So here's an oddly comforting/motivating/bleak thought:

I'm edging toward my fifth decade of life, and have been thinking about how to use what's left to me. We only get so much time on this earth, and when the clock runs out, how do we jibe what happened, what we did in that time, with what we wanted?

For me, especially lately, it means refocusing how I use that time toward the things I want now, so I can't say later that that time was wasted doing what others wanted instead.

I have kept track of my studio time since 1998 or so, with a few gaps in record-keeping in the mid 2000s.

I've always thought of this in the way you might think of a FitBit - you can't improve what you don't measure, and clocking time gives me something to game, to better. Can I put more time in the studio this year than last year?

But increasingly time has come to mean something different to me. It's not how much I've banked, it's how much I have left to spend, and how not to squander it.

2017 is about this.

Someone emailed me the other night, doing research on all of Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawings. Apparently LeWitt kept track of all of the "first drafters" of each of his pieces, and I did an install of one of his shows at Ace Gallery in 1997.

Anyway, brought back memories of schlepping down to Washington Street (I think?) on spring mornings, crappy coffee in a Celadon blue Greek printed paper cup, to work on a drawing that now I only vaguely remember as being "wavy and long". I think it's this one (below). I had a crush on one of the gallerists too, which I think was pretty standard fare for single 20-somethings.

Sol used to give out prints of his work to the artists who worked on his drawings. His studio mailed mine to 57 Hope Street in Williamsburg where I lived, but I never received it. I always assumed Manny, the gun-toting, porn-wallpapered-basement-office superintendent of the building who used to scream at the Chinese factory workers across the street, and who we paid to get our mail, and who we had to bribe to run the elevator, threw it in the trash.

Oh well.