In the past thirty days, I have seen all of these works of art in person:

I voted for Obama, too.

Older citizens gathered at the inauguration ceremony were asked if Obama’s swearing in was a more historic event than Martin Luther King’s assassination, or the landing of the first man on the moon. The answers were unanimously yes. While I can’t make an accurate comparison because I was not alive to witness either of the aforementioned events, I can say that today is a day I will remember for the rest of my life, no matter how President Obama’s term goes.

Memphis, albeit a majorally black city, is still a Southern town nestled in a die hard red state, and while sentiments may have been more colorblind in cosmopolitan metropolises up the coast, the atmosphere was the same as ever in the Mid-South. Intertwined with crying black reverends praising God for such luck, uncharacteristically optimistic blues singers, and old Civil Rights advocates celebrating a new nation, were news reports of young white hicks in Arkansas arrested for plotting assassination attempts on Obama’s life, and my grandparents who still believe that our new President is a muslim extremist closely connected with Al Queda. It seems that no matter how different and changed and open-minded CNN tells me America is becoming, the same stagnated sentiments of our ancestors and Southern culture can’t help but ooze out.

Regardless, it is really cool to think that we have a president that people in other countries actually respect.




Click to see some amazing photos of the day from boston.com.

Classes resume on Tuesday.

You wanna go to sleep, you wanna get up, you wanna go out again tomorrow, right? Wherever you are in life, it's my feeling: you gotta go.

-Jerry Seinfeld



I need to dry out and take some time to clear my mind.
But before you know it here I am again, fucking 2 o'clock in the morning,
standing in a bar, with a drink in hand.
How low can you go before you can't turn around?

-Against Me!

Lyrical Therapy

It has only happened a handful of times in my life that in the wake of a traumatic event, I'm driving, and a song comes on that I know by heart, yet never really attached any meaning to until that moment. It happened last night.

They make bad, bad jokes, it's okay not to laugh.
For every push forward, you get the same fucking push back.
You had, you had nowhere to go,
so you, so you found someplace,
You had, you had nothing to say
you start lying...

What the fuck were you thinking?
I'm not sorry.
I'd do it all again.
All the lines between hate, love, and revenge,
it's just dead, it's dead, it's dead, they're just dead feelings.

Against Me!, "Unsubstantiated Rumors Are Good Enough For Me (To Base My Life Upon)"

P&H Mural Night 01

[CLICK TO VIEW]
Derrick Dent & I's collaboration, with some visual contribution from KP.
Will post some decent daylight photos soon.

New lead courtesy Brad Postlethwaite M.D. (almost)

Hashimoto's Thyroiditis is a type of autoimmune thyroid disease in which the immune system attacks and destroys the thyroid gland. The thyroid helps set the rate of metabolism, which is the rate at which the body uses energy. Hashimoto’s stops the gland from making enough thyroid hormones for the body to work the way it should. It is the most common thyroid disease in the U.S.

Some patients with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis may have no symptoms. However, the common symptoms are fatigue, depression, sensitivity to cold, weight gain, forgetfulness, muscle weakness, puffy face, dry skin and hair, constipation, muscle cramps, and increased menstrual flow. Some patients have major swelling of the thyroid gland in the front of the neck, called

goiter.

CHRISTMAS 2008

CHRISTMAS WISH LIST

Mod Cloth's Hat Scarf


Converse All-Black Knee High Chucks


Urban Outfitters Lace Tights


Urban Outfitters Sweater Dress


A Billy Welch Original



House Seasons 1-4 on DVD

I'm pretty sure I'm a workaholic because it's the only thing I've found yet that I can be addicted to that doesn't slow down my productivity.

103108

I had a Happy Halloween.

Past Due

These are some of my portrait panels from the Merge Again show in July.



James Carey


Jonathan Dodge


Andy Breig


Opie


Self-Portrait


Taylor Martin


Tommy Kha

To Any Potential Friends:

-If you are the type of person who cannot stay home alone and be okay with that, we probably won't along.
-If you are the type of person who needs company to run errands, we probably won't along.
-If you are the type of person who needs others to constantly validate and supplement your self-esteem, we probably won't along.
-If you are the type of person who puts the responsibility of keeping you entertained or happy on others, we probably won't along.
-If you are the type of person whose daily routine is comprised primarily around a substance, we probably won't get along.
-If you are the type of person who dwells on petty drama between your friends, boyfriend, ex-boyfriends, friends' boyfriends, friends of ex-boyfriends, and/or ex-boyfriends of friends, we probably won't along.

However,
-if you are the type of person who can call, ask to hang out, receive a no, and be okay with that, then we may just get along.
-if you are the type of person who likes talking about illustration, or movie directors, or websites with particularly good design, or zombie lore, or graphic novels, or any other interesting topic displaced from the mundane gossip of small college living, we may just get along.
-if you are the type of person who is too busy with all of the extra projects you keep taking on to even have friends, we probably will get along.

THIS BUILDING



IS SO OURS NOW.
...is gone.

THANK YOU KRISTI DUCKWORTH.

To all of the new MCA freshman:

If you are sleeping a healthy eight hours a night, eating three square meals, showering daily or even just regularly, not consuming caffeine, and living in a clean, orderly room, then

you're probably failing.

On that note...

