Tired

There are days when I'm tired, in a way that I never felt before then.  Tired in a way that just means no energy for anything, especially on Sundays.  I don't see churches as beautiful anymore, not in the way that used to get me up and going on Sundays anyways.  Family occasions cause anxiety now so my Sunday evenings are void of those.

Uninspired to draw I lay here, too tired for anything, inspired yet uninspired.

I wonder what my next step is.  

Expectations: Lesson from a Baby Tiger

I had a dream where a mysterious man in a cloak gave me a baby tiger.  The tiger reminded me so much of myself that I couldn't help but fall in love.  It would do the wrong things at the wrong time and never met my expectations.

That's a lot how I feel about myself in this body/life.  I never met anyone's expectations.  

Breakthrough

"You spend so much time being part of other people's art, but what about your own? You jump at the opportunity to see someone else make art, but sleep yours away."

Damn #truth! Until recently I've always been part of other people's art, being an art model doesn't leave you room to do much else.  I spent so much money in the last year buying art supplies that stay locked in a studio I barely spend time in.  I follow other artists on social media, but everytime I get to mixed media I give up.  Waxy soft color pencils were too difficult for my impatient nature.

This week was different.  Fueled by hash and Adderall I drew and coloured, and for the first time I felt comfortable about what I'd done.  I changed how I handled the markers, colouring in small circular motions and working quickly, changed my approach to colour pencils, bought a blender pencil and learned to sit with my style.

This morning I woke up feeling ready to dislike what I drew.  I hesitantly walked downstairs to my studio, and crept to my desk where I left my drawing.  The creamy colour of his skin was exactly what I wanted.  My right hand throbbed in pain but I reveled in feeling something. The pain showed that my hours of nothing were worth something after all.  I think before now I never let myself struggle, never let myself fully fail and keep trying.  I'm learning that it's what you do with your struggle that truly makes you great.

Blender/Calm Seas/Boundaries

For once I'm grateful that I spent money on art supplies!  I bought a set of two blender pencils and some inks and I had fun blending them. FINALLY get how people get that creamy skin time with marker and colour pencil!  And I almost gave them away because I didn't like the way burnishing with white or cream looked.

I started with skin tone because I'm not really sure how to get the look I want on Fashion Jesus' Face.

Also I kinda want him bigger so the mandala background seems smaller.

I think I'm having an art moment. Damn. I've been staring at Fashion Jesus too long.

What If?

To My Fellow Artists:

The next time someone calls you 'soft' or implies that your artistic nature makes you weak, remind them of this simple fact:

At one time, Adolph Hitler wanted to go to art school but wasn't accepted.  He went on to lead one of humanity's most atrocious acts in which millions of people were tortured, experimented on and killed.

What if Hitler had become an artist?

Brain in A Fishtank/ A is for Asparagus

I'm not even hungry, but I'm going to eat this meal.  I didn't eat enough calories all day.  This was supposed to be my lunch, not my before bed snack.

I always feel slow, like my brain is in a tank inside my skull. I wonder what that looks like.  A brain swimming around in a fish tank with fins.  I guess that's Piece 3 for Castro Castle.

F is for "Fashion" and "Food"

For once most of the food in the fridge is mine.  For months I've been starving because I could only afford one meal a day (if that).  Now, I go to the kitchen just to open the fridge and look at how pretty all the food looks arranged on the shelves.  After being hungry for so long, I can quite shake the feeling that I'm running out of food.  I only have 2 weeks until my EBT card gets more money for the next month but the feeling never quite subsides.

Right now my stomach is grumbling and I'm thinking of all the things in the fridge I can eat.  Macaroons or asparagus risotto.  Shrimp nuggets or just plain shrimp.  Shu Mai, lemongrass spring rolls, chicken curry, pesto cheese and crackers, grapes, strawberries, raspberries...

This time no one said anything about my being on food-stamps, quite the opposite, my aunt bought me pizza and sent me home with food when I went over to her house.  Turns out, neither her or her side of the family knew that I could draw or that I'm the least bit artistic.  Fashion Jesus wasn't the way I had planned for them to discover it, but Jesus (whichever one you believe in) had other plans.

Time for me to eat something and draw A, which stands for...

Alexander McQueen/Fashion Jesus

A mock-up that took me two days.  No matter how many pads of good paper I buy, my mock-ups always end up on taped together piece of tracing paper.

Still needs words, a halo a background and hummingbirds.

My cousin said she'd give me some cash at the end of the month to help out.  I hope it's enough to put a dent in my bills or buy art supplies.

I heard back from Barbizon.  They want me to come in April 5 and observe some classes.  She made it a point to tell me not to interject and to dress professionally.  Things are looking up (kinda).  

Bong hits, dinner, Alex and me.

#thatsmytribe

Alexander McQueen/Fashion Jesus

A mock-up that took me two days.  No matter how many pads of good paper I buy, my mock-ups always end up on taped together piece of tracing paper.

Still needs words, a halo a background and hummingbirds.

