Monday, December 31, 2018

What Will 2019 Bring?

"The Observer" 21"x21" acrylic
If 2019 provides half the learning and change that came with 2018, it's going to be an exciting year for me.  Since last April, I spent much of my studio time teaching myself to incorporate a new form of expression in my painting that allows me to speak more clearly. I've learned that when I change the perspective, I create space for ideas and stories. While I was initially inspired by the work of artists like Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Stuart Davis and Charles Sheeler, I took their ideas of expression and made them into my own. Now I'm using my own new and growing body of work to springboard new ideas.

Color, shape and value have always been important to me in my work. Increasingly pattern is playing a more conscious role. Symbols I've developed and personalized over the years move into the compositions naturally. I've learned to think of an object or see a suggestive shape and build a story around it. I like to see how the story changes if I change colors, values or move the object in space. It's like working a puzzle, getting the pieces to fit. I'm doing a lot more thinking.

"Her Majesty's Garden" 14"x21" acrylic
Fran Larsen is correct in insisting that art is work, not fun. The work must be done with the brain engaged.  The fun part comes with the satisfaction I get when it's finished and when a piece is accepted into competition or is purchased.

I wish everyone a Happy New Year on this final day of 2018. I have one thing to say to the New Year 2019: "Bring It On." 





Friday, May 11, 2018

About Being Frightened, Scared

"Our House 2" 2018 10" x 14"acrylic
When you step away from who you are and how you are known and what you do well, which is a very secure place, you have to accept that you will probably fall flat on your face many, many times. You also have to give yourself permission to change, to grow. We do this many times, very unconsciously, while we are growing up, maturing. At age 40, we say, "hey, why not?" At age 70 that casual shrug does not come off so readily. I am changing the way I paint images and that relates to the way I talk. I don't think in words. I think in images. To speak to you, I have to envision the words first. Now I am stepping away from a body of 20+ years of work, of images that spoke what I did not have the words to say. It's very much like standing on the edge of a cliff. It's truly scary.

"Sandy's Place" 2012 10"x 14" varnished watercolor
I see much of my work has already touched on this new place I am entering. I see  works that say "hey, no one noticed me how I am! Put me in your new work." I'm getting a lot of ideas from looking back, from thinking "what can I bring into this form that I have defined in my past work?'

What is life if not an accumulation of life's work and experience? Does it really matter if I'm recognized, applauded, congratulated, acknowledged? I don't think it does. I think what matters is that I keep working until finally one piece expresses my heart and my voice. And I'm not there yet.

I remember so many places with Mad Mike, scared, pretty sure I was going to die in a bad splat off a mountain or a bad place on a river. And I haven't yet. And I don't really think I'll die from this new idea, either. Should we shrink back from what we don't know and what we are afraid of because of our age? I think not.


Monday, April 23, 2018

Stepping Out

"Only When I Listen 3"
21x14" poured watercolor
When you are good at something, it's not easy to give that up for something unfamiliar and new. Giving up something you are known for, admired for, is an enormous step. It appears I'm taking that step in my artwork. It's scary. It's unknown. And it's completely mine, to define as I wish, to make use of and to learn.  So it's also exhilarating. That is why I'm "stepping out".  I'm stepping out of the safe place I was as an artist and venturing out into the unknown.

Well, not completely unknown. Many fine artists have come before me with these ideas. There is much to learn from looking at a body of artwork by another artist. There is nothing wrong with saying "that appeals to me and I'd like to paint like that." There is also nothing wrong with saying "I've done as much as I can with this and now I'm moving on."

"My House" 11x14" wc
a first attempt
This change means that I will again spend years learning my "craft". I like to compete, to have paintings accepted into national and international shows. That likely won't be happening much with this new style. I have to let competition and recognition go. I have to learn how to express what I feel and think in my paintings in a different way. It's important to me, to the person I am and to the life I live that I find a clear and concise way to express that.

"Our House" 11x14" acrylic
2nd attempt
I'll be 70 years old this September.  I'm following the wisdom of Fran Larsen, a teaching artist who I consider one of the best, most intuitive and honest artists anywhere. If she can, over a lifetime of being a successful working artist, redefine herself 5 times, then  I've got time enough for one more iteration.

When you get "stuck", when you say "I've done all I can" and "I'm as good as I can be" then you aren't, not really. No matter how old you are or what you've done, there is always room for new growth. Just ask the plants in my garden. Be the mint. Grow some new roots.




