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Living the Questions Now
The crucial difference between putting out artwork and allowing artwork to happen.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. — Rainer Maria Rilke
It seems that all my epiphanies happen while talking to my husband over some sort of cocktail.
I love cool, damp, rainy days in Florida for the same reason that people love hot, clear days in northern climates: their rarity. We celebrate this rarity with hot toddies, over which we recently talked about why my artwork has so suddenly and obsessively pivoted from one series of subjects to another.
In October 2019, the first all-female spacewalk happened aboard the International Space Station. It was as though I’d been electrified. It’s now February 2020, and during these past few months, I’ve become fascinated by NASA: its history, its technology, its future. The artwork I’d done for years before — portraits inspired by my mother’s Cuban family and our own cultural legacies — were (seemingly) cast…