Blog / 2024 / What Do You Do to Center Yourself?

October 26, 2024

[video transcript]

If you’re a “read or die” kind of human like me and you’re looking for inspiration, then here are my favorite books of 2024 so far: Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg, American Fever by Dur E Aziz Amna, The Drone Eats with Me by Atef Abu Saif, All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan, The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K Le Guin, How To Read a Book by Monica Wood, The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, Unlearning Shame by Devon Price, and How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler. (The links take you to bookshop.org, an online store that supports independent booksellers instead of harming them.)

You can see the making of the 2021 version of Read or Die here, and you can buy prints and other pretty things of the 2024 version here in my print shop.

skeleton reading a book, a funny play on the “ride or die” meme but for booklovers instead of bikers, by Lambertville Halloween artist Gwenn Seemel
Gwenn Seemel
Read or Die
2024
acrylic on unmounted canvas
30 x 20 inches
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty stressed out right now. The last time I was this anxious about the uncertainty of our future, it was COVID. This time, it’s not a pandemic that’s making it hard for me to find my center: it’s the question of whether or not the US will continue to be a democracy.

So I gave myself the assignment of making a painting—this painting!—in a day.

Usually it takes me weeks or months to make an artwork, but I had a little help this time, from the me of a few years ago, who made this small painting on paper, shown on the left here. As I began work on the large version of a skeleton who knows that if they don’t read they’ll die, I was looking at an image of the little version. The proportions weren’t exactly the same. I had to make adjustments so that the new painting would fit in my apartment building’s front door window, but the work I did composing the 2021 image still made the new piece go a lot more smoothly.

Specifically, it allowed me to skip over thinking through how to represent a skeleton sitting on the floor with their legs crossed and how to show the skeleton holding a book as well as how to lay out the text and how to make a controlled sort of color explosion in the background.

Despite that, the big painting isn’t a precise copy of the small one: there was still plenty of room for improvisation. I didn’t do the color explosion in exactly the same way. The new skeleton has a greenish hue, while the old one was more pinkish. And the 2024 skeleton has a different expression from the 2021 version.

Working like this—working off of a painting I made in a smaller version before—it’s not something I’ve done a whole lot of in my 21 years as a full time artist, but it’s definitely something I plan to do more of as 2024 comes to a close.

The next few months are going to be hard. Either democracy will have won and the fascists will try again to take over with violence, just as they did after the 2020 election, or the 45th President—AKA the Criminal in Chief—will win the electoral college count, become the 47th President, and start implementing Project 2025.

Either way, at least some of the time, I’ll be hiding in my studio, trying to hold onto my center. I’ll be making big paintings based on small works I’ve made in the past. And I’ll be reading so many books. Because, unlike the bikers from the 50s who coined the phrase “ride or die” to explain their dedication to motorcycles and getting out on the open road, I’m a “read or die” kind of human.

Ride or die. Read or die. Paint or die. Here’s hoping you know what helps you hold onto your center in stressful times!

smiling skull Halloween painting
detail of Read or Die

Maybe this post made you think of something you want to share with me? Or perhaps you have a question about my art? I’d love to hear from you!

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