Whispers

My new show at Lane Community College opened this week in Eugene, Oregon. It was exciting to have so many students attend my art talk and reception Thursday. I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak about my work in this educational setting.

Whispers

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Whispers

Nancy Watterson Scharf

April 18th - May 25th

Artist Talk on Thursday,

April 21st at 2:00 pm with a 

reception immediately following.

  

Artist Statement:

For as long as I can remember I have had a sense that there is more to this world than I can see. Sometimes I get a glimpse, feel a vibration, briefly hear a rustle or buzz. I catch an elusive trace of something just beyond my vision, or a feeling that I am not alone. I depend on my eyes to tell me what the world looks like. Yet science tells us our vision is less absolute and more fluid than we may think. Human eyes discern but a fraction of the entire light spectrum. I wonder if they tell us everything.

Animals' senses are acute. They often perceive things that we do not. Not only do their eyes perceive differently than ours, but some see better with their ears, their noses, or their skin. And plants don't rely on eyes at all. Although we live together, each organism "sees" a variation of reality colored by its own history and specific needs for survival. Ironically these divergent perspectives overlap as we each negotiate limited space and resources within our shared habitat. Every species lives in a world of its own, like a ghost within the larger ecosystem. We egocentric humans are actually just phantoms to other organisms. This perceptual anomaly intrigues me.

Modern "civilized" humans don't like to think about how we are part of nature. The vastness of nature is complex and its wildness is frightening. Our innate tendency is to put a fence around ourselves with man-made structures and inventions. We like to go out to visit the wild rather than to live within it. I am curious about how we compartmentalize and self-limit our perception to maintain a feeling of safety. That human sense of otherness or separateness is central to my investigations.

The show runs from April 18^th to May 25^th. There will be a lecture on Thursday, April 21^st at 2:00 pm with a reception immediately following. The reception is free and open to the public. The galleries are located in building 11 on main campus, 4000 E. 30th Avenue. There is no charge for admission. The Art and Applied Design Department phone number is 541-463-5409.

                                      

Learning to See

New studies suggest that visual perception includes a kind of feed-back loop. The more we inform ourselves, the more we are able to physically perceive. The brain works closely with the eye, improving perception.
When I was teaching drawing, I found this to be true. Learning to draw is actually learning to see. One must learn to consider shapes and their relationships, look at underlying structures and consider relative size. Students want to draw what is in their brain rather than draw what they actually see with their eyes. They draw with symbols of things. The challenge for the teacher is to get students to draw directly from visual examination.
It's very interesting to look at Kindergarten drawings. At that stage of development children draw and paint entirely in symbols. They know many pertinent details, such as that there are five fingers on each of two hands and five toes on each of two feet. They can put eyes, ears, nose and mouth on a face. They often make a yellow sun, a multicolored rainbow, or a green tree. The sky is a blue strip at the top of the page.
As children mature they not only add more symbols and details, they add new images based on experience and observation. Around 10 years or so they become motivated to draw what they see more accurately. By the time they hit middle school, they already have self identified as someone who "can draw" or "can't draw". This attitude is tough to break and often lasts for their lifetime. Careful and sensitive instruction at that pivotal point can make a world of difference. There are a few lucky individuals whose eyes talk to their hands automatically. But most could use some help training their hands and eyes to work together.

Local Heroes

My next foray into the Ghost project involved a close investigation of the bees in my garden. Although there are true honeybees there, I concentrated on the native varieties. I was amazed to learn that there are so many different types of bees, many of which I had mistakenly thought were some weird type of wasp.
I chose representatives of four main families of bees in my area. There are so many variations within these families, but I chose the ones that were most visually interesting to me.  This painting includes a sweat bee, a mason bee, a bumble bee and a miner bee. They all are important pollinators. They make honey for their young and live in solitary pairs.

Ghosts II

I found some unryu paper that had quite large fibers in it. It seemed like it could be an interesting material to play with in my ghost series. I wanted to work with images of reptiles that I'd seen around my studio, specifically the northwestern garter snake and the western skink. I painted an image on a panel in black. Then I glued the paper over it and happily found that it was transparent enough to show the image through. Perfect. I laid down another layer over that to increase the tangle of fiber.
I began to paint highlights on the top, working with the transparency and glazing. I liked the image, but a ghost figure kept jumping into my mind. So naturally, I put it into the painting.

