Like most things in life, the work has come faster than the words. I can spend a long time contemplating the use of language and its perception by the reader or listener, but what will come out comes out without regard anyway.

This writing is already in the past. The thoughts and inspirations that revealed the painting #underneathitall happened months ago. The ideas and concepts were in some sort of pre-verbal state, which I began to catch glimpses of those pre-verbal images in my journal the end of last year.

The journal images are very raw and deeply personal. I feel that sharing them might be too revealing. I am still debating, so this post may get reworked to infuse them later.

For now, here is #underneathitall complete:

Underneath it all a painting by Sarah Katherine Gray

I cried while painting it. I suppose the blue pulled down strokes emphasize those tears. I didn’t even know I was doing it. My only hope is that when you look, you feel something too.

what i am listening to: arcade fire, the sound of violins

what i am reading: too many tweets

what i am watching: people who long to be seen

   It has been said, and I perfectly agree, that there is a deep and romantic sense of urgency about my work. At times, I feel as if that if I don’t get IT out or HAVE it in that moment, a part of me will die. This NEED, this catalyst, will cease to exist and an opportunity for something outside of the ordinary will have been lost. Also in all of my curiosity, I am often functioning at a level match to someone with ADHD, easily distracted, thoughts running amok in my mind, fleeting, escaping, gone.

   My writing mimics this in a similar yet individual way. There is a fluidity and quickness about my writing, for this particular blog, I edit very little. I have left my words as raw and fresh as possible, allowing for the new experience of exposing some clarity from within. My painting is reaching new levels of this, my tempo is quite rapid, my need to get it out, has been coming with increasing frequency, and the subjects and style is repetition of the internal rawness and freshness I have been feeling.

Within all of this, I have found that winter is a place for introverts, and inside of it; I have thrived.

The music of silence and the damp darkness of black nights and bright white days have afforded me a quiet. The quiet has lead me further on a journey inside of where these thoughts and fleeting feelings run. I have compared myself to the weather before, but never have I resembled it so much.

So from this place of winter I am starting.

Moving the inside out.

Even in all of these dark dreary days you can see the shapes and shadows of things, sometimes with more clarity than in the light of day. With the blurred edges of my vision, this place of where things start and end is always fuzzy. It makes logical and emotional sense that this is the new place from which I chose to begin, again.

   All things have a point of origination. That origination can be organic and internal or can be inspirational and external. At times the internal and external collide and burst into ideas that can manifest great things.  Like the sand and stone drug from the river bed, past experience, creativity, and events begin to trickle into this inspirational stream and somewhere further down, the river drops over the rocky fall of process and forms into a pool of completion.However, it is just the nature of water to avoid rest possibly in fear of evaporation.

Organic fluidity keeps creativity moving, it can both inhibit and prohibit the completion of projects. Often this fluidity prevents a termination or destination and keeps the art in a state of flux and indecisiveness. Thoughts such as, “this could use a bit more” or “I’m not sure this is done yet” overwhelm the present state. This momentum can be good at times for taking the old and making it new again. Fluidity of the creative process is propelling me to take the past and sew it into a new future.

   This is the beginning of a process of tearing things apart to clean space for something new. This work has been stagnant for years and is now evaporating, soon it will form a dense cloud, and rain down into something new and fresh. For now, the sounds of ripping canvas, puffs of dust escaping in small bursts of movement, and emptiness will keep me busy until those clouds are full enough to pour.

WHAT I AM LISTENING TO: arctic monkeys, morrissey

WHAT I AM READING: brainpickings.org, alan watts

WHO IS INSPIRING ME: L.D. Smith, T. MacFarlane, J.Pollack

When I embarked on this journey of creating an altered book for and about my practicum experiences; I at first felt very opposed. The idea of destroying something so sacred and special that’s sole purpose was to convey thought, meaning, and beauty felt naughty and disrespectful.

Once I began to encounter, engage, and understand the adolescent clients at CV; I began to see that no other medium existed that could convey the message necessary about this population to explain their desperate existence. The only other mediums that could directly relate to the plight of these urban youth was either hip hop or graffiti art and neither of those mediums could effectively work to express my emotions that have grown from working with them.

“The human race is the most stupid and unfair kind of race. A lot of the runners don’t even get decent sneakers or clean drinking water.

