Symbols that Lead the Way

It is always my intention to learn from my art experience. A direct hit occurred yesterday. I'd finished up these drawings from "10,000 Lives" earlier in the day. That evening my husband and I were discussing a huge shadow of uncertainty that loomed in our immediate past and future. We've been trying to put a healthy spin on what has the potential for being a black monster of suppression. Then I remembered the middle drawing, above. I brought it out, marveling that this drawing, reading from left to right, representing the idea of a life, had a solution: Build from what is put before you, no matter how formless the chunk of clay might be.

Thank you, David Hays, whoever you are... 30 years after this card was last used as a contact vehicle.

Blissful Unawareness

"Lovers and Leavers"

Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to clean up someone else's mess? Stephanie said it was her gift to the street to clean up the debris while she walked to work. I did not realize the major impact of her efforts until she moved away.

This was drawn around Earth Day, but of course, on my calendar that whittles it down to any one day out of 365. (The image you see right now is about the same size as the original. If you click on it you'll see what I see when I wear magnifying glasses to draw it.)

(Sold)

"10,000 Lives" Project

Every day I spend time with at least ten people through a communication system that is at least 30 years out of service.

What if the Sea Dries Up?

"Generosity Goes Fishing"

Drawing on the Imagination for Salvation

Floating along on a wave of change that we have no control over is a daunting experience. My life support system has always included a sense of humor and a thorough examination of the perils ~ real or imagined. What becomes difficult is when ones own life support might be dangerous for others of different philosophies floating alongside in the same storm. "Change As A Bouquet" emerged out of experiencing this entanglement.

Meditation with Pink Fish

Just a bit of quiet time after all the chatter.

The Blue Snake Seduces

At times I take trips from paint and line and create in other mediums. Food, with its intriguing color, shapes, and flavors, grabs at my attention many evenings. The backyard garden canvas with its seasonally shifting textures, forms, and colors has also attracted me and taken up years of my concentrating time.

I can see that this visual blog idea, which I avoided doing for years, has now taken hold of me. Who can resist this enticing light, the velvet darks, and the saturated colors? Writing one's story and seeing instant publication is so satisfying.

Yet, even as I burst with posting ideas I feel an uneasiness settling in. I am an image maker. It is time to crawl out of this silky virtual space and get back to the often cold and harsh reality of concrete image work.

This is the blue side of things. Not sad, but serious enough to cause pause. We must continue to check and recheck the path that we are on. Are we even on a "path"? Of late I've been thinking of it more as a jungle ~ where we climb through the tree-like vines and pause to check out the beauty, gasp at the oddities, and peer into enough scary shadows to find soul satisfying insight.

Bon voyage!

Windy World

The creation of art, if approached with a sense of adventure, is a great tool for learning.

Direction Comes Drifting Through the Air

I was listening to earth beat music while working on this piece. It was fine going until I reached the sky/cloud-like area. Here I felt stuck. I had no idea where I was.

A few days later I heard sweet choral music drifting from across the art complex. Intrigued, I left my earthy, deep-drummed painting scene, went across the patio, and settled myself outside the door of the wafting music, which turned out to be a collection of Bach cantatas.

I could feel my sensibilities drift upward with the music and relished the lightness of being the music infused into me. Returning to my studio light years later I saw where the painting wanted to go immediately. My neighboring artist let me borrow his music and with its spiritual-like accompaniment I was able to complete the piece.

This 3' x5' painting is meant to do a push/pull on the audience. The shapes shift in and out of abstraction/representation. This piece encompasses such a magnitude of complexities it was difficult to name. I did not want to lead the viewer in too straight of a thematic direction. I finally settled on the both practical and abstract "Confronting Brown."

Out with the Old, In with the New

About Me (...the old)

I apparently can look through you, am too short, need to correct my voice, talk too fast, don't talk enough, am judgmental, do not have an opinion, am chatty, am a dud, fascinate, am silly, should gain weight, don't read books, read too many books, know too much about you, don't know enough about you, don't look like anyone who you'd imagine creates art like I do, try too hard, am not ambitious enough, am relevant, am nobody, don't pay enough attention, over think, used to be a lot of things that are no more, and am too used to doing it my own way to listen well to others. In other words, I'm uniquely indefinable, just like you.

