Nakedness and Beauty

It's strange to me that most of my family seems to find some offense, or at the very least is uncomfortable with, my use of human figures that are naked in some of my glasswork. The responses have run the gamut, from "I don't like these at all -- I don't like looking at images of naked people" from the aunt (whom I always thought was pretty free -- she took me to see Hair) when she saw Eye of the Beholder, to a cousin who only talked about the abstract pieces when discussing my work with me, despite the preponderance of figure pieces in the studio.

Living in Venezuela challenged my concepts of beauty. I learned that not all men seek the heroin chic skinny twiggy hard bodies that dominate the images of beauty in the US. I saw women who would be hiding their bodies in the US celebrating them in tight clothes, bright colors and bikinis. And men still looked and admired.

Then I came back to the US. I took a figure drawing class at the Art Sudent's Leaugue of New York. And I found myself most interested in the models with body fat. What I found myself appreciating and celebrating in my drawings was the flexibility of these models. I preferred the models with character. It wasn't the ballet dancer or the swimsuit model that caught my attention, it was the middle-aged, paunchy man with a beard who could hold physically challenging poses for 40 minutes at a time, belying the image his body projected of an unfit man. The honesty of a sagging breast brings to mind the life it has lived -- the babies it nursed, the years it went free and unsupported, the pounding it survived when its owner took to the pavement as a runner. Is there not more beauty in that than in the perky siliconed breast of a woman afraid of aging? Gravity rules and eventually wins.

These are the bodies I use to portray emotions and ideas. The images are not about the model, they aren't about the human body, even. The body is the vocabulary.

I don't like thinking though, that my use of the body alienates a viewer. I have a friend who makes up names or uses obscure terms to name her pieces and doesn't care if people understand. She doesn't seem to be interested in communication, only in expression. She doesn't seem to care if her names alienate the viewer.

I want to communicate. I want to draw the viewer in. I want the viewer to get the idea I am trying to express. Maybe this comes from my years crusading for social justice... Now I want to use art to change the world one person at a time. So how do I resolve this? It doesn't help that it's my family responding negatively to my work. I want to celebrate these pieces and they want to hide them... Isn't that just like family?

Explorations: Beneath the Blanket

Late this winter, when I was beginning to come out of the dark space I had inhabited after Tony died, just after I had finished making the glass for "A Grief Observed" and for another not-quite-yet finished figure piece, I decided to play. I wanted to explore something more abstract. I had been following the advice of several friends and had been examining the work of several abstract expressionists.

(Can I say that I am now gaga over Sean Scully? - more than his paintings, it's his photographs which speak to me. The photos I have taken over the years, while not the same quality, portray similar subjects, similar moods. It was like opening a scrapbook of my photos when I looked at his -- they took my heart to the place it wants to go when I explore through the camera lens.)

So, I wanted to explore a different direction, and I wanted to play. And I decided to play in neutral colors, not at all my palette -- but it felt right, like it would be soothing, as comforting as a blankie or a bowl of cereal on a rough day, as safe as the fort I built with a blanket and a table.

This is the piece born of that exploration. It wasn't quite right until I sandblasted the surface, taking the gloss off the glass and giving it the warm silk feeling I like so much. The cold gloss may work for my figure pieces, but this one needed to be more comforting.

People have seen all sorts of things in this piece of glass, mesas, gardens, a room, a journey. For me it was about comfort and integration, a visual assurance that all would be right for me again.

This was a significant departure for me, in both the colors I employed and the design. There was none of the chunky visual texture I almost always use, no color reactions, no metals, no fumed glass. It didn't feel organic to me. But neither was it as graphic as the figure pieces set in texture. And perhaps the texture was in the placement of the elements, the repetition of color and form, the movement.

Everyone who saw this went nuts over it. Maybe I am onto something here? I have continued to explore these while still working on figure pieces. Eventually they will come together. In the meantime I find comfort in the space, in the palette that calms, in the safe place I find in these neutral pieces.

A Grief Observed

(kiln-formed glass) 17" by 17" by 1"


About the piece....

My interest in the experience of being human is explored through the depiction of human figures. The figures are an expression, an abstraction even, of ideas and emotions. The surrounding background represents the complexity of our inner lives and our attempts to be connected to others.

A Grief Observed is born of the experience of collective isolation experienced after the death of a dear friend.


About the struggle....
I have been thinking a lot about the work that I am doing in this line. Are the pieces just reproductions of charcoal sketches in glass, or are they more? This one came from what I was living as I was trying to reconnect with the world after watching my friend die. But most people, seeing this, will not see what I lived, or what I am communicating in the piece.

If it speaks to them, does that matter? Do they need to know that the red lines are about connections to other people, are about pathways, neural pathways, pathways on computer chips, the ways that make our lives what they are? Do they need to know about the texture beneath the surface of the glass? Dark and mysterious, I hope it pulls the viewer in, to wonder at the texture on the flat glass, to wonder at the valleys, heights and rivers, and perhaps to see it as metaphor for all that we experience, a symbol of our hidden inner lives.

Maybe it's enough for them to think of it as pretty.

struggles

Have been away from home and away from studio forever, it seems. Last time I fired my kiln it was to fire student work. I miss it when I am not working.

Struggles with the content of the work....

• Do I keep on with the figure pieces as they are, expressing connectedness or lack thereof?
• Do I abstract the constructs more expressly by cutting the figures even more?
• How does this work with the new direction of neutral abstracts?
• Do I work on integrating the two directions into one? -- How?

Gotta get off my butt and create more work so I can present some of it to a gallery that is appropriate for the content of the work.

When????