Tuesday, 24 November 1998 4:32 pm Artist's Journal?  What?  ~CIU

Tuesday, 24 November 1998 6:07 pm
Before my class at 3 pm this afternoon, DeForest and I had a long brainstorming session about my final project cause I had to write up a paper for class— that I never actually read or had to turn in, instead we were all asked to explain what we were doing and of course I was the last person to go, shy one that I am and this was practically after four thirty or right on the dot and I don't think that people were paying much attention.  Liz didn't seem to understand what I wanted to do, but I am going ahead with it anyway.  Sometimes art wins.  No, I think I give art the game a lot of the time.  Here's my quick and dirty mini essay on my project (it's only a little more refined and organized than a journal entry anyway:

Childhood is a non-linear existence within time, filled with wonder about the myths and realities of life.  Since early this summer when my mother began telling me stories of my own childhood, things that had happened to us that I cannot remember or barely remember because I was so young, I have been interested in re-exploring my own childhood in terms of these stories, in terms of the myths I inhabited as a child.

Fiction, reality, and memory are all functions of mythology.  Through these three functions, I hope to disseminate the physical and mental worlds that I ruled a child in the form of two books, one "fictional" and one "autobiographical."  As I plan to show with these two books, the genres of fiction and autobiography are not exclusive and, especially in the realm of childhood, one does not exist without the other.

By definition, fiction is imaginary, reality is truth, authenticity, and memory is a collective interpretation of our past and nearly everything that we have experienced.

In relation to adult reality, childhood is non-linear.  The memories, realities, and fictions of childhood operate on a different scale, a scale generally, blithely described away as fantasy.  To aid in this sense of non-linearity, which is important to childhood, I will publish these books in the form of a web page— and take very seriously, that this form is a web.

The first story, the fictional book, will be a familiar tale to my childhood, some story that I existed in when I was young yet it will still be recognizable to readers, not as a single story that they once knew, but many stories.  This follows a very Jungian notion of stories we commonly share as human beings, stories that define our existence.  This will not be just a fiction related to my childhood, but somewhere blurring the bounds of childhood reality as well.

The second story will surfacely-speaking be more autobiographical, but undertoned in the telling with the stories and worlds of my younger self.  It will not be straight exposition of who I was as a child, but a more subtle "here's what I did" with the readers almost painting the stories in themselves and certainly drawing their own conclusions of who I am as an adult today.

The last important physical element to these books are photographs.  I plan to use old photographs, selected from various points throughout my youth, to illustrate these books.  The same pictures will illustrate both books, serving to tie the two works together in a physically recognizable format.

By publishing these books on the World Wide Web, my options are very open for creating out-of-site links, and small tangents of myth and reality drawn from the word of mouth of other people, like family and friends.  If time permits, it would be interesting to look at single photographs of a particular incidents and the varied stories that people can tell about this seemingly fixed point in time.  What is the reality of a photograph?  What stories do they tell?

I would also like to incorporate, most likely within the text of my two tales, words, phrases, passages from the unique books that I read as a child.  These are literary pieces that helped to color my environment, so I think that are important to the product as well.  Time permitting, I will also look at songs that listened to and sung as a child— publishing to the web gives me the option of using sound files.

By these books, their associated tangent materials, and the mythologies that I hope to stir up within those people that experience the finished project, I want to have successfully explored a portion of the physical and mental environments of childhood through the window of my own childhood— which is the material that I know most intimately.

~CIU

Sunday, 29 November 1998 7:20 pm
Mom's turn now.  I have been through some of our family pictures, a week ago, but now I need the stories.  I started writing one of them Thanksgiving morning right when I woke up and I liked where it was going, but then I had to go clean and cook cause no one else was home to do that.  Now I hate it.  Well, I don't hate it, but it doesn't work for this project, it's too long and maybe too personal.  So it's mom's turn to be my savior.

