Tartarus daily

When I shared my coffee grounds with a friend a week ago (I do this with friends almost every day) he said they looked like souls relegated to Tartarus: the straits of hell where human spirits are left…swimming? Constance Debré swims every day, I read in an excerpt of Love Me Tender, her newly translated book, where she writes about her sinewy back muscles, saying without saying it that swimming is a way to harden her heart, to brace her more feminine emotions that certain choices—good choices, in a sense—have also made near impossible to endure. When I swam every day, which was from this time last year through the past fall, I felt my back becoming whittled and more masc and like Constance I enjoyed the feeling...but also, my sinuses and auditory canals clogged up with chlorine, and my hearing deteriorated further, so I returned to daily yoga and let my outline soften once more. And what my friend called Tartarus in my coffee I tell him reminded me of my paintings, which are as Venusian (watery) as I am, this is how I describe them:

I typically begin a piece by delineating a structure, introducing "light" and "matter" through tonality and form to lend each composition an individuated meaning. I paint mood, but mood only as it can be pinned down, I paint the aspects of our inner lives that are willing to be mapped, to be shown expanding and contracting over a painting’s genesis. I am curious about how artworks, like people, become "themselves," how they attain actualization or embodiment, and so I chase down fleeting feelings and ephemeral experiences, aiming to make them physical fact. In painting I enter a trancelike state, deploying color, gesture, and cultural tokens to translate where I am in the middle of a maelstrom. I am, in Amy Sillman’s terms, a processual ‘draw-er’, building ineffably from inside out as movement and moment carry me forward.