Gasoline on A Fire

I knew that this point would come in the MFA process, where I would feel like everything is spinning out of control -- because it is -- and where if possible, each day I would feel more clueless than the last, and then the point where all I want to do is paint small dead-palette still lifes and hide under the covers - maybe even at the same time.

I am trying to call up the patience and equanimity that usually serves me and remember a lot. Remember the Siena residency, remember the BFA year, remember that the nadir is inevitable and so is its receding, eventually. This is how it goes. This is how it always goes. This is the part that sucks.

But I am almost out of patience and this is taking a long time.  I keep trying to find ways through the forest but every time I think I've found another path I get more lost. Every time I think I've done something that should aid the progress I end up making things worse. In the studio, in life, in everything.

I hereby declare that all of this is okay. It is okay to not be okay. It is fine to not understand and to not be understood. In fact Levinas would say that this is our right.

I am going to ride the chaos and let the structure fall - follow my nose across the Wisconsin countryside and play the audio files of the interviews to bring a few things to light. To the team - performers, photographers, crit group and advisors, I say - hang on, kids. I feel another change coming on.

I am like a teenager currently living out the consequences of an ill-judged decision to tie my skateboard to a city bus with a thirty-foot rope just to see what happens.

At least I'm bound to learn something.

Watch this space.

Love letter to the Boston Fire Family

I am not sure why the subdued palette and spare composition of my still lifes gives way to something more vivid in painting the portrait, but it seems to, at least these days. My fire tribe in Boston has been amazing in their participation of the most recent series, something fairly ambitious that is still getting off the ground.

First step is choosing the team and then doing work together - lengthy interviews and also head studies. (In a couple of cases I got carried away and these turned into portrait sketches, but I don't think anyone would blame me, given the magnificence of my friends.)

These head studies are a foil to the larger pieces which will surely require some photographic references - something I almost never use, but the practicalities right now demand it. You can't ask a flame to hold still for three minutes, let alone three hours, or thirty. So I have to capitulate to the necessity of the photographic reference. But all the same the head study allows me to fully understand the forms and anatomy of each person's head, face, features and body in a way that a photograph could never tell me.

Most of these images are quick sketches under 16x20" in size, done in under three hours. 

Terrence Drake - fire performer- breathing, eating, and staff

Dominique - fire eater, hooper, and aerialist

Siha - dancer, fire breather and principal dancer with Abraxis Dance Company

Steven - actor and fire performer (staff)

Mooch - juggler, fire performer

Dear God, I love working from life . . . and these participants modeling for me make it so easy.

Many thanks to Terrence Drake, Dominique, Mooch, Steven and Siha for their generous time, patience, kindness and enthusiasm.

"Unsounded - Cairo/Sinai 2010" by Amanda Kerdahi Matt

So who was that woman reading by the window? It was Amanda Kerdahi Matt, one of my school mates at the Transart Institute - raised in Texas and living in Cairo and creating some delightful, engaging and profound video work.

Unsounded is eight minutes of clear, dreamlike imagery paired with sound that at first seems to be from the same moment. But as the scene changes it becomes clear that the conversation is not happening at the same time as the video being shot. Contrasts - the bread and butter of great work - emerge, as a strange musical note resolves into the sound of subway brakes - we hear a casual conversation between two friends on a subway that leaves the scene of a road trip to serve as the audio caption for a man taking a leisurely swim at the beach -- contrast as the soothing sound of water smooths over a nearly-empty subway car containing a forlorn two-year-old and his tantrum.





Unsounded / Cairo, Sinai 2010 from amandakerdahimatt on Vimeo.


 What makes the piece work is the sparsity and clarity of the visual and audio choices. Managed so crisply, each thing standing alone is a visual or audio landscape that we can appreciate. The juxtapositions confuse the sense of time and space, and ball up the sequence of events so that we are no longer in a continuum-- we are in a dream space, the part of us that is thinking one thing and experiencing another, or the way we reminisce long after a vacation or outing has ended.

I did a lot of traveling this year. I have spent five out of the past twelve months somewhere else - four of those overseas. I have visited six countries around the globe and have seen some of the world's great cities, including Cairo, one of the subjects of the piece. (And seeing Kerdahi Matt's video reminds me how much I want to go back there . . . soon.)

What that level of mobility did was move the furniture around in my head to a pretty significant degree. I often find myself wishing to visit a park or cafe that is halfway around the globe, forgetting for a moment where I am. Visiting a new city, I find I refer it to many others - Cagliari is very much its own city, but wandering its center I was all the same reminded of Cairo . . Alexandria . . . Paris . . . New Orleans  . . . Hawaii . . . Houston . . . New Mexico . . . bits and pieces of other places kept dropping into the present moment, overlaying it. Sometimes a memory comes up out of hand in the middle of a day - nothing reminded me of it - there is no reason. But driving down the road to Chicago sometimes all I can think about is a certain day in New York or the way a certain chilly summer morning felt in Berlin, a sparkling and rain-washed hour.

