4] In 2011-2012, her work Still Life With Landscape (Model for a Habitat) was installed on the High Line in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and received the AICA Award for Best Project in a Public Space. In 2016, a permanent installation of drawings by Sze on ceramic tiles will open in the 96th Street Subway Station on the new Second Avenue Subway line in New York City. [5]

Sze is a 2003 recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program “genius grant”.[6]

Sze lives in New York with her husband, Siddhartha Mukherjee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies, and their two daughters.[9][10]

Bio courtesy of Wikipedia

Artwork by Sarah Sze

Artwork by Sarah Sze

Here’s to another day of creativity…

Day 356: Twelve.TwentySeven.13

These were actually captured on Christmas and yesterday, but thought they were worth the delayed share:

md street art

 

md street art

 

dc architecture

 

dc architecture

 

dc architecture

Here’s to another day of creativity…

Day 355: Twelve.TwentySix.13

As the end to this year-long resolution – experiment – draws to a close in a mere ten more daily posts, I’ve been doing some thinking about where it’s brought me, and what happens next. Except… I thought it would be wholly more profound than it is. Like this whole AaaaaHaaaa moment of clarity. I would have my life figured out. Except… I don’t. In some respects, I feel exactly where I was an entire year ago. And yet, I know, I know, of course, I am not at all the same person I was when I sat down to a blank blog screen.

I do know that this whole thing has been wholly about me (how selfish) – about discovering and uncovering and repairing. But also, hopefully, something universal and relatable and worthy of reading. So instead of drawing out the much bigger meaning, I will simply share the thirty (that’s a lot right? But I do have three hundred plus entries, and I’ve become quite attached to this thing…) posts that I feel most connected to. The ones that were the most difficult to write, the easiest to post, the most heartfelt… You get the picture.

In no particular order of importance, rather in order of appearance:

  1. Day One. Remains the backbone of my wish for this project. It’s why, and how, I create.
  2. Day Five. Felt good to write. It came from a totally true and honest place.
  3. Day Eighteen.  Regret.
  4. Day ThirtyOne. The dream that just won’t quit.
  5. Day ThirtySeven. The Virgo dilemma.
  6. Day SeventySix. To heal.
  7. Day SeventySeven. Why I look good.
  8. Day SeventyNine. Guerilla gardening.
  9. Day OneHundredFive. Beautiful darkness.
  10. Day OneHundredTwentySix. Onstage magic.
  11. Day OneHundredFortyThree. My health care dilemma.
  12. Day OneHundredSixty. A little reminder that the sun will shine again.
  13. Day OneHundredSeventyThree. A Love Story (for my someday child).
  14. Day OneHundredEightyFour. Relationships of the fairytale kind.
  15. Day OneHundredEightyNine. A day of discovering.
  16. Day TwoHundredOne. How I know the world will be alright.
  17. Day TwoHundredEleven. Thanks Girls Like Giants for re-posting this one.
  18. Day TwoHundredTwentyEight. I’m (still?) a dancer.
  19. Day TwoHundredFortyThree. Time to start acting my age.
  20. Day TwoHundredSixtyOne. A reconnection of the artistic kind.
  21. Day TwoHundredNinetyOne. To Believe.
  22. Day TwoHundredNinetyTwo. The art of blankets.
  23. Day TwoHundredNinetySix. My mama is cooler than most, well, people.
  24. Day ThreeHundredTwelve. So ludicrous I just would do it.
  25. Day ThreeHundredFourteen. Validation for all my crazy.
  26. Day ThreeHundredEighteen. Some whimsy. (It doesn’t all have to be serious all the time, after all.)
  27. Day ThreeHundredTwentyThree. An amazing day doing one of the things I love best – discovering a city’s art and space.
  28. Day ThreeHundredTwentySix. Love. Love. In Love. Want. Want. Want to do this.
  29. Day ThreeHundredTwentyNine. The beauty.
  30. Day ThreeHundredThirtyOne. Seattle. Rediscovered in photos.

Here’s to another day of creativity…

Day 354: Twelve.TwentyFive.13

For years I cringed every time I heard even a few notes of Nutcracker music ringing out in stores and on commercials this time of year. Having spent the better part of two decades listening to the entire score from September through December, it was all I could do to tune it out once I got into my twenties and ‘put ballet behind me.’ I told myself it was similar to ‘It’s A Small World’ – something I just couldn’t get out of my head. A jingle that grated on my inner ear.

The truth, though. The truth is I miss it. So much. And for many years it was just too painful to be reminded of it, knowing I had ‘put ballet behind me.’ I miss being part of a tradition so much larger than me. Focusing on a singular goal for so much time, all leading up to sharing a timeless joy with so many audience members. The hours upon hours of rehearsals and classes, the waiting to find out what parts we would be playing that year – it could be agony to be sure. But also something so special I craved it – still crave it. Nutcracker was synonymous with Christmas for me. And then when it wasn’t I went in search of all kinds of other holiday traditions that just never seemed to fill the void.

I tried putting my pointe shoes on again the other night. (I posted pics HERE.) To be reminded of what it felt like to be a dancer. It hurt. More than it used to. And I may never put them back on and return to the stage to delight audiences with my fancy footwork. But I also know, now, more than ever, that I will never stop being a dancer. It will never be behind me. The torture I have felt throughout the years when I have made the conscious – or not – decision to turn my back on dance, it was because I was being untrue to myself. I can’t ever separate me as a being from me as a dancer. We are one and the same, even when the perfectionist in me doesn’t feel my current state lives up to the dancer I once was, or could have been.

But I digress. The point of tonight’s post was, that I was reminded today of how much joy Nutcracker has brought to me throughout the years. And while the holiday spirit didn’t quite snatch me up this year, reminiscing about my dancing days did bring a smile to my face. And it brought me to the below picture, which also made me smile.

Nutcracker Memories

Here’s to another day of creativity…

Day 351: Twelve.TwentyTwo.13

I generally have a fairly optimistic perspective on life.

Not these days.

I’ve become pretty dark in my own mind and I’m not really sure how to let the sunshine return.

I see occasional flickers of light.

Now, I just pray for daylight to dance its way back in.

Here’s to another day of creativity…