If everything one does or goes through is a means of growing or progressing in some way, I believe the utilitarian function of romantic relationships are to end tragically. It seems people never really learn anything profound from the other person until then.

ONE DAY
we will all look back on these days of living paycheck to paycheck, wearing the cleanest of the dirty shirts to work, eating crackers for dinner, sleeping in our classrooms, buying mapco burgers at 5AM, drinking construction site vodka on porches, applying bug spray to work in our studios, blogging our complaints on the internet, conning overdraft charges to afford rent, shoplifting acrylics paints, and literally living off of coffee, ramen, and pall mall lights,

AND LAUGH.

Do vs. Think

The other night, I had a conversation with a close friend about the difference between thought-oriented people and action-oriented people. Often enough, people don't have a balance between the thought and the action. Thought people are very thorough in their thought processes. Every action they take, every paint stroke they lay down, every sentence out of their mouths is highly weighed, considered, and analyzed. Often times, it's out some kind of insecurity (isn't every interesting personality aspect always come back to insecurity?) of looking stupid. As with anything, even too much of a good thing can be bad. I know thought-oriented people, and they drive me crazy. I feel like they never take a break. They could never sit and watch a mindless movie contentedly, or draw a picture that didn't mean something so much deeper.

Then there's the action-oriented. As with thought people, action people have a split between thought and action, but the focus is on the actions. The actions represent the thought, and unlike thought people who analyze life for each and every decision, several, or even a hundred actions can equally represent one idea.

Myself? Action-oriented. I don't do a lot of thinking, weighing, doubting, or analyzing on a regular basis. I take an idea I like, I figure it out, and I act on it. The difference is just what it is that keeps you sane. Rethinking the ideas and concepts that make up your life constantly? Or acting on them constantly, using the trial and error method, figuring out a mode of living is good or bad by thinking only so far ahead, and acting out the rest.

I've been doing things. I'm always doing something. Most of my actions and efforts are toward one idea. One idea I thought up a long time ago and started doing things toward it, and I just never stopped. That idea is Rozelle Artists Guild. Sometimes I have to stand back and rethink the manner in which I'm going about these actions, to make sure they are still matching up with that idea. Sometimes the idea gets stale, and I have to marinate a while to juice it back up. But I'm an action-oriented person because the DO is what keeps me sane. It's what keeps me going. If I have more than a day with no commitments, appointments, calls, e-mails, flyers, or busied time, I GO INSANE!

However, being an action-oriented person so much of the time, sometimes I just need a long stretch of time to reevaluate the situations in my life, just to make sure I'm still chasing the same idea, and to make sure that idea is the one I still want to chase. It takes me longer than other people to logic out and prioritize big things like Rozelle, or being with Shea, or going to school. I often find that when I suspend myself in a go-nowhere thought process, squeezing my brain in a clamp to make sense of all the actions I've been doing... I end up insane. The way back to sanity is to just.. act. See what happens, or what doesn't.

I HAVE FINALLY ACQUIRED INDESIGN.
...which means that I can finally open & edit my trading cards. And I just spent a good two hours converting these to web-friendly jpegs (not to mention the 30 minutes spent searching for a free Bauhaus font download. I don't remember it being so difficult the first few times I downloaded it at school...)
ANYWAY. Here's a sneak preview:

and the rest of them can be viewed here:
laurenrae.carbonmade.com
(Which is my spiffy new gallery birthday present. Thanks Dad!)

That is all.

I'm in a show

The Andy Warhol exhibit just opened at the Brooks, From A to B and Back Again. I'm not really much of a fan of Warhol... Seems like he was just weird to be weird. And the art, well, it's tough to describe my qualm, being an artist that specializes in a design art oftentimes made to be duplicated, but, I guess the idea that you are never looking at a Warhol original bugs me too much to enjoy it. I like to look at art and think about how long it took to make, and I have no guage for his art. I mean, how long does it take to copy a photo? Is copying an image repeatedly art? If it makes a point once, can it make a new point by being repeated, or slightly altered, or the colors experimented with? Maybe it can.


myself, photoshop

It's been a while since I posted anything I've been up to artistically. Here are two metal pieces I've been working on in the past couple semesters.

I made these in Intermediate Metals 2 but they "let go" of Richard Prillaman, master silversmith, a week before classes began, so Bill Price, the replacement, barely had time to get moved let alone line out a lesson plan. So our first project (to research the history of tea and create a tea infuser based on that research) ended up being our only required project for the semester. I completed most of one other project, a sundial that my grandfather has been hounding me over since he saw the first one I made in Introduction to Metalsmithing my second semester. Twasn't Bill's fault our semester was so misguided. We ended up missing nearly a third of our classes due to holidays, advisory days, and a few sick days on his behalf. Regardless, Price has done more in renovating that metals studio in his short career at MCA than I have seen any department leader do. New cabinets, torches, and countertops.

Anyway. This is my tea infuser. The cap of the acorn is copper, the base is nickel, the branch is silver, and it's held together by small magnets.








Here is my sundial. It's 22g copper sheet, formed to hell, with lost wax cast bronze head, tail and feet, and an unintentional mix of silver and lead solder.



I made the sundial as a going-away present for my grandparents, who are moving to Florida tomorrow for their retirement. They both loved it, and I was pretty fucking proud I finally finished it.