Fragments, Resistance, Passion and Shadows

Most of my days are made up of fragments, bits of this and that, intertwining but not quite connecting. The fragments are often in motion, falling away, leaving shadows in their wake - shadows that haunt, shadows that disguise, shadows that cripple - preventing forward movement.

Fragments is this oil painting, a pictorial record of how life appears at times. Red for passion:  passion for my family and my home; passion for my two littles kittens, Mim and Pip; passion for nature - fauna and flora; passion for earth and all it's glorious bounty; and passion for creativity, however it chooses to express itself. Still with all that passion, I resist living life to the fullest.

Fragments
20" x 30" oil, slate and paper on canvas

Fragments are oftentimes obstacles, cold and grey like slivers of hard slate dappled with blood, sweat and tears. They fall all around and avoiding them can be hazardous...so you let them fall and you accept the shadows they cast. Fragments, like words, can cut and diminish. Fragments, like incomplete thoughts, keep you suspended. Fragments of life, love and loss...

Still, every now and again you tune in to the passion and once again you rise and greet the day with enthusiasm. That day is at hand!

Threads II - Forest for the Trees

Renovate, paint, blog, photograph, renovate, print, carve, renovate....you got the gist of it. This total "busy-ness" makes it very hard to focus. Yet focus is becoming more and more important to me. I believe I need it if I'm ever going to really be good at expressing myself through my art, at reaching some pinacle of success. Okay, perhaps I'm overdramatizing a tad...Success is subjective and I guess I have achieved it in many regards.

What I really need is to quiet my mind and I feel a good way to achieve this is, you guessed it, Focus! With this in mind, I am continuing my search for the common threads in my work and lo and behold, there is the tree, a source of inspiration and awe! 

Although I have countless art pieces featuring trees I'll share these four, some old, some new, some unfinished and all in a different medium.

La pénombre (The Shadows)

Monotype-Ink on Somerset paper (32" X 55")

Moonlight Through the Apple Tree

Digital Photograph

Shadow Play

Acrylic on unmounted canvas

8" x  48"

Raw clay carving, not yet air dried. Bisquing and glazing to follow. (4" x 10" X 2")

Of course, don't get me wrong I do treat a lot of other subject matter, but when I look around in my home, in my studio, in my yard, trees are very present. And no wonder, where would we be without them!

Threads

As a multidiscipline visual artist, I find there is a certain cohesion lacking in my environment. I am literally all over the place. Still it remains clear to me that I cannot specialize in just one area of expression. Having accepted that, finding my unique voice seems all the more difficult.

In an attempt to bring order (that ever elusive state) into my creative endeavours, I have been trying to compartmentalize my projects, while still looking for common threads between the different forms of expression. The ultimate end to this exercise would allow an observer to recognize the works in my studio as mine alone. At present, the collection of my works gives the impression that I have a multiple split personality.

Some years ago I started writing journal which I titled Know Thyself. In it I wrote (and write) my personal beliefs about life in general, from the mundane to the exhilirating, from the surface to the deepest recess of my mind. It is far from complete. My best hope is that I will "know myself" in this lifetime.

I am applying this same process to my art, that is, I am going to examine the pieces I have created and will create to see what the common threads are, from colours to subjects to the choice of medium...Surely my voice is in there somewhere.

One place to start is with the subjects that seem to attract me most and today the focus is music and shadows, the colours are reds and blacks and the shapes are square.

Passion in Musical Shadows

Each is 4"x4" acrylic on canvas

I've had strange experiences with most aspects of life, music being one of those aspects.

I remember a Christmas long ago when a piano was delivered to my childhood home.

I will never know why, and I will never forget, only the children in the house were to play it even though none of us would ever play well.

That piano now takes up a corner of my livingroom like a sliver of my memories.

Out with the old...

Let me begin by saying that it is really difficult to post when you haven't done it for awhile. I just felt like I needed to clear out a few things and create a more orderly work place. And that's what I have been doing...Out with the clutter; Out with the old! And hopefully the "In with the new" will soon follow.

Before I discard or store away the old, I want to keep a record of certain aspects of my work. In keeping with this concept, every now and again I shall post some of my old work prior to removing it from my studio.


In 2007, I had a solo exposition at the Capitol Theatre in Moncton, New Brunswick. It was called Cognition and dealt with the subjects of awareness and duality. Two of the pieces in that show are shown here. They have been hanging at Curio Studio since that time.