She tells me I should start with the autobiographical story and that I should try writing about cats cause cats and kittens were a big part of my life as I was growing up.  And my parallel fantasy feature can be unicorns cause I really loved unicorns when I was little.  Wow.  It works so well!  The unicorns especially took me by surprise cause when she said it, I knew that I had been working up to this point— I had been rediscovering unicorn pieces of my childhood: the movies I had watched, the stuffed animals, the books.  I was never overboard with unicorns or anything else that I can remember.  But in a strange way, unicorns have still echoed down time's passage, past the time when dragons were cooler than unicorns, past the time when I found out that I still knew the movie The Last Unicorn by heart, (seven years after I had last seen it), past the time when I bought myself a Beanie Baby unicorn even though I really hate that Beanie Baby mania.

So now I am to write about cats.  I hate forcing myself to write and be creative about it.  I really do.  But time's ticking away.  I need to have this done before I go back to Ann Arbor.

~CIU

Tuesday, 01 December 1998 10:30 am
Artists are curious, fickle folk.  They can harbor great amounts of passion that will suddenly explode under pressure of inspiration or deadline.  But they have slow burning fires perculating long term dreams, transforming those elusive visions into creations.  And when an artist has poured out her heart or soul, and worn her fingers to nubs, the canvas is colored, the page is filled, the monument erected— what is left?  Of the artist or her materials?  She can walk away and hope that people see something of herself and something of humanity in the piece she has created but most of all she hopes that they will never really know how much went into the work, how much blood and tears.

I consider myself an artist, of one type or another.  At times (like now) I am not sure that I really feel there is a need to distinguish or delineate or care.  I create.  My art eats me and feeds me and I love it.  I am a writer.  I also love ceramics and paint and photography and mixed media sculpture.  I like fantasy and history and Jungian psychology  Over times perhaps these things will come to love me as well.  But I know my pen loves me.  It is a love-hate relationship.  No, it's not that but it definitely hurts a lot of the time.  It hurts to perform and produce under pressure of a deadline but that work buys me the times that I ignite under pressure of inspiration.  School makes it difficult to tend these fires, but I recognize that my trouble is directly drawn from an external force and it is not permanent.  I look at my mother and see how her own writing and the time that she puts into writing has evolved over the course of my life.  She used to never have time and now she writes all morning before she goes to work and she's happy to be writing more.  No one way is forever.  No frustration is boundless.  Change is inevitable.

I admit to being totally dumbfounded at the idea of keeping an artists' journal for this final class project.  Journals are very personal and it is not my experience that a majority of artists keep any sort of regular journal.  Maybe 40% do.  But that's a subjective estimation cause I am a writer and know many writers.  And perhaps writers keep journals more than other artists do.  I don't know.  Also, I don't keep much of a journal when I am taking classes cause I don't have the time.  The pieces of my soul are scattered around— I just can't find the piece of mind to curl up around my notebook.  I do have one though— journal, that is.  Finally, anything that I would put into my journal during this period of time that I am working on my project for this class would probably not relate to what I am doing.  The best that I can show for an artists' journal is a progressive report is what is being sought, are the consecutive rough drafts.  Take those.

~CIU

Saturday, 05 December 1998 evening
The stories are written, most of the pictures are scanned (thanks mom and dad, for loaning me the scanner).  I began writing the web pages tonight using Netscape Composer.  It's not a bad program, but sometimes I don't have all of the freedom that I am used to from producing printed projects in CorelDraw or Wordperfect.  But it's just a new program, I am still learning the ropes.  Now it's Matthew's turn to help me cause he's done plenty of web pages.  All afternoon and night, as I have been working, I leave a connection open on my modem and whenever I have a question, I send him an ICQ message and he promptly gets back to me.  It's great!  It's better than the help menu!  So far, his extremely valuable contribution has been telling me to use tables in order to put images and text together without those components going all over the page wherever they want and looking ugly.  Tables = control.  He also helped me figure out why none of my images were loading after I first attempted posting what I had done of my site.  Evil Photoshop (actually, I would just like to state for the record that I worship Adobe!) saved my pictures with the extensions in capital letters: .JPG.  And when I uploaded everything to the server, they were saved there in all lower case letters.  Arg!  Matthew saved the night from being drowned in tears of frustration.