I treasure this kind of fragmentation - there are no sure anchors of reference in my physical experience and they are becoming less weighty all the time as my range of experience expands. There is not an ontological yardstick anymore - things are no longer "like home" or "not like home" -- there is in fact no home -- everything contains bits of everything else and I begin to feel at least partly at ease everywhere.

Kerdahi Matt's work primarily evokes that wonderful feeling - the memory of holiday, of place, as it sneakily and blessedly intrudes at times on our waking life and as we can sometimes remember more than one thing at a time. The work speaks to life richly lived and richly seen.

The visual peace and tranquility holds trump in the sensibilities driving the piece - this is fully realized and crystallized image and sound communicating unhindered. As I am a painter, I feel sympathies with Rene Magritte, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and Johannes Verneer - there is yet lushness in these lines that is brought courtesy of a diamond light.

Kerdahi Matt's work can be seen on Vimeo here.

Back after the Swirl to Tell About It

A schoolmate obliged me for a pose at the Tanzfabrik in Berlin - July 2011

Hello, everyone!

The last post was back in May. About that time so many things broke loose that it was necessary to let a lot of stuff drop, and the blog was one of those things. Now this is the creative conundrum, isn't it? Because it seems that just when things are at their most exciting is when it ought to be the perfect time to blog. Right? Well, this works for a lot of people. I have learned that I need to work things a little differently.

I have learned that I'm on the slow side. When I experience a place or an event, if I thresh that into work - whether it's writing or art - too soon, then there is something lost in the richness. I think it's a little like those times when you realize that when you are someplace awesome, if you spend the whole time with a camera to your face, there is a way in which you didn't really get to have the experience, only catalog it for some sort of posterity - the later examination of yourself or others. It's the problem of actively remembering something while or in place of fully experiencing it, and there is an important - a critical, fundamental, mandatory - step that gets compromised or lost when you do that.

So actually some of the most beautiful moments of my life are ones that I never photographed or painted or drew or talked about. Those things are only in the archive of my head. In an era where we share absolutely everything with everybody on blogs like this (well, some people do) - that can seem like a meanness, a stinginess, a tease to say that you have had, known, experienced things that you are not willing to share.

But I'm here to assert that to do that is none of thoes things. It's okay to do that. It's healthy and that's human, and for me, it's necessary; essential. It's vital to me to know that there is a secret garden, a private hive, where exquisite things dwell that are not for sharing, just there for me. It's important for me to understand that I, alone, am enough - a good enough recipient for that gift of beauty without needing to hand it off to someone else.

It also makes me a better artist, because I consider things for release into the frame via the brushes only after it has had a chance to dwell a bit and make itself felt - only after I have savored deeply and fully the delish wish of juice and light and gorgeous that caught my attention in the first place, taken it into myself for what it is, not what I think I can turn it into, taken it in because I love it and not because I think someone else will love it.

This is my apologia for a very specific sort of what some people would call selfishness, but what I only call living and honoring what I live -- living it like a human before I start using it like an artist.

So where have I been all this time?

Well, in April Scott was laid off his job, and a mercifully short job search yielded the reality that we would need to move across the country. That meant packing a full house and studio, getting the old house ready for sale and all the work that entailed, and finding a place to live in our new spot - Rockford, Illinois. At the same time, my work for the year for my Master's program was due - finishing the studio work, completing the studio documentation, submitting research work, and a full-up proposal for next year's thesis. As well, I was invited to take part in a monthlong residency at the Siena Art Institute in Siena, Italy, which I needed to prepare for -- directly after which I was obliged to be in Berlin at the Transart Institute for another month to fulfill a graduate residency, which I also needed to prepare for -- directly after which I roosted for a few weeks in Connecticut and Boston for some research and field work. Finally now, I am back in Illinois and putting down a root or two in order to keep work going.

Which is why on many occasions over the past four months I have said to myself, "Wow, I should really blog about this," and didn't.

With all that swirl going on, it's a good thing I waited. Because the dust is just now starting to settle and now that the experiences have not just been had but are also being truly absorbed - now that I am beginning to remember sights, sounds, smells, moments, impressions and adventures and not just remembering the sheer fact of them -- I really want to share some of these adventures here with you.

So off we go!

The Noisy Plume Has a Film!

Jillian, one of the loveliest people on the planet, is the creator of unbelievably gorgeous and unique and museum-worthy jewelry and her shop is called The Noisy Plume. I am always gobsmacked by her work and inspired by her open heart, luminous beauty and incandescent mind, her poet's heart and her strong hands and her delightful smile. Her work keeps evolving and getting better, and I am so honored to have several pieces of plumage . . . she has always been amazing at letting people into her world and sharing the beauty she knows with others, so every time I visit her blog I walk away with a lighter heart and the kind of smile that reaches the eyes and the heart and doesn't just stay on the face.

