My daughter and I made a date to work on the same topic for a blog entry.  (She's been working on her own blog about writing).  We were talking about the creative process, and how it is a very individual experience.  To write this entry I made a list of steps that I tend to go through each time I paint.  Here they are:

1.  Inspiration:  often in the form of some narrative element (a poem, a concept)

2.  Gesture:  like Francis Bacon, I tend to paint first, and find the gesture, the skeleton of the painting, while experiencing the visceral quality of the materials.

3.  Storm:  the usually inefficient, at times unpleasant step that takes the form of a manic swinging to and fro, between two disparate parts of myself, back and forth between graphic clarity and complete obliteration.  And excessive scraping of paint.

4.  AHA:  a clear minded self remembers one of Diebenkorn's notes about painting: tolerate chaos.  Making a drawing from the painting can sometimes help me find the skeleton within the chaos.  Drawing clarifies the editing process.  More scraping, but this time I might smile while scraping.

5.  Magic:  when the composition feels like it has become itself fully and the brush strokes sing to each other, and there's a unified song that I recognize and love.

I've tried to tweak the process, to change that challenging third step.  When I was at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, a visiting artist, Frank Bowling, asked, "why do you need to create a tornado every time you make something? (and why don't you clean up this studio?!)"  To some extent, the tornado is still with me.  There's less destruction and more intention, but there's still stormy weather.  But...I've always loved storms.

Ever since I first saw Cornelia Parker's sculpture, Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson) at the ICA, I've wanted to talk about it and think about it.  Now that Damien Ortega's piece, Cosmic Thing, is installed, I have an excuse.  I haven't yet seen the Ortega sculpture, but I did have a look at Sebastian Smee's video tour of the exhibit. First, about Hanging Fire...what I love about it is the flow between the narrative, conceptual elements of the piece and its overall presence.  The arrangement of floating, delicate bits of wood and nails recovered from an arson site creates a feeling of ascension, as if the material body of the building has become the building's spirit, rising upward.  The spaces around the bits of wood translate as the memory of the building's rectangular and upright form.  For a conceptual piece, it feels incredibly intimate.   I think this is because it conveys the feeling of ascension so well, and because the narrative is specific: the life and death of a building.

Call me a spiritualist, but when I see objects floating around me, I think of ascension.  So I'm curious to see how Ortega's piece reads. 

Cosmic Thing also calls to mind Cai Guo-Quiang's suspended cars at the Guggenheim last year.  For me that show was more about spectacle and emotional distance, than meaning.  Too often artists and art viewers are interested in speaking in tones of cool emotional distance, like the way the teens I know talk...especially when they want to hide authentic emotion.

(For anyone who wants more ascension metaphors floating around the psyche, check out Marilynne Robinson's book, Housekeeping.  There is a beautiful descriptive passage somewhere early in the book about the law of ascension.)

Cindy Cantrell's article on the exhibit appeared today in the Globe West.  We're excited around here!

Besides the beautiful space at the Willow Gallery, the best thing about a LynnArts' opening is that there are multiple openings happening at once and a lot of opportunities to connect with other artists.  I enjoyed chatting with several of the artists who are exhibiting work in the show, War and Peace:  Images of Conflict and Resolution in the 21st Century, juried by Ken Hruby.  I appreciated the very specific and useful feedback that some of the artists gave me as they looked at my work.  David Lang creates intricate sculptures that are fascinating to look at.  He and C.J. Stevens told me about an upcoming installation on loss and love by Evelyn Berde at Mass Art.  I'm not going to miss that show.  I also enjoyed meeting and talking with artist Tamara Wolfson, who was passing through Lynn and decided to stop in.

As a mother artist, I couldn't help experiencing the day partly through the eyes of my kids.  When we first arrived, and my nine year old looked around with wide eyes and a proud smile, I felt deeply satisfied; the opening was just beginning, and as far as I knew, strangers hadn't praised or rejected me, yet, but his wordless response gave me what I needed from this day.

I was really grateful to see the familiar faces of several friends who came by.  Old friends, new friends, family, and art -- it was a memorable day.

This past Labor Day was gloriously sunny and perfect for playing with rocks at Odiorne Point, NH.  It was interesting to watch the various people, old and young, as they approached the cairns that dotted the rocks.  Most of the visitors were unable to resist the urge to create their own cairn, leaving a record of their presence.  It reminded me of the description in Steinbeck’s East of Eden about the difference in personality between two main characters, Aron and Cal, as young boys.  Steinbeck imagines how each boy would respond when finding an anthill.  Aron would lie on his stomach and watch the ants for hours, while Cal would kick at the anthill and watch the ants respond to the disaster.  “Aron was content to be a part of his world, but Cal must change it.”

Fortunately, no one that we observed wanted to destroy the cairns, but I think some young folks may have “restructured” some cairns or “repurposed” some of the rocks.  I think the urge that I felt while moving rocks around was connected to each of the two personality traits that Aron and Cal represent: the desire to be a part of one’s world and the desire to change it. The work portion of my day was actually very enjoyable.  I had a phone interview with Cindy Cantrell of the Boston Globe West People Column.  She had seen the press release for the We Are Made of Dreams and Bones exhibit and wanted to speak with me about my work.  Cindy asked me some insightful questions, and I hope I managed to be reasonably articulate.  I can see that being a journalist is hard work, especially on a sunny Labor Day.  The piece is tentatively scheduled to appear in the Sunday, Sept. 13 issue of the Globe West.

