Coming up for air

Whew! I've finally been able to come for air after nights of staying past 1 AM laboring over the details of a portrait doll I'm making as a comission for a friend.

The wig gave me a bit of a problem but I think I was able to manage it well enough to install it tonight. Regretably though, I'm afraid it's not the same hairstyle as the person who's portrait this doll is supposed to be. I can't quite seem to get the naughty impish look I'm aiming for either.

I'm going back to work on her after I finish this post. Hopefully I'll be able to post jpgs of herwithin the week.

Meanwhile, I'm still figuring out how how to manage my time between the comission works which are steadily coming in trickles, the upcoming creatitivty workshop early next month and the two completion papers that are due by the end of this semester among other things.

I'm trully torn between devoting more time to art production and the completion of my master's degree. When I started on the program I was quite sure I knew why I chose art theory and criticism. I thought this area of study would help me sort out the varied contradictions I have about art and it's significance to me. Now that I'm only a thesis away from it's completions (plus the 2 papers I've mentioned earlier) I'm even more conflicted.

I started out looking for answers to several questions about the true value of art to me and to whoever will be coming accross my work. I realized that my personal significance is more valuable to me that how others will regard my work or the text of my work.

All this digging into the myriad of ways of reading text has informed me of different methods and devices for producing text. As to how I'm going to turn this realization into a topic for a masteral thesis that is plausible is another matter.

At the moment I neither have the inclination nor the desire to work on my thesis. This realization alone is what's giving energy to what augustine calls the inertia beast.

As far as I'm concerned, what I've set out to accomplish when I went into this field of study has already been accomplished. These realizations alone however does not earn me a master's degree. And so I labor to convince myself to push on with this endeavor for completion if only just for the sake of completion.

Perhaps I'm not really that much in the dark about all this and that I merely need to look at all this another way, as James parents would suggest (james & The Giant Peach).