Hot Summer Art

For the last few weeks, I’ve been absorbed by my job as an arts educator - so much so that there was no time to create my own new works or to write. But the time spent sharing my knowledge with others was rewarding. I will be traveling and teaching for the next few weeks and will probably not be painting, sculpting and writing again until August.
In the mean time, I am posting a few samples of the works of my students in the Reach Summer Arts program at Sumter High School. The students were engaging and their work is a testament to their talents and abilities.
In a time of extreme budget cuts for the arts, we made these mosaics with mostly recycled materials. We started with discarded matt board from the refuse bins of picture framers. The large pieces were cut into standard sizes for mounting art work on - 10" x 12" and 12" squares. The other scraps were sized on the white side with gesso and then faux finished with acrylic paints. Using scraping, ragging, stippling and trailing techniques, the painted boards gradually took on the appearance of precious rocks and fine textiles. When dry, these were cut into squares, rectangles, haphazard pieces and strips. Using PVA white glue, the pieces were assembled in various mosaic styles.
For subject matter, I had the students extrapolate from two sources. The first source were fused glass pieces of the student’s own making. The other source was clippings of paintings from art magazines. I had the students take these focal points and create a world around them. When possible, I used objects from the students’ previous art projects - like those beautiful fused glass flattened bottles that their art teacher, Heidi Adler, helped them create. One of these is featured in the mosaic piece above by Lexi Melton. The reverse side of this and some of the other glass pieces has been treated with silver-leaf in order to block the background color of the matt board and to enhance the iridescence of the glass.
I like the approach that many of the students used in completing their projects and marveled at how their individual aesthetic approaches shaped the final product. The strange but exuberant collage surrounding a picture of a kimono by Bryan O'Connor is a study in a controlled chaotic fantasy of Asia. The heart motif could have been a cliche, if not for the variety of cuts and the skill in their assembly. The heart sealed with an x by Angel Rodriguez becomes more of an icon than a valentine. The tree with madonna is by Amitra Simonson.
I continue to prepare for a series of summer camp jobs - the summer is my busiest teaching season. It is a dizzying whirlwind of activity as I prepare to teach two more courses at McDaniel college. But as the sage painter, Ba Da Shan Ren once said, "teaching is half of learning," and I expect that my own artistic vistas will broaden as the result of all the hot summer art activities.

Memorial Day for GI Joe

G.I. Joe, the fighting man of the 1960's, with his pistol wielding hands and paddle boat feet, had a pink scar upon his face. I always wanted to erase it. So when I painted his portrait I did leave it out, but put a highlight in its place.

I had a small collection of G.I. Joes as a child in addition to the Barbie entourage I wrote about previously. As I found the Ken doll suspect, Barbie’s consort of the day was the military man, if only so that she could borrow his neat jeep.
To paint the G. I. Joe portrait I altered the lighting on his face so that he was illuminated from below - brightening eye sockets that would ordinarily be in shadow. This gives his face a somewhat less than benign appearance. It is Vincent Price lighting, to be sure. One doesn’t know whether he is terrified himself or is frightening to others.
During my recent exhibition, "Homage to Squares," which closed last week, Joe was hung separately from the other doll portraits, but just around the corner from them. It gave the impression that he was ogling them from a short distance, with surprise and indignation, perhaps?
This little square portrait was different from the female doll heads in that Joe did not get a metal leaf background but a painted one with metallic paint instead. The paint was mottled to look something like battle camouflage. G. I. Joe, once again is at our service.

