What is an Edition, Anyway?

Yesterday I got to tour What Is An Edition, Anyway? the current show at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts. It's a smart and interesting exhibition, full of cool art much of it from Bay Area artists. Here are the things that were my favorites.

Above: Panos Tsagaris

Ann Collier

John Herschend, Will Rogan

Yuji Obata

Barbara Kruger

Ala Ebtekar

The Black Panther, Vol. 111, No. 14 (artifact selected by Ala Ebtekar)

Hank, Willis Thomas

Popsies, ca. 1960-70s (artifact selected by Daniel Clowes)

Dennis Morris

Tammy Rae Carland

Stephanie Syjuco

Mickalene Thomas

Color Poem #95

they’ve got a gold going on in this hallway
so old so burnished so mellow so warm that
it’s like the lobby is glowing and breathing
washed down in honey for you to walk into

How Time Is On Your Side: It's Here!

It’s here, it's here! Advance copies of my new book How Time Is On Your Side landed on my desk this week and it is a sheer delight to behold. I am thrilled with how this book came out, and so excited to bring these ideas to world about how we find time for the things that matter. It somes out next Spring!

All hail the amazing team at Chronicle Books who brought this dream to fruition: Christina Amini, Dene Reyes, Michele Posner, Rachel Harrell, Janine Sato, Sarah Lin Go, and Diane Levinson. Woo!

Short Hair!

I chopped my hair off this weekend! Or, rather, the lovely and talented Megan Morales of Dreamers and Make-Believers did so, at my request. I had, and adored, short hair for most of the decade between 1995 and 2005 and then grew it out thinking it maybe wasn't super flattering for my face shape. But I always loved short hair, and missed having it, and recently I decided, you know what? Who cares if it's "flattering" (by which word, let's be honest, we mean "it somehow gives the illusion that some part of your body is smaller in size than it actually is in reality")? My head is the size my head is. And now my hair is the size I want my hair to be. It feels light and free and real. I was influenced by the haircuts of various folks: Megan Rapino, Maye Musk, Pink, Mealanie Kobayashi, and Captain Marvel (when she had short hair in the comics) -- here's an amusing pinboard of all the inspirations for this current look. And here's a little gallery of great-moments-in-Bridget-short-hair-history (because of course I had to dig back through all my old photo albums -- film! paper! -- before pushing the button on this new version):

Crisco

I'm still way back in my own deep archives here (this drawing is from early 2016), admiring (and almost, oddly, envying?) my own previous wonkieness and looseness of line. The idea of drawing a can of Crisco remains entirely essential to the larger conceptual project I continue to think about and work on continuously in my picture-making: the magic of the boring.

Lee Krasner

There's a Lee Krasner show up at the Barbican in London right now that I wish I could go see. The ability to just magically pop down the block to various cultural venues around the world at will would be a handy super power to have, come to think of it. I mean, just look at this stuff! It's like candy. Makes me happy, even to view it through the digital window from afar.

Color Poem #94

it’s tempting to call it millennial pink as
that’s become the shorthand for all pale
and not bright pinks in our present murky
century and I’ll grant you it’s close but
there’s a muted-ness the millennial shade
carries that this washed-down paint mess
lacks an emphatic-ness here that’s insistent
unexpected like I’m for the ages this pink
declares

Cover Reveal: How Time Is On Your Side

My next book is coming out next spring and this is it's cover! Woo! It's about how we make time for the things that are important to us and I am so excited to share more about it with you as its publication gets closer. But for now I'll just leave it here in all it's blue and silver shimmery glory.

Current Joys

The other day on Swiss Miss I came across this quote:

“Talking about our problems is our greatest addiction. Break the habit. Talk about your joys.” -Rita Schiano

It reminded me of all the smart and great things Ingrid Fetel Lee has to say about joy (if you're not getting her newsletter I highly recommend it) and how challenging it can be to focus upon joy. How we think it's selfish or frivolous, especially during hard times (be those hard times personal or global). 

So my dear work-wife Christina and I decided to list our current joys. This feels especially important to me right now as I attempt, not always successfully, to take care of myself with the black dog of grief sitting on my chest. Of course, in keeping with that circumstance, my current joys tend to be rather low-impact, undemanding, comforting sorts of things. They are:

• Patching a quilt made by my dad that I inherited from my mom and that needs some love, on Sunday mornings, while Bill and Mabel read the Sunday comics out loud
• Drawing and painting
• Working on my upcoming talk for Creative Mornings (October!)
• Contemplating a drastic haircut
• YA fiction (currently reading: the new Angie Thomas On the Come Up, and listening to The Last of August by Brittany Cavallaro)
• WHALE SHARK LIVE CAM
• Ice cream at 9pm

Motor Home

When I was a kid my next door neighbors had a motor home and I was pretty obsessed with it. I wanted to live in one full-time when I grew up. I would be an artist. I would travel all around painting pictures on an easel. With my horse, obviously.

I made this picture in the spring of 2016. Looking at it today I notice a real concrete change to my style over the past three and a half years. If I drew the same thing now I would make all those brown stripes much straighter and neater than I did back then. This is not an entirely voluntary choice, nor am I sure it's an improvement. I may, in fact, like the old way better. But I'm not sure I could make one like this again if I tried. Things have just moved on. Huh.

Julia Kuhl

I love these watercolors by Juila Kuhl, from a recent show at Frosh & Potrmann. I'm a sucker for words in art, and for plaid in art, so their juxtaposition together is just perfect delicious fruit for my personal eyes and brain.