Spring fever is no joke

Wow. It's been rough lately; lots of internal and external drama that has wrung me out. I love that as far as humans get from nature, in the end, we are no match for it. The seasonal changes are just too strong to ignore. This is from my final project for my poetry class with Myung Mi Kim. I feel like that now: when you're done with a semester and are about to be severed from a teacher and a classroom and then what do you do with all that you've been doing for the last few months?

Maybe that's not how I feel at all. I'm shut out of the printshop this weekend for the holiday - good and bad. Good b/c a break is handy. Bad b/c I was just getting ready to produce my zine in an etched format. Yesterday in the studio, I got horrible headaches from the bad ventilation. But I worked on seven plates, and had fun playing w/a new technique: sugar lift. I haven't been documenting my printmaking learning curve, so here is a good video on both the aquatint and sugar lift techniques, by Crown Point Press in SF.

I'm also in the bereft state of mind. I miss Ching-In - she's in Singapore on spring break. Before she left, she said that I read like a writer. My boss today showed me self-portraits she did when she was 10 and 20 years old, and I thought about what it might be like to know that you were an artist from an early age. I used to envy my musician friends who knew exactly what they wanted at age five. Or even fifteen.

Today was another exhausting studio day at work, but exciting: I began the very first production run at the resurrected papermill!! There are still lots of kinks to work out in the new space, but I managed to pull two sets of sheets, about 70 in all, while looking out the windows at the garden-in-progress. It was funny being back at the vat, after such a long absence. But I guess it's like what they say about riding bikes, or having sex (maybe they only say it about riding bikes...) - once you learn, you never forget. [Though I kind of protest this point b/c I learned how to ride a bike when I was a kid, and then had to re-learn it in college.]