De La Vega is emptying my mind...







I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to write about today --i knew i wanted to write, but wasn't sure that i had anything particularly interesting to say. So I sifted through my old photos from my trip here (wow...I just used the word old to describe the photos i took only two months ago...this will come up again in a minute) and was thinking about how I can't believe that I'm more than half way through my stay here. Before I left, the prospect of five months seemed like an eternity. But now that I'm here, the time has flown by. I've been asked multiple times when I'm going back, and each time I've stated the date followed by "no quiero regresar todavia"--I don't want to go back yet. I feel as though there is still so much for me to do here and I'm afraid I'm going to leave before I able to do what is floating around in my mind --and there is currently A LOT. I've got ideas for art projects I've been scribbling down in my sketchbook along with a homework schedule, trips to be planned, excursions to take around the city, restaurants to visit, the idea of internships next summer as well as a more permanent direction for my artwork, and then you add in the general concerns of grocery shopping and cleaning the apartment and doing laundry and you've got a taste of my current state of mind.

A few days ago I was looking through some web pages of artists discussed in one of my classes when I ran across a Puerto Rican artist working in Spanish Harlem in New York: James De la Vega. His work mostly revolves around chalk works and paintings done around the streets commenting on the world around him with thought provoking images and statements. The one I found particularly pertinent, and which led me to today's posting, was this:

"The discipline of emptying your mind is as important as the discipline of filling it."

While it's not the most eloquently worded statement, and when written, it lacked any sort of decoration or icon, it stands quite well on its own as is. I've been running around in circles in a hamster wheel of my own, spinning round and round inside my head and I've been trying to stop running, but what I need to do is remove the wheel altogether for a while. This sounds like an impossible task what with the prospect of missing a deadline or something else of that sort. But what I'm slowly realizing here is that I won't be able to fully absorb all I can without taking the time to literally do nothing but empty my brain of all of its thoughts --which could take days on its own.

So this brings me to my current state of reflecting and emptying. Here is a smattering of photographs I found in my archives form this trip...maybe they will spark something else...