Here is a very short and lovely little film about Jillian and her work - Jillian, you always inspire me in so much more than art!

http://vimeo.com/21510032

Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo

The surrealist artist Leonora Carrington passed away this week at the age of 94, as reported in the Guardian.

I  was the greenest possible art student in Houston, Texas, having just quit my desk job to study art full-time, beginning at the very beginning at the Art League Houston and studying, briefly, with Mexican artist Tomas Schoelmann. I didn't study with Schoelmann for long, but as is true with most art teachers, I was with him long enough to get something from the experience that was integral to my own way of making and looking at art. I was not too familiar with the surrealists, though I lived a few blocks away from the Menil Collection and so could (and did) walk there occasionally, especially to enjoy the extensive collection of Magritte's work there. Schoelmann looked at my portfolio when I came to ask to study with him and from the beginning he saw a compatibility in my work with the surrealists -- and more specifically, the Mexican surrealists.

He did not, as it turns out, find it worthwhile to mention Frida Kahlo. Instead, he drew my attention toward two other women whom most Americans have never heard of and who knew each other: Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. I have always been grateful that he had the sensitivity to connect me with them. He succeeded in his attempt to give me a relationship with significant artists who were women and who were too under-the-radar to get co-opted by the feminists. He also saw the surreal streak in my thinking and saw the gentleness of my intentions, and so steered away from the darker and more vicious surrealists (de Chirico and Dali) and toward the gentler but infinitely odder and more complicated artists who did not identify their main motivations with war, disembowelment, inferno and Armageddon.

Below is Carrington's painting, Minotaur.

Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo were women, and to that extent they spoke with a woman's point of view, but I think they would both have objected to being made poster children for the feminist movement, and so I am glad that never happened. Varo's work was more accessible and her painting Exploration of the Source of the Orinoco remains one of my favorite pictures. The ethic of Athena resonates in here rather than that of Demeter or Persephone or Aphrodite. Not woman as victim or woman as lover or nurturer, but woman as explorer.

Reading that Carrington had passed away and reading about her incredible life (eloped with Max Ernst, caught in the Third Reich, escape to Mexico and subsequent career as an artist, personal friend of Kahlo and Rivera as well as of Varo) you get the feeling that when Varo painted her explorer, she was probably painting about herself, but she could have been painting about Carrington or the other audacious and self-determined women that she knew.

My thanks to Tomas Schoelmann for introducing me to Carrington, and my thanks to Carrington and Varo for being such excellent sisters from the past to feel connected with.

Luna's Sea at Cornerstone Playhouse in Mystic

Last week the Cornerstone Playhouse premiered its new show for children's puppet theater, Luna's Sea. Luna finds herself chasing her pet penguin across the sea and encounters a great many strange and wonderful sea animals. Dancing, theater, music, puppetry and rich set design combine to make this a beautiful and magical spectacle, for children and grownups as well.

The artist Linda Wingerter, a driving force in the New Haven art scene, has devoted her gifts as a painter, illustrator, writer and puppeteer to bringing Luna's Sea to life. Reminiscent of the Nutcracker or Fantasia in its series of glittering and delightful vignettes, the show takes the audience seamlessly from the beach to the inkiest depths of the ocean, where we see creatures and sea plants through the eyes of the girl Luna and her guide, the luminescent Christine Poland, as the Moon. Ms. Poland also choreographed the show, whose dance numbers range in style from modern to ballet to tap, so the mood of the dancing shifts to match the flow of the narrative.

Range of scale lends a sense of surreal and delightful variety, with puppets ranging from a few inches high to over twenty feet long. The considerable skill of the troupe brings the puppets to life in a Bunraku-inspired style of puppetry, where the black-clad puppeteers appear on stage rather than hiding behind a screen.

Connecticut is fortunate to have such a gifted troupe and such a beautiful live puppet show on the scene.

Ticket holders can receive a treasure map to the Olde Mistick Village, site of the Cornerstone Playhouse, which is housed in a refitted segment of the movie theater there. Director Karl Gasteyer has turned a film house into a versatile performance space, and thanks to support from local patrons and businesses, the Cornerstone Playhouse has been producing top-quality work for the community.

Children are brought into the show and made to feel welcome. After the curtain the puppeteers sat on stage to answer questions and allow children to come up to meet and see the puppets up close.



Patrons have the option of a combination ticket which allows admission to the Aquarium as well, or a single ticket - both include a treasure map which children can use to wander Olde Mistick Village, collect stamps and return to the theater to claim a special prize.

Luna's Sea is running through October and deserves the full support of the community. I enjoyed the premiere so much I returned the following week and brought others with me and I hope that everyone in the area, especially those with kids, will have a chance to enjoy this magical confection of puppet theater!

Tickets can be purchased online or by calling 888-838-2906 ext. 1.