Beginning Again

February is a month of beginnings for me. I was born in February (many many moons ago…). I began my South American adventure learning to speak Spanish in Bolivia in February twenty years ago. I met my husband in February ten years ago. I started my job here at the Red Cross in February six years ago. This year, in February, I wrote my first show proposal. (Probably the first of many that will be rejected – but I have to start somewhere!)

Writing that proposal was about as hard a thing as I have ever done. I was fortunate to not be going it alone. KW and I wrote many drafts, emailing them back and forth, talking in between the mailing, until we figured out what to say. The hardest thing was finding a way to express the common theme in our work. We can see it in a way. We have some techniques in common. We are both approaching some difficult things. But it wasn’t until we recognized that we were both working around the same theme, her from the inside and me from the outside, that it clicked for me and I had a conceptual reason to put my work next to hers in a proposal. Then we had to find the right words to say it. My wonderful old friend Debbie had a lot to do with that. She rewrote the statement and even though we changed much of what she wrote, she helped us see how to make it better, stronger, more graceful. It went out in the mail yesterday. Now we bite our nails until April.

Yesterday I also received notice that “Out of Asia” was juried into a local show. I didn’t expect that to happen as one of the jurors doesn’t care for my silver-fumed work. But I hadn’t wanted to submit any of the dwelling places work, or any of the work about emotions to this show. Life is full of surprises.

I took a year and a half off to reassess the direction I was moving in, work on building a body of work, and begin to think anew about strategies for positioning my work. I don’t see myself producing for a fine crafts market. I haven’t got the free time to do that kind of work. This is the year where I start seriously pursuing exposure for my work. Maybe I will submit something again to the Bullseye show. I don’t know. It seems pointless. I’ll probably send some work to Pilchuck again. Then I get to go, see friends, have fun at the party, talk to people about my work, and hope I make a connection with someone. Just about every year that I have set glass goals, I have met them. So, this year, the goal is to find an appropriate place/audience for my emotions pieces. And try to relax and be happy.

Draft One....

Growing up in a house surrounded by art, it never occurred to me that art would not be a part of the environments I created. From childhood on I have been a diligent observer of people. It was a survival tactic, enabling me to predict how they would act and react and therefore prepare myself for what was ahead. To satisfy my curiosity about why people did what they did, and what humans need to cope with the joys and challenges of life; I studied psychology in college and eventually made my way into a career as a behavioral scientist. I began to think about exploring a vocation as an artist in my mid twenties. Art is the space in which I explore the experience of being human, not as a scientist, but as a philosopher.

The language with which I make these explorations is that of abstractions. As intense and intimate as human experiences can be, I seek to view them from the outside rather than from within, thereby sharing with the viewer a more global perspective on the themes. Figures have their place in this work, not as representations of individuals, nor as images of beauty, but as portrayals of emotions. Drawings in paper become drawings painstakingly executed by laying down glass in powder form, somewhat inspired by my experience watching Australian aborigines create sand paintings in a museum in Paris in the mid 1970’s. As the glass powder is laid down, layer by layer, my point of reference, the drawing, is obliterated. These powder drawings are fired in a kiln, and when the firing is complete and the glass has cooled, the image they create is revealed. This process enables me to preserve the drawings I first make in charcoal on paper that quickly yellows and disintegrates. I take an image that was once fragile and, using a medium thought of as fragile, recreate the image into something that can endure the centuries without fading. It lends an unparalleled permanence to the art.

The last few years of my life have been about loss; anticipating it, helping others through it, living it. It was inevitable that this experience would make its way into my work as an artist. The work of Sean Scully is a recent influence. Layering colors in this work, leaves the viewer with brief glimpses of what lies beneath the surface; what supports us through the trials that weigh us down.

