I was warned, and its true, I am already losing track of days and its only been 2 or 3- what will it be like in 2 weeks?! I am in the studio now properly, i.e. for more than 1 hour at a time, and just acclimatizing, arranging things and even doing a bit of drawing. Nothing new- just a continuation of my written drawings which are something like diaries but end up being graphic/ visual rather than legible. I decided it would be good to have a routine of sorts, something to start the day with; there’s no schedule here, especially on the weekend when we don’t have dinner cooked for us so there’s no timetable to work around.
Actually today is the last of the scheduled events, following yesterday’s site visit and Thursday’s supermarket visit, which was fairly comic: Rich, the New Yorker, trying to pry us foreigners away from the garish packaging and huge variety (my favourite so far: Cholula hot sauce in chili and lime- definitely taking some back). The site is massive, taking 2 hours to traverse in full, including time to admire the environmental artworks as well as the wilder, more remote parts. This evening we have ‘Artists Exchange’, meaning a brief intro to everyone’s work, which I suppose I should be working on now. I’m also starting work on the writing- first of all I need to collect lots of phrases used as taglines for stock video as these are going to be the basis of the film. It’s hard to focus on one thing- so many other ideas come up once you’re actually in the environment. But then I thought, I’ll start on this and see what happens, rather than trying to work out in advance what would be the best project to focus on- too much pre-determination usually ends in tears for me.
Meanwhile, in news that is not strictly art-related, on a bike trip to Devil’s Hopyard state park, I saw chipmunks for the first time. They were incredibly cute and made high pitched kind of ‘peep-peep’ squeaking noises at each other, so that I thought they were birds.
Dinner times have been entertaining, I’m finding out so much about life here- who knew that the top tax rate in New York state is 55%? And I thought there wasn’t much in the way of social contribution here. We have been talking politics, economics and education so far- maybe time to talk art or something.
