Current mood: groggy and tired, the detritus of dreams floating around in my dehydrated brain. Some are like jewels fallen from my grasp, others like faded shreds of old cloth or sinister nothings hiding behind a dark corner of my mind.

I've been watching a movie about Jackson Pollock (the movie is, appropriately enough, 'Pollock'), mainly because I wanted to better understand his work. In all truth, this is one artist whose work I never understood at all. In short, it looks like a mess. Actually, the impression I had was that the guy has chewed up a bunch of paint and then gotten sick and vomited all over the canvas. Why anyone would want to pay for it was clearly beyond my comprehension. Now that I'm halfway through the movie, it comes into focus. This guy was a mental and emotional _mess_. He was an alcoholic completely out of control, unsure of himself, insecure and clingy. He was disposed toward sudden outbursts of rage and inappropriate behavior. His work only expresses his inner turmoil and confusion. We all- artist or not- express our personality in everything we do (or don't do). I think of Piet Mondrain- a precise, tidy, and rather ascetic man; his works reflect his personality. Van Gogh- a tormented dreamer and romantic bordering on madness; his paintings reflect that.

I've been working off and on, not as much as I'd like because I require a certain amount of solitude and time for thought and quiet in order to work at all. This isn't easily attained in a house with five children. Much of what I do these days, and indeed, for the last ten years, seems tentative and rather forced. I used to be able to work without really caring what anyone else thought, used to be capable of whipping out fifteen or twenty drawings before I came up with one good one, and didn't give the failures a second thought. They were necessary and I recognized that. Now, I'm afraid. I don't want to waste the paper. I want every stroke, every mark, every line to be perfect, the first time. If it doesn't work out, and it doesn't, because it's too planned, too staid, I pick it apart and it torments me. Every once in a while I let go and produce something confident that's actually decent.

So- of the work that I do have; the latest is one of a single walnut leaf. It's pretty hideous. The colors- bright green against a rose pink background, are simply awful. I wanted chartreuse against fuchsia/magenta, but the green turned out too strong and I had great difficuly attaining even a faint approximation of magenta. If you knw how to get this shade in watercolors (or purple for that matter), please let me know! Before that, there was the oil painting of the skunk cabbage flower. I'm happy with that one, except that again, I wanted some purple in the background. Before that, there were at least three with a double theme- two cyclamens (twice), and two segments of an orange, two failed oils (again with a solitary image) and an oil pastel with a single comet against a black sky, inspired partly by this song. My watercolors are almost always done in a very controlled style in which the subject is broken down into segments of color. The segments do not touch and are seperated by margins, the white of the paper. It isn't a very spontaneous technique.

A single leaf, bloom, or peach, I hardly ever draw or paint a group of anything; in some way perhaps the single theme expresses isolation and aloneness. People often tell me that I must feel isolated because I rarely get out or see other people: this is a line of crap. Whether I'm with someone or not, I'm usually alone, and it's much more pleasant when I'm also physically alone. There have been a very few times when I've felt close/ in harmony with another person, and they are some of the happiest times of my life. There is always the temptation to prolong them, to try to make it a permanent state, but inevitably the moment passes and I'm alone once more.

The margins and spaces- in a way these echo the single theme, but there is the added element of detachment, of seperation. The pieces fit togther like a puzzle, forming a whole, yet each retains it's own shape and individuality. The thought of being swallowed up into another's identity, of boundaries being erased, gives me a panicked, claustophobic feeling. So perhaps what my art expresses is this: there can be beauty in detachment and solitude.