of witches

They always pull them out this time of year, the decorations showing haggish women in rags, warts on the nose & bad teeth. Pulled from shallow closets and deep memory, the witches come back.

But what we forget, is that everyone looked like that back then, back in those medieval hours that haunt our imagination. The lot of them didn’t brush their teeth or have proper soap. They knew nothing of the value of being clean. And here we are with our Ikea and CB2 lives and have the distance of time to push that historic memory into a ghoul. And this distances us from from the ghouls of our own time. Those places that fail to fall into shiny right angles and Helvetica, those places that ooze, bleed, stink a little bit and get sick, those aren’t here. They’re there, then, those people. The monster, it doesn’t live here anymore. Not unless it restrains itself and has proper manners.

There is no Y in art

What do you do when the thing that you absolutely must do just does you no good? It’s a nasty, expensive habit often bad for my heath and most definitely bad for my savings account. It’s worse than an addiction, really, because I can’t blame it on some externalizable chemical reaction. Damn that dna. It’s me. That contemptible tendency to make art.

Of late it seems that this tool I’ve fashioned and thrown out into the world & make some sense or just a way for myself seems to have boomeranged back upon me, fixing to cut me to ribbons. I could let it. Or I could bank on my last nerve and catch it.

Why all the bright colors? Why can’t I just paint things the way they “are”? well, I’m sorry that you can’t see bright fields of energy around people, but I do. Statements like “the way they are” I find ever more laughable each time I hear them. You want me to paint the way something IS on the inside or the outside? Who made our visual surface the deciding factor in what something IS? Who made you judge of the way “things really are”?

And the frogs? What’s with the amphibians, winged things, and half people? Well, those are self portraits, to. They outpicture part of me I have in common with the reptiles. The part of me where all the bad ideas, the knee jerk fear and strings of addiction hide. The part of me that might be better were I not too nervous to express it. They stand in for my disease.

Why? Why spend the time, and the money? Because, I’m going to try for yet another show. Because I just have to reach out and try one more time. Maybe this time I’ll assemble an exhibit that is so un-buy-able that even I’ll have to take it seriously. Maybe even I’ll be forced to stand up behind all of the images and words and confess that I am an artist.

The plastic statement

Both as a writer and an artist, I am drawn to exploring those invisible threads binding the web of humanity together. Underneath any notions of class and race we are each more alike and inter dependent than we realize. In a nuts and bolts, beans and grains way, humanity is intricately connected by factors, such as economy and diet, that we touch upon daily without often giving it the slightest thought.

The simple God-trusting dollar in my pocket anchors the currencies of countless other countries. Should that dollar sicken, the economies of Asia, Africa, much of the world would wretch.

I am corn cob with feet. The carbon constructing my cells has been largely manufactured from sunlight and made edible via miles of corn stalks stretching across the American Midwest. I haven’t eaten corn flakes, grits or corn on the cob in months yet everyday I eat, touch, even wear several derivatives of this miraculous grass.

Now that the genie of globalization has been unleashed there really is no shoving it back into the bottle with blame and public protest. We’re all here on this little space marble with our hands in each other’s pockets and our hope that no one gets hurt. It gives me pause how mindlessly I interact with the rest of the globe through my most unconscious, mundane choices.

My medium of choice has long been watercolor because I loved layering transparent colors. Last year I realized that I wanted some way to make these paintings even lighter – to make the paper disappear and have only the paint itself hanging in space. I was reorganizing my supply closet and came across the plastic resin I used for design projects in graduate school. Pretty soon I was trying to think of ways to make what I normally paint using plastic.

Working in this medium has also allowed me an artistic way to react to my thoughts about globalization. As a modern material it blankets many parts of the world under its effects. Plastic made from one country’s petrochemicals are manufactured into packaging and bags consumed in another. Those of us who do recycle our plastics send them on a long journey to China. However, many plastics, collected but in fact non-recyclable, land in the ocean where churning currents break them down into tiny particles that fish and birds then mistake for food. I could very well end up consuming the plastic again through seafood. Plastic is the fabric of our life and its scraps bring us together as a global village. It is because of this and because the medium really satisfied a desire to work with color in a new way that I have continued to work with it.

This medium requires me to plan much more that painting ever did. And yet, I have to let go of results even more. The process itself demands incredibly fast work and the exothermic curing process can have it’s own way with how the colors blend. But,when it works, the results are addictive and exciting! I have been creating 12 x 12 inch, cast plastic, flat & relief sculptures. I cast objects using alginate or sculpt surfaces in clay and bring these together into a rubber mold to create each square.

