Photographs from The Apartment here in San Francisco. I'm always totally mystified by the shopowners discretion over pricing these photographs and discerning which have worth. In the art market things are generally sold by size ratio for beginning and mid-carer artists (if one drawing is half the size of another and done by the same artist than the price is generally also half that of the other). Certainly composition and subject matter should be considered, but it also makes for awkward comparisons like the one in the pricing of these two photographs:
We drove back from Portland today and are exhausted but it felt good to be driving home towards a bed that's firm and all mine and to put dry shoes on my feet. Today and tomorrow I'll rest and work to make money, but come Tuesday the heat will turn on and I've got to get back to making. 
Morgan and I had a visual day biking around Portland to the Farmers Market, Powells, Reading Frenzy, Liz Leach Gallery, Sweetpea Bakery, Really Good Stuff and Vita Cafe. Once it got dark it became harder to look at things so we switched into the car. To complete our Portland adventure we decided to go to a strip club, a place of looking that neither of us really know much about. The looking was interesting-- especially looking at the looking, looking at what was being looked at, and looking at the look of looking.
Since my camera is still precarious I'm relying on Morgan to photographically capture this road trip-- hopefully not a heavy load to bear. We occasionally become self-aware of how weird it is to take pictures sometimes, especially of ourselves. It's especially strange to watch someone else take a picture and what they're taking a picture of knowing that neither of these views are the ones being captured when the camera goes *click*.
I found this in Portland at Really Good Stuff where I got a lot of new things for drawings-- photos of course, but mostly in the form of scrap books. I'm totally pumped about them-- one of them is from a family whose first cousins I have school pictures of already (weird). I also got a bunch of just loose pages. The photo here is one of two in a small squashed book I found-- the rest of the pages are totally blank. I like the scrapbooks I have where photographs are obviously missing, having slipped out or been extracted by prying hands before I bought them. These spaces are really provocative to me because they call for insertion. I'd like to draw the missing photographs, or insert photographs from other family narratives (maybe even my own) in their place. Nearly all of the scrapbooks I own now are from the 70's and 80's-- the era just before I was born. I'm particularly interested in this time period because it seems like all the events that happened in my family are directly causal to my existence. Which, now that I wrote it, really sounds quite self-invested and I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. Anyways, I like these small books because they are portable-- the bigger scrapbooks are really not-- they're pretty much the most unwieldy objects ever made, as if intentionally crafted to sit on a coffee table or human lap and never leave.
Morgan and I left around 3:00 pm yesterday and drove up the Pacific Coastal Highway. Unfortunately it got dark two hours later and the vast majority of this journey was done in the dark-- but surprisingly the dark made the redwoods seems even more colossal as they bounced off the light from my high beams. The moon was bright and lit up the ocean to be a dull flat gray all the way to the horizon. The giant rocks off the coast were lit with mist and seemed like enormous beached whales. We hit a raccoon and mourned it by turning off the car radio and driving quietly under the stars. Around midnight we crossed the state border and arrived at Harris Beach where we had reserved a yurt for the night.
What I determined from the past few postcard themed posts is that people, for the most part, generally describe their travel as benignly as they possibly can. Which is interesting because although people travel with the impetus of leaving home but the descriptions of their travel reveal that they have actually taken a lot of home with them-- their vocabulary, their values and their ways of doing things. In a class I took at Wesleyan regarding the sociology of tourism we discussed how travel becomes meaningful only when daily rituals are disrupted and the predictability of routine is changed to create new ones. In fact, the longer you are away from home the more these disruptions have the potential to become normal eventually making the return to home disruptive of these more newly adopted routines.
I worked on finishing the ragged edges of the screen in this drawing I started last summer. I'm thinking about having some stuff caught in the wire, but am hanging it on the wall for awhile to think about it. It might be a boring drawing.
After such a long time coming I completed filling in the texture of this piece I started last year. I decided I'm going to focus on finishing things for the next few weeks before winter break so that I don't have too much unfinished business laying around my studio-- it's been getting kind of cluttered and overwhelming.
Marion,
Left Riviera Beach this (Thursday) morning. Drove through Miami and came on the trail to Naples on the gulf on the west coast. Sorry you have so much snow in N.J.. We were at the beach all day Monday and the water was very warm. Love to you all,
This is a Big village gone busy. Wish you were here. 
