my eco-feminist series of paintings under way. they encompass landscape , geometric design and yup—crafting.
a studio sanctuary
Every artist who has family or day job obligations (most of us), know that studio time is sacred. So not without difficulty, I structure my life around closing the door to my sanctuary to incubate ideas and objects. Its like if my brain was a room, and I feel safe to turn to my own instincts, cutting off influences, trends, or other peoples opinion. I get a natural high when I simply allow, rather than compel, a painting to take shape— even if it looks like “granny art,” or is too pretty, too ugly, highly designed, or too rough, half baked, or over-worked. Finding a balance between fresh and finished— that perfect mark which unifies a piece and makes it vibrate is not something to be forced. I know that I will spend my life to never master painting—because it is something that will continue to evolve and expand with the universe. I frequently fail, and precious time is drained by false starts, car-crash compositions, or dissonant color. sometimes Ive seen a good work in progress suddenly fall apart; inducing a nervous breakdown and obsession over a piece in a sleepless sweat. The next day I come back to edit, sand away or scratch at an image, or add detail, nuance and a sharpness attributed to completion. The studio contains the complexity of experience and ideas as they become distilled into a series of final work. Making a painting is a slow, time consuming and arduous process—from initial conception to completion can be 6 months to a year. This is completely antithetical to our culture of Amazon Prime same day delivery, but this is why painting is good—for heat, to look at, to make. Including all bad paintings of which there are millions (including some of my own) painting is a goodness in our world.
pretty (or) powerful
I am reconnecting to my angst journal—doodling teens. I was a dreamy quiet kid, and art did and still acts as a universe I can retreat to. I didn’t know much about contemporary practice or new media—I adored Paul Guagan, Aubrey Beardsley and Gustav Klimt and even the art Nouveau illustrator Alphonse Mucha. The Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler portrayed lonely figures amongst the hills, and it was hard not to be seduced by the willowing nymphs of Pre-Raphaelite painters, which can be seen reproduced on many silk scarves or mugs at Museum shops. I was attracted to the romance, sexiness and stunning design sensibilities of these artists. I loved their depictions of various female archetypes, goddess’s and queens, sirens and mothers. I understand now that they are forged out of the male gaze—but I related to the young maidens, I was one. I saw myself in long dresses with decorative pattern, or luxuriating on the river bank. I was a teen in northern California in the 90’s, I went to belly dance class, and hung out in New Agy book stores, and patchouli-pungent, hippy galore import shops. Woodland nymphs, fairies and Amazons were in my consciousness. I was obsessed with Mists of Avalon—the reinterpretation of Arthurian Legend portraying a mythical order of Priestesses. I still have my Ryder tarot deck from that time. Even though I moved on as an artist, being influenced by figurative megaliths like Lucien Frued and Jenny Saville in my twenties, then all the German Painters by the time I went to grad school especially Gerhardt Richter and Neo Rauch, these late 18th century, early 19th century masters of graphic flatness, patterning, sound composition, and a sensual and harmonizing color palette left and indelible print. I have always had a leaning toward design and illustration, but never had it in me to be a commercial artist because even though I sparkle over a gorgeously, varied, textured and rich painting surface, I like to dig deep as I can in my paintings. But perhaps I just miss the naive girl who simply loved art.
Nature in action
Control; we humans love it. The thing is we rarely if ever have it, not truly even if we create the illusion we do. There is pleasure in mastering a tool or a process, but at that point losing control is more interesting. The most special thing about making art is how my human nature interacts with the nature of a material. It’s my nature to desire, visualize and direct my intention, and it is the nature of my media to be sticky, rough, absorbent, sheen, puckered, or woven. I don’t always know how my intention and the reality of substance will interact, but experience lends me an intuitive grasp. In the studio i see myself as one actor among many, as player in the ecology of my studio. I ask myself what it means to engage the principals of nature, such as growth, spontaneity, evolution, change, systems, pressures and forces. I may happen upon a polystyrene board on clearance at B&q, or green house paint in a skip, retain a discarded air dryer and scraps of MDF around my studio. My attention is on my everyday life— the shops with my two sons, or walking my dog up Arthur’s seat, receiving packages at home. The endless quanities of stuff which flow through family household. By noticing and discovering the useless discarding stuff, I build a porous membrane between my art and my very regular domestic family life through scavenging, collecting and foraging. The paintings and soft sculptures I am interested in making now are really a portrait of my life, just as I feel the trees I select to paint are more portraits showing the individuality of a tree, rather than a landscape. My painting bi-products become sculptural interventions like the shadow to my Id. What happens when sediment sits, dry, decay, crack, muddy? Pooring, splattering, dabbing, splotching, spraying all create a language out of probability and randomness. In this way art is almost a living animated form, it gels numerous actions of my body, and I am never sure if I am sculpting and image or being sculpted by its own momentum. Or palette scrapings calcify into stalactites—this is the earths geology at the scale of my studio sanctuary. The ecology of my studio are like the clay pillars propping up the psychological spaces of my paintings. It pains me, but I am going so far as to work with non-archival materials, which means these works will fade, crack and discolor over time. Old house paint, MDF, spray paint—low quality materials at endless supply in the western world. They are not fine art supplies, made to last the centuries. They will corrode, chip, yellow and fade—they will die just like everything. I em engaging a process of being natural in my existence, and the art stems like branch with new leaves out of it.
