What's up with that Rock??

When people visit my studio, one of the first questions they often have is this:
why do you paint that rock (or is it an egg?)? what does it MEAN??? Anyone who has seen my work knows that I have used that image for years – first as an outline, then as a flat oval, and eventually as a three dimensional form. I think it started out as a cell or an egg, certainly both primary shapes in any time or culture. (Start to look around and you will see this oval shape everywhere in contemporary art.) My usual answer is that it represents a lot of things: life’s origins, mystery (what’s inside?), balance (as it is often teetering), the Self in various situations (up a tree, on a wire, stuck in a crevasse, supporting a pile of other rocks). In any case, I have felt compelled to paint it for years, and it has become almost iconic in my work.

But there is an interesting story about “the rock”…..after a few years of painting it, I went to South India for two weeks with my friend Charu. We went to an ancient holy site on the southeast coast called Mahabalapurim. Among the temples and wall reliefs, sitting up on a hilltop, there it was: “Krishna’s Butterball”, an enormous balancing rock. People see the photo in my studio and assume the rock inspired the paintings, but it’s actually the opposite. The paintings lead me to the rock. Much like in the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when the Richard Dreyfuss character is compelled to sculpt Devil’s Tower out of his mashed potatoes. In the movie, other characters mysteriously sketch or paint the form, without knowing why. As the story progresses, it turns out that all of these “possessed” people are led to that location to await the arrival of an alien space craft. Science fiction, perhaps, but in essence maybe not.

Experiences like this make the Magic of art-making real. They allow me to remember why I started doing this in the first place and why I will continue to do it, even as the current world situation makes that more and more challenging.
As I tread water in the stormy economic seas of 2009 (oh, please, sorry for the cliché), I sometimes see that rock off in the distance, and it gives me the strength to stay afloat.

Barack!

Tomorrow is the big day.............there is nothing else left to say except for "HOORAY"!

Catch and Release

(note: this is not a picture of me........I only fish in metaphors.)

Sometimes I lose sight of the fact that the process of making art involves give and take, though I prefer to call it take and give. I accept (take) the gifts I have been given – inspiration, talent, the true desire to be an artist. I make art, then I try to give it back to the world. This is the tricky part as I am often mired in – for lack of a better word – the marketing part of my job. Who is my audience, what venues will best serve me, where can I sell my work? Can one truly “give” ones creative work back to the world in an appropriate way and still make a living? I’d like to think so, but it is always a challenge.

To know that my work moves people, taps into memories, and makes them think in new ways means a lot to me. That’s why I do it. (Which is not to say I don’t appreciate it when people like and/or buy it just for, say, the color.) Once I make a painting and send it out into the world, I can only hope it makes an impression and brings some good mojo into the atmosphere. But that is out of my control – my job first and foremost is to make the art. Yet it is essential to get the work out; creative efforts turned only inward can become a burden. For me, too many paintings stacked against the wall can lead to feeling of stagnation, and can make me feel self-absorbed and somehow psychically stingy.

So I try to “catch and release” – catch the creative energy when it is flowing, then release what I make back into the world so I can catch some more inspiration which will lead me to make more work which I will eventually release back……hopefully, in beneficent and meaningful ways.
(btw, I am always happy to hear about ways in which my work may have enlightened, annoyed, amused or otherwise affected people - so please feel free to let me know. I'm not fishing for compliments here ha ha.)

Onward to 2009

May we all greet the challenges of the New Year with grace and guts and gusto!

Do You Look Like Your Work?

(See how my pointy chin matches those trees???) heh heh
A couple of years ago I was invited to be a juror on a panel to award the Ohio State Arts Council grants to painters. This was an arduous two day process, during which I learned more than I could have imagined – not only about the grant process from the other side of the fence (which in itself was a real eye opener) – but also about looking at art and the assumptions we make when doing so. Once we finally agreed on eight painters (out of an initial 200) to receive the awards, only then were we told their names. There were three of us on the panel, and we discovered that we had subliminally assumed the gender of each of the eight – and we were wrong about five of them. It made me think about the question: do you look like your work?

This question of course leads to other, deeper questions about how and why we as artists develop our particular voices. Can we pinpoint the time when we began to truly “own” our work? When the basic skills we learned in art school began to serve us in developing our own language? When a distinctive shape, line, color or composition that we still use today first appeared?

Some of my painter friends look exactly like their work, but most do not. Of course it is more than looks, it’s personality and world view. And of course these judgments are quite subjective, too.

Do I look like my work? Despite my quip at the beginning of this post, my first answer would be “no” – because in my personal life I tend to be quite moderate. I have a secret fantasy of being a minimalist sculptor. Not likely to happen, but interesting to note. I call myself a “Maximalist”. Everything at once all the time, in a way. An onslaught of color and imagery and a chopped up composition……but my work is about all that: the random interaction of objects, trying to make sense of our own stream of consciousness thinking, extracting the essence, feeling the Gestalt of the moment without necessarily understanding each individual part.
So, do I look like my work? I certainly feel like it.