Baking pies

I baked an apple pie today to donate to a community auction.  I arrived with my pie and laid it with 40 or so other beautiful pies of a wide variety.  I had no trouble figuring out where the pie table was because there were women gathered looking over the pies with a proud and critical eye. Pies are serious business!
Every time I bake pies I am transported in time to my mother's kitchen, my grandmother's kitchen, my aunt's kitchen, our neighbor's kitchen. Suddenly I am a child watching and helping in one of those farm wives' domains where I spent my early years. Tying on an apron does it to me as well.  Hanging out laundry, canning fruit, collecting and drying herbs. I hear echoes, a whisper in my ear. A brief glimpse from the corner of my eye There is something in the act that is a particular kind of wisdom, a ritual performed over and over by women through the ages, their sure hands rolling and pinching and slicing.
I think about all those women whose creativity was limited to their daily routine. They are there beside me and behind me. Once again I am reminded that I am not separate, but rather a continuation and expression of all sisters who have come before.

Update:
I learned today that there were a total of 51 homemade pies donated to the fund raiser.  The pie auction brought in well over $2000 for our community center.  I do love our small town.

Good Vibrations

 Listening to a speaker this weekend at the Oregon Country Fair I was struck once again  by how all things are connected at the farthest reaches of abstract reasoning. The various approaches of different disciplines seem to reach similar conclusions  At first, the speaker came at it from a mathematical approach, then physics, then astrophysics and metaphysics.  Ultimately these approaches came to a similar conclusion: Everything in the universe that we perceive is vibrating. Everything. Ergo, there is much that we humans do not perceive.  In order for a human to perceive anything, whatever it is has to be shooting energy toward us, like the light of a star.  Just because there seems to be empty space between the things we perceive does not mean that there is nothing there, but merely that we do not perceive it. Wow!

To an artist, negative space is a familiar idea.  Negative space is as much a part of the drawing as the marks. It is tangible and has enormous weight. Developing a composition takes into account the entire space, both negative and positive. One tries to create some sort of cohesion. Yet 2-D artists are limited by the eye. By using that human organ we try to evoke other ideas and more subtle perceptions by using color, visual texture and movement, and triggering memories of past experiences. We play with perception But that seems sort of like working backwards  doesn't it? The negative space the speaker talked about is vast, unknowable, mysterious, and not limited to a canvas or piece of paper.

As humans, hubris is one of our biggest flaws.  We like to think we know everything and can manipulate our world without consequence. We like to be the center of our universe. The speaker's talk reminded me how fragile and narrow human perception is and how we limit ourselves when we are not open to all possibilities.   I am awed by the enormity of it all and how frightening and confusing these ideas could be to someone. Thinking about it made me feel more compassion for those who choose dogma or prejudice to organize their worlds into manageable boxes. For myself, however, my curiosity outweighs my fear, and I have long sought explanations that match my experiences.

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?

Gardening

I am at a difficult spot in my current painting. I have thrown everything I know into it and now I just have to try different things until the direction emerges. Every painting seems to have this place where I have to step out into the abyss. It's painful, takes everything in me to do it, but at the same time I love the process. It's the crux of the painting for me. But, I have to take breaks.

And so, I have been out in my garden. You may say that gardening is my main hobby, but hobby isn't the right descriptor. That implies dabbling in something that you can pick up or put down.  Growing up on a farm wove the cycles of the earth deep into my inner being.  When spring comes along I feel the awakening in my core. The soil in my fingers, the sound of the bees and birdsong, the energy of the growing plants put me in the absolute timeless present. It is as essential to my well being as breathing.  When I am in my garden, I open up in ways that I can't put into words. My thoughts go silent. I am very small, and feel my place in the complexity of nature. And when I am very lucky, fresh perspectives settle on me like a warm gentle rain. Rather than a hobby, I would call my gardening my zen practice. And any gardener knows that there is lots and lots of practice!

Home at last

It is so good to be home from vacation. Leaving my studio for a time has made me appreciate it that much more. I treasure the life I have carved out for myself here beside the river with daily time to reflect and practice stillness, to listen and wait, to explore the moment through visual imagery. It keeps me in tune with the universe, whole and grounded. My life as an artist allows me balance, such a fragile state of being I find.

While I was away I learned that three of my recent paintings have juried into the ArtWorks NW show May 10-July 5, 2013. This is the annual juried awards show sponsored by the Umpqua Valley Arts Association.
These three pieces were selected for the show:

The Certainty of Change, 30 x 60

Adaptation, 40 x 30

 

 

Within You Without You, 40 x 30