We installed the LynnArts show this week.  I am so thrilled with the Willow Gallery, a bright, airy space flooded with sunlight.  The great street-side visibility doesn’t hurt either! I never actually climbed that ladder in the picture, but I did use another tool, a secret formula passed on to me by Kaetlyn Wilcox.  I met Kaetlyn through the Arsenal Center for the Arts, where she teaches and has a studio.  Kaetlyn creates works of ambrosial beauty that are full of secrets to be discovered.  So when she met with me last winter to chat about art, life, and a magical hanging formula, I was deeply grateful.

Before this installation, I thought I was more of an intuitive, eye-baller type, but I can now say I am a formula-loving, calculator-dependent, intuitive, eye-baller type.   If you want to know the formula, (and can keep a secret), click here.  (We had to ditch the formula when hanging the arrangement of small paintings,

because the math would have made my brain explode…) 

If you see the show, and can come up with a good formula to handle the arrangement of small paintings, just email me – you will win a photo of this fabulous circus dog.

If I’m lacking inspiration, the best thing to do is to see a Miyazaki film.  The new release, Ponyo, makes use of one of his favorite narrative and visual techniques:  blurring boundaries.  In Ponyo, a relationship between a magical goldfish/girl and a boy leads to a storm, which causes the boy’s familiar seaside village to become flooded.  In one scene the boy and goldfish (now transformed into a girl) are in a boat, floating above the surface of the road.  They peer through the water to see the road and street signs below, while prehistoric fish swim past.

In an earlier film, Spirited Away, there is a similar flooding that happens after days of heavy rain.  The heroine must embark on a journey.  She boards a train whose tracks are submerged.  Along with the heroine, we watch as the train rides across a vast body of water, the towns glide past, resting quietly on the water’s horizon line. In both films, the blurring of the boundary between land and water and ordinary life and the magical, spiritual world occurs when the hero or heroine is facing a significant heroic moment.  As his characters embark on a heroic quest, seeking resolution, Miyazaki is seeking the liminal state, the in-between world.  For me, this blurring of the boundary between the ordinary and the spiritual makes me see life differently, just as Miyazaki’s characters see the world through changed eyes.  The in-between state is the place of potential transformation, the place where the heart opens as in physical and spiritual ecstasy.  The boundary of the self dissolves.

I have a similar response to abstract expressionist painting.  I see a liminal world in the blurring of the boundaries between the subject and ground.  As the forms flatten against the ground and the negative space comes alive, a potential space emerges.  And, in the best paintings, a rhythm emerges as well.  There is an opportunity to see more, to see differently, to seek that liminal state, where the boundaries of the self dissolve, where we feel a sense of oneness with the natural world and the ecstasy of an open heart.

I recently read an interview with Lasse Antonsen on Making the Art Seen which coincided with Antonsen’s exhibit, The Continuous Translation, at the Artists’ Foundation Gallery.  I was intrigued by Antonsen’s discussion of his work, particularly his ideas about “bringing two or more objects or realities together” in one piece. He says that combining objects, possibly dissimilar or unrelated objects and possibly altered in some way, “represents a rupture, but also a fulfillment: an expression of languages that were already embedded in their structures. These languages are not only visual, but also dramatic and poetic. Indeed, it is to the extent that these new objects can establish their disruptive element – which we, for lack of better words label poetic or dramatic – that they succeed in re-awakening, or accessing, new levels of memory and awareness.”

I love the words rupture and fulfillment. To me, words and images are most alive (fulfilling) when they are separated (the rupture) from their usual meanings and re-contextualized through artistic transformation or creative juxtapositions.

Antonsen referred to the white-painted flowers in his piece as funerary objects. When I was once attempting to translate grief into a painting, I put a mostly white, paper mache flower in the belly of a torso. When I see the flower in my painting and the flowers in Antonsen’s work, I see: the fragility of old, wrinkled skin, thin, bleached bones, the passing of time, and the visceral absence that inhabits our bodies in grief, the absence like a constant shiver passing through the body, or a quiet hum.

This is my translation, my re-awakening and it is this kind of continuous cross-pollination and artistic dialogue that I love so much.

Why would a person become an artist if self-expression doesn’t come easily? Is the driving motivation the struggle to communicate a deep, almost inexpressible yearning? Ease of expression is not my talent. With age, I’ve learned to see and accept what my strengths and weaknesses are as an artist. I recognize when I’m channeling the Giacometti-like tendencies, being tormented by a sense of failure, being unable to perceive the beauty before me. But, somehow I always find enough love in the practice of creation and I can recognize the magic of lines intersecting in just the right way, so that shadows falling across a face suddenly form a narrative. The narrative may be darkening thoughts, puffing up like a storm cloud, but in the act of creation, the cloud exists in the vast, openness of expression, with room to breathe and the space to become something else, no longer trapped inside a single person’s head…like a cloud bursting out of the darkness, it floats to find another soul.

I recently participated in two exhibits, Balance: Mothers Who Create and Important Things at a wonderful gallery, TLGUTS (the little gallery under the stairs) in Lynn, MA.  As director, Jocelyn Almy-Testa is so supportive of her exhibiting artists and it is clear that she is very dedicated to building a nurturing environment for the arts.  She has completed some new gallery projects that are very exciting:  a monthly Mothers' Art Salon; a resource room where artists can utilize library materials and useful tools like a slide projector, sewing machine, etc.; a mini exhibit space in the resource room for small solo shows; and a small gift shop for "high quality, low cost, small originals".   I'm so glad I responded to the TLGUTS calls for work because I've found more than just exhibit opportunities.  I've found a vibrant community and a director who is working hard to nurture artists.  Thanks, Jocelyn!