#17 winter solstice 2015

Our day began with the gray and very wet rural view. It ended with a damp urban walk. In between we wandered the open studios of the MFA students of the School of Visual Arts. It is wonderful to see so many artists getting their ideas into physical forms and so many friends, family, and other artists supporting their efforts.

Advice to artists from Jerry Saltz:

envy is the enemy

keep working, always

if you can, only work 3 days a week at your day job

be nice to people & go to openings - no one else knows what to do at them either

you feel the need to dance naked in public, everyone else does it in private

this is your gang (your peers from art school) - protect everyone in the gang, even the runt

85% of what's in Chelsea is shit, but what's fascinating is that your 85% is different from someone else's (like the Wallace Stevens poem Metaphors of a Magnifico: "Twenty men crossing a bridge, / Into a village, / Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges / Into twenty villages")

don't be cynical - once you become cynical you can't make good work