Ghosts

I have been thinking about all of the plants and animals that live around us diligently working away unnoticed.It is as if they do not exist unless they somehow get in our way. It is a complex crowded ecosystem, reliant on the many. Beetles, spiders, pollinators, fungi...it goes on and on. In some respects it's probably a blessing that we aren't conscious of all of them all of the time. The eyelash mites come to mind.
I have been trying to listen, to look, to suspend judgement and fear just to take in as much as I am able to perceive. The closer I look, the more I see. When I was teaching one of my projects was for students to take two square feet of a natural area and catalog everything there. It was amazing to learn how much goes on in that small of a space. If we had investigated what was happening underneath the surface of the soil, we would have found a complex universe.

My new Ghost series is about these selfless workers and fellow travelers that I have discovered living around me. It all began with a Green Darner Dragonfly that I found dead and perfectly preserved at my feet on my walk out to my studio. I have not found the Oregon Spotted Frog because it has disappeared from my local habitat. I remember seeing them as a child, but now they are found in only a few remote places because of habitat loss.
The paintings are 20 x 16 on panels. I decided to hang them as a group and float them on the wall without frames. As the series grows I'll probably group them in different ways. I've been having a lot of fun with this project.

Going somewhere and ending up somewhere else....

I finally finished my new painting, Looking For Shelter, last month. It was a struggle, but that's nothing new. My process tends to be complicated and time consuming. I take that as a given. But this piece really was trans-formative. When I finished I felt that I'd put down a heavy stone.

Originally, I was inspired to use images of snow geese and traveled to the wildlife refuge at Tule Lake, California to find them. It should have been the correct time but the illusive birds had just left. This bird's migrations is legendary and to experience thousands of them taking off together is one of the wonders of the world, at least I imagine that it is. Darn. I'd been thinking about them a lot, as they are one of the few birds that fly all the way above the arctic circle to nest. They travel huge distances and their existence occupies such a fragile niche, vulnerable to any tiny shift in temperature or climate. They depend on the shrinking flyways and watering holes strung like pearls along their route.In that way their fate is tightly entwined with human consumption.

I did get some pictures of a small flock of tundra swans, which I later learned also nest above the arctic circle. It was a clear and windy late winter day.  The lake was in stunning contrast to the austere desert landscape. The land was barren in multiple subtle variations on gray, rust, umber, hints of sage with violet shadows. The thin clear air of the high desert... I am in love with it.

So, change of plan. I decided to use the tundra swans, and of course changed the palette to closer resemble the winter desert color. Instead of an enormous overwhelming and joyous flock of snow geese rising, I went with a lonelier composition.I used the sheer beauty of the geese flying out of the painting toward you. I wanted their wild power. There is a rich history of indigenous peoples living in that area, and I wanted to add the presence of people in contemporary times. I added a relentless line of cars moving across the painting, and power lines.

I felt like I needed one more human element but hadn't settled on anything until I went to a friend's house to see a documentary on the Canadian tar sands oil development. I was very disturbed by the huge lakes they call settling ponds where migrating birds land and die in great numbers on their way north and south. I couldn't put it out of my mind and before long, images of the refinery went into my painting.

In Looking For Shelter, as in all of my current series, I try to give voice to nature in the context of human needs and technology.

Solstice

I love welcoming in the annual winter solstice. The return of the light is such a big turning point for me. It is the darkest quietest day of the year, a small death at the end of a long season of birth, growth and harvest. It is a time to reflect and give thanks. It is a time of rest.

The Thanksgiving  celebration, and my year end studio clean-up and sale begins the wind down. After putting all of my paints and tools away for the sale, it has been interesting to me to see what kind of work I would do after the sale. It turns out that the closure gave me an opportunity for experimentation and trying out ideas that have been simmering for a while. It has been helpful for my creative process to stir things up and open myself to new possibilities. I am looking forward to passing the long quiet days of winter in my studio. It is a good time for reflective and serious work. I am ready.

I've included some images of my neat and clean studio, all ready for the sale.