Engineering is a bit like art, trying till it works. Good thing they don't announce it worldwide when I try /  by Mirena Rhee

Imagine the headlines

She tried again to make something silly in her room, cried bitterly all afternoon and then just walked in the park.

She tried painting, lol, she hasn’t painted in oils in 10 years, good luck doing that again.

Drawing is not like painting, dear heavens, we don’t need another Van Gogh drawing the outlines and suiciding weekly.

Don’t even bother unless it is about vagina, politics, trauma, or butt /tits combination.

Forget it - she never done a residency except that one time when near homeless stayed at an airbnb.

Oh not him!

Poor work ethic she spent more time thinking about art than doing art.

Poor discipline she spent more time thinking and walking than working.

Martian worries /  by Mirena Rhee

I know a lot of artists when alone take a deep look inside themselves. I do that too, I worry about who I am where I'm coming from and where I'm going. But my obsession is not any identity or gender or the state of the world but rather rocks and dirt as captured by a robot on Mars. I worry about the pebbles between the rocks, and look at the special glints that the Sun left on various stones.

I see that in some places the dirt has been ground into fine sand. Although some stones and groups of rocks are very close physically they seem with different patterns. Some rocks have been sanded smooth, some are very low to the ground and mixed up with dirt. Some are just triangles with shiny peaks and others are polished cuboids. I try to find the contact with the ground. I want to make sure I haven't missed any of the important dimples. And then, I freely put some squiggles where there's a lot of uncertainty in the surface.

Currently my painting has the varied surface of the surface of Mars. There's shiny places and very matte places which makes sense because the dirt doesn't reflect sun light, just grounds it. But the rocks because of their crystals do return sunlight.

I really like transparent glazes on deep shadows. There's a lot of scattering of light there. While the lit side is just light.

Painting a mysterious landscape of a otherworldly planet, captured fleetingly by a passing robot, with the chances that no one ever will pay attention to the tiny rocks just like there. It makes me feel intensely compelled to paint it knowing that it will be there long after I'm gone.