Making it is Art

Over steaming bowls of caldillo Tía L made us I dipped a charred corn tortilla in the warm tomato based broth as my tongue burned from the heat of the soup and the jalapeño. Sometimes when Vaimo and I are being funny we joke about how we’d love a wife and I found myself noticing that spending a couple of nights at my auntie’s house is that dream realized. I’m such a bad niece I’m not sure if she’s in her seventh decade yet or just shy, but either way during our visit she mentioned a lot of times about how sometimes in life you just have to settle. She talks about maybe moving out of her country home that she shares with her husband, but that would only be after if, when, something happened to him. Plans of traveling the world put off to some future unknown date. Whispers of well, “if that happens it happens.” Dreams of the kitchen remodel put off until they won’t happen in her lifetime, or in the time of her caretaking of the home even as its been decades so far. Meals uneaten because she can’t find any restaurant nearby that serves the risotto she had that one time she traveled abroad. 

After Emporia I make my pilgrimage to Wichita by way of the Kansas Turnpike. I whipped onto the Interstate with my K-Tag, flew through the gate as the surveillance cameras take my Equinox’s photo, probably catching me enthralled in the current listen of an audio book. I observed cattle grazing in freshly harvested fields and am grateful I’m not riding these 80 or so miles on horseback or via wagon. I’m grateful I’m not making the journey on foot. My trusty steed is a 1.5-liter turbocharged four cylinder. Over brunch another Auntie tells me that I’ve gone to so many places and done so many things that are on her bucket list. I tell Uncle he needs to take her to Hawaii!

These journeys this Pandemic, but especially in 2021 where I’ve logged so many hours on the road through Midwestern corn, wheat, and soybean fields, have given me a lot of time to think. Think, and be, in motion as I’ve traced interstates and highways from Minnesota to Kansas and back again, finding new favorite landmarks and favorite pitstops. I’ve pondered a lot about what it all means. How to keep going. Why we dream and what we long to achieve. The we here is me. But maybe you too? After all, you ask for these letters to hit your emailbox twice monthly. Before I set out for Kansas my Bestie said, “I love your life, that you can just go do what you want to do.” And I thought, yeah, this life isn’t so bad. It’s true. Some people are waiting lifetimes for a two week creative retreat, maybe never having the time to do it. My life brought me two residencies this year, one for which I was selected, and the one I made myself.

Making it myself is something I like to do. I pretend like I don't need others' help or support even though it's probably what I crave most. And of course being able to make it to two residencies wasn’t my victory alone. I was able to come back to Matfield Station, the renovated Mexican bunkhouse in Matfield Green Kansas to get back to my book project about Mexicans in Kansas because I sold a painting. That funded my stay for two weeks, the privilege of time away from the piles of laundry I was sorting through before I left. The home repair projects I’ve been meaning to do and just can’t seem to get around to completing. Of course if I was revising chapters at home my bookcases would have their doors installed and the library lighting would also be up. I’d had built the canvas frames for new paintings and lovingly primed them. But I wouldn’t have a rewritten first chapter of my book, nor would I have the insights that the book needs me to scrap two chapters and replace them with something else. The content of which I spent the last week carving out of the many ideas floating through my head and based on the trajectories of my life’s most recent meanders. I wouldn’t have a book manuscript to revise at all if not for my former academic life. And I wouldn’t have had these new insights about different chapters that the book needs if I wasn’t a painter. And probably would have none of this if not for my Tía’s daily prayers for me and the other ways good fortune and luck have aligned to place me exactly at the place where I am supposed to be.