Fashioning a Barbie

Extra care requires making extra parts. When creating the square painted papers for my collage "Sleeping Standing Up," I made several extra 4" squares of paper sized with light blue gesso. After painting most of them and placing my select few onto the large work, I had to do something with the rest. What to do with about ten extra sized pieces of blue paper? The answer came from an unlikely source - a vintage Barbie doll collection. I had brought the dolls out of storage with the intent of selling them off. But before parting with them, I thought it best to paint them first. I sized gold and silver leaf onto paper and carefully traced the shape of the dolls’ heads onto the gilded and silver leafed surfaces. I then cut out the shape and stored these for later use. I mounted the silver and gold with the cut out shapes on to the blue gesso paper. I built a textured paper frame around the leaf - pink for silver and brown with blue for gold. I then carefully painted these iconic doll faces on each square page. There was the Barbie with the bubble hair bob from 1963. There was a fashion Barbie with a strange headress with gold stripes. A Skipper doll was also immortalized in acrylic paint on paper, as was Barbie of the late sixties. G I Joe made an appearance as well - the only man so far in the little square doll portraits.
Despite their design to appeal, the faces looked almost ghoulish to me - the overly long necks with eyes too blue, noses too small, and mouths too demure. Painting them caused me to reflect upon standards of feminine beauty. Despite the "improvements" to Barbie throughout the years, I found that my preference leaned towards her earliest incarnations - the design adapted directly from Lily the fetish doll. There was a remotely Oriental look to her, with those narrow eyes askance. Perhaps I had a nostalgia for a fifties era that I was not a part of. Or perhaps I was just intrigued by the idea of painting an image of something meant for men that ironically became the provenance of little girls.
How arbitrary and fleeting are concepts of beauty. This very mutability of the desirable is what I find so fascinating. What creates a desire for certain proportions and a predilection for a narrow range of coloring? I look at these Barbie dolls and despite their appeal, seem to mock our choices - holding a mirror up to our tastes and finding them bizarre with the passage of years.

Sleeping Standing Up

My "Homage to Squares" exhibition turned out to be elaborate and complex. It took me and three volunteers two vehicles to get the art and installation set up to the site and eight hours to hang the show. Thank God for friends! Heart felt thanks go out to Julia Wolfe, Pierce West and Kevin Smith. I could not have done this without them.
Interestingly, my friends often had a better idea than I did about how to hang much of the work. This does not surprise me. I just create the art - displaying it is yet another art. Pierce West especially had good ideas about what to use in focal points and how to arrange things so that they would read like a long narrative, as in the case of the thirty small figurative paintings and their accompanying poems. Kevin and Pierce rearranged my long line of Barbie Doll portraits separate from the single portrait of G.I. Joe. So instead of being a part of this group, he was a counterbalance to it - like a long story with a punch line to it.
After an exhausting day of hanging art, I spent the day before the Friday opening busying myself preparing food. In keeping with the theme most things were square - fudge brownie squares, lemon squares and pecan squares to name a few. Opening night on Friday was surprisingly crowded, with most of the food and all of the wine consumed by the throngs. Again I am grateful for the savvy publicity from the Gallery 80808 webmaster, Susan Lenz.
Preparations for this exhibition have been so consuming that my intent to write about the art has been somewhat curtailed. Nevertheless, I will manage to write for a while about the work in this exhibition. With about eighty pieces hanging in this show, there is plenty to write about. With work ranging in dates of completion from early last decade to just last week, the show turned out to be something like a small retrospective. The most recent work, "Sleeping Standing Up," featured at the top of this page, was finished just last week. The picture is a collage on canvas comprised of a figure excised from a previous painting that met up with an unfortunate studio accident. ( I had written about this in a previous blog when I first cut the standing man out of the painting.) I had salvaged the figure by cutting him out of the painting and pasting him onto a new canvas. It took a long time to get back to the image of this man, which had remained rolled up in a closet for several months as I attended to my daily routines and weekly deadlines. As the deadline for completing new work for my exhibition drew near, I feared that I would not be able to carve out a niche of time to complete this larger, elaborate piece. But I found a sufficient block of time after all, in the final week before my show.
In this new version of "Sleeping Standing Up," I outlined the figure by squeezing a tube of scarlet paint around the contours of his body. I did this for both pragmatic and aesthetic reasons. Using a sold line instead of collaged fragments of paper as in the rest of the work, highlighted the subject in a bold and provocative way. The thick paint also served to hide the seam created by a heavy piece of canvas pasted on top of another canvas.
This mosaic collage, like most of my others, was not laid out in entirety then adhered to the substrate. Instead the process was more intuitive - colors and patterns revealing themselves as I worked along the surface. There were many surprises along the way - like the pink quilt-like border, and the large blue squares. A commentator thought there was a symbolic intent to the pink color - a threat to the masculinity of the subject. This was an interesting concept but was not in the forefront of my intentions. The pink just mysteriously resonated with me.
I hung "Sleeping Standing Up" at the end of the long hallway leading to my exhibition because I wanted it to be an iconic focal point. There are many things one could say about the brazen colors and the torpor of his presence. With the economic downturn, and so much of life turned upside down - lost retirements, state ownerships of what we used to consider the apogee of capitalistic institutions. This season brought with it a sense of sleepwalking - because so much of what we thought was real was not.
"Sleeping Standing Up" serves now as the greeter to the door of my exhibition. Unfortunately he will have to come down the day after tomorrow. Such a brief exhibition with such a long theme!

