Search

It went off this morning, at 8:40, which is earlier than I have voluntarily done anything in some time. A small application, honestly. Modest money, one year, to make a proper voucher set of the county's native umbellifers, pressed and painted, with the field notes transcribed alongside. The sort of thing that gets done once and then lasts a century in a drawer. I have been drafting it for eleven weeks. Not because it is difficult. Because it is the first thing I have written with a committee at the other end since I left the lab, and I had convinced myself that a painter has no business asking for research funds. Ridiculous, when I write it down. My training is right there. The hand has only changed medium. The part that nearly stopped me was the references. I sat with the citation style open in front of me like a woman meeting an old acquaintance at a funeral and not knowing whether to embrace. Anyway. It is out of my hands now, which is the only dignified place for it. I am going to go and finish the second leaf of a birch that has been fighting me since Tuesday, and I am going to try very hard not to refresh my email.

For twenty years my portfolio was a PDF. Sixty pages, properly photographed, the works shot in good light, the lot. I sent it to maybe four hundred people over the years. Response rate near zero, and I never thought to ask why. Earlier this autumn a curator in Brno asked to see my work and I was tired, so I sent a link to one page. Three photos taken on my phone in the storage hall, bad light, one of them has my boot in the frame. Four lines of text. Where the work has been, what it is made of, what I need to build the next one. Two serious enquiries that week. One is now a real commission for next year. I think the sixty-page PDF was doing the opposite of what I wanted. It was proving I was serious. It was not showing anyone a door. A curator has eleven minutes and forty other artists. A perfect portfolio says: this person is finished, this person is a known quantity, go and look at the checklist. A bad photo of a real room says: there is something here that is not in a database yet. I am not saying make ugly documentation. I am saying I had confused thoroughness with invitation. Thoroughness is for your own archive. Nobody walks into your archive. Now the part I am less sure about. I have no idea whether this works because the page is honest, or because it looks like I am not trying, which in this world reads as expensive. Possibly both. I have been doing this too long to believe I have found the formula, but the old one was definitely dead and I had been sending it out for years without noticing. Still keeping the PDF. For grants. Grants love a PDF.

Spent the morning writing the artist statement for the March group thing and it came out as nine hundred words of nothing. Deleted it. Wrote six lines. Deleted those too. What I actually wanted to send: this piece is made from a photo of my brother's kitchen that I tore into about forty pieces and glued back together wrong, on purpose, because that's how I remember the room. There's a coffee ring near the corner. I left it. Instead I have a document that says "explores the tension between preservation and loss." My friend Jen read it and said it sounded like a grant application for a hospital. She's right. Anyway, my real question, and I'm genuinely asking: does anyone actually read these things, or do they just get filed and nobody looks until after the show. Mine's going in the frame on the wall and I keep thinking I should just print the six honest lines and let it be uncomfortable.

i have a folder. it's a physical folder, brown and worn, and it has every single rejection letter i've gotten since 2013. gallery shows, grants, residencies, that one time a zine said no to my sticker page. i don't open it. i don't throw it away. it just sits on my shelf like a tiny museum of my own mediocrity. my therapist would have a field day if i had one lol. but also there's something weirdly useful about it? like proof i actually tried. nobody writes back when you don't apply. the folder only exists because i kept sending shit out. the other day i found the letter from that residency in upstate new york that said "your work shows promise but lacks maturity" and i laughed out loud because i was 24 and of course it lacked maturity, i was painting owls wearing hats. anyway. keeping the folder. it's my version of a photo album i guess

There's something about dismantling things other people threw away. The motor was seized, the screws were stripped, I had to drill out three of them. By the end my hands were cut up and there was grease in my hair and I realised I hadn't thought about a single thing except getting that rotor free. I'm not even sure yet what I'll do with it. Maybe nothing. Maybe it just sits on the shelf for six months. But that hour of pure mechanical problem-solving with no audience, no jury, no curator waiting for a statement, that's the part they don't put in the grant applications. Makes me wonder how many of us are secretly just hobbyists with good framing.