Making it as an artist probably looks different to each of us. But what we each share is a desire for someone to connect to our work no matter how small; even if that someone is ourself. The traditional goals for "making it" in the 21st century as a visual artist probably looks like gallery representation, sales of work providing a livable income, work on museum walls, works in museum collections. Being recognized, whether as a person in our celebrity obsessed nation, or by what you have produced, housed in these walled spaces. And it’s all luck really. Being at the right place at the right time. Meeting the right people at the right time. Defying insurmountable odds. Buying into the cruel optimism that our present demands of us, that somehow if we work hard enough we will make it. The irony of all of this is that you have to make it to even get close to making it. In this sense, I mean you’ve got to make the work. No desire to make it as an artist can be stronger than your catalogue. I’m just out here on this spinning rock, desperately, earnestly… trying to make it. You too?

What I’m Reading

Magical Habits, by Monica Huerta 

What a beautiful, surprising, and unexpected book. In the book, Huerta works through an archive of her own making family photos, restaurant menus, text messages, maps and memories that serve as the framework of analysis through which Huerta presents in bite size pieces in this slim volume. Her prose constantly weaves through different spaces and times and resides in the in-between space of truth and fiction or past and present. She’s an expert time-traveller whose words bring as many questions as answers for herself or the reader. It’s an academic memoir that made me (fittingly as it is scorpio season) jealous that it wasn’t my own. And also the book feels so slippery as it weaves between what sometimes feels like disconnected subjects only to make the connections for the savvy reader several pages later. But, perhaps its most brilliant accomplishment is that it requires one to feel as you wade through the pages. Which is perhaps why finding it made it all the more important to my own ways of knowing.

What I’m Watching

The Other Two (Streaming on HBO Max)

My Bestie got me completely hooked on this HBO Max Original show which vacillates between the knowing winks and nods in attempt to subvert known comedic tropes and stereotypes and laugh out loud moments that surprise the viewer. While I found the beginning of season one to take a while for the show to find its legs the relationship between the two main characters (a brother and sister duo who are struggling to get their lives together) holds the tongue-in-cheek critique of the entertainment industry, celebrity, and publicity as well as notions of power and sexuality that advances the purpose of the show beyond the laugh out loud moments. A refreshing take on gay sexuality and mainstream (ill-informed millennial) feminism rounds out this show as thoroughly entertaining. You’ll be loving and hating Brooke and Carey Dubek who are definitely flawed heroes and rooting for them even as they make so many missteps. The supporting cast is also great, including the awesome Wanda Sykes. 

Artist Offerings

• A refreshing new Latinx gallery that goes beyond the stereotypes of Latinx representations related to identity.
• Look at these beautifully colorful paintings by Margaret Garcia for her upcoming retrospective in California
• Check out this writing by Ashley Fairbanks This is the work for the rest of our lives that provides purpose for our continued work on climate change
• The writing about these paintings, and the paintings of doughnuts by Emily Eveleth highlighted in the article made me hungry. Sumptuous indeed

Creative Ritual

I returned to writing in a way I had not in a very long time by taking myself back to Kansas for a two week retreat. Working on this book project has involved so many trips to archives and so many secondary source readings and what feels like a lifetime of work. As some of it has been the result of the last 20 years of my life I guess that’s not so far off. I am digging deep into my most persistent of follow-through traits to get this across the finish line. A new version of it to my editor by end of this year or bust. You all can hold me accountable. I learned I made it to the semifinal round of a grant I applied for but not on to the finalist round. Oh well, the universe has other plans for me. At the bunkhouse I worked on a small interior painting in between writing and that felt good. I was also solicited to write a piece for a journal, which I’m working on for a mid-November deadline- yay for people connecting with my words!

Questions to Ponder

What have you made lately?
What does making it look like to you?
How have you pursued your dreams?
What dreams still pursue you?

Thanks for journeying with me. I hope, as always, that you take what you need and leave the rest for someone else, or for another time. 

-KCF

PS: As always if you can, support this work that is my labor of love with one-time or sustaining support. Anything helps! Thank you to my four sustainers! Can't donate, no worries, I'm glad you're here. Please consider sharing my newsletter with someone you think will enjoy it. Till next time and Happy Halloween, Samhain or DDLM if you celebrate!