Plagiarism in the Past Perfect Tense

My upcoming exhibition is a patchwork of old and new work. The square painting turned towards a diamond shape to the right is a self portrait untimely torn from a painting I made years ago while I was still living in China. I didn’t really like the awkward composition in the original work so I salvaged the face (for historic reasons?) by excising it with a utility knife and then discarding the remaining canvas. I then pasted the portrait on to a gesso panel. Using a slightly updated palette of colors and an older painter’s way of wielding the brush, I surrounded the old image with new paint. It still has a somewhat naive early Lucian Freud look to it, but I will be exhibiting it anyway.
I am reminded again of Proust’s observation that when artist’s reach a certain age they begin to plagiarize from their own past, which explains the first word in the title of this little painting.
The second half of the title, "the past perfect tense," is an overlay of puns, historical references, and an interest in the cultural ramifications of linguistics. It is all word play. Through the rose colored lenses of the present, is the golden age of youth, with its seeming simplicity, a time yet untainted with responsibilities and limitations? Is the past perfect? Or was it really fraught with the tensions of uncertainties? Perfectly tense, maybe. Tenses do speak volumes about the cultures that invent and use them. It seems to me that the past perfect is a language of regret...
"If I had gone to medical school instead of art school, then I would have been much better off financially."
Staring into the face of the past through this little self portrait, I recalled wondering at the time, how I would feel looking into the mirror a few decades later, as an older woman, particularly considering the high premium our culture places upon youth. Surprisingly, it is more annoying than distressing - especially having skin hang down from my face while standing upside-down.
I suppose the mere fact that I bother to walk around on my hands in an old-age-be-damned attitude is its own answer to the trepidation one should be feeling at this time. And the young, rather than evoking feelings of loss or jealousy, elicit charm. Sometimes they look like little dolls to me. Even my own visage from those decades past is doll-like, with that narrow little face and those big staring, almond eyes. But the older face that looks back upon it has some regrets but does not mourn. It only exhales in relief at having survived the vicissitudes of the life lived since then and grateful for the experience gained.

La Mei

The large commission that I wrote about in my previous blog is finally complete. "La Mei," the plum blossom of the winter, does retain the atmospheric quality of the initial grisaille but it was not without some whiting out and repainting of select areas of the surface. The spots of yellow at the base, originally elliptical, became increasing rounded as the painting progressed. The upper right corner was painted in a very gestural way, then tightened up, then trimmed up and loosened again. This is probably what the Abstract Expressionist meant by the dynamics of "push and pull" in a painting, even though this one is more Oriental than Occidental in feeling.
Because the dimensions of the painting are roughly a square, the work will probably appear in my upcoming exhibition, "Homage to Squares," as a surprise to myself as well as everyone else who expects to see only figurative work. The painting is too large for me to get far enough away from it in order to get a complete image, but the detail illustrated here gives a general idea of the use of paint and composition.
Since the opening of "Homage to Squares" is less than two weeks away, I will devote the next series of blog posts to the square paintings featured in this exhibition.

