Art talk for my show "Three Sides of a Coin"

Let me tell you some of the history of my thinking and a little bit about why I approach my visual process the way that I do.

 For as long as I can remember I have had a sense that there is more to this world than meets the eye. Sometimes I get a hint, a glimpse out the corner of my eye, a ghost of something. Our eyes are the gateway to our concept of reality. What you see is what you get, right? They faithfully transmit to our brain and ta-da- we have our picture. But when you think about it, our eyes only discern a fraction of the light wave. What about the part we don’t see.  Does that mean it doesn’t exist?

Animals sense things that we do not. Some see better with their ears, or their skin. And plants don’t have eyes at all. Imagine for a minute what the world is like to a fish, or a 300 year old tree, or a 3 week old butterfly.  I think about that a lot. I especially think about how birds see reality. They exist among us in a world of their own, with their own unique agenda and cycles.

So here’s the big question: Are birds in our world or are we in theirs?

I am concerned about how we modern humans seem to feel separate from nature. After all, we are a part of nature as much as any animal or plant, but we don’t seem to know it.  Or maybe we just don’t remember. We have separated ourselves with our inventions and human constructs.

This body of work you see tonight reflects my investigation into the hidden connections and tensions between humans and the rest of nature.

The first bird to enter my paintings was a great blue heron. There are many herons along the Umpqua where I live. At some point I began to consider how herons are virtually the same today as they existed thousands of years ago before the human species came along. That is not hard to believe if you’ve ever heard their croak. These patient still watchers became the voice of nature in my work.

After while fish began migrating through my paintings, just as they migrate through the river by my studio. In thinking about the endless wheel of seasons and the bird and fish migrations my sense of time has shifted. The natural world is full of these quiet and ancient cycles that have become a symbol for me of longevity, history and the primal power of nature.

My most recent paintings have focused on wetlands. Watching birds has drawn me to these primitive stops on the annual bird migration routes. They are the fragile watering holes and nurseries for so many organisms. And often they are the flood control for streams and rivers. Yet they are so easy to zoom by in a car.  It is tempting to think of these essential places as less than desirable land, buggy bogs that should be altered in some way.

I ask a lot of questions in my work, and I offer no answers. There is no correct way to interpret one of my paintings. My hope is that you will be able to enter a piece with a little of yourself and find your own meaning. And through my process I like to think that I have honored our fellow travelers on this planet.

Announcing my new show at the Jacobs Gallery

The show opened Friday evening, October 11th and it was beautiful.  A large crowd attended to check out the show and hear the art talks. Grace lives in Illinois and was not able to make it, but Bets and I spoke and answered many questions.

New Work-Four and Twenty Blackbirds

Four and Twenty Blackbirds is my most recent painting. I have been steadily drawn to wetland habitats in my recent work. This fragile habitat is so easy to overlook and dismiss as a muddy bog when one glides by in their car. So much of our wetlands have been dried out and managed for human uses. Yet these habitats support a wealth of organisms and provide essential support for migrating birds that pass through on their ancient cycles.
In Four and Twenty Blackbirds I explored wetland reeds once again. I tried to convey my wonder at the power and beauty of nature. I put myself out on a limb in terms of technique as I did not begin with the bird images in the underpainting as I usually do. I also worked with the new palette of color I began with my previous painting, Pilgrims' Progress. I hoped to give a stronger voice to nature in this painting. The yellow headed  blackbirds give me a thrill when I look at them in their black masks. They are in charge of their world.

New work-Pilgrims' Progress

Finally, at long last I have finished my two new paintings.  With the first, Pilgrims' Progress, I started with a mental vision of color and a strong sense of the concept which led me all the way. I have been trying to loosen up my style a bit and reduce images and ideas to the essentials necessary elements. I feel really happy with this piece because I believe I accomplished that goal. It goes where I wanted it to go simply and succinctly.  And oh those Sandhill Cranes. They have an almost human quality to them, more than ordinary herons and cranes.  They are really huge and walk more like a turkey or a chicken. I was lucky to observe a pair in their elaborate mating dance at the Summer Lake Oregon reserve one winter. These mysterious migrating birds require the wetlands that are threatened all across the western United States.
Pilgrims' Progress is large, 30' x 60", and the images march right across.  I wanted it to seem a continuous flow, like a river of people and birds.

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.