Looking Close Can Bring More than Clarity

As anyone who reads this blog backwards (which is really forwards) knows by now, I am exploring ideas about perspective. Here is a graphic that I've set up to explain the process. The original inked part of the drawing is about 3 inches tall. If you were to see this rendering from across the room it is a small, odd shaped nothing. Getting closer it begins to take on some sense of being. From two feet away it resembles two very different things to my mind. And then I think about those things and realize they are actually connected! A-hah! Click on the lower image for a microscopic view.

The wonder of rendering is that drawn & painted images can be more than depictions of visual reality. They can represent a more physically obscure but very present emotional reality.

I have often heard poets describe living with human awareness as being a fight. Depicting our feelings is all part of the big fight. Acknowledgement of distress is the first step to healing. As a visual artist I draw to plant seeds of hope, in myself as well as in others.

(I am thinking of the airline emergency instructions to put an oxygen mask on oneself before we put it on our children. HA! I'd be a pile of healthy earthworms by now if I didn't pay attention to that warning!)

Abstraction to Realization in Bird Songs

Our brains are constantly shifting between abstract thought and cognitive thought. I enjoy making art about this phenomenon, and I enjoy even more finding great art out there that represents this atmospheric sensibility. Think Michelangelo's emerging slaves as a very early example.

The American contemporary composer/songwriter Andrew Bird plays with this idea. He often uses the sounds of words, rather than their meaning, to inform the exquisite musicality of his work. In his song "Souverian" he relishes the French sounds of that word (sue-ver-ee-yoh(n)), repeating them again and again... and we English speakers are mesmerized into tripping on the sounds which mean little but music to us. Then at the last minute he makes almost invisible sound switches and all of a sudden we have English word clarity: "So very young."

Sure, we can concentrate on catching the words... and even occasionally go to our dictionaries and figure out the possible exact meaning behind so many of his obscure references, but the essence of Bird's musical genius is found in drifting with the musicality of his sounds, in the lilting ride from focused to unfocused thought. Life is full of abstract atmosphere. I think Bird revels in it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40s7vgpPRi4

Another Bird song I can't resist, but doesn't feel as abstract, word-wise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZBoZ0sUT3k&feature=related

Feeding the Artist

When I painted "Diet Pizza" I knew it had problems. And why, if I know this, am I posting it here? It must be that I want to learn from this failure.

Compositionally it has major issues, so I cringe when I look at it, and even want to chop it up and throw it away. But then I think of why I painted it and I tuck it aside, facing the wall.

This piece has thematic meaning to one person. Me. Is it ethical for an artist to create art that only the creator understands? Can a mystery piece, if well done, be a piece of art if no viewer understands its true meaning?

A critic said, "Put more color into it." I would have preferred that she had instead asked, "Why is the color so dead and empty?" I think the failing of this piece is that she didn't ask that question.

Maybe someday I'll paint over it in a way that she'd understand, if she saw it again, that the lack of color is the point. In other words, I guess I didn't make the painting feel empty enough.

We the Critics are Gathered Here...

We are all critics. We all have opinions and a desire to be right. We (humans) are also very complex organisms.

Today I listened to a documentary about the jazz musician Dave Brubeck. Early on jazz folks thought his creativity was totally out of place. Jazz was about swing back then. He didn't have any swing. "You don't speak our language, you don't belong!" is the gist of what they told him over and over again. He probably thought these people were amazingly close minded because he continued on his way, connecting with the sounds of music he heard in the most honest part of his soul, and connecting with anyone who would listen. History tells that a lot of people did listen!

Brubeck is a very successful artist. We are not all in that very public boat (flower, seed pod?) but we are all leaders in our own tiny little art gardens. When we look around at the art of others, do we look to see originality, insight, some element of truth? Or do we look with an attitude of "You don't speak my language."

When we look at our own artistic practices, do we think "I must follow the rules laid down by those in the know." Or do we know in our hearts that we are speaking a language coming from so honest a place that no regional philosophy can deny it.

