Inside Out...About the process

Ever the observers, artists in a sense do rob from people. Their experiences may translate into a line from a book or play, a song lyric, a photograph or a painting, etc. That's usually okay though, and why is that?  I think it is because the artist has interpreted it from within their own personal experience and it has become a part of themselves.  They are not separate from the work but speak from within it.  Too much detachment and the work is a lifeless intellectual manipulation, and the subject is like a bug in a jar.

I've been thinking about Austin, the landscape painter in Jane Urquart's provoking book The Underpainter. He reduced his life to the controlled rectangular views contained on his canvas.  These narrow, precise windows enabled him to keep his life and his anxiety about human emotion at a distance. His intimate studies of his model/muse are in his own words an " intimate violation", cold and calculating. Austin takes himself and his "work" very seriously, never letting it conflict with any personal attachments. Yet as he searches for passion in his work,  he doesn't realize that he has missed his opportunity again and again because of his unwillingness to accept love in his life. Sounds great, huh?  Yet it is a heartbreaking look at the interior of an artist's life.

I've known artists like that.  Somehow in dedicating themselves to their work, they take themselves too seriously. In their desire for success they set themselves apart and above the rest of us. Austin shows us the trap inherent in that position.  Life is messy. Period.  It seems to me that profound meaningful artistic expression comes from entering the fray, getting bumped around, usually a lot, and coming up for air from time to time.  Art comes from within us, is translated through our beings. For me, making art is an experience in itself, filled with struggle, exhilaration, fear, and the pure pleasure of seeing images emerge from chaos.  That is the joy of it, to feel my ideas, experiences, inspirations, and observations reorganize and synthesize into one unique visual image.

ArtWorks NW 2013

Umpqua Valley Arts Association opened their annual juried awards exhibition ArtWorks NW on Friday with an evening gala. The juror Martha Morgan, curator of the Portland gallery Chambers@916, selected 35 works representing 27 artists from the 171 works submitted by Pacific Northwest artists.

I was honored to have three of my paintings selected for the show, as the competition was stiff. I was so surprised and pleased when my name was announced as the first place winner with a cash award of $1000.  The juror selected my painting Adaptation as the winner. Hooray!

 



 

The setting for this piece emerged from one of my many sojourns to Summer Lake Wildlife Refuge near Paisley, Oregon.  The sheer magnitude and inevitability of bird migrations inspire me. If anything is sacred it is the way these beautiful avian creatures mysteriously appear and then disappear from the dormant late winter landscape. The piercing beauty of the birds in the stark cold neutrals of this desert oasis moves me into a deep peace.

 

I feel the history of this fragile place in an almost tangible way that leads me to thinking about the future. Relentlessly, the growing populations of people with their subsequent need for development threaten this ancient system. What if there were no birds left? How can we decide whose world is more important, theirs or ours? Or perhaps a better question is, are we really separate from the rest of the inhabitants of this earth?

 

 

 

 

 

As big as the wind....

The other day my friend's young daughter told her that "the kale is as big as the wind". I love the way small children leap over fences and boundaries in their minds to make fresh  associations and comparisons.  Their brains have not yet been fenced into separate sets of ideas, isolated rooms of thought, rigid pathways, halls of connecting fragments trapped in houses of ideas.

In another life I taught Kindergartners. I fit right into their free world of suggestion, imagination and innovative association. We were kindred spirits.  The "kale" girl's mama is a poet.  I am a painter.  One of my sons is a musician, the other a sculptor.  Different mediums but artists just the same.  What is an artist but someone able to venture far into the abstract and away from conventional thought. Artists reorganize the world in new ways that spark recognition in other people and reflect the world back to them. Often artists provoke thoughts and questions that people do not realize they have. Artists use words/sound/images/objects to express things others don't know how to say. Picasso said, " It takes one a long time to become young."  Is that what I am doing?