It would be impossible to separate art from life, wouldn't it? Sometimes my inspiration comes in the smallest of packages, some little fingers proudly displaying the infamous clay snowman smoking a pipe. I think the pipe was added after remembering my response to my daughter's recent addition to the dress up stash. Why do children inherently make snowman when given a lump of clay? They really do. It was put to the test today at the local school I teach at part-time. I gave 115 kids clay today and probably when I was given the option to make ANYTHING, probably 10% made the snowman.
If you've spent any time with me, you'll know that I am a passionate person. One of my passions is having a good cup of coffee and the other is paint and everything about it. When one of my students commented that my art studio smelled like paint and coffee, I kept trying to create a equation for myself from that. Maybe you have an idea.
When my daughter was first born, I floated through those first few months feeling like my body was somehow disconnected from my mind, my daily activity. The tiredness of late nights, breast feeding, constant everything and then no constant "nothing". Quiet and stillness vanished and I kept trying to find ways to reconnect with my life, my new life. At that time I created a series of artworks I titled the "Landscape Diaries". The works juxtaposed my personal journal writings including letters to my mother who had recently passed, small chapters on beginning motherhood, and ramblings with landscape images of a familiar place, a "home" to me, the areas of Frankfort & Prospect, Maine. These images sought to create connections, much of the idea I am exploring in a different way in my studio today.
Last summer I was drawn to an image in a magazine of a river. The river was moving through the landscape with great gentle force but at the same time with a willingness to go "off route". Maybe I was holding a paper mirror to myself of how I wanted to be. With the intense demands of the gallery over the summer, I yearned to meander. I even read the "Art of Nothing" and found that I needed to give myself a little permission to explore in my artistic pursuits in some new ways. I started working large on paper, and started to play with images that spoke to me metaphorically about the lack of connection we can all feel at times. Using images that originally were intended to exploit either the abundance or lack thereof water in their usual "places", I have abandoned this content to use the photographs to rather speak about the lack of the human connection with the earth. Perhaps we are all floating above it, ignoring its natural curvature and building perfectly geometric homes on quiet desert... so there you are. The original images are not places I have been or known and now my eyes move to Australia where the abundance of waters have created strange paradigms for our connections with the earth. These works will be in a show in the Blue Gallery at Bowdoin College in March.
