Aluminumfoiled Abba

I’m writing from the motherland this week. In preparation for the long flights required to get here, I loaded my netbook with works in progress to work on during my gadget’s long battery life. I then spent the longest plane ride catching up on movies and TV shows through the video on demand system and slept on the shorter legs because I’d watched too much crap instead of calibrating my bio-clock to minimize jetlag. I told myself there would be plenty of downtime at my parents’ house and I would get lots of writing done there. I’m very good at lying to myself.

There has been loads of time during my first week here that could be used for writing, but the same thing that always happens when I visit happened again. Spending my days speaking Swedish means I can’t put English worth a crap on the page. My sentences are all wrong. I reverse the noun-verb order and can’t find a synonym to save my soul. My sentence structure becomes super simple and my work read like a first graders’ “What I did this Summer” essay. Read more »

I longed to learn printmaking since I first saw Goya’s etchings in an Art History class my sophomore year in high school.  And over the past few years I’ve thought a lot about pairing my writing with images. But despite the fact that as a child I spent more time drawing and scribbling than anything else, I never had any technical training or skill as an artist. Now that I’m finally taking a printmaking class in Eastern’s art department, I’m experiencing the difficulties of that technical side of things.

In fact, in a class full of art and design students, I feel somewhat handicapped in terms of basic tool-using. I’m good at making things up. I have detailed plans, images, and visions in my mind. But when it comes to carrying those visions out, there’s a disconnect; the technical process is what matters, and that’s where I lack confidence, experience and foresight. It’s all these foreign processes that cause anxiety and make me wish someone would sit there patiently and tell me what to do for each step so that my print comes out just how I see it in my mind. And while I love tools and objects and the tangible quality of it all, my fear of ruining the product often keeps me from embracing them. Read more »