My cousin said she'd give me some cash at the end of the month to help out.  I hope it's enough to put a dent in my bills or buy art supplies.

I heard back from Barbizon.  They want me to come in April 5 and observe some classes.  She made it a point to tell me not to interject and to dress professionally.  Things are looking up (kinda).  

Bong hits, dinner, Alex and me.

#thatsmytribe

Raw/Objectified/Dinner for Thought/Intervention

I'm scrubbed raw, bleeding in silence for all you to see.

Soul a patchwork of scabs and scars nicks and scratches, bleeding in silence, in front of your apathy.

Beaten black and blue by your red white and blue dream that's really hollow and cold.

Just get over it

Get over being tired of living someone else's dreams?

That's a stupid thing to want to be! Be a doctor instead, you're smart.

Because holding someone's beating heart in my hands or curing someone of cancer is your choice for me to make.

I'm smart, but that's for you to decide what I do with it.

I'd rather hold your spirit and soul, imagination and thoughts.  Your intangibles, because money can't buy you that. It can't buy you my power to wonder.

Nothing I do makes sense to you, but then again, why should it? You never made sense to me. Dinners spent in my head instead, floating away in the glass of wine, the dinner I can't afford with the people I don't understand.

Why should I be what you want me to be? You don't understand what goes on in my 'smart' brain.

Dinner

How object-like you are.  I can't understand your words so your mannerisms are all I know.  You're saying something disapproving because your lips are pursed and you're sucking on your words like a child on a lollipop.

How's school?

You're only asking because it's formality.  That's the first question of the night, always from the tag along I don't know.  You're a part of that machine that churns out some random blob of a person. You're also Zimbabwean, and somebody's someone somewhere 'back home' knows you and by that you're a de facto something.  A zero of a person that I can't bother to remember.  Your suit speaks louder than you do.  You're a something that's corporate.  Something with a desk that leaves you starved for a personality.  I've yet to learn your name, but you seem to know mine mostly because people talk, but I don't.  I text and your Blackberry says you don't.

Do you want some creamed spinach? Pass the creamed spinach! Here's some shrimp

My you're shocked I'm here.  Appropriately dressed and in a decent mood.  My usually bunt way of speech has been turned into pleasant banter.  I've ordered a glass of wine and you're hoping it doesn't make me less than mellow.  How dare I order wine though, even if I'm 28! But as not to make a fuss, you shall too! You probably should be more important to me, because you're my aunt, but most times you act like an absent mother, one who offers the least bit of advice that's usually something I tried two years ago and didn't work.  You view my hardships as me being scatterbrained not under-funded.  You seem like you want me to like you, but I don't even think I want to like you.  You're too boring.  I can't talk about my fetish-gear wearing boss or about being half naked covered in paint.

Hi! How have you been?! Too bad we didn't get to talk during dinner.

You're another somebody's someone somewhere, a homunculus personality of bland questions about Africa.  I have no clue who's someone you are, but who cares? I'll never meet them anyways.

Sitting here I feel so alone.  Like I need an intervention, let the art world come get me, take me to treatment and spit me out later with a story. "I'm finally designing and making art of my own. My canvases sell for thousands of dollars.  Didn't you see my 3-D fashion show? We're expanding it into a stage play. 

Afrocentricities/Blank Canvas/the Dream

The honestly shitty thing about being first generation American and being an artist is that you get misunderstood and mislabeled no matter what you do.  You go hardcore towards being the best artist you can be and traditionally people wonder why you're not out caring about making money and buying a house.  Then you draw, make art in whatever shape or size and all people see is how "Afro-centric" you are when you're trying to just be you and escape being Afro-anything.  The labels people give you never quite fit, because there's no mold for who you are.  You want to be normal, but for you there's only a confused mash-up of the American Dream and Africa.  You're the first of your kind and being the archetype for anything sucks ass.  It's lonely as hell and you live your life in a strange exile .  You want to be avant guarde but really that's what you are already because there no precedent for who you're supposed to be.  You're expected to be the best of your cultures but constantly seen as the worst.

Then you finally get out on your own.  You're free from the stigma of culture and what people 'back home' will think, but it follows you like a thread, threatens your experiences.  There's no safe space to be different.  Any moment culture and the people 'back home' will gossip, say the wrong thing and then you're back to being the worst of the worst.  

Really I'm not anything.  I never really got the chance.  There was never any space in anyone's dream for that.

Hail Caesar...salad/Ides of March

How ironic. Eating a Caesar salad on March 15.  It has me thinking:

Do you think people named Julius get nervous when March 15 rolls around?  You know the only reason anyone names their kid Julius these days is after Caesar so maybe they all get nervous?

The thoughts one has while eating a Caesar salad...

Black Hippie/Hugalicious!

Take a look at yourself.  How much do you weigh? Look at your arms, normal women care about that stuff. I used to shave and wax them, but all that is expensive and highly unnecessary.  Besides it just grows back, isn't it supposed to be there?

