Darkness Fades
This is not a post about the trend of milky notes in perfume.
The nights are now
Better stay, light
I’m looking for a way
Darkness fades
from Darkness Fades by Sharon Van Etten
I sat down at my workbench in the studio yesterday for the first time in almost a month.
My mother-in-law’s funeral went as well as a funeral can go. My own mother and her Alzheimer’s are both out of the hospital and now in memory care. Besides memory, Alzheimer’s erases all filters: on her first day there, she touched a Black nurse’s hair (...and told her how beautiful she is). On her second day, miniature therapy horses came to visit. Memory care feels like the best of no good options.
Somehow this has allowed me to be back in the studio. The crack is how the light gets in.
Kindness without Hope
The Santa Fe Literary Festival was this past weekend. It’s basically Coachella for Books. In that spirit, I blagged a couple tickets from a VIP friend for the morning meditations and talks with zen teachers Henry Shukman and Roshi Joan Halifax. Both incredible. I wanted to see Ocean Vuong in conversation with Rebecca Solnit, but that was oversold by 800 tickets (and live-streamed to a packed Lensic theater audience a few blocks away). I heard it was like going to church.
To make up for this, driving to the barn the next morning, I listened to his New York Times interview on The Daily from last year. His most recent book, The Emperor of Gladness had just been released. He gives good interview.
As I understand it, Vuong has studied with Roshi Joan for a while, and is greatly influenced by Thich Nhat Hanh. He spoke of being in this world and of actions, large and small, born from kindness without hope. He spoke of caretaking for his boyfriend’s grandmother with Alzheimer’s in exchange for a place to live, he spoke of his mother as she was dying. I think of my mother and the miniature horses. I think of cleaning a hoof or brushing a mane, and making my scents from the piñon here, to share a piece of the light and space and scale of New Mexico. My visual work still holds a place, but the solid perfumes are compact and can circulate more easily than a large 40x60 inch piece. They don’t require wall space, a crate, or a framing invoice. I hope they are kindness without hope.
So I’m back to staring at the gathered piñon branches in the studio that I abandoned last month. The warm winter drought has almost certainly brought the bark beetles to our once healthy piñons, meaning, for better or worse, I’ll soon have more branches to work with. I look at the piñon on the table and consider how I will get them into oil. I haven’t figured out the process yet, but will try. Actual pieces of this place will be alchemized into scent.
In the Bardo
I got this in a gallery press release email this week:
The fuck does this even mean. I have an MFA in fluent Art Speak, yet reading this convinces me that consciously uncoupling myself from the LA Contemporary Art World and moving to the high desert to be with horses and light and space and scent with a 40% lower cost of living was the right choice. Creative life arbitrage.
It’s a funny thing, to stand at some distance to the thing you wanted for so long. Gallery press releases are the purest expression of tryhard vibes, a team effort to convince everyone you have created something Important. You want to be seen, to have your ideas matter to someone beyond the studio walls. And secretly, yes to sell some actual work to make an actual living. But you can’t say that last part, because that would be Careerist and somehow render you less of an artist. Instead of shouting “Buy Now!” the email whispers “Request Preview”.
And then there’s Duty Free.
Traveling back from the funeral in the UK, I walked thru Duty Free which truly felt like a place perfume creativity goes to die. (even the thin Hermes branded blotter strips were flimsy as shit). Still, because I was flying home to rural New Mexico, I took the opportunity to stop and smell the (synthetic) roses. It felt like a big, sad world away from where I want perfume and scent to be in my life. I couldn’t relate to any of it. All that will make someone a lot of money. Which is fine. I want to make a lot of money too. But more than that, I want to make something…else.
Between performative Art World pretension and, on the other end of the spectrum, mass market perfumes that are blurbed as “juicy and irresistible, bursting with playful charm and spontaneity,” there is a middle path. There has to be.
Life is Short
Watching the new Martin Short documentary this week, Marty, Life is Short, I was struck by how much joy and fun and play he’s managed to maintain, in the face of so much loss and grief. Steve Martin says this seems to be Short’s guiding principle in all career decisions: “Is it fun?” Short declares that 98% of his career has been failure. This is just the nature of a creative life, he shrugs.
Maybe this is true for everything. 98% failure. Certainly with art. With most things related to horses. My friend Chris Wilcha made an incredible meta-documentary Flipside on the nature of creative practice, and all those unfinished, unsuccessful, unrealized projects littered across a good life. This is not a Zuckerbergian idea of “fail fast.” This is failing slowly, after years of hard work, of trying to balance the art vs the commerce and never managing to feel like you’ve been successful at either. And yet.
Lessons from Bookchella
At the festival merch booth (aka the official bookshop) I picked up Earth Keeper, a slim volume by the late Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday:
Moving to New Mexico has been an exercise in this, looking at a landscape, and therefore life, creative and otherwise, it’s all one thing really, from a different angle. I was so entrenched in LA Art World, but didn’t realize it until I left. Working with the piñons and other plants and trees around the studio feels like a way to connect to the world around me. The actual world, not the machined world of algorithmic attention and Like counts. I don’t know what the piñon oil infusion will become, but it will be a base of a scent built of here and now, of this season and wood and wind and rain. It will be a part of this place. There won’t be any trending milky notes. It will be kindness without hope. There is a 98% chance it will be failure. But it will be fun.
Thank you for being here,
Alia
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