Sunday, January 14, 2018

Abstracted Thinking

"Peoples of the Earth 1" 21"x 14" collage on paper
I will have 3 paintings in a show in Bend, OR starting February 2nd. The show is open to artists in the area. The theme is "Abstract". "Define 'abstract'" I said to the gallery owner. She smiled, shrugged and said that she would like to see how people interpret the word. I've asked that question many times over the years: "What is an 'abstract' painting?"

Instructor and master painter Gerald Brommer once told me that some artists believe something is abstracted as soon as the pencil or brush touches the paper. He felt abstraction in art occurs in degrees. In one painting the viewer might recognize what the painting is about, what shapes are representing or suggesting where in another work nothing makes sense. Artists work in varying degrees between what is called "realism" and what is called "non-representational" art. 
"A Winter's Dream 1"
10" x 14" Acrylic on paper

I had the great privilege of attending a workshop with Glen Bradshaw many years ago. Mr. Bradshaw painted in the more traditional definition of "abstract". He would, for instance, take a seed and break it into it's components arranged artfully on the paper so that one could see the outside, inside, top, bottom of the seed. For a while, Donna Watson had a similar body of work regarding an Asian coin which had a shaped piece cut from the center. This is another definition of "abstract": real but not real, broken, abstracted into it's several components. 
"This Moment In Time" 14" x 21"
 poured acrylic on paper

When the gallery owner left the issue entirely up to me, I decided to submit 3 paintings that are each entirely different degrees of "abstraction" as well as different media. Many of my paintings are "abstract" in that they do not represent anything "real" and yet the paintings will portray "real" shapes. While I love to paint a completely non-representational painting, most of my paintings use recognizable subject matter in symbolic ways. These are, by anyone's definition, "abstract" in that realism has been left behind.


Monday, December 11, 2017

Does It Count?

"Weaving - Autumn Fields" 10"x10"
yarn on a pin loom
Does it count if I only write a blog post two or three times a year? I think it does. I think it "counts" if I show up. I show up in the studio nearly every day that I am at home. I try to show up on my blog but only when I have something to say about what I'm doing. When I first began to blog, I was determined I'd do a post every month. Then I realized that it's more important to do the work of an artist than it is to write and blog about it. I don't seek fame or even fortune, which seems to be the aim of many bloggers. I seek knowledge and understanding of my own work. Writing about what I'm doing and thinking helps me define my progress. So if I write a post now and then, I think it does count.

Cover page of a small book
 5" x 7.5" collage 
"Daisy Duet" 15"x21"
poured acrylic on paper
I keep a sketch notebook of my work. It includes photos of my artwork on the left hand pages and on the right side I record thoughts, ideas and notes about what I'm working on. I blog, in a sense, to myself. I also practice the "morning pages" described by Julia Cameron in "The Artist's Way". I've done these pages for 20 years. That is also blogging to myself. Then, when it comes to a public blog, like this one, I can review, sift and sort, and decide what people might like to hear about.

Artistically speaking, this has been an interesting year. While I'm still painting, collage and multimedia have taken over this year's inventory as the most product. I started weaving on a pin loom and also created a number of collage and assemblage pieces. Does it count? I am, after all, a painter. Those weaving and assemblage pieces required that I figure out problems, that I stretch my imagination and my form of expression. Painting has become "flat", assemblages challenging. Does it matter? Does it count? It does, to my personal self. Anything I do that expresses what I see, how I feel, what I'm thinking and what I'm imagining "counts" and that includes writing this blog post. I hope everyone has had a productive year, has grown in some way, come to understand their own selves better. I have. And it does count. All of it.



Thursday, May 25, 2017

Walking Alone

"POE XV - Traditions"
21" x 21" acrylic on paper
It's almost June and my last post was in January. I spent a lot of time this past winter thinking about the peoples of the desert southwest, reading books and getting prepared for a week long tour of the Chaco Canyon area of AZ and NM. The "ancient ones", the people called "anastasi" by many, became my focus, to the exclusion of all else. In April, back home from the tour, I began to sketch down some ways I could express what I learned, saw and felt.

Those people, those ancient ones, can only be studied by what they created and left behind. There is amazing stone work, buildings 4 and more stories tall, tucked into cliffs and on top of  mesas. There is pottery, several types, scraps of weavings, remains of murals. The people lived and built in relatively small numbers and then vanished. Archaeologists match the departure with a 50 year period of drought.