The individual pieces are simply impressions, like I’m trying to catch the world in my little plastic net and can only come away with its colors. As I’ve made individual compositions, I have begun seeing these as pieces of a greater whole, like quilt squares. My goal is to bring these together and, in a sense, “sew” together a quilt made of plastic.

maybe, maybe not

There's a list of things for me to be working on but I just can't manage to get my forehead out of my cradling hand long enough to do them. The whole bloody stupid weekend-art-show was a glorified headache and my skull is still sore. I feel that if I fail to gently hold it in one piece the whole mass will explode. I feel like there's too much blood trying to shove its way through miles and miles of capillaries - if only i could just drain some of it out.

I had a dream last night that the mice were back. Maybe they are? Maybe some new thing has come in to gnaw at my sanity and fray the carefully maintained edges? Maybe...

Maybe I'm not really an artist at all, but just a person with a lot of paint brushes. Even as I walked around looking at other artists' work this weekend i noticed how they seemed to have a cohesion and repetition from piece to piece that I don't. And where I do have themes it seemed to be held up to ridicule. "oh look, circles!". hm. Is there something definite that I should be saying? Is there some way I should be simpler than I am? Am i not sketching and pre-thinking enough? Am I not hitting folks over the head enough? Am I just not really very good? Is that why nothing sold? Besides the economy and the million things which can play into a fair like that... is my work just crap? I look around at the piles of framed paintings I've brought back home and have half a mind to smash the lot to bits. Destroy the evidence of this cruel joke I've been playing upon myself. Use that room as a bedroom and nix the idea of having a studio. maybe. I hide the hammer from myself, nonetheless.

I look into the mirror at body features nature designed to nurture life but which never have. And now they have the nerve to begin unhinging themselves from original locations and heading south. Maybe I'm not really a woman, just another body running around the planet & sucking up resources. I may as well not have a gender anymore.

They tell you, all those well meaning parents, ministers and sunday school teachers, that your life has a purpose. That you are meant to let your light and your talents shine. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe there really is not room enough for all the light and the talents? Maybe inspiration isn't enough? maybe some of us are just here to be junky under-layer of humanity which allow the few best to glisten in contrast to our muddy, muddled lives.

"That's just self-pity!" She yells at me. Maybe. I know whatever it is it's not going to change the fact that I am a person who needs to wear a bra and that I also tend to take my brushes and make marks on paper. But maybe any joy that stemmed from both has faded to black. maybe. maybe not.

Who?

Who knows you best? Who is the person who knows who you are under the edifice of the person you project? Who is the person who can call truth to your lies? Who is the person you share your ideas with even if they are someone who disagrees with those ideas? Even in your disagreement you know you are safe with them. Who is that person around whom you feel the light of unconditional love and honor and to whom you want to reflect the same... maybe more.

Does such a person exist? Who is it? Who would you like it to be?

And I feel fine...

It swings back and forth. They command from their heights and it's us, the masses, the "little people" who get the good squeezing every 20-30 years or so. A generation spends their way out of pain. Then for the next, the limits come flying off and the spending dries up. Each one reaches for utopia with the words "never again" on their lips. Each tactic is chased through history by ever grislier monsters of our own creation. The government gets off our backs and tears the scab off with it. How many years of this next contraction do we put up with? The marketplace is a harsh disciplinarian. Not sure I deserve this spanking at the hands of some economic theorist with bad hair.

And now? This week? The paddles are out, trying to shock this thing we call an economy back to life. Bailouts, paper, credit, nothing works. It wiggles and twists, up one hour and down the next as if in jovial laughter at our efforts. Perhaps, finally, after centuries of abuse, the economy as we know it, money as ever we have loved it, is dead.

We'll be asked to redefine our lives and lifestyle. Not just to get through 3 or 4 possible years of "this sucks" but to retool what we think & do for whatever new thing is in the agony of being born. Will I have some sense f nimbleness about me to make the reinvention that my parents, faced with a squeeze at much my same age, failed to make? I feel like one of those mice I hated so much that I moved into this bigger, fancier, more expensive apartment to get away from. I scurry toward supply and hope to avoid the traps. I must have been made for more than this.

Maybe Ghandi was right and we really simply need smaller economies to better value where our goods come from. Maybe then...hm.

It's enough to just make me want to shop.

escaping flatland

Are you walking anywhere or just sort of wandering in a forward direction? Are you aiming for the light or just trying to avoid the dark? Do you seek awakening or merely hope to stay alert enough to watch “Survivor”?

Do I feel like an animal stuck in your hot car? Do I feel like I’m always walking with a pebble in the shoe… while I to push a rock uphill… wearing high heels?

What do we need? And if we find it do we really want it should it mean giving up what this territory of life we’ve mapped with our limited understanding? Could we give up being amused, pacified, entertained even for a minute should finding that thing we need mean that we can no longer sit on the sidelines and live life as in the confines of day to day to day passing? The question lives in the middle of everything, trapped in a space made raw. It tries to get out. I try and reach in to grab it. But not too much. Not enough. Just enough to irritate.