Where oh where has my sanity gone…

…oh where oh where can it be? With its tail to short and my brain too long, oh where oh where can it be?

Mimi has once again refused to nap today. Now that there is nothing to contain her, not a goddamed thing, she thinks she can just cavort around like a human being with free will. Beenie took it upon herself to take a proper nap, despite her sister’s antics, and actually slept on the futon in their room, because she’s a grown-up and can be trusted to do such things. No such luck with Mimi.

Had a surreal weekend in New York with hubbo. Warm and sunny, we walked around all day Saturday. Started out at the MoMA. Had never seen the re-design from however many years back. It was ok. Kinda clunky in parts, but not terrible. I don’t remember disliking the old space, so am not sure what is supposed to be better about this iteration of the museum. Whatever. The visit consisted of an hour or so on the Design and Architecture floor, where I was reminded how beautiful a fan or a record player can be, especially if a Swede or a German is in charge of designing it. Then another hour was spent absorbing something quite good, “Tangled Alphabets: Leon Ferrari and Mira Schendel”, in the sixth floor gallery. Wow. Don’t miss that one. All I can say about it is: eventually, everything word-ish melts into Arabic. Really wonderful crazed wire sculptures as well. Worth the $20 large you gotta pay to get into the museum. Also nice was five sun drenched moments in the sculpture garden before we left for the first meal of the day. By the time we left, my brain felt overloaded with culture. Luckily, we were able to pop into a 4:30 movie later in the day to rest-up for the evening, and completely negate anything good we might have absorbed from the morning’s art intake. I won’t bother telling you what movie we saw, but it was REAL DUMB. Kind of perfect in it’s badness. Left the theater refreshed and ready for a trip to Brooklyn, then Queens, then back to Brooklyn. Nice. I would have liked to add a week onto our visit and had the chance to see more people, but it was last minute and we were gone as soon as we arrived it seemed.

The visit to the museum got me thinking about what happened to my artistic vision when I opened myself to seriously learning to SEE. I think I lost something, honestly, during my arts education. I don’t regret it, or think I should not have studied the masters or color or form or learned about art history, or even pursued painting rather than something commercially viable. I did what I needed to do, but still… viewing some of the less formally educated artists in one particular exhibit of scenic and theatrical drawings got me thinking. It would be nice to re-visit the part of my artistic mind that was paused when I was trying to make a painting look like what I thought it should look like, immersing myself in the medium. To think in more graphic terms, less loose, if you will. Tighten things up. Paintings are not tight things for me. They are living, organic objects that change as I address them.

Hubbo is trying to get the girls into bed. He is having as much luck as I was earlier today. Better him than me.