Cherry Painting #1

no, not a painting of cherries...

This is the first in a set of hummingbird paintings I've been commissioned to do by one of my biggest supporters, Cherry!

Working on this painting gave impetus for the epiphanies and revelations I've had about painting, my work, and where I want it to go [see previous post].
And, for the first time in a LONG time, I felt like I was at home with painting, that I wasn't trying to contrive something because I "thought I had to". And MOST IMPORTANTLY, I didn't have the thought demons [the nay-saying critics inside my head] nor was I bothered by the ringing of past professors' voices in my ears.

I never thought I'd really escape that, but I think that listening to all of the artist & crafter interviews on this one podcast I've started following has really helped me. Listening to others speak about their work in a non-pretentious way, and the fact that they are successful artists outside of the mainstream and outside of the Art World, is really giving me hope. I've just been so caught up, these past few years, in everything that art school was preaching, the direction my professors were urging me to go in....and, they very well could be right, that maybe I "should be doing this other thing, this other way". But when listening to those voices prevents me from painting at all, then "that way" is the wrong way. For me at least.

To put it one more way, it's as if I came to a multidirectional fork in the road, recalling voices that urged me to take one way, with my own mind telling me to go another, and then over-reasoning/analyzing to take yet another route. And so I stopped, and sat/stood/slept at that fork for the past 4 years, only imaging where each of those off-shoot paths could take me. And everything that has been happening lately- including commissions and realizing that staying in a 9-5 desk job will eventually kill me, I just decided to get up and start walking, intutively, whichever path my feet gravitated towards. So, I guess, this blog will be documenting my "travels".

So, thank you, Cherry. I am free from the bonds of my past! And, I think, on the path moving forward again.

yes I said yes I will Yes

[written yesterday]

Dear B.Log R. Eaders,

[Had to make it look like i was actually typing an email, in my Outlook window...]

I really should be typing up meeting notes right now, but instead I have to write about this idea I had while freefalling into daydream. I think it just saved my life [metaphorically speaking] in this moment. Perhaps I’ll go home re-energized and ready to make when I get home- instead of excitement-turned-burned-bike-riding-energy-turned-tiredness.

So, it’s as if all of the ideas and notions swimming about in my head, for pieces and works and paintings and craftings converged and knocked me breathless. Lately, I’ve been thinking incessantly about how to marry my need and love to paint with my obsessed infatuation for fibers and fabric into something that makes sense. And then the side-swiping thoughts about making meaningful work, work that says something beyond “ooo, perdy colours and feminine imagery…” and the thought demons that usually ensue.

But they didn't get to attack. I glided past them in my freefall of thoughts: I think it’s really coming down to using the paint as material to construct the backgrounds/backdrops- much how I am accustomed to painting trees and other flora. Then come these thoughts of the fabric flowers I’ve been making- they can’t be contained to the two dimensional backdrop. They need to exist like their living counterparts do- in space, around our ankles and hanging from trees. This is turning into 3 dimensional spatial planning, e.g. installation work.

Then backlash thoughts: what about painting? What about manipulating the 2 dimensional plane into the other worlds? BUT: my paintings have always been about SPACE. There is always the space around the foreground elements- I’ve never filled the entire surface of the painting [well, I have, at the urging of a well-respected professor- who was all about the painted surface, painting as the tactile paint living on the surface]. But even within that parameter, I’ve always needed the painting to act as the viewfinder to the larger world- wherever it may be.

[I digress.] So, these flowers- give way to the thoughts of the birds I’ve been painting- that I feel need to come alive through many pieces and bits of rich fabrics- 2 dimensionally through collages, or entering the 3 dimensional world- maybe both. Maybe I need to bring these animals alive in real space, much like we give personas to our stuffed animals when we are young. These animals need to exist off of the picture plane. Then, looking at Mandy Greer’s work lately, thinking about how these lush yarns become knitted/crocheted forms that turn into tangles of branches, leaves, or Spanish moss, extending from the background walls. I need to make this place, where material is color and color is material. And I need to create this place that I live in, inside of my head, this world I run to when everything on the outside is pressing in….like Alice’s world beyond the rabbit hole! [yeah, ok, cheesy considering my long obsessive history with the story, imagery, and characters…]

And then after this freefall [haha, um, down the rabbithole?], I’m slammed back into reality when I happen to look back down at my meeting notes. Surrounded my glowing computer screen, piles of photocopies, an array of yellow-lined paper with various work notes scribbled all over, and more of the same pinned to the murky gray walls of this cube-this cube I sit in, day after day. And suddenly, with that thought, I am propelled back into the free fall of day dream and think about how so many of us are stuck inside these walls: dreary, drab- some photocopy-lined, some not- and how we create a mental escape plan to some other place, whether it’s some complete fantasy wonderland, or if it is just daydreaming about the unattainable vacation to the islands.

So, the culmination of these whirlwind thoughts and time-warp daydream is this: I need to find a cube, cover it in the photocopies and legal notepads I plan my escape from each day, and create the “safe place”, the mind-space of refuge that I escape to- and welcome all office job refugees into it. Not so metaphorically, but actually, visually, and physically.

And that, y’all, is my goal/resolution-revolution for 2010.

[View of Mandy Greer's installation piece, "Dare alla Luce"]

[i HIGHLY recommend checking out her website/work:

http://mandygreer.wordpress.com/]

another pair down

completed these in one night, 4 hour period. my fastest to date!
AND NOW, on to the decal experimentation...
[will report back tomorrow]

ps. sadness in philadelphia. damn yanks.