New Forest & Old Forest

2 separate acrylic paintings on stretched canvas 24" x 52" (each piece)

In Old Forest our eyes cannot see the forest for the trees, while in New Forest our eyes cannot see the trees for the lumber. As a reflection of my own hypocrisy in condeming the pulp industry both are framed in wood, a stark reminder that when you point a finger at something, three fingers point back at you.

Seven Deadly Sins

Overpass scene painted on seven canvases each measuring 12" x 48".

Written in Latin, one can read the 7 deadly sins as designated by christian religion:

INVIDA - AVARITIA -LUXURIA - IRA - ACEDIA - SUPERBIA - GULA

(ENVY -AVARICE -LUST - WRATH - SLOTH - PRIDE - GLUTTONY)

The use of the overpass seemed the perfect segway to each panel and demonstrated how we go about our daily routines without really noticing what is happening around us.

This piece also had a counter piece which dealt with virtue. In researching the virtues as they corresponded to the vices I found none truly spoke to me. That being said, one thing did seem to be an antidote for all the vices one could think of and that is RESPECT.

Also consisting of 7 panels (12" x 24"), each panel held one letter painted in a graffiti style, a commentary that it is often graffiti that is used to point out the "disrespectful" behaviour of others. I am happy to say that RESPECT is hanging on a wall in an elementary school in the southern part of New Brunswick.

Of course, there were many more pieces, some which I've already posted here and others that I would just rather forget. My thinking has changed a lot since 2007 and I would not approach the topics in the same way. I now believe that focusing on the negative only gives it more strength. I sure hope that is not what I've done!

The most important thing is that a new day has dawned and I am hoping that a daily routine of coming to the studio will help me achieve my goal of giving voice to my creative self.

So far so good!

The Divining World

I've always been very interested in such things as astrology, tarot, fortune telling and all forms of divination. Although I'm not a firm believer in predicting the future, I have always had a certain respect for the tools one might use to predict the events of their lives or to query the spirits about some problem they are facing. As such, I have a pretty good selection of books and paraphanelia relating to the subject of divination. I have used them in the past as I sought answers to some issue or situation I was seeking clarification for and very often answers came to me.

I use these methods still today and the reason is quite simple.

I believe all answers are available to us and, when the time is right, the answers are there to grasp if we open our minds. Whether through dreams or divination, through the reading of signs or even through some game or system we develop ourselves (ie. 'If I get three green lights in a row, then the answer is GO'), we are often looking for help in deciding which road to take or which career to follow and even with the more mundane daily questions we come up with.

There is a wide array of tools one can use in a quest for answers but I have been developing my own. Of course, I do not presume to have the knowledge to create some new form of divining only instruments that I find aesthetically appealing.

That being said...My latest project will be a series of cards in the spirit of my Alpha Omega project, only much, much smaller. Presently I am working on a numerology set (pictured here) which measures just 1.5 inches by 3 inches.

I don't know if I will manage to complete it during this very busy family time of the year, but I do know it is just the first in a series because I consulted the spirits and they said so!

Alpha Omega - Part II

"From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie."

Katsushika Hokusai, painter and print maker from the 1760-1849.

Outer side of the canvas envelope (roughly 40 in x 16 in)

Inside Pocket

Inside pocket with Alpha Omega cards inserted

Spread of Alpha Omega

Life is what happens between the Alpha and the Omega.

Robin's Return

A beautiful robin perched on a mountain ash just outside my kitchen window was busily gorging himself on the ripe berries. The mountain ash are barren now as winter is fast approaching. Flocks of robins, the likes of which we've never seen, are fueling up for their journey to warmer climates. I snapped this picture through the window and thought nothing more of it as I headed to my studio.

Once there, I looked at a print that was waiting for me. It was a large print with a barren landscape and barren trees. It reminded me of the mountain ash which held the perfect robin. Sweet Inspiration!

But wait, it doesn't end there! As I painted in my little robin, a memory was triggered. Robin's Return, the only song my mother ever asked my father to play on our piano.

When I look at the sheet music, I just can't imagine how he managed to play this for he did not possess the long, elegant fingers of a pianist. His hands were small, his fingers short and stubby...I would watch in amazement as he played effortlessly and my mother smiled. This was in the early 1960s. I inherited the piano and all the sheet music, but sadly none of their musical abilities.

It only stands to reason that the three page music piece inspired me to create Robin's Return - a Tryptich.

Although we are presently enjoying a little warm weather, I know it won't be long 'til the robins take flight and leave me waiting for their springtime return.

