i have a studio in my home, and lately, it makes me feel very cooped up. walking around san diego, i happened upon this building with studio space for rent. it seemed like it was calling to me with its charley harper esque front door mural, so i made an appointment to go check out the interior later today.
hoping for the best!

do any of you have studio spaces in or out of your home? i'm finding that at home, sometimes i'm not able to focus or stay motivated & it has become quite frustrating. also, i love the idea of having a space where i do work not related to my shop or business. like, it could be my painting studio only. not my design studio - and definitely not my EMAIL studio. good god.

on a side note, if any creatives in san diego would like to potentially share a studio, email me! -- not sure if the offices here are big enough to share, but i like the idea of sharing.

we went to see the padres vs the cubs last night here in san diego. i was conflicted about who to root for as predicted. the friends we went with asked "what's with chicago's teams being bear-themed, are there bears in illinois?" and it's kind of bugging me that i don't know why. (no, there are no bears in illinois...that i know of)

i kind of want to challenge myself to make an artwork a day, preferably varying media as much as possible, but i feel like i would let myself down & eventually slack. sometimes i wish i could just not have email, so i could reclaim the hours i have to spend every day responding to it & do something creative FOR FUN (not for work) with my time instead. my sister is always suggesting that i allot 2 hours, say..2 days a week to respond, but that would never cover it all. i got 562 emails in the last week, over 18,000 in my inbox total. so much of my life feels wasted responding to emails saying things like 'please take me off your email list' and 'i'll get back to you on that'

i saw something on the news about how it's a new type of classifiable anxiety: fear of having too much email or something like that. email feels like someone is constantly tapping me on the shoulder asking me to please, please pay attention to them now right now please look now.

something is screwy. First, i set fire to the microwave two days ago with a bag of microwave popcorn -- i swear, even though i stayed up all night boiling lemons and coffee and washing down every surface in the house, it is STILL all i can smell. also, let me tell you -- the fact that it was 100 calorie kettle corn does NOT make it smell sweetly. it smells like cotton candy from hell. as a result, even the thought of food makes me nauseous, so running on no sleep and no food, somehow i managed to do the following:

a. i re-coded over 250 pages on my shop. i added a banner, changed some of the buttons, reformatted the tables, and most importantly, added this little "or you might like" button that you see on the left there, which allows for easier browsing of the shop. it was all so tedious which is why i wonder: where the heck did the stamina and concentration come from?!!!! didn't you read what i said before about popcorn hell?!

b. i started training again this week. i've been doing physical training for the last 7 months or so, a couple times a week at the YMCA - but had to take a hiatus when i had the broken shoulder. somehow, in my weird empty lifeless state, i trained vigorously day before yesterday and i'm going to do it again today - somehow. um.

c. i'm driving again - yes, for 7 weeks there i was not mobile at speeds greater than 4 mph (maybe 5 if i hustle) so yesterday i had to run an errand. on the way home - what should have taken me 15 minutes to drive took me 90 minutes. why? because i spaced, deep in "thought", and missed my exit by, like, a lot. in rush hour! maybe i better stick to the no car thing....

i'm just wondering when i'm going to crash - i feel like i haven't slept in days. last night around midnight, before i did get ~3 hrs of sleep, michael and i were watching the padres vs cubs game (it's like the battle of cities-i-lived-in) and i started talking about how funny something or another was. after 2 minutes of incoherent babbling i realized i had no idea what i was saying. not like: "oh, i was saying something but i lost my train of thought" -- more like "oh, what i am saying makes no sense whatsoever in any language"

if only i could sleep. but then i wouldn't have gotten all this work done....

two quotes from "The Beautiful and Damned" by F Scott Fitzgerald (which i am currently reading)

"Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so."

and

"Frantically, I get a thing I call sentence-fever that must be like buck-fever. It's a sort of intense literary self-consciousness that comes when I try to force myself. But the really awful days aren't when I think I can't write. They're when I wonder whether any writing is worth while at all -- I mean whether I'm not a sort of glorified buffoon."


on a sidenote, while i love the plethora of design blogs and often find myself clicking around them for hours in wonderment, has there ever been such a sheer mass of work so readily available, so out of context? it does sort of make it all feel meaningless and oversaturated...

i guess that means i have sentence-fever or whatever its visual equivalent must be.

this is a painting i did, a portrait, of michelle's cloud-like dog named praxis whom i love dearly, and who was recently diagnosed with lymphoma. the proceeds from the sale of this painting, as well as the other contributed artworks by other artists, will benefit his medical treatments. it's up for auction on ebay here:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Praxis-by-Susie-Ghahremani_W0QQitemZ140302706854QQcmdZViewItemQQptZArt_Paintings?hash=item140302706854&_trksid=p3911.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1205|66%3A2|65%3A12|39%3A1|240%3A1318

he is really a wonderful dog. thanks to anyone bidding and/or spreading the word.


in other news, last night i had a really weird nightmare that i was being attacked by monsters in providence who gave me the options of: 1) be tortured or 2) leave rhode island.
kind of like real life rhode island!

in retrospect, my advice to any present or future risd students is to get the hell out of dodge when you graduate.

speaking of things in my life that need/needed mending:

only a few miniature paintings came back to me after my solo show in August -- and looking at them, they just didn't seem to work anymore outside the context of the art show. so i decided to mend them. this is the 'before' shot of all 6.



and here's the afters:



( more )

PS Felt Club's next sunday [11/16!]! see you there, i hope -- i can't believe the holidays are upon us. doesn't feel that way.
PPS GOBAMA!

in less than 24 hours....

wish me luck!
August 16th - September 17th
THE WILD LIFE: new works by Susie Ghahremani
at Giant Robot, 2062 Sawtelle Blvd, LA, CA
Reception: August 16th, 6:30pm
more info: http://www.boygirlparty.com/wildlife

i leave in 3 days!
think i can pull it off?






THE WILD LIFE: opens Saturday, August 16th at Giant Robot, 2062 Sawtelle Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90025
i'll be there! will you?

that little finch didn't even make it through the night. i just found out over a terse email. it is heart-breaking when a wildlife rescue doesn't end happily. i hate when finches die -- i hate that we never figured out what was wrong with him. some days i feel really un-good about wildlife rehab, it just gets hard sometimes when animals don't make it that you really wish had. i thought finding him on my doorstep was a good omen, i thought maybe we helped him in time, but i guess that wasn't the case.

anyway.

today i was in LA for a shoot for a production for which i designed the sets. let me tell you, walking around my drawings is the most surreal thing i have ever experienced. i'm DYING to share pictures but can't until the commercials are officially released. this happens a lot with stuff i work on -- i have the urge to share but legally must wait. like the line of chronicle books stationery i have about to come out. i finally get to leak the secret: only a few weeks away!!!



i'll have them in the shop soon. these too -- just released today in Chocolate&Steel's Etsy shop, we've been working on these for awhile as well:


it's hard to keep some of these secrets! hopefully the surprise is worth the wait.