Below are some shots of my sediment pieces, where I use the mud from the bottom of my paint thinner can to make molds, scrape paintings, and dried out tubes. The last image depicts a soft-sculpture made out of discarded materials Ive been collecting. My aim is to refine these works further, by adding decorative weaving and imagery. I imagine a large wall installation which combines soft sculpture using all found materials (see bottom image) and painting.
espiritu santos
You can feel it in a chapel or on a hillside, near a spring, or at an alter. To me spirituality is accessing power and trust within yourself that gives you a direct experience of beyond yourself, or ego. Its the choice to notice things and see meaning in connections. To me art is god because it encompasses the wholeness of my paradox as mind and a body. The dictionary tells me spirituality is the quality of being concerned with the human soul as opposed to physical or material things. In other words, we live in duality—among the tangible and intangible. Ideas are thin air until they are reified into objects and images. The aspect of duality I am focusing on now concerns changing physical nature, and the fixed truths of mathematical language. the external wild throng of nature zigzags every which way in a magical coherence of balance and symmetry. A profound presence and focus outside of time emanates from the majesty of millions of species in the forward motion of evolution. Then there is the internal a priory symbolic perfection of mathematics which we use to describe the cosmic order. I have not much more than a high school training in maths, but I know enough that numbers don’t lie, so there is a grounding factuality in this numerical language of the universe. Geometry is the mathematical science of space, which is what I am interested in. I am an intuitive process based kind of artist, and am even struggling to write this paragraph because i can paint about this more than I can articulate it. To put it short, I am using the symbolic nature of basic geometric shapes to express some kind of internal motion and energy. Somehow though symmetry, parallel lines, rudimentary shape and simple measurements I feel a weight depressing downward, or a release of firey rage, a directional force. Sacred geometry has its own traditions and history in many cultures: we see the circle as a sign of unity, diversifying in mathematical beauty in the Vesica Pisces and flower of life. A triangle refers to the holy trinity, where matter is imbued with spirit, as in the star of David. Squares refer to the four directions and the four elements (widely seen in North american tribal culture). Roundness and angularity like the fabric of space-time. my mission as an artist is to investigate duality—our sensual and spiritual lives, us as animals and AI.
