Painting

I have been painting a lot lately.

I think I have figured something out about being an artist. Making art is thinking about art.

You do not need seperate thinking time. Painting time is thinking time, they are the same time.

Thinking about painting when I am not painting is really just thinking about starting a painting. The process of making a painting includes making a lot of decisions that would be very hard to predict before you start.

Here is a new drawing.

John Prine

I was sitting in Texas on a rainy Sunday afternoon, waiting for training to start up again on Monday. We were getting deployed to Afghanistan, a place I did not know too much about at the time, and I was feeling alone, tired, and dejected. I had just had to dropout from graduate school during my final semester, and I was feeling frustrated for the first time in an otherwise charmed life.

My friend Dan Attoe (a pretty famous painter in his own right) sent me a mixed CD of music he thought I would like, he named it MRE 1, after the Meals Ready to Eat in the Army. I was sitting there on my bunk, miserable, and I put the CD in my player, and I heard this song by John Prine. Man I started crying so fucking hard, I was beyond being embarrassed, and I cried so hard my throat got sore and swelled so I could barely swallow. Afterwards I felt better.

John Prine has a myspace page. If you search his name on YouTube there are a bunch of great videos, especially some duets with Iris Dement who has a phenomenal voice. The guy is pretty old. I already said what I had to say about his music.

Update: Click Here for John Prine singing and talking at the Library of Congress, John comes on stage at 10:40, there is a lengthy introduction

Joan Linder is on the cover of the Entertainment section of Newsday

I went downstairs this morning, and sitting on the kitchen table was the Newsday Entainment section with my name written on it with arrows pointing to a story about the artist Joan Linder (she is on the cover). I have written twice about Linder's work on this blog, frankly, because I really like her drawings.

Joan has a solo show up at Dowling University, at the Oakdale campus. Oakdale is on the southern coast of Long Island, about 45 minutes from NYC. I will see the show sometime this week, and afterwards I will write about it on Ink Stained Hands.

I have been thinking about what makes a drawing interesting to me, and it has a lot to do with if the drawing can channel my imagination into an enjoyable, quiet mindset, where it does not matter if I am thinking in language or not. Joan Linder makes drawings that put me in that particular mental space.

Newsday has a video of the artist in her studio.

Here is the main article.

warning:

The video puts a political spin on the work that is there, but is not the emphasis. When I saw the work it came across more as a personal expression of careful perception, created by someone who enjoys subverting the viewers experience by including themes and rendered objects that are funny, surprising, politically conscious, and seductive.

Richard Prince, Interview pt 1 of 4, VBS.tv

Richard Prince makes the most detached art possible: jokes culled from playboy magazines, posters of the marlboro man, and other laconic cultural references. Here is the begining of an interview from VBS.tv with Richard Prince, they have a neat program entitled Art Talk, it's worthwhile to check out.

Prince is living in upstate New York, in the wilderness. The town he lives in reminds me of places like Savoy, population 600, in Massachusetts. My experience is that people who live in the middle of nowhere, in places where it is cold for large stretches of the year, also prefer to be alone for large stretches of time.

Very Important Post, Book Arts

I was reading through the interviews on the Zine Arcade website for a second or third time, having enjoyed hearing from creative independant publishers so much the first go round. Knowing that my memory is for shit I thought a second read would be interesting and useful.
While reading the Jackie Batey interview I came across (important link---->) a link for the Book Arts at the centre for fine print research. It is part of the University of the West of England, and I do not think I have ever seen a site that could be more rewarding and interesting for a bibliophile, there are links to many independent publishers, which I think could easily fill my spare time for the next 2 weeks, as well as news, explanations, exhibition information, they curate a traveling exhibition of bookmarks every year (I am definitely contributing, I always create my own bookmarks), they publish a bi-yearly journal documenting current book art practices, there is a plethora of promising projects presented, and I gleaned all that info having only found the site half an hour ago!
Ok, enough writing to you about it, I am going to check it out myself.

Book Arts Centre


-Bill

Hey, hey check it out!

If you have been visiting Ink Stained Hands for very long you realized that the website address (URL) was http://billdonovan.blogspot.com

Which is impossible to remember, and useless to try and give to people in a conversation unless they also use blogspot.com to host a blog.

Now, I have got a real URL www.inkstainedhands.com the blog is still the same, and you can still enter in the old address and get to this blog.