Designated by the Kansas State Legislature as the Official State Theatre of Kansas in 1992, The Jayhawk Theatre has been closed for more than thirty years. Plans to demolish the building have been thwarted repeatedly and a fund-raising campaign for full restoration is underway.

Having never been inside, I was especially interested in making reservations for a visit offered by Ghost Tours of Kansas, a guided walkabout through supposedly haunted spaces in both Topeka and Lawrence. Three days before Halloween, my friends and I paid $25 each to help save the theatre and maybe get lucky enough to see "the man in top hat and tuxedo" who frequently appears/disappears on the stage. Armed with cameras, twelve of us along with a local psychic/medium walked single file along an old hallway and into the cold and dusty past of the Jayhawk.

In addition to work and life pulling me in a hundred directions, there’s often a former professor, classmate or colleague asking if I’m working on anything new and if so, what. The answer is always the same: nothing worth showing at the moment but the ideas are piling up. There was a time when I looked down on artists who didn’t produce, who blamed family and work on their creative slump, and now I find myself in exactly the same predicament.

Fed up with talking about thinking, a friend and I went camping this past weekend and aside from my car battery dying (radio + KU/Colorado game + both doors open) we spent a desperately needed 48 hours away from the internet, e-mail, phone, traffic, neighbors, TV and assorted appliance humming. I brought my sketchbook, camera and new library book. Drew and I both agreed to allow each other time alone and it took nearly 18 hours to stop talking and laughing and branch off mentally to accomplish what we intended to do: think, write, not think, sketch, observe, snack, write, draw, think some more, walk alone, stare at nothing, stare at cows, close our eyes and simply be.

Why is this so obviously necessary but so impossibly hard to do?

Those of us growing up in the 70s probably remember when chimps dressed in overalls and gingham dresses frequently appeared in supporting roles on shows like BJ and the Bear, Chips and Hawaii Five–0. I was only allowed to watch stuff like this as long as it was balanced by PBS/Jane Goodall documentaries, and all were responsible for my life-long fascination with primates  and how similar we are. Always on the lookout for new monkey-human bookstuff, I was excited to find Jill Greenberg's Monkey Portraits is on order for the Library's collection.

Greenberg, known as "The Manipulator" since the early 90s for her use of Photoshop techniques to "transform photographs into surreal portraits by tweaking colors, cutting and pasting and otherwise distorting images", most recently made headlines in 2006 with End Times, a controversial series of portraits featuring young children in various stages of emotional distress. Self-described as, "an allegory for the deepest fears of the human species as a whole drawing on the vocabulary of Christian millennialism, conspiracy theory culture and doomsday environmentalism", Greenberg saw in her young subjects an intensity which captured her own despair.

How did she do it? With candy.

In my experience, when someone asks how an art piece was created, it's relatively easy explaining technical concepts: "oh, they used a mixture of paint thinned with linseed oil to get that varnish-y look" or "think of a lithograph like drawing on an Easter egg...the wax resists color the same way resin-treated stone resists ink." Thanks to Google, Wikipedia and hundreds of reference books 200 feet from our office door, I can talk technique in my sleep.

But some questions take much longer to process, and by process I mean: record in my sketchbook, respond from the gut, internet browse, reconsider original answer, redefine and reflect. I was looking at Interrogation 1 by Leon Golub at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art when a woman whisper-hissed bitterly to her friend, "Why in the world would anyone want to paint torture and interrogation scenes?" My first reaction was to mumble, "why wouldn't they?" But that's not enough. I rephrased it into what I think she was asking: why does the absense of aesthetic beauty in this painting make me feel such anger and disappointment?