~CIU

Monday-Tuesday, 07 - 08 December 1998 middle of the night
 The presentation of the project is tomorrow.  No, let me correct myself: today.  I have spent all of my weekend— all night Friday, all day and night Saturday, Sunday night— working on this project: scanning pictures, arranging typeface and jpegs.  Let me tell you, mister journal, this doesn't leave me feeling so inspired.  It's four thirty am right now.  I wrote Matthew an ICQ message an hour and a half ago sending him to bed.  A little less than twelve hours and the whole world, including my class, will be enjoying the fruits of my labor.  Twelve hours from now I will peek into this journal from it's online version and laugh at myself.  Hahaha.  Silly girl, why do you always stay up all night?  I fool myself into feeling inspired that way.  I become so tired, I am beyond fatigue and until my html editor program crashes just as I am aligning the last line of text (no, I am really not kidding, that did happen to you Carol.  Something about Murphy's Laws, eh?) and I stand up for a moment and stretch— cause damn if you don't need a taller chair!-- oh then I feel it.  But what is there to do but reopen the program, hope that I saved sometime in the past hour and oh thank goodness I did, I only have to redo half of the page.  Presto.  I am a magician.  My secret: the dead still middle of the night.  When I can't think and no one else is thinking either.  They are all dreaming and I am pretending to dream.

Right now, not a whisker of an animal is moving.  Too early for the early risers and too late for the night walkers.  Even the Moon is sleeping.

I have done my duty here, added to the great tome of my artist's journal so that all may know the secrets of my soul during its creative process.  So that these precious processes are carved into the proverbial stone for later reflection, for grading, for judgement, and hopefully someone's amusement.  Here's hoping those who one day read this will have as sweet of dreams as I am about to join.

~CIU

Tuesday 08 December 1998 10:50 am
Sometimes I think it is harder to wake up from having had only a few hours of sleep than to just stay up and crash when it's all over.  Maybe so.  But I also don't want to get sick again.

The main pages— the story pages— are done.  Not posted cause I want to get other stuff finished before I sign on and just dump it all in one giant load.  I should really put each page in it's own directory but that would involve a lot of fiddling with the links in each file so I am not going to worry about it unless, for some wild reason, I get ahead of myself.  Maybe that is what I will work on before Thursday when it is all officially due.  Gosh, I have to do printouts.  That could get messy with the formatting.  No, let me correct myself: it will get messy with the formatting when I print.  Oh well.  It was never intended to be a print medium.  That's another project for another lifetime.

~CIU

Tuesday, 08 December 1998 4:40 pm
Class is over.  Presentation is over.  Thank the gods.

Can I be erratic and be forgiven?  I am afraid this journal isn't everything that it was supposed to be and then I feel that that is silly so I am not going to worry about it.  Just wanted ya'll to know that it bothered me for a moment.

I am going to touch up some things for the page before I "turn" it in for good Thursday.  Liz wants a printed version of my journal (oh boy) and if I can get it to work and my printer can handle it, I will print up my web page for her.  Though I worry, from an artistic point of view, that that would ruin the purpose of putting it on the web, of making people interact with a virtual world where things don't move in straight lines.  So Liz, if you are reading this and I don't turn in a printed version of my web page, this is where I officially ask for forgiveness.  Sometimes art wins!

My momma taught me well.

~CIU

Thursday, 10 December 1998 10:34 am
Feels strange to not have thought about my web page for over 24 hours.  I was living and breathing html there for a while.  But it was also good to have a chance to stand back from all of it and go "hmmm" and "ahhh" and "oh damn, I have to fix that!"

~CIU