March Thaw

I wrote this a month ago and haven't published it until now. In retrospect, I might reconsider the image of melting and going down a drain, since I consider surrender a good thing.

So, the word for today is melting. The weather is a huge factor in my daily experience because this is Minnesota and I must walk this dog and it’s been a la nina winter and this is March. At the same time, the encaustic business I’m intrigued with and acting on is all about melting wax– so melting is on my mind. Thinking and looking as I walked, I shot some photos, and everywhere I saw melting. What might melting mean to me? Melting, I think is about surrender – it is the surrender of your solidity, the yielding of solid boundaries to the existing conditions and then following the path of least resistance. I have noticed in my life that when I fight existing conditions and feel they are unfair (and that I am more right than the world, which I like) I resist, but when I do so they get even stronger, much to my amazement. When I finally give in and surrender, say to myself, “it’s not right that this should be, but here it is so I will accept whatever” – it miraculously changes. So here is an image I made as in response to this thought about surrender.

Image of Time

I recently made this image for a themed show on the topic “Temporality.” In the exhibit, the images are mounted on mirrors and in matching frames, the mirrors symbolizing the ever-present now. It was the first piece I have ever shown that was not a painting. Because I am interested in theories of time anyway, I had ideas about images that already exist that express the spiral aspect of time with more clarity than abstract painting. I found that thinking about the symbolism and looking for the images and combining them in Photoshop exciting, and upon seeing the entire exhibit, I wondered whether I might have arrived at a point where the beauty and plasticity of paint seems irrelevant. I felt good about making a piece that explored the theme of the show rather than just using a recent painting I liked and crafting some kind of statement and a title that relate to the theme, which I confess I have done before. I can honestly say that I feel free of concern about how the piece is received. Perhaps I have outgrown the habit of just showing something I hope people will respond positively to.

The other day someone said to me that music is how feelings sound and I realized that expressionist painting is how feelings look, and is therefore of value, but I have a new appreciation and intention to explore other more verbal kinds of imagery along with the purely visual.

picture like life

This picture reminds me of life in that there is an overpowering and dramatic presence in the sky that dominates the city, small and far below. Really the clouds are just vapor, moving through my vision while the city and the sky are stable.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

This is what the process of illumination looks like to me today. It is the dawning of clarity as the darkness of self identity fades away. These moments are vivid on my morning walk and then the impact is increasingly subtle during the day, but I try to find a simple visual sentence to describe them.