Her body (UN)seen
A rant on religion, renaissance and…um, quantum mechanics
I am fascinated by the art historical genre of the female nude reclining in a landscape. Botticcelli or Titian maybe made our Renaissance version of porn, many of our most celebrated paintings hung in bedrooms for private pleasure Compositions were often set up from the view of a secret male viewer stumbling upon a nymph or goddess bathing. I love these classical works telling the stories of Greek mythology (to the point where they are really a blue print of my own image making/story telling), But i don’t have a male gaze; I like these them because I identify with the heroine—and through the power of figurative painting I have a visceral sense of my own form. Goddess’ have been present in art since it began, but at one point they became worshipped more for beauty than power. Perhaps these shifts in representation evolved alongside the development of monotheistic religion? Our projection of an all powerful man in the sky, stole the blood heart of spirituality because it doesn’t acknowledge a universe evolving. It took nature out of god, which means it took witches, shamans, and animal spirits. Though I admire much of Jesus’ message, Christianity left women in a whore/saint, sacred/profane prison, with no allowance for an authentic feminine wild nature, and we’ve been trapped in an alien structure since. If the masculine seeks objective outcomes, structures and accomplishment, the feminine is oriented toward process, receiving, growth and mutuality. (Please note: I am not referring to gender—as both sexes slide along the spectrum). Feminine qualities of growth, process, slowness, receptivity and cooperation are always devalued in current society. Ancient cultures honored the divine feminine for a millenia before oppressed violence began developing in classical greek and roman times, and calcifying in judeo christian ethos. It is interesting that women are more associated to our bodies, as any media figure will tell you. While influential women deserve to be free from a destructive and painful patriarchal gaze, perhaps there is some truth that women inhabit their bodies more than men. Our body (of both sexes) is a source of intelligence and wisdom, intuition and insight. Prioritizing intellectual analysis, while serving an important purpose, can at times be of great disservice. Our bodies are finely tuned instruments which tell you when to run, to speak up, set a boundary or open for an embrace. But what is a body? It is an extraordinary electro-chemical machine with amazing healing abilities, with a mysterious ability for reflexive self awareness acting as our sensory node to the outside world, interpreting and communicating with other entities. We have feet to feel the ground underneath, and a tongue to detect nourishing nectar, but maybe a body is even more than that. Yogic practices which go back before monotheistic religion show us the ‘subtle body’ the psychosomatic forces which can be felt through directed focus and attention. Quantum theory substantiates subatomic particles as perhaps not even the smallest unit of matter, and this is what our bodies are composed of alongside everything. Humans can imagine, and contain a raucus of ideas and feelings all while standing, walking running, or growing a baby. You know how you always feel someone looking at you, or get caught gazing at the driver in a car in the next lane? Perhaps humans can sense subtle forces that our technology yet cannot. There is tremendous wisdom in our mysterious bodies, made out the stuff of this earth, and I guess in order to dodge a problemetised history of representing the female form, I am focusing more on the emotional energy through color, as though I were looking at it with a CAT scan or radiograph.
object/image
Paintings as we know are more than the sum of their parts, they transcend their object-hood to enter the realm of the symbolic psyche, or the metaphysical mind-scape. One of my favorite painters Paul Nash, calls a painting an “imaginative event".” I agree with this because paintings emerge from the psyche, as submerged unconscious material bubbles to the surface. However, I would also say that painting is an action, a force from our bodies onto an object, Delueze talks about this in his book about Francis Bacon—that painting is about sensation, which speaks to us as bodies. I work within the internal logic of a digital collage process, and I am fascinated by how I can emulate a virtual aesthetic, but also diverge with the gross materiality of paint. Sometimes I follow a composition exactly and other times the image does not translate onto canvas and I have to revise. Below are some collages I made as part of my creative process. Only some of these will generate painting work, but the instant gratification of color changes, and composition editing cant be denied. I can make these speedily and the immediately show me what I am trying to say, or what I want to avoid.
The idea here is that the landscape and geometric design act as companion pieces—though I am reluctant to call them a diptich. I am just finding a resonance between the two, and connecting them. I am interested in using crafts, in this case beads as a nod to traditonally feminine crafts. the final effect is kind of an image/object—half painting, half design and wall sclutpure. I want them to look handmade, and I am ok with a bit clumsily grafted together, because having things look slick and refined to my purpose of living nature through art making.
I will connect these with strings of beads as well. I will plug them into her back and join at the center of the geometric design. I think of the beads as DNA code, or energy cords between her body and the transcendent beyond.
this is a study of a collage i made below. I think id like to paint this at a life scale as a free standing painting.
A fire goddess on the river bank, which I based on some poems and experiences I had at Roslin glen over the summer.
the background for a painting i am basing on the collage below.
This collage is the inspiration for the painting above—in this case I am being quite faithful to the digitial collage. I like to compete with photography and see if I can paint it just as well, like a game.
I cant wait to paint this, and I think I will go big. I think I will paint it almost in a screenprint style look.
Honestly right now, the Donald, and the pandemic, I need the power and majesty of deep rooted trees, with re-wilded women connected to their internal psychic space. As a human I am reflexivly aware, I am aware of my awareness, which makes it easy to forget that my body is an animal, and so I question the certainty of my intentions and movtivations. Making art I can remember my body and watch my hand move and watch a color skate across a surface and observe how it moves out of curiosity. Like a child squishing cake into the floor just to see what it feels like in my hands, and wonder how I can manipulate it.