Today both the Hopi and the Navajo claim that arid and rocky land. The two tribes live in an uneasy balance. The Hopi, far fewer in number, literally live on reservations surrounded by the Navajo. The Navajo have embraced much of the culture of the Europeans. The Hopi, smaller in  number and much more insulative, secretive, have resisted, to a point.

"POE XVI - Traditions Witnessed"
21" x 21" acrylic on paper
Hopi culture has a legend that when lines crisscross the sky, times will end (at least for the Hopi) and so the "hardliners" (pun intended) live in Old Oraibi without electric power lines coming up from the valley nearby. I visited Old Oraibi and noticed the solar panels on the roofs of some of the dwellings along with the tv satellite dishes. There is no running water, no sewer, no electricity. And small luxuries creep in, regardless. The people of Old Oraibi exist in a far more fragile and marginal way than their claimed ancestors, the anastasi. They barely exist selling artwork and trinkets to the tourists. They still live in stone structures but lack the skills to rebuild them, so one by one those places crumble. They still practice ceremonies that hark back hundreds of years. And every year there are fewer and fewer of them.

In contrast, the Navajo move more easily within our European based culture. They understand how to negotiate with our government, how to change in exchange for those dollars the tourists bring. One of the hotels I stayed at during my tour was on a Navajo reservation in Chinle. The only difference between that and downtown Flagstaff was that there was no alcohol available. The traditional housing of the Navajo is hogans but most live in European style housing now.

Two paintings so far have come as a result of this specific trip, and there are more planned. I am trying to express what I learned and what I felt. The symbols are my own along with the Hopi and Navajo. Both tribes believe that there are 4 sacred mountains and assign colors also associated with corn (white, blue, yellow and red) to each mountain. This much at least they agree on. The Hopi's directions are NE, SE, NW and SW. Navajo are N, S, E, W. They disagree on up and down: Hopi believe they originate from the center of the earth and Navajo believe it is the sky. There are four sacred or traditional plants: corn, beans, squash and tobacco.

What I want to show in my paintings are my feelings that as strong as their beliefs are, I think their time is ending. This is part of the whole message of the "Peoples of the Earth" series which began in 2015. It isn't just the Hopi and the Navajo whose time is running. People are stretching and straining and tearing at the very fabric of life on which we depend. When I paint in this series (not everything I paint is part of this) I often feel very lonely. Will anyone understand or even care about what I'm saying? Is it important that they do? I walk alone here, because there are things I must put say and my primary means of expression is paint.







Thursday, January 5, 2017

Measuring Progress Over Time Part II

"Journey - Feather Moon II" 21"x21" poured watercolor
In April 2015, at the Intensive Studies Seminar at Taos, NM, Katherine Chang Liu challenged me to figure out how to combine my non-representational gestural marks with my love of pouring paint.  "I plan everything I do" Katherine told  me. "I don't have a lot of time to paint and I don't want to waste the time I have." That brief conversation changed my approach to painting. I could not get those words out of my head. She plans those beautiful collages and paintings?!  I look back to that exchange almost 2 years ago and realize now how much it influenced my thinking and changed my approach to painting.

"Journey - Feather Moon I" 21"x21" poured watercolor
For two years now I have explored shapes and symbols that have meaning to me and that help me express the thoughts and feelings about people and the earth that began to crystallize during my trips to Arizona and New Mexico in 2015. I've developed a symbolic language of my own, taken shapes and arranged them and poured a LOT of paint. 100 paintings, collages and weavings are on my inventory list for those two years and more than half of them are planned poured watercolor or acrylic.

While I've identified and learned to use many symbols, I had yet to figure out how to incorporate my gestural marks.  A couple weeks ago I took several sheets of paper and using a marker I just made large sweeping gestural marks. Each was distinct. So I looked at the mark I find most often in past paintings which was the very first paper I had marked and then I tried to figure out how I could incorporate that sweeping gesture in a painting plan. Once I changed the mark from a line to a shape I immediately saw how that could replace the twisted energy lines I'd used in earlier paintings. Now I had my own gestural energy shape!
"Feather Moon II" 21"x14"
poured watercolor

"Feather Moon II" was completed on Feb. 3, 2016. It is one of my personal favorite paintings of the past year. These two new paintings take the same symbols and put them into a square format which required a different composition. Here is the symbolism: feather is journey, moon is cycle (not necessarily a period of time), stars are wishes, the coins are the payment or the reward. The swirl is, as I said, energy. Now you can make up your own story, cast your feathers into the winds, make your wishes, pay your price and reap your reward. Happy New Year everyone.