The First Three

I began working in the collage medium in March 2009, in miniature (mostly 5″ x 6″) dimensions, and on canvases (a new commitment).  Tired after work every day and finally ready to emerge after several years of rest, I fell into the tiny world of those canvases, bite-sized fantasies of shape, color, and texture.  Complete possibility.  I drew, pasted, and finger-painted so I could feel the medium.  (Touch is why I became a sculptor).

I had no idea what I was doing.  I did it anyway.

Today I framed the first three images that came out of my practice that year.  Now they hang on my bedroom wall as a group in a single frame, the way some people display family documents.  I framed them so I could look at them together, chronologically correct, as a root of this larger thing I’m doing now.  And hung them by my bed, so I could see them in the morning.

Jonathan Cox, my sculpture professor at Marshall, would say to his class (a bad paraphrase from me):

Creating art is like pushing little wads of paper through a long pipe.  You have to keep putting wads of paper in that pipe, and, finally, something is going to emerge from the other end.  You have to just keep making the art — good or bad, putting it all in the pipeline — in order to eventually make good art.  It takes making the bad to make the good.

And, when I was stuck, all of my graduate committee at UNM would say:

MAKE THE ART.
JUST MAKE SOMETHING!!!

These are the beginning of my collage art pipeline.

The first three:

Bath, 2009

Contact, 2009

Motionless, 2009

My Next Show

You’re invited to the opening for my next show, a group show, on March 8 from 6-8 pm at the South Broadway Cultural Center.  (Short post today – I’m working on the show!)

Open

If an atom is overwhelmingly empty space,
And there is a little cavern at the base of my throat,
And my belly does become a void,
That’s good news.
I am gliding through my apartment
To answer the door
The atoms inside my shoulders softly humming in unending fermatas
And the spaces in my bones exhaling into whole note rests.
My heart pumping into
Empty spaces like waves fill rock crevices.
My day has started late, my hair a bird’s nest,
I haven’t scheduled it out,
So it feels like the empty coffee cup in my sink.
And only now I realize
That most of me is floating, with and without definition,
In the form of small pockets of nothingness,
Which means that I can welcome my visitor -
Also mostly a void -
And I can feel secure in the idea that
We are not much more than possibility
As I open the door.

Art in the Morning

It’s 7:25 am.  Cold.   Heading to work soon, to a job I love.  In my tiny car, which is already warmed up.   And then off to the tax accountant’s to sign papers in the afternoon.  And then home to make art, by the 3 pm light that comes into my living room.

It’s a good life.

A few years ago, a loose-lipped doctor told me I might have leukemia.  I don’t.  I have something that could become leukemia or something else at some point – or not.  So it’s a little like Russian roulette, though, not knowing what my body is going to do.

So, I choose to trust it anyway.

When I was coming back from Greece four months ago, my seat on the plane was next to a woman who is internationally known for energy work in Polarity Therapy.  (I think that modality is amazing.  I always feel like I’ve been reborn when I get a Polarity Therapy treatment.  It’s as though my cells have all regenerated.)  The conversation couldn’t help but get personal.  She told me about her love life (we had a nine-hour flight, so we talked about everything!), and when it got to my health, she looked at me as if to assess, and then told me, “That blood disorder isn’t going to bother you at all in your life.”

I believe that.

Here’s another new piece from January.  To me, it’s about mystery, the future, and things we just have to trust:

Opening, 2012. Mixed media. 24" x 20". (sold)

New Pieces

My work is featured at The Octopus and The Fox in East Downtown Albuquerque this month.  Here are a few images if you missed the opening last Friday.

If you’d like to buy one, the store ships.  Thanks for looking!

Reach Me Here, 2012. Mixed media. 12" x 12". $120.

So Far 1, 2012. Mixed media. 36" x 24". $400.

Saturday

Saturday

Why is it?  I am awake at 3 am
Until 5:30 am.
Many mornings.  Thinking of
One responsibility
After another
After another.
They might not be mine, but I think of them anyway.

So, why is it?  That
It is 3:30 pm
Now
On a Saturday
And my mind is so asleep
And dreaming,
Snoring, slippery,
And not one thought can grasp on.
Let alone repeat itself.
It sees the sun coming through
My living room window
Facing the street
And feels the warmth,
Without a single thought.
Seeing, but sleeping.
I don’t dare awaken it
But neither do
I encourage
This irresponsible behavior.

Night Collages

Here at my wooden kitchen desk, in silence, on a day off,  I feel compelled to write my Wednesday afternoon confessional.

So, I hung a show last week at a boutique at 514 Central.  The Octopus and The Fox.  They’re making cupcakes for my opening, where, when you walk in on Feb. 3 (from 6-10 pm), you’ll see a store of vintage clothes, t-shirts printed with graphics of legends like Mothman (from Pt. Pleasant, WV, no less), handmade purses, vintage clip-on earrings like my mother’s mother used to wear.  And on the back wall, large pieces from my Night Collage series.  Sometimes, when no one is behind me, I slowly drive by the store on my way home from the office; the moon in one of the pieces can be seen from the street.

My first solo show since I graduated.

My work is around town (at the Main library and at the Printmaker’s Studio), and there will more to hang for a March show at the South Broadway Cultural Center.  When did the post-graduate shyness leave me?

At SkopArt in September.  I was running, and that flow of energy carried over to quick decision-making in the studio.  The same mechanism that pumps the blood through my heart and brain and toes when I’m running, is the very tool that moves me past any hesitations, in almost any part of my life.  When I am a runner, I tap into a well of trust, an invitation to live without fear.  Life in balance.

Night Collage I, 2011