Morgan and I have known eachother for 6 months-- when I remembered this tonight I didn't stop there with my thinking in numbers... that's 1/2 a year... that's 1/50th of my life... that's 1/20th of the decade that is almost over. 
Thems any sentiments too. 
Dear Mrs. Fulmer,
Looks as if your F. would be sent to a convention of Soil Conservation Service at Clovis, N.M. next Sunday. He would be there 2 or 3 days. If you should be on your way here and coming by way of Clovis you might see him there. 
I'm making plans to take a trip up to Portland for Thanksgiving at Vanessa's house and Morgan has decided to come too. We have loose plans to drive up the coast and stay at a beach yurt in Oregon, but the biggest plan we've conceded upon is to try to not make too many plans. But the thought of trips and travel has got me looking at pictures and postcards from the trips of other people to see what they elucidate. This picture reminded me of the pictures in my grandparents' travel albums full of photographs of one or the other of them standing in front of something old, beautiful, or historically significant. 
Two women standing, faced towards the camera, space between them, one closer, one further, both with right arms loose by their sides and left arms bent at the elbow, hands resting above their hips. Dark high-waisted skirts, all the way to the ground, eclipsing their feet as if they're floating. belts with shiny metal buckles, tucked in high-collared shirts, long sleeved, poofed upper sleeves. Hair pulled back and up. In the corner of a yard, housing on both sides, badly weathered siding in need of fresh paint. Most windows are missing their shutters. A simple elevated porch with no railing to the left. A large barrel against the wall with potted flowers on top. The grass is strewn with organic debris, mulch, dead leaves, hay, grass and weeds. Perhaps it is fall. In the front are fast moving geese, perhaps four or five or six-- their forms are bright and warbling with their beaks down searching for food. A single rooster stands amongst them, still and not eating, so still you can count the dark feathers on his tail plume. The women are watching the camera. The one towards the front, perhaps holding a basket, is playing with the clasp in her belt.
I've had the picture with the man and dog and fox for over a year and only realized today that it is actually the flip side of this photograph here (the intended front side judging by the colored border and the printing quality), presumably of the same dog. I was totally pleased by this newfound reversability, what it means and how it elaborates on a lot of my previous postings, drawings and ideas.
A man in a hunting cap, earflaps up because he's been running, jacket unzipped, high collar, formal hunting vest and tie. Pants tucked into high-pulled wool socks. Sturdy laced boots. Seated on a lichen-studded rock with beagle, thin rope around the neck, and dead fox. Rifle in lap, pointed towards the unseen sun. Moustache, eclipsed eyes. Dog implores, fox laughs. Scant vegetation.
I drew a mountain of babies in my sketchbook during class on Wednesday and today I worked on making it for real. I've been thinking about ways to start using the images of the people from my photograph collection and it seemed to me that making landscapes with their forms would be an interesting way to talk about the phenomenology of photographs and how the bodies portrayed in them sit in that gray/grey space between being an object and being a body. I spoke to new advisor Abner Nolan about it a little bit yesterday who suggested that if I made such a thing it would have to be colossal in size in order to be impressive. I'm shooting for a mountain about 5 feet off the floor-- I'm about 1/3 of the way there.
When my grandmother died I was given the responsibility of putting together a poster of photographs taken over the course of her life. Some of the photographs, like this one, were so attractive in their composure and curation. At the memorial ceremony people kept coming up to me to tell me how I looked just like my grandmother-- it was a strangely morose and flattering at the same time. My grandfather tried to convince me take some of the photographs with me but my father took over the role of family historian and insisted that all the photos stay exactly as they were (read: as my grandmother composed them-- it is her handwriting labeling the bottom of this photograph here). So instead we made photocopies of the pictures I felt most precious. My father was emphatic about the importance of these photographs and expressed horror at the idea of me mixing them into all the other photographs in my collection. I'm still thinking about what that fear was all about.
I made this at Morgan's house on Sunday night as we waited in vain for an episode of Dexter to download. I bought a couple of rag rugs last week and have been thinking of new ways to incorporate them into my practice. Yesterday Jeff Gibson told me that I should stop thinking so hard and just make whatever seems appropriate... confusing because one of the first things he said to our class was that he felt it was important for artists to be responsible and conscious in their making (which I understood to mean non-intuitive).
Tim Gardner
Tara Donavan
Sue deBeer
Phoebe Washburn
Monica Bonvicini
Michael Krebber
Lara Schnitger
Kate Gilmore
Ellen Harvey
