When I was asked last fall to blog for the Chronicle Review, I thought only of the impossibility of blogging. Who are these people who think they’re saying something coherent, on all these crazy topics, two to three times a week? No way that could ever be me. And if someone had said to me, “Laurie, in about ten months you’re going to have written 100 posts on your little blog,” I would have laughed with disbelief. Yet here I am, at exactly that point, looking back on my 100 posts in, well, stupefaction: a vast collection of small essays on topics ranging from Georges Seurat to the Monkey Puzzle tree. What I find hardest to comprehend isn’t so much that I wrote them, as that I thought them up in the first place.
As a professor, I’m used to talking about ideas, and people who know me well think of me as a yammerer. I’ve also put words into print on a number of occasions, writing essays for The Chronicle Review and The Common Review, as well as catalog essays on a couple of individual artists whose work I admire. Even so, writing remains an extremely difficult activity for me, and it never, ever, comes naturally. My sense that writing should be solid and timeless (compared, at least, to the fleetingness of speech) requires it always be well-crafted, concise and purposeful. In short, I’m constitutionally unsuited to blogging, a form that mixes spontaneous speech with casual, journalistic writing.
My mother was a strict grammarian who, judging from her letters, was a clear, strong writer as well; she continually corrected my speech while I was growing up. And even though she’s been gone for almost two decades, she hovers over me (relax—not as a ghost, but as a memory) whenever I am speaking or writing, insisting that I fix my slips in grammar, change my weak, passive verbs into strong, active ones, and replace my bland adjectives with really meaningful modifiers.
At heart, I possess a painter’s disposition. I spend much of my life working in solitude in my studio, ploddingly building the forms and surfaces of my abstract paintings. The brain astounds me by its willingness to do a hundred activities at once. While mixing colors and mediums, scooping up paint onto a brush, adjusting my compositions and straightening my edges, I simultaneously ponder the part of a picture I’ve just painted, plan what I’m about to paint, listen to music (John Prine’s In Spite of Ourselves has been my album of choice this summer), consider what’s in the fridge that can be transformed into the evening’s dinner, remind myself to call the dentist, ponder the numbing stupidity of TV political analysts, and try to avoid scratching the patch of poison ivy rash that’s scabbed up on my back. And it’s most often the case that while I’m in the studio, busily multi-thinking, I come up with my blog topics.
Before I started, blogging struck me as too journalistic, individualistic and sloppy, and the only good blogs I knew were Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes.com, Walter Robinson’s Artnet Magazine, and Terry Teachout’s
About Last Night. Now I troll daily through Brainstorm blogs, as well as a host of others—most notably, the
