Spring Cleaning!

It took a week, but my studio is clean and reorganized.

I sorted through hundreds of pieces of paper, collage elements, tubes of paint, and old works. Went through boxes, drawers, and containers and grouped all the like items together. Threw out old sketches, half finished work, and old pieces that I was over.

  

Now to return and create.

It's Nothing Personal.

I am fascinated by the arrangements in medicine cabinets and junk drawers.

Leave me alone with your personal correspondence, a diary, journal, or stack of open love letters and I'm not going to read them. I not even tempted. In fact I probably won't even you if ask me to. However, I am going to open your medicine cabinet or pull out your junk drawer.

Oh don't worry. I'm not interested in exactly what you're taking. This isn't about learning anything about you. It's about me, I am interested in the shapes, colors, and composition of things.

Medicine cabinets, in most cases appear to be ordered. Tooth paste and dental floss sharing the same shelf. Bottles of medicine line up, their round and oblong pills inside. A razor lying next to a comb.

And the junk drawer. Heaven! A pair of scissors, one rusty nail, spare change, a piece of red twine curling around a toy giraffe. Wine corks, rubber bands, a shoe horn, measuring tape, a solitary lego, the plastic clip from a bag of bread. The colors and the random way they seem to have been shoved together to spend and undetermined sentence until the are needed.

They tell stories, these places where the things we don't consider until needed reside.

This is why I love creating collages. I like arranging color and shape, bits and pieces taken out of order and assembled into the beginnings of a tale.

Once upon a time there was a sheep who fell in love with a fish.


My collage may be viewed and purchased at my Etsy Shop

https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheSuperlativeHorse?ref=hdr_shop_menu

Fresh off the Easel

Ghost Horse

Mixed Media on Panel

15" x 15"

1250.00

This painting took years and moments to create. 

I had a panel that I had been adding and subtracting color to for years. Literally years. I have memories of this particular panel that are at least 8 years old.

Sunday I was looking at it. I really like the color. I started adding lines with a pencil that became the outline of a horse. I started mixing paint and applying it to the surface and then removing it. I added more lines with colored pencils, I added more paint, and so it went on.

Yesterday morning I looked at it and thought it was finished, so I left it alone. Today I believe it is ready to share with you.

I Believe in Beauty

I believe in beauty.

 Not just the beauty of something pretty, but all beauty. The beauty that comes from something you feel so deeply you weep. The heartbreaking beauty that is there when after countless rejections and disappointments, you willingly, lovingly, pick up the task again. The beauty that is present in loss.

I believe in beauty.

The beauty that is present in the still quite early morning hours when all is dark except the glittering stars. The beauty that is there in the sunrise when the day lies before you and everything is still possible. The beauty of the fading light in dusk.

I believe in beauty.

The beauty that is present when your friend, or child, or lover smiles. The beauty of exchanged smiles between strangers. The beauty in kindness.

I believe that it is transformative, restoring, and ever present, even in descent. I believe it has the power to comfort, elate, and enlighten, and I believe it is the doorway to joy.

I believe in beauty.

Delighted

Yesterday I received this photo of "Wild at Heart" hanging in it's new home. I am delighted when I get notes and photos of where and how people are living with the artwork I have created.

If you are living with one of my creations, please by all means send me a picture. I love seeing where they make their homes.

Thinking & Inertia

Detail of painting in progress

This is the perfect image of a painting I am working on. It's a little dark, a little out of focus, which is exactly what I am feeling.

I thought this painting would be finished two weeks ago. It is no where close to bringing finished. Why? Because I am so easily distracted by what I think I should be doing, instead of doing what I should be doing.

Thinking can become my trap. Over-thinking is my down right nemesis. Heaven forbid I start awful-izing! All of these ultimately lead to inertia. Like a shark if an artist stops moving they start dying.

I recently came across an article that addressed this issue. The correspondence between Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse to stop thinking and just paint, to just DO IT!

So now I am off to the studio to just DO IT!

Fires of Change

Nineteen

Katharina Roth

photograph by

Tom Alexander

The Coconino Center for the Arts has a remarkable, "Fires of Change" show on exhibit this month. I have seen it twice and I know I will go again.

There is one piece in this show that brings me to my knees. Artist Katharina Roth of Sedona, Arizona  chose the Yarnell Fire and the tragic deaths of 19 of the Granite Mountain Hotshots to memorialize. The installation is entitled "Nineteen", 19 beautiful crafted porcelain helmets were fired in a wood kiln. The result is beautiful and profound. Traces of black and red are the marks left by the fire. The intense heat has wrapped and in some places has cracked the fragile media. It is breathtakingly beautiful and terrifying in the same moment, just like wildfire.

She has also given us hope. There is a small tree growing out of an upturned helmet place on a tree stump. For this I am grateful.

After I left the Center I thought about this piece, it haunted me. As artist we are in the world and experience that. Some of these experiences and public events take hold of are thoughts. Scratching away at us, embedding themselves in us until they are part of us. Like seeds, they start to germinate, to sprout, and then to leaf out. They will not be ignored.

When they become mature, or just to painful to carry alone we start to create. We take are private moments with these subjects and turn them into art, and then we expose our wounds to the world for healing.

Not everyone will ever be moved by a single piece of art. However, those who are touched by are work, become our tribe. A group of individual points of consciousness that are connected by fine strands of understanding, filaments of the heart. We may never meet them and we may not have anything else in common with them except for this one moment. It is though, sublime. It is enough.


This exhibit is "Fires of Change" is up at The Coconino Center for the Arts , 2300 North Fort Valley Road, Flagstaff, AZ and on exhibit until October 31st, 2015