So, it's less than a month until Florence. Am I freaking out? YES. I've been having some crazy dreams...last night we ended up going to an extravagant party, then going to a musuem that opened up to a beach, all before we got to our housing. I've had a few nightmares about it too...getting lost, etc. I am quite excited though. I'm tired of waiting and making lists and planning, I just want to pack and be there.

I've been, as usual, listening, watching, and reading about Radiohead. They really can get me started. I want to start playing around with animation, video, sounds. I've always been interested in film, I love digital photograpgy, and I feel like the things that I'm interested in right now (time and my relationship with it, birds and what they represent, the fall of Rome (of a western way of life), maps and the idea of being both big and small and interconnected) could all play well and be explored more by taking them beyond painting. I want to incorporate what I already do and love (painting), but take it further. Meshing all of these things is difficult. Thom Yorke said in an interview I watched recently that "if you know something will work, you also know it won't work", and I think thats completely true. I have a desire, a need to create, to push things out and onto paper, to express. I love painting, I love the process of it, I love seeing where it will take me, I love oil paints and turpentine, how they smell, how they feel under your fingers, how they dance across surfaces, but lately I've been wating more. More texture, more depth, more than just a surface. They work, but they also don't work.

I've been struggling for the past year on how to reconcile the fact that art, paintings, are just things-they're objects that are hung on walls then discarded later. They don't function, they don't do anything that serves a needed purpose; they basically become waste that is thrown out. And with our huge problems with waste and what it's doing to the Earth, I often have a hard time justifying to myself that my career choice is not only financially possible (lets face it, art is a luxury, and in a world going through a huge financial crisis, art is a luxury that people cut out first), but that the choice to try to become a painter is even an ethical thing to do. In the process of painting I create a lot of watse, as much as I try to reduce and reuse, and my product in the end will eventually become trash. I love art, I love painting, but really whats the point. It's just stuff to fill space on walls. This fact gets me down sometimes.

Anyway, where all of this is leading is that I need to create art that is present, that deals with this existential crisis I've been having, but that also is of our time. I don't want to take away the imortance of a painting, of the traditional forms of art-they are the most important and most valid. I hate the idea of being different just to get attention and I don't like the idea of avant-garde. I think taking the time to look a physical piece of art is important-it does something to you and it is a very real thing. I think there is nothing wrong with painting just to paint. But I also think that in this day and age, it takes more than looking to communicate and have a conversation with most people. Digital multimedia can do that. I can talk about life now, using the tools and the mediums that make life now what it is.