Writing (UGH) the Artist's Statement

I hate having to write an artist's statement. Not because I have too little to say, but rather because I have too much to say and condensing it down is a bitch. Now if it is a scientific abstract I am writing, or a proposal, I can condense without a problem. But I have an incredibly difficult time writing an artist's statement, probably because I have a gazillion things to say about the work and I don't know where to begin. It's even more difficult to write a statement for a proposal for a two-artist show. How do we find the right words to pull together works around a theme, seen from differing perspectives, using different methods and vocabularies into a whole that makes sense? Tying together two bodies of work is more of a challenge than I thought it would be.

Not knowing where to begin is also the problem I am having with my personal statement. So maybe it would help to brainstorm all of the thoughts in my head about the work, my motivation, my vocabulary...

1. From childhood on I have been a diligent observer of people. It was a survival tactic, enabling me to predict how they would act and react and therefore prepare myself for what was ahead.
2. I studied psychology in college because: a. I wanted to understand why people did what they did; b. I wanted to help people (my therapist once called me a teat for the world); and c. I wanted to figure out how to heal myself emotionally (adolescence was hell)
3. I am an empathizer. Have always been fascinated by Charles Williams conception of "bearing each others burdens" in the "doctrine of substituted love" (Descent into Hell) and how different that is from just empathising or sympathizing. There is something powerful about the act of taking on part of someone else's burdens so that their load will be lighter.
4. Living in Venezuela taught me to celebrate the human body, taught me that every society values and idealizes different aspects and different types of bodies
5. For as long as I have been creating art, I have been making images of human bodies, in clay, on paper, and now in glass. In particular this happened for me after I had lived in Venezuela.
6. In my professional life I am an abstract thinker. I take abstractions, numbers, statistics, and weave stories from them to help paint a picture of what is happening with whatever I have been measuring (usually human behavior). My professional work is a big picture view of the observations I have been making since I was a child.
7. Since I was a kid, sitting at the dinner table answering the word problems in math that our father threw at us, I have been creating math problems in my head to amuse myself. I look at buildings and try to calculate how many offices are in the building, how many people work there. I play games with myself, looking at the groceries I have placed on the conveyor belt and try to guess what the bill will be. (I am usually right within five dollars.)
8. I married later (at 39) than most of my friends did and then discovered I was infertile. I had always hoped to bear children. I would have loved to have a child. Adoption wasn't a comfortable option for us early on and now would be very difficult to pull off. I still grieve the barrenness of my womb, the injustice of a universe that gives one woman extreme fertility, the ability to get pregnant the first time she tries (or doesn't) and takes from her sister all fertility. Some days I just can't bear to be around children. Amazing that after all of these years of facing it, it still brings tears to my eyes.
9. Loss seems to be a recurring theme for me right now. I feel the loss of my womb deeply, albeit less frequently than before. I still grieve the loss of my friend and colleague Tony. I am facing the impending loss of my father and my mother-in-law. I try desperately to ignore the illness of a dear friend, yet know her day may well come long before mine.
10. I am fighting the loss of my youth, of my strength and flexibility, as arthritis pain begins to take me over and the muscles in my back begin railing at me for the years of compensating for a short leg. For the first time in my life ever, I am able to bend over and touch the floor with my hands with straight legs, unbent knees. I have set a goal for myself - to be in better shape at 50 than I was at 25. Three years to make that goal!
11. Three bullets on loss is more than enough!
12. Seeing a Matisse retrospective at the MOMA in the early '90s was a mind-blaster for me. After that show I started drawing figures incessantly, exploring color, figure ground, composition. Then I started life drawing classes at the Art Student's League of New York and was blown away by the beauty of the body.
13. The body in my work today is not about beauty, even if I see beauty in the body. I am using this work to capture what I do: observe. The figures in my work are intended to be seen as abstractions of emotions, feelings, experiences
14. I code switch, as comfortable in the world of numbers and statistics as in my studio. I can get as excited about drawing conclusions from statistical analyses (the more complex the better) as I do when I pull a successful piece out of the kiln, when I see a powder wafer reveal itself to me.

to be continued.....