5. OCD

Sometimes I just want to post a photograph and call it quits for the day. I feel confident in my ability to compose an interesting photograph, but not confident in my ability to communicate in the written word. So I am struggling every day two fold... one to make a photographic image and to put something down in words that anyone would want to read. Now that I have a whole three followers (well really two because one of the three is my husband) I feel even more pressure to perform. I know why I started this project but why do I continue?

Neil Green, father to one of my dearest friends, clarified it in one word for me today... compulsion. He's right. The one thing that drives me nuts about my daughter Katie is her obsessive to be compulsive. The apple didn't fall far from the tree.

For years I have always just thought of myself as a really great worker. I always did my homework, cleaned my room, paired the socks, lined up the salad dressing in the refrigerator, closed the window blinds so the slats are always facing up, not down. Wind me up and I go.

What I have always loved about Neil is that he is honestly straightforward. To hear such honesty can be hard on some, but he always had a gentle way of delivering it. I started working for the Green family art supply store at the early age of 13 years old. I was paid $2 cash per hour to help count all the General's charcoal pencils, gum erasers, tubes of gouache, sheets of foam-core, boxes of Chatpak Ad markers, rolls of armature wire, reams of illustration board, bundles of sable brushes, drawers of sculpture tools, and bottles of glue during the yearly inventory. An art supply store is an obsessive person's dream - so many items to put in rainbow order. Thirteen years later I graduated with my MFA. Neil knew that given my compulsive behavior I would never leave Carter Sexton on my own. So in his gentle way of delivering the truth, he fired me.

No worries. He was right and we are still close friends. He now spends much of his time up in San Francisco with his daughter Kelly and her family. I look forward to his trips down to LA and we go out to dinner. Tonight, we shared a plate of baby back pork ribs and talked about a lot of things...family, Haiti, the economy, chimpanzees, my girls, and old friends, but it was that one word that stuck in my head - compulsion. As an artist, is it so wrong to be compulsive?