At 2 a.m. early Saturday, I woke up watching podcasts, konmari-ing my sock drawer, filming this winter’s first snowfall that so cutely happened right on the solstice and then drifted back to sleep at 5:30 a.m. for 4 more hours.

I spent the day taking apart big envelopes to put back together into even bigger envelopes with lots of packing tape after lining the paintings with bubblewrap and cardboard; grew excited with each completed package; took this picture. I love the analog world and resent my fragmented and practically shattered attention span. I could have been quietly picking a banjo and eking out a new song helping me process the complications of life, but instead i’m watching podcasts.

Which brings me to a fun musing:

Yesterday someone said, flippantly but perhaps more accurate than not, ‘I give the internet five years.” Because the internet is a commercial hellscape of popups and garbled AI. God, please be true. I don’t know how the internet is going to evolve, but I hope I evolve back into a fully analog creature, capable of full appreciative immersion with no instinct to grab my phone; free of anxiety; released from this technological loop and catapulted into a nirvana of potent reality.

I dream of paintings made without interruption for twelve hours straight, like I used to do back in 2005, playing Odetta’s music on repeat. I listened to so much Odetta while painting, even moving to Chicago on a whim in 2006 because I thought I’d find the same feeling there, the feeling of listening to her music. I make loose associations and follow them with conviction. It’s called intuition; called being an artist.

This blog post is a portion of today’s installment of my newsletter The World-Famous Art Studio Dispatch that I sent out this morning. To subscribe to fun, occasional writings my from art studio (always non-salesy, except for that one time I announced a Black Friday sale), sign up here. http://eepurl.com/dHIgT1