Look at your art, the clothes you design, you're a black hippie! I guess I'd call him Mr. Virgo.  And that's today's lesson.  I kinda am a black hippie.  I paint, I like chai tea, I speak really soft and wax psychedelic on a regular. I like Shpongle and Alex Grey, and Haight Ashbury is actually kinda cool.  I'm a nude model at times, or one in costumes in others.  I'm rail thin with slightly unkempt hair but I'm quirky to boot.  I smell like frankensence and myrh and I'm pretty sure I belong on a mountain smoking DMT not here with the rest of society.

I'm the first of my kind.  They can't tame us or pretend we don't exist.  You were feeling yourself when you designed these. Yeah I kinda was.  But I'm really feeling myself now.  

Black Peace Now! claimed bankruptcy.  That's all I know I want.  Black Peace Now.  The hippy in me wants peace, the black in me wants peace.  All life in me wants peace.  Maybe somewhere in the forrests, somewhere amid the trees.  

Funny tonight I went to dinner with my family and while I was hugging everyone, the couple at the table over from us asked me for a hug too.  Why not? Everyone deserves a hug, so I gave them each one.

After their dinner, they thanked me for the hugs.  My family was puzzled on why they would stop to talk to me I was hugging everyone, and they asked for a hug too, so I hugged them I said giggling.  Why not? I'm all for free hugs!

#eröstribë

Art Is T

During a late night snack (Lunchables and mango lemonade) it occurred to me In becoming an artist, I may never be happy or comfortable with my career. I feel that art is something where I'm constantly forced to become better and comfort is a sign that I might not be giving it my 100% best.

I might always be up late at night pondering the next best thing.  Lately I've taken to examining my artistic style late at night over a bong it or two of hash.  Tonight it's just one bong hit as I need to be up fairly early to visit Castro Castle.  Art show in June, scoping out the scenery.

Sleep never comes.

Prepare for Something New

I'm glad you're putting it behind you. Is that what you think this is? I've never put it behind me.  I was just told to shut up about it.  This isn't me putting it behind me, this is me fixing it and telling the world so that you never do this to someone else.  You call it culture, I call it abuse.  Culture never leaves you feeling raped for being who you are.  It doesn't ignore you as an individual.

If you think this is me putting it behind me, you're wrong.  Your actions don't disappear, you can't pretend they never happened.  You've had four years of that.  It ends now.

Turnt Up!

I spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday in San Francisco. I hate walking through the Tenderloin, it's so disgusting she conplained.  Really, I thought she was lucky.  I'd kill to live in San Francisco, even in the Ten.  It's not the most amazing place to live, but it's San Francisco.  Better that than Oakley.  

Laying in my bed in Oakley, my body aches and hurts from too much fun for three days.  My ears ring, the stark silence takes some getting used to after three days bathed in the symphonic sounds of city life.

Art/Whore

What happened to that job at the corner store? You said you got a job working weekends what happened to that?

I couldn't tell her, so I just brushed it off They didn't need me this week, not enough hours.  The truth however was far, far worse.  No use bothering her with the details.  The way he stared, the places he touched me.  

To be honest, I doubt she'd believe me anyways.  The fact that things like this happen in a nice neighborhood like ours wouldn't even cross her mind I bet.

I walked in on them.  He sat on one of the two swivel chairs, his eyes closed, head laid back and cocked to the side.  His hands fondling her breasts under her shirt.  The money was still clenched in her hand.  I'd seen her before, we talked once.  She was a bubbly and seductive Aries, auburn hair.  She was living out of her car she had said.  Her mom was a meth addict.

Life.  What a fucked up thing it is sometimes.  The things a person sees.  Im grateful that isn't me.  My stomach rumbled and I turned and ran.  You could be a hundred dollars richer.  His words echoed in my head.  As hungry as I was, I couldn't bring myself to ask for the $24 he owed me.  What good is the money if you sell your soul?  We already sell our time to the highest bidder.  Have we stooped so low that nothing is sacred? I'd been there, so I can't judge her or blame her.  I'd known that emptiness where there's nothing you wouldn't do for a price.

That feeling scares me now.  It propels me towards my goals, but the intensity scares me.  Just as feverishly as I want to make something beautiful and leave behind a legacy, I could want money or fame or pretty things.  Once, I did want them that feverishly too.

What do I want now? To do something that suspends imagination.  That changes your perception if only for an hour.  I'd live for it.  Live to create something so cinematically stunning that it makes you forget where you are. I want to share the world in my dreams with someone else.  The place I go to when ugly things become all too real.  

To want anything this badly seems almost a sin.  I might as well be that girl on her knees clenching that hundred dollar bill.  In a sense I am.  Slave to a hidden thing no one else sees or believes in.

It really only makes me art's dirty whore.  Willing to jump when someone says art.

If there's any lesson I've learned its this one:  Never step over the memory of someone who's already dead in order to praise someone who's still living.  The living have time to accomplish more than what they have already, and the dead are closer to the Gods and only they know which Gods they've achieved favour from.  

You could easily spite the favourite of your personal Gods in order to gain favour of someone who's only purpose is their own well-being.