100 Days of Doing and Probably What Not To Do

What Lives Between Pictures and Words

A 100 Day Project

It’s already strange. I forgot to read the fine print of the 100 day project newsletter where the suggestion to try to keep your doings for the next 100 days about ten minutes long. So you don’t burn out and so you can attend to the other parts of life too. I’ve already failed that but the project is an every other day session of letters to pictures and pictures to letters, an every other day back and forth.

Thursdays I’ll show work in process on Instagram, and Sundays I’ll show you the week’s work tied in a weekly bow here.

Welcome to the next 14.2 weeks aka a 100 Day Project, a synthesis of conversation between image and words! (I hope I can do this—is it ok to say that?)

Apkallu-figure Fertilizing the Sacred Tree, ca. 883–859 B.C.E. Gypsum stone, Assyrian; Ancient Near Eastern, Brooklyn Museum

It seems unintentionally to be beginning with IN THE BEGINNING. The first picture literally came out of a blur. Then demanded I consider the origin story in words the second day. This is what it will be I guess.

On the third day came the black swans. But on the fourth and fifth days I forgot to write to it and was working on three things at once, having a lot of fun playing around with the swan images digitally and going down a real swan hole into the roots and onto a sea of something ancient and still beyond my grasp. Nothing happened in order on those days but I did put the days together on the sixth day and rested on the seventh day. I followed my body more than the prescription. I watched soothing tv, read Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey, sat glassy-eyed and speechless through Friday’s Press conference. I roasted winter squash with honey, smelled Springtime outside which, by today, went back to winter. Still there are snowdrops, a warmer slant to the sun and a sliver moon tonight over Manhattan.

A citizen’s project of sorts: Be human. Make art, write to it, see what it all tells you to do. I was hoping if you follow along, maybe you can give me some clues or send some vibes and we can go on this journey together if you want together. This seems part of the plan. Here it is…

WEEK ONE in Images then Words and So on-February 23-March 2nd, 2025

One: An Origin Story

Waves in conversation.

(waves)

When the serpent said to Eve, “Look what I found!” Adam strained his ears toward familiarity and found only strangeness.

The garden was always the serpent’s place to begin with, a garden carrying the fecundity of uncountable skins shed.

Two: And then the garden is the past.

Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth, tells that the serpent in the garden is known primarily as the deceitful one but here is another way of considering the tale to make room for Eve:

“The Garden is the serpent's place. It is an old, old story…Without the knowledge of this tree we’d be a bunch of babies in the garden of Eden with no participation in our lives.”

The serpent’s role in leading Eve to the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is that of bringer. A bringer of consciousness, a bringer who aims to help Eve throw off the past to make way for the future. A shedding.

Campbell tells us: “Man doesn't enter life except by woman, and so it is woman who brings us into this wold of pairs of opposites and suffering. And so Adam and Eve have thrown themselves out of the Garden of Timeless Unity, you might say, just by that act of recognizing duality.

To move out into the world, one acts in pairs of opposites.”

I look up Black Swans because they keep coming to me in my waking dreams which are the paintings. Paintings as waking dreams.

“Black Swans usually live in monogamous pairs, however these birds can form very large groups, especially during molting season when they are unable to fly. Juveniles tend to change partners often but once mature they mate for life…

Both sexes are are highly aggressive in defending the nest, and will attack any incomer with vigorous beats of their powerful wings.”

They make a high pitched call when in flight, that the San Francisco Zoo calls a trumpet: “Although the male’s trumpet call is deeper than the female’s, black swans also produce a softer cooing sound as well as a whistle when defending a nest.”

I want to draw them all day but I only have time for this one. Maybe they’re following the pair out of the garden and along the sea.

Row row row your boat

Gently down the stream

Merrily merrily merrily merrily

Life is but a dream.

Three: When I am at sea, I want to come back to land, when I am on land I want to go to sea.

I named this one “Disappearing Flower” and inserted it on the shoreline of the garden. Maybe I am still below the Tree of Knowledge.

The tree as a big flower. The earth holding it like hands. Arms like snakes. Everything a blur.

I am learning the Sumerian version of the myth: The name of the mountain is Mashu. As he arrives at the mountain of Mashu, which keeps watch each day over the rising and setting of the sun, whose peaks reach as high as the "banks of heaven," and whose breast reaches down to the netherworld, The scorpion-people keep watch at its gate.*

If my art is the land and the words are the sea, I am beginning to feel a little excitement between the waves.

*Rivkah and H. Yehezkel Scharf Kluger, The Archetypal Significance of Gilgamesh: A Modern Ancient Hero.

After Thoughts

Maybe it will all make better sense as I go. A wise person once told me, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there” and I will add “then suddenly we’re studying the Epic of Gilgamesh, Joseph Campbell and working with Jungian Black Swans and shadow selves.”

This week’s beauty and brilliance in the world:

• A life changer: Pádraig Ó Tuama reading Phase One by Dilruba Ahmed

• Zadie Smith’s brilliant wrenching take on this terribleness…

• Countered by my very favorite instagram account hands down, because mostly I am reluctant these days to be there, in an attempt to loosen corporate hooks in me. When I find them like a barb, I just go back to Isabelle’s cakes.

• This so very beautiful book illustrated by the wonderful Stacey Dressen McQueen