Watching paint dry

This "art" project I'm doing for Couples Therapy has become the most time-consuming venture I've engaged in for a good long while. Nearly every aspect of my life -- cooking, cleaning, reading for school, drinking water -- has taken a back seat to this painstaking process. The only reason I'm writing the blog at this moment is because I'm waiting for some paint to dry.

What's sad is that, when the end product is seen by others, there will be very little evidence of how much time was consumed. The only reason this concerns me is that we're supposed to do something equivalent to the effort of researching and writing a 16-page paper. This has taken me far longer, but I'm afraid it will look like I simply slapped some pictures and some words onto a few pieces of painted cardboard.

The process will be invisible, as it always is.

When I worked as a graphic designer, it always amused me to empty my paper recycling into the massive shredding bin down the hall. I would do so about once a month, and it usually felt like an archeological dig. I would sift through layer upon layer of my ideas, images, words, whole compositions that would never see the ink of an off-set press.

They were the civilizations of my creativity. (Some fell more quickly than others.)

But there is a huge difference between doing graphic design on a computer and making an object in the physical world.

If I was working in Photoshop, I could save a copy of the original file and create dozens of alternatives without losing the material. In Quark, InDesign and Illustrator, I could do the same. Copy, paste, apply a filter, resize the font, whip up 30 variations of red and apply each of them as a tint, print the file, see which I liked best.

Mixing paint and laying it down is alright. When I don't like what I've done, I can paint over the last layer and create an entirely new effect. Or I can flip over the cardboard and start again. I enjoy that. No problem.

But the rest of the work is a bit of a bugger. Because I'm working with an adhesive and doing things to images for which I have no duplicates, each step in the process becomes an irreversible decision. I have to press forward. If I screw it up -- or just make something I don't like -- the piece ends up on the scrap heap.

It's not time wasted, per se, because I learn something from the stuff I don't like. And I also learned a long time ago from the ex-XGF, who's an artist, that you can always incorporate the crap you don't like into something you make in the future. Waste not, want not.

Nevertheless, I have a certain amount of pride to deal with over here, and I also have to finish the project this weekend. So I'm rather anxious about the prospect of getting it done *and* ending up with something I won't be ashamed to show to the class.

On top of that self-induced pressure, I also have to prepare some sort of presentation -- basically, me talking about my intention with this art and how it relates to theories discussed in the class. In the pieces I'm creating, I've been swinging wildly at every ball marked "patriarchy," so that's pretty much what I'm going to have to discuss. Fun, fun, fun!

My little gay boyfriend came over yesterday and saw my work spread out all over the place. He laughed ruefully at a couple of the pieces -- a good sign -- but said he is concerned about my ability to explain them. "The straight people aren't going to like what you're saying," he told me. (Another good sign, if you ask me.)

Well, it will all be over soon enough.

On that note, I believe my paint is dry. Back to the mess I dare to call art.

And then it's off to bed because I have to work at 7 a.m. tomorrow. That is an hour I didn't even manage to see when I was three hours behind in Hawaii. No telling how I'm going to manage to do that. But I have a feeling it involves going to sleep before 2 a.m....