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Where Do You Get Your Artistic Inspiration?

Oh wow, the last week was a blur… and next week’s not going to be any better. One of the main things that’s really devouring my time is this print I’m making for Diane Villani Editions. It’s awesome – I get to go to Brooklyn and work with master printer Jennifer Melby, who seems to know absolutely everything under the sun about etching and aquatint. But it’s a steep learning curve for me, since I have literally never made an etching before. Jennifer’s there to help me and talk me through the process, but she can’t make the print for me – anytime anything needs to be done on the plate, she’ll explain to me what needs to be done but I’m the one to do it. So I’m sort of learning on my feet; a crash course in etching. Luckily I have the image totally worked out, so that part is easy. The print (or at least a proof of it) has to be ready by early November.

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On another topic entirely…

There is this awesome bodega in Jersey City where, if you give them $2, a man with a bandaged hand will come out from the back and take a large green coconut outside and put it on a tree stump they have conveniently placed in front of the store, and then hack away at it with a machete til it’s carved down enough that you can either just drink the juice or crack it open and get to the meat. I discovered a few months ago, much to my delight, that Whole Foods and other natural food stores have started carrying neatly packaged containers of coconut water (no cool guy with a machete, but it’ll do in a pinch). The stuff is delicious and I always get some energy out of it.

But it is of course my lot in life to feel at least a tiny bit guilty about everything, and so I found myself on line at Whole Foods recently wondering where the hell all these coconuts were coming from. Meaning, it seems that coconut water is the hot new food and so production of the stuff must be through the roof, but coconuts don’t grow overnight. What the hell?

Likewise, I found myself happily sipping a smoothie from One Lucky Duck (holy GOD – if you haven’t been there, you must go immediately… it’s incredible), wondering what exactly a Goji berry is. I’m sure it’s really good for you and it’s completely definitely delicious (One Lucky Duck is one of those places where even if you told me all the food was made from lard and preservatives, I would continue to eat there because it’s just that damn good). But it’s some rare Himalayan berry, right? And it’s another one of these “hot” foods. So how do you suddenly 20x the production of something like a rare Himalayan berry?

Ok, so these are all basic sustainable agriculture questions, but it leads me to this: I think I’m going to make my 22′ drawing for the Jersey City Museum more or less about food. I’ve become totally fascinated in how obsessed we are all about food – how in NYC in particular, what you eat is your identity. No one in NYC eats simply because they like a particular food. Everyone eats to make a statement and to draw a line in the sand about what they believe in. I can’t help but find this practice to be futile and ridiculous, and yet I do it too.

So… yeah. So the drawing is going to be something about food and politics, food and the environment, food and personal experience, food and me. I’ll have to see where it goes (I really don’t believe in narrowing down what a piece is about too much before I’ve been working on it for a while) but this seems like a good way to start.

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Discussion: Where Do You Get Your Artistic Inspiration?

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