Category Archives: aside

Mar 05 2015
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aside

Love of Making

#cover U #magazine

Where is joy? I’ve been struggling with this. Studying art as an undergraduate can make you either a robot for craft or concept. And even if you excel at both something feels missing. I think it’s love.

I’ve never attended a critique where the love an artist puts into a piece is discussed or perceived. Instead we drill down into the formal and conceptual aspects of the piece. I think people get uncomfortable with love. And talking about love under the umbrella of art feels ambiguous.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend and they left me with this quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”:

“You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you – no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself.”

So what I’ve been insisting myself to do is this: encourage my love for making. My love for putting pen to paper. My love for thinking. My love for the process. My intense desire to create a window to the world.

So to all the artists and tender creatures out there; peace be with your heart, soul and weary hands.

Go get your love back!

-paris

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Dec 20 2014
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aside

She

Untitled

Sitting in a comfy armchair with her socked feet tucked underneath her with a sketchpad on her lap. Soft music playing in the background. She gets uninspired at one point so she sips tea and pinterests for a while. I love thinking about her as a human, not something swaft in clouds and pointy beams of light, but rather someone that reads all the time and even gets frustrated.

I bet she spends time in a room like this…thinking, creating, pondering.

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And drinks fruity alcoholic drinks with her meals in a room like this…

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And falls asleep on that chestnut colored chair with a cat curled up on her lap and that green pillow wedged in the crook of her neck.

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Maybe she even plays dress up when she’s bored.

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Maybe she goes out with friends and has conversations that will seem to solve the world’s problems for a few moments.

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I love to think about this. Makes above seem closer.

Whether you celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, or St. Pillows we wish everyone a very happy holiday season! Go spread joy!

-paris

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Aug 18 2014
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aside

Outside There

David Hockney

Outside there’s a girl sitting at a small coffee shop table. Across from her sits a boy. An important boy. He’s reading and she’s typing. Flip. Flip. Tap. Flip. Tap. After a few minutes she looks up to make sure he’s still there. He is.

Snap.

“Got it,” I see him mouth. His head leans forward inspecting the picture he just took. He looks up and grins. She smiles, not bothered, accustomed to being the subject in the frame of his camera. Her eyes return to her laptop, fingers tapping the keyboard again.

He keeps gazing at her. He says something. She looks up, eyes wide. She says three words and spins around the table, landing in his lap. His arms catching her waist. Her ankles crossed rocking from side to side. They are in a kind of rapture, via wavelengths, lightning, shocks, softness.

I’m inside looking out on this from my table. It’s such a private moment. I should turn my head but I don’t. I watch instead.

She’s dancing. Really. On the sidewalk in front of him. Her silk floral dress billows around her body. Between the skirt and boots are long legs and pink knobby knees in hiking boots that swallow her feet.

Love is its own flash mob.

– paris / art by david hockney

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Jun 07 2013
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aside

inner dialogue

image

What’s the point?

So you wanna know about Jesus, huh?

Yeah. I mean, nah dude, stop, I really don’t care but if you got something to say, say it.

You’re the one who brought it up.

Ok never mind.

Ok.

(pause)

Dude just say what you gotta say. If you can’t make it simple forget it.

..let me see…really at it’s core the good news is about one thing: and one thing only the impossible got abolished.

I don’t understand.

The impossible got abolished. Nothing is impossible. All that negative shit in your head is not true.

I don’t understand.

Look. When Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation what did he do?

Freed the slaves I guess.

Yeah and do you think the white brothers down in Texas, when they found out, went out to the fields, rounded up the workers and hollered, “Hey y’all are free now. President just changed things up. Y’all can go on? You think they did that?

Nah probably not.

Really?

Ok, damn, I know they didn’t.

Yeah so a bunch of Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger got on horse back to ride down to Galveston, Texas to give them the news. It’s called Juneteenth, the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. This was two and a half years after the signing of the emancipation proclamation.

That’s kind of like what I am talking about with the good news. The good news is not advise but news. Something happened! Jesus did something decisive. They don’t put things in the newspaper because it is interesting or good advice. They put things in the paper because something happened, something shifted. That’s what I mean. Jesus did something. He freed the slaves. He abolished the impossible. And yet you don’t believe it. You still living on the plantation.

You got a point.

Yeah I got a point.

That’s cool. But you know something?

What?

The plantation is real. I can see it.

It’s what you know to be true that is real whether you can see it or not.

christopher

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