Impossible City

This is my monthly art-related newsletter/blog. It's generally about the new art I've made, news about exhibitions, and other art-related ideas I've been thinking about.

Art News

1. This year, I am participating in San Francisco Open Studios! This means that my studio will be open to the public for a whole weekend. My neighborhood's weekend will be on November 3rd and 4th, from 11AM - 6PM both Saturday and Sunday. My best artwork from the last year will be up for view (most of it will also be for sale), and I'll have a limited number of signed and numbered pigment prints for sale as well.

If you live in or near the San Francisco Bay Area, please come!! I would love to answer your questions about my art, say hello (even if I haven't met you yet), and/or graciously leave you alone if you want to look at my art in peace. There will be snacks and nice places to sit, and a weird-looking white kitty to pet.

The address is 110 Santa Clara Avenue, San Francisco. This is one of those unusual neighborhoods that has plenty of parking, AND is an easy walk from public transit (the West Portal MUNI station).

2. Fifteen of my original tarot paintings will be on exhibition through the end of the year at Azari Vineyards in Petaluma, starting in mid-October. The estate is an incredibly lovely place to visit—they even have a guest house!—and their wine is really and truly superb. You could take advantage of this beautiful autumn weather to plan a day trip to taste some wine, look at my paintings, admire the beautiful views of Petaluma Gap, and take a stroll around the grounds.

For those of you who don't know already, I published a tarot deck in 2014, and despite zero advertising on my part, sales continue to be pretty great (thanks to the photos, reviews, and videos posted by my amazing customers!). The only continent right now that doesn't contain any of my tarot decks is Antarctica—anybody know a tarot-lover in Antarctica?

“Treehouse”. Graphite on paper.

As for the art I've been working on recently, I seem to be on a little bit of a hiatus. I'm done with my insect/flower paintings, and I've got a really big, interesting idea for my next series, but the idea hasn't finished cooking yet, so to speak. I know from experience that I can't rush these things. I just have to keep scribbling notes and sketches in my sketchbook and thinking about what it is, exactly, that I want to make.

When I'm developing an idea, I start chasing other people’s art. I spend hours in libraries, thumbing through picture books on history, urbanism, botany, ecology, neuroscience, marine science, or whatever. I spend hours in museums, sometimes spending all my time in one room, scribbling furiously in my sketchbook about a train of thought originating from a single sculpture and then racing home to look something else up.

Sometimes nothing else will do except wandering around the city at some odd hour, listening to the strangest and least music-like recesses of my music collection.

I don't yet have a good explanation for the new idea I'm working on, but I'm going to try anyway (after all, I suppose that's why you're here, reading this). I want to make art about impossible urban places: architectural interventions that make cities more accessible, more surprising, more imaginative. In particular, more human and less...institutional, I guess. Huge cave-dwellings, stretching out and interconnecting below the basements of skyscrapers. Treehouses installed in the recesses of highway overpasses. An entire apartment block gutted of its rooms and floor subdivisions, a shell for an empty, quiet, cathedral-like space, cut through by shafts of light from the vast wall of windows, with ladders and hammocks and bunks and bookcases covering the walls.

None of these ideas are in any way feasible, or even desirable, in real life, but that's exactly what I like about them.

I think there is something in me, as an artist, that has a great antipathy to anything practical. Perhaps this secret dislike extends farther than myself: maybe it’s shared by general scientists, or people who work in pure mathematics, or unpopular philosophers, or kids and teens who want nothing to do with the grownup world of trading 40+ hours a week of the only life they'll ever have just for the privilege of continuing to survive.

Anyone else? The rococo aristocracy, hobos riding trains, island-owning billionaires, anarchists foraging for meals in restaurant dumpsters and squatting in condemned buildings: people who try to place themselves far above or far below the mundane concerns of modern mainstream survival?

I certainly don't mean to propose generalizations. It remains difficult for me to imagine the variety of different reasons a person might have to long for the freedom of a permanently unrealistic world. I know that most seek to contribute in material ways to the world around them. An architect feels pride when she sets foot in a building she designed, and observes how the occupants use it. The world is full of research scientists who long to find a cure for cancer, a way to reverse global warming, a new innovation that will end world hunger.

I am no exception. I would not be able to live with myself if I didn't keep trying to find ways to positively impact the people and places around me. But I do think there are those of us who, while we know there must be practical innovations to change the world for the better, yearn for a world of pure ideas, where everything is possible.

To be honest, that kind of world really doesn't sound important, even to me. It sounds like the insipid fairyland of a very spoiled child who never managed to grow up (welcome, by the way, to the deepest of all my fears about what I really am).

Nevertheless, brain scientists and psychologists tend to believe that it is important. They describe us as existing within a "layer of thought", which acts a neurological buffer between our own impulses and the sensory information we receive. Our ideas, our beliefs, our worldview, and our moment-by-moment experiences are often largely intellectual in nature. The social sciences are full of studies illustrating that people get by on dreams even more than they do on realities. Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, knew this. “Ever more people have the means to live,” he wrote, “but no meaning to live for.” Not only does this world of impossible ideas help us survive, it does so by being the most desirable part of human experience—by imbuing it with interest, joy, meaning.

I always end up believing that this impossible world is important, and not because of all the scientific, political, and moral arguments backing it up, either. I just believe in it because I can't help loving it, even if I and everyone else turns out to be wrong, and it really is just a waste of time.

It is my own core belief. If this isn't true, then nothing is true.