February 2019's Post-it note art from Instagram

Over on our Instagram page, we’re posting a weekly installation from Clare Johnson’s Post-it Note Project, a long running daily project. Here’s her wrap-up and statement from February's posts.

February's Theme: A Luxury Beyond What’s Reasonable

Lingering over my poet friend’s choice of an “art life” theme for January’s publications, a crisp quick decision introduced itself. (I am always so happy to make friends with a quick decision, as my decision companions are often more of the belabored, untidy sort.) This year people living art lives will choose each month’s post-its. It will not be every artist/writer/drag queen/actor/musician/other-creative-whatnot that I know. It is not exhaustive. Just a well-mannered idea I’m curious to sit next to and get to know for a time, maybe gently ask it about relatives or past relationships if things are going well. To start things out right, I asked the most spectacularly-artistic-person-I’ve-known-since-kindergarten to choose the art for February. Creative energy permeates everything about my friend Amanda, from her home to her work to her clothes to her speech to her texts to the tips of her fingers. (PEOPLE, I AM TALKING ABOUT HER FINGERNAILS. THEY DESERVE A FAME OF THEIR VERY OWN.) Frankly, sometimes the thoroughness of how much art is entangled in Amanda’s every endeavor makes me feel a little lacking, a nagging drabness in my person, I could be doing more, am I an art fraud. From what I can tell (over 3 decades of evidence), Amanda is capable of being good at anything/everything, and generally slights her own skills. I’ve heard tales of her mother going through her waste basket to save the countless art gems teenage Amanda would regularly discard. (I try not to tell my parents these stories, because they would flat out die with envy. Sometimes I think their most heartfelt wish for me is that I’d throw old art projects away. I disappoint them in this hope.) Here are some truths about art life: Full-time art is not a stable job. We work overtime; the money is like an unpaid internship. Middle class existence (without a high-earning spouse, family money, nice office job) remains especially, increasingly elusive in the arts. Amanda will always be making art all the time. Amanda will likely never be doing it as a job. She is currently being an excellent Spanish teacher at a fancy school. Her students are lucky that she’s too practical to risk it all on making art her job just because she’s dazzlingly good at it. She wants things in life she knows would be harder as an artist—just some normal life things—things I luckily, conveniently, do not want. Everybody is handling this arrangement and seems to be doing ok. I catch myself ruminating. Back to the post-its: Amanda’s choosing process was characteristically artistic, fluid yet firm. To start, she narrowed her options by being drawn to water—therefore looking only at summer months when I would have been swimming outside every day. But she did not care if the post-its themselves talked of water; in fact, what mattered was a strong guiding aesthetic, imagery that felt spare, clean, decisive. Small coincidences occur to me: One happened to be her birthday, though that was not why she picked it. When air-drying laundry made me say in my old life I was thinking of when I lived in England to be with a partner; she knows what I meant because her British partner has lived these years in Seattle, to be with her. (The England I knew was unconvinced about dryers. Too expensive, too wasteful, a luxury beyond what’s reasonable.) In high school—era of choice for the pulling of wisdom teeth—Amanda provided my favorite account, about a friend of hers with a real talent for embarrassing scrapes. It involved a lot of surprising blood. I have no idea now whether those stories were true or exaggerated, remembered by anyone else. I didn’t actually know this girl. The day after they pulled my tooth I fell desperately ill for weeks. The tired realization that I needed to see a 2nd doctor NOW, trying to collect my sick self and get out the door, smashing a glass and cutting a finger that wouldn’t stop bleeding and glass all over my kitchen floor at the beginning of barefoot season and it was one of my cheap glasses from England that feel special and irreplaceable despite their cheapness. (My favorites were the ones with the dots, not the stripes.) A concise, tidy post-it to remember all that mess. I shouldn’t play favorites but the ghost is better than anything I could say about it. Forced to type out the caption I fretted about lost meaning—I really live in that / . Between come back and don’t last; in the drawing it’s located at an invisible mouth or a neck, you just have to imagine. Right where the ghost would swallow.