When I start a new project, I’m inclined to say “That’s the way it always its” But not in the sense that I know the steps to follow and I have everything worked out. Almost always I have just the slightest clue that I’m going to make something and let’s just see what the first thought might be. The more I do this, the better I like it. I love the surprises. So it was with the blue shirt (which I gladly gave up to the project because the color was so perfect.) Taking an old pillow for the stuffing discovering the whole pillow could be coaxed into a body shape was surprising. What would I do for arms and legs? I’m not a doll maker. And then came the realization it would need to sit in or on something. I’m am still so happy about the chair – finding just the right wood and easy way to assemble it. And that red paint? I want to use it again! And so it goes. That’s the way it always is. Fun!
This is my second painting of a local barn and it features a closer look through an open doorway. The composition was not altered from how it appeared in my reference photograph, but fortuitously three significant diagonal features, the rusty gate, the top of the left doorway, and the shadow line from the right, all converged on the open illuminated window visible within the barn. In my photo, there was only some green weeds present beyond the window. This seemed inappropriate for a focal point of the image, so I pondered with playing around and considered a fanciful addition. Maybe some memories from an art history class many years ago sparked a realization that the placement of the open window resembled a feature in the Velázquez’s masterpiece “Las Meninas” (The History and Mystery of ‘Las Meninas’ by Diego…) . I knew immediately that the mysterious figure in the doorway of his painting belonged my in barn window. I was very pleased with the addition, and after the painting was completed I did a search to see whether my inclusion of the doorway figure was original. Of course it wasn’t. I must have had subliminal memories of other artists (Picasso, and Dalí in particular) using a Las Meninas theme, composition and figure(s) in their own paintings. In fact, there is an incredibly rich history of many artists doing this (covers & citations » Diego Velázquez, ‘Las Meninas,’ 1656). I guess it’s difficult to be original these days, but I’m happy to be a very small part of an artistic tradition.
As an artist, I am interested in the evolving transformations of living things as time moves everything forward; I strive to capture the moments of growth and decline that are so fleeting in nature. In this series of work, I focused on the adolescent growth both mental and physical of my daughter. The time that one grows from childhood to adulthood is fascinating because it is a point of tremendous change for both the body and the mind. This work is a meditation on the passing of time and what it is to grow up. I’ve tried to highlight the difficult and unpredictable changes that a woman’s body and mind go through during adolescent years.
SPECTRAL PROJECTIONS, The Writing on the Wall, is an array of color patterns projected from prisms hanging in my kitchen window. Every sunny morning they flood the space,covering everything for about twenty minutes. For a moment, I’m dancing around with my iPhone, capturing visual poetry.
Periodically She Rearranged
The Furniture In Her Mind
Women Elected
Gave Her Unexpected
Gumption
Raising Oneself Up
Through the Fall
Of Another
Two dimensional painting and three dimensional mixed media continue to fascinate me. Each has its particular systems in which to explore possible paths to the finished piece. It’s healthy to make mistakes in art. Mistakes are my sign posts to places I want to go but can’t yet reach. Mistakes feel uncomfortable at first, but if I am making mistakes, I know art will be an adventure.
This is an image in the Mechanization series. It originated as an iPhone image that is modified and abstracted in several digital apps. The intention is to create an image that has the character of a object construction that represents our current world that is rushing towards a society that is increasingly mechanical.
In the spring of 2019, I spent three days with friends hiking the western end of the Finger Lakes Trail (FLT) in Allegheny State Park. I was about a third of the way to my goal of hiking all 574 miles of the trail. During the hikes, I use my phone to capture sights along the trail.
There had been a lot of rain that spring, so we were trekking through a lot of mud and across streams of various sizes. At one point we crossed a fairly elaborate bridge. FLT volunteers maintain the trail and the stream crossings can be anything from a couple of planks to actual wood structures spanning twenty or thirty feet. I snapped some photos of this bridge and continued hiking. As I walked, I started imagining a wall sculpture in my mind. I would use a photo of this bridge along side a couple of wood planks to represent the simple next to the elaborate stream crossing. As I pictured the piece in my mind, the idea grew into a whole series. I would find inspiration from my photos from previous hikes. I could make one piece for each of the thirty-four maps on the trail.
To date, I have completed a bit more than half of the 574 miles of the Finger Lakes Trail. The February show will feature nine pieces using images from seven of the maps
Using photography in my work is not new. I started combining photos with my wood constructions in the 1980’s. Since then I have returned to that combination periodically over the years. But I have never wanted to cover the photos with glass, and this leaves the paper prints highly vulnerable to damage. For the “Light, Color and Shadow” exhibit at State of the Art, this project is funded in part by a Special Opportunities Stipend from the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County. The funding enables me to have the images printed on aluminum plates so they will be more durable.