Alpha Omega

I thought it would take me a lot longer than it did to get through the second phase of my project especially as I had no preconceived notion to begin with, only a monotype which I had stored away for the last five years. I always felt it was incomplete, however my professor at the time was very much the purist...you never enhance a print! In fact, because of his words I was extremely hesitant to touch , let alone recycle, my old print. Now that I've done it, consider me hooked.

As a total control freak, just letting things happen is not so easy but I think I'm getting the hang of it. My project, which eventually evolved into Alpha Omega, began with thoughts of the how small a connected world is. I thought of the continents, the people, the common threads and the different languages. And that is where the project took on a life of it's own. Using signs and symbols, each of the eight pages looks to promote a sense of well being.

The writings and symbols include Greek, Hebrew, Sikh, Hindu, Chinese, Alchemy, and Runes. The mediums I used include pen and ink, conte crayons and acrylic paint.

The next phase is an envelope for which I have already tea-stained a piece of canvas. Not quite sure of how it will end up...Stay tuned!

Letting Creation Develop

Can art find expression amid the chaos of construction? I sure hope so!

A few posts back I wrote about recycling my student prints. These are works that are just laying around the studio, many of which just don't seem complete in the fullest sense of the word.

My first recycling projects were story box books. My latest is a monotype print that I am hoping will find a voice after being silenced for five years. The print was about 32 x 24 inches and the subject was about the beginning of Christianity. It invovled numerous ink passes to build up the background; some laser copy transfers of maps from a bible; chine collé using beautiful japanese paper; and impressions of skeletal hands and bones which I cut out in balsa wood, inked, positioned on the print and ran through the press.

When I came upon it in my studio I was actually looking for another print, but as soon as I spotted this one I was compelled to go with the flow. As a matter of fact that is exactly what I am hoping to achieve...going with the creative flow and just letting the piece, which seems to be in book format, develop itself. No preconceived notions; no ultimate goal. Just creating and recognizing when the piece is done!

So far, I have divided the large print into eight equal pieces;

glued them back to back to create four pages;

thus, I now have eight equal size backgrounds. What will develop will develop as it should!

The creative process has begun!

Chair with a view

Until yesterday the time I've spent at the studio lately has been focused on renovations, a continuation of what we have been doing to our house. One thing that has become clear to me is: "Be Careful What You Wish For!..I always said I wanted to be a 'painter', so guess what I have been doing...Painting walls, window frames, doors, etc., etc. of course!

With winter fast approaching, I was sure my cement chair was going to have to wait 'til spring then low and behold, sun was in the forecast for two days so I got to it. It took 12 - 60 lb bags of cement, chicken wire, some copper pipes and a broken plastic adirondack chair.

I can't wait for it to be cured so that I can check out the view from a seated position! This evening, this is what that view looked like.

This Disordered Life Challenge

I love a challenge so when This Disordered Life aka notmassproduced posted a creation challenge how could I refuse?

All Roads Lead To...

digital collage using photos & prints

And this is what I started with...

...A master piece in it's own right!

Be sure to check out This Disordered Life for links to other artist who have taken up the challenge and see what they have created.

Endless chaos of the cluttered mind

The past few years have been really all-around crazy for me in every sense of the word. At times I feel that my head is akin to that drawer so many of us have that is just jam-packed with all types of junk imaginable, tossed in there because you just don't know where to put it.

If at least there was room in there for thoughts to ferment long enough to reach maturation, then to be released leaving space for the next thought or idea to develop...Alas, creative ideas just get thrown in with worries, useless thoughts, memories (both good and bad), plans and projects, lists of things I want to do, I could do, I should do...Every day the drawer gets harder and harder to close.

Ever the optimist, I keep trying to put order. The first thing I need to do is to take stalk of what is in there and focus on one area at a time:

3 Hearts

An assortment of Carniverous plants:

Five Heads:

This is just at first glance...Clearly, the time has come for some serious spring cleaning!

Curio Studio is where my creative side can really come out to play. It is where the interesting, the unusual and the creative come together. Nothing has to conform and nothing is judged. Sadly, it has been enduring a serious drought as the mundane has pushed it to the back of the drawer. The struggle for a drawer of it's own is evident...Hence this blog, hence yesterday's post and today's inventory of what you can find there. (Some, to my dismay, covered in cobwebs!)

You may be wondering who is keeping Curio at the back of the drawer...I know exactly who she is. Her name is Sonia, Curio's alter ego...No wait a minute, Curio is Sonia's alter ego...No wait, they're so different they can't possibly be occupying the same head-space! One thing I do know, Sonia is getting stronger and now she wants a blog of her own. We'll see who gets the upper hand!