Design is attractive. Truth is not always so. But truth resonates and makes one's life worth living, whether we are seeing it in the work of others, or in the art we create ourselves.

Beauty is in the Eye of the Lover

I'm reading a book describing an artist who surrounds herself with beautiful people (sculpted cheek bones, smooth skin, elegant lines, etc., etc.), because of course, she is an Artiste! She wants to be surrounded by beauty at all times.

Sometimes I play a game about beauty and perception: I look at a stranger, someone who is considered homely, plain, non-descript by the media standards. I concentrate, zone in, and immerse myself with a fantasy of being in complete and utter love with this individual. It takes about 3 seconds for me, and then reality shifts. The result? This "nobody" becomes the most beautiful person in the world.

I appreciate elegant and symmetrical beauty as much as anyone else, but I have a suspicion the Artiste, above, misses out on quite a bit of earthy magnificence.

Rembrant was not a handsome man, yet how we do love his self portraits. Alice Neel was a master at finding beauty in shadowed humanity.

Perhaps the trick is to fall in love.

Caught Unawares

I woke up last night feeling like this. Go away, I yelled. The monster didn't listen. I used his tail to wipe out the story. It must have worked because I didn't remember this until now.

The Element of Surprise and the Risk of Failure

One of the stumbling blocks of the creative mind is that originality often goes hand in hand with fear of failure. Falling back onto safe ground is much easier than flying into new territory. What I'm referring to here is the tendency for one to relive past success by duplicating what works well. This is a huge subject with octopus arms miles long.

"Cleaning Chaos" came from doing a bit of window washing. It was safe to do the miniature nature of the work. The topic is surprising and therefor interesting. The fear factor came with the physical act of drawing. There was no prep pencil work. I'd never drawn this theme before. I started inking at the left (the squeegee) and built it to the right. There is a lot of self trust in this type of drawing. It's either that, or foolishness.

The cactus drawing is a much more safe drawing. Even though there was again no pencil prep work, the elements have repetition of form that is more easily controlled. From a distance this piece of art feels uninteresting. The surprise is in the story, which is visible only to the viewer who looks closer. Of course, with this type of art there is always a risk that the viewer will not think to stick his nose so close.

That Martini is the Beginning of the Trip

"Martini Chaos" came from nowhere and took me all over the place, from a head trip, to the desert, to science fiction, to snakes and sex and rats, to ships and war and girls and skiing and maybe angels and drinking too much. This is the treasure of the artist. We get to travel! Endlessly. Mine are very selfish trips: I am my own travel guide.

The Richness of Originals

I have bumped up against the predicament of drawing so small that it is difficult to reproduce the archive image of the piece. "Fertile Chaos" is a pen and ink that measures a little under 4 inches in width. The inking is extremely delicate. The scanned version, above, appears much more dense than the original. Herein is illustrated why I love looking at original art, as opposed to duplications of art. The originals have a life to them, a texture, a delicacy, a realness that can not be duplicated.

I just bought a tiny piece of art by Brooklyn artist R. Nicholas Kuszysk. Half the pleasure of viewing this intricate robot drawing/painting is imagining the artist sitting there painstakingly, with perhaps an invisible smile on his face, constructing humor and visual delight from nothing more than board, brush, and pen. This board, this paint, this ink!

A Final View at the Door

Speaking of art going on to a new public, I just got word that "A Final View" has been stimulating a lot of conversation in the welcoming hall of the collector's new home. This acrylic on board is not large at 18"x24", but incorporates so many stories within it that one can spend many long moments chasing down different paths and links of thought. I included a tiny dpi image of this painting earlier in my blog ~ which I realized later was rather useless since nothing important about the piece could be seen except general color and composition. Here it is in a larger form (click on it) that should give a better idea of the complexity of the work. Even at this size many details can not be seen. There are crowds of people that only the near-sighted can see. It helps to have a magnifying glass nearby.

One of my quibbles with online visuals is that the art is not usually reproduced large enough to reveal the intricate dynamics of the work. It's paranoia that keeps us from revealing the whole, and well placed from the point of view of control, but not very generous in spirit. In the case of artists who celebrate detail work, such as me, it is similar to cutting off one's head in order to feed one's belly.