What the human race needs is a lot more streakers.”
― Banksy, Cut It Out

This book feels a bit naked and raw. It is an altered book loaded with expressive language, dark and violent colors and images of cityscapes scribbled across page after page. From beginning to end, this book just gives a glimpse into the dying identity and hope of a generation of young that were given up on years ago and failed by the closest of kin at the earliest of ages.

I walked into that studio with a bias and an attitude of unrealized oppression and privilege, but the thing that they needed the most, I had; desire to be present. These boys want to be heard, they want to be acknowledged, they want someone to know they exist and realize their pain is as real as the tears that stain their pillow cases. The only gift I could have ever given them was just being there. In the back of my mind I had judged and feared them and they had equally judged and feared me. In the end, we left as an alliance against the greater oppressor that has thrown them to the side, discarded them like weekend refuse.

This book exists because of the pain, abuse, neglect, violence, blood, death, and life that have all been lived in less than a decade for some and less than two decades of life for all. The resilience and strength displayed by these children emphasize the power of the unadulterated human spirit that despite the worst circumstances can still shine through when given even an ounce of chance. The best I could do on even the best of days in even the best of circumstances was just to show up. This book is me showing up.  

Call for images:

Currently, I am constructing a 2ft by 4ft wood panel mixed media painting. The subject matter of this painting includes the prevailing institutionalized attitudes among many of our social climate. The intention of the work is to use vocabulary and portraiture to expose these systematic flaws of our social classification system.

Included in this mixed media piece will be the digitally enhanced and altered images of any friends and family who wish to participate in this project.

If you are interested in participating and having your likeness used in my art. Please submit a photograph which shows your face, torso, and arms. I would prefer that you send at least two shots in different poses. If your mouth is open as if you were speaking, the photograph would be even more appropriate to the work.

If you’d prefer, I can take your picture.

In addition to sending a photograph to sarahkgray6@gmail.com I ask that you are kind enough to offer up a donation to my 99 project  https://www.wepay.com/donations/the99project

It seems that I am no longer stuck in that idle complacent gear of neutrality. I have been thinking for days and adding to an ever growing collection of notes and musings. I have plugged back in to something undefinable, while disengaging from the 24 second flashes that had lulled me into this state of idleness.

I had time today and spent it sitting around thinking about what I was going to ‘make’ today. Being the good little robot that I am I was staring at Twitter and found this.

I read a mind-boggling article on Huffington Post about a 15 year old girl ‘accidentally’ being deported. How does such a think happen? I googled and kept reading and kept scratching my head.

Here is the finished unfinished painting of J. Turner based on the photograph that was published in the article. I left her form rough and very painterly, leaving blank spots on the canvas, knowing that the reality of this story is that, it is NOT over.  I have probably come up with a thousand questions about how this entire incident could have taken place and still I come to one conclusion, the system is broken. If our government is listening to the lie of a 15 year old girl and believes it enough to deport her to Columbia, things have to change!

There is an obvious failure in how she was initially picked up, documented, put through court proceedings, allowed a passport as a Columbian citizen, regardless of whether she spoke up or not or thought this adventure as a runaway teen might be ‘eye-opening’, something went horribly wrong.

WHAT INSTIGATED THIS?

WHAT I AM LISTENING TO: the clash, outernational, the velvet underground

WHAT I AM READING: the corrections by j. franzen, bukowski, twitter

WHO IS INSPIRING ME: valiant gallagher

As of late, that wicked beast, insomnia, has kept me from my dreams. (Or is it drawing me nearer to my dreams?) Nonetheless, years ago I felt that implicit need to create and I feel that same insatiable drive now. My creativity had waned for years, my energies having been spent up on other fruitful endeavors, I finally feel that now is the time to share, while my creativity is again waxing.

During the duration of several years, I have begun to fill the pages of a large notebook. The notebook was made in China and purchased in Las Vegas. Its contents, however, are entirely mine, organically grown, raised, and fed on anger, beauty, life, and culture.

My notebook contents include: several t-shirt ideas, nearly 3 entire novels or notes for novels (I will post about the first novel at a later date), jewelry concepts, and lots of sketches and blurbs about art pieces.

Most of the content of this blog will be from or about the content of my handy-dandy notebook.

WHAT MANIFESTED THIS?

WHAT I AM LISTENING TO: the clash, talking heads, sex pistols

WHAT I AM READING: the corrections by j. franzen, bukowski

WHO IS INSPIRING ME: sylvia plath, francis bacon