art is good.

today, seeing as we were no longer under a tornado watch, I headed to brooklyn with a friend who had mapped out the studios of several artists taking part in Go art brooklyn or Go brooklyn art...anyway, this painting is called Empire and was in Jennifer Delilah's studio along with some very cool drawings of crows and very odd paintings of half-bird/half-humans doing nasty S&M type things to each other. All very cool. We visited 10 studios total before we were just too tired. It was my first extended trip to W'burg in ages that didn't involve a rock show or someone's party.  Lots of glass/ugly modern buildings going up (same as the E.V.) and lots of cool spaces for making art.  I could never live there - can't imagine what it would be like there at night or in winter. Some of the art we saw was wonderful, some not.  I really liked Gary Mellon's wood work (garymellon.com), Lynda White's masks arts.lyndawhite.com & her VERY cool skeleton king sculpture, Ryan Scully's paintings (ryanscully.net), and Clark Goolsby's  big puppet man (clarkgoolsby.com). Overall it was a great "field trip" and it was good to see so many people making things in this city full of people who mostly seem to just be about how much money they can make and how much stuff they can amass.  Last weekend a friend described me as a "stuff" person & looking around my tiny apartment I guess that's true. The stuff in my life though is made up mostly of books, things people have given me (rattlesnake skin, horse skull, hand made pottery, pieces of art), and then I have some shoes and some clothes (though not many for a woman living in NYC), and lots of cups to put tea in.  Most other things are in storage or sold or given away.  Seeing all these artist's spaces I see how much different and how similar my little space is - lots of odds & ends & photographs & stones from hikes & shells from the ocean & whatever else will help me make stories.  I'm not a painter so I don't have all their tools but that same need to have more than the basics, more than bare walls and a few pieces of furniture.  Of course, if I had a house, it would seem very empty indeed.  These are the things all this viewing of art has made me think about.  That and the description (somewhat inaccurate) of me as a "stuff" person.  Most of the artists we met were very nice people - some awkwardly charming, some trying hard to be hip, and some just nice people making good art.