Ideas Written Large

Large Ideas, Limited Budgets and Engineering Challenges
My clients had a problem area in their home - a large recessed area with a dubious- looking Asian painting pasted directly to the wall. The painting had become water damaged in areas and was unsightly. They wanted to have something cover this area of about eight feet by seven feet but didn’t want to remove the painting. My clients also wanted any art work covering this area to be easily removable for eventual transport to a new location. Lastly, the project budget amounted to what I would typically charge for something about a quarter of that size.
The problem of what to do within these constraints was bantered about for a few years. A large, lightweight, easily removable artwork seemed to point to fiber art - something that could roll up. But my clients couldn’t find a fiber art piece that suited both taste and budget. A large canvas would have to be put on an equally large frame which would make it not easily transportable. P A mosaic would be too heavy and a collage would take too long. So what I finally settled on was a painting on cotton duck canvas that would be attached to a large diameter dowel and rolled up like a scroll. To keep material costs down I proposed a minimalist approach to composition and colors- using mostly whites. A number of years ago, I had created a series of white, atmospheric paintings with touches of biomorphic details for an exhibition at the Lancaster Museum. The originals were sold off here and there a long time ago but I had images in my archive which I e-mailed to my clients. They settled on a particular composition that I could adjust to a much larger scale.
There was an Asian theme in the room where the large painting would hang so I brought everything in my Chinese art training to the fore in the execution of this project. For structure, I dismantled a damaged Chinese scroll to see exactly how the painting was attached and wrapped around the wood piece at the bottom. It was not simply rolled around the bottom but attached around the back of the scroll with the wood hanging somewhat like a sling. This clever arrangement enabled the scroll to hang flat against the wall and roll up easily. I decided to pattern my own canvas scroll after this design. Such little details like this make such big differences.
Preparing a canvas eight feet tall by eight feet wide that would hang freely turned out to require great patience and some engineering skills. First, the canvas had to be hemmed around the outside except for the piece that would wrap around the wooden dowel. The top had to be looped around to create a space for a removable rod from which to hang it - something like a curtain. This all required finding a seamstress with an industrial grade sewing machine. Through a well-connected artist friend I found just the person in a nearby town. Of course this meant somewhat of a delay getting started as I was dependent upon her getting around to the project when moved to do so but it did get done.
After squaring the canvas I then connecting the bottom to the wooden dowel with PVA white glue Priming the canvas was another challenge. I could not staple the canvas to a conventional stretcher because staples, or tack holes would show up around the seamed edge. So I ironed out the canvas as best I could and primed it carefully on top of painter’s paper. It was a mess. The paper underneath became moist and buckled, which caused the large canvas to crease as well. Not knowing how else to get a better surface I decided to use two by fours and L-brackets to make a large scale frame. I solved the problem of the stapling by stretching the canvas over the frame with contractor’s tape - twisting it and then taping it to the floor with a second piece of tape. After priming, the tape seemed to hold for most parts but I ended up having to buttress the dowel - wrapped end with another piece of lumber. For days my commission looked like it was a patient in traction but I got a good surface.
For a painting this size that would rest in a small room, I thought it would be best for it to be a light as possible - like bright sun on snow. I thought of the paintings one of my professors used to make years ago at Chinese art school. Master Gao was particularly fond of painting La Mei - a kind of Chinese plum blossom that had waxy yellow flowers that would open in the middle of winter. After he painted various intensities of yellow spots on the xuan paper, Master Gao would the prepare washes of pale orange and blue. The washes always looked like a sky in winter. Master Gao would then splatter the whole page with white gouache that he would liberally fling from his brush like Jackson Pollock.
I did something reminiscent of this Chinese master when working on this large canvas by slowly building up washes of greys, metallic silvers and earth tones. While still wet, I scrubbed in a variety of textures, using rags, brooms and windshield cleaners. It was the first time that I actually broke out a sweat while painting. Every gesture with the brush, fingers or other instruments had to be made quickly because I was painting in acrylic. After adding the washes and textures, I painted in a blizzard by flinging and dripping silver, white and cream. Painting on this scale with such vigor was a joy. I was happy to have a large commission and to feel to totally absorbed by the process of painting.
I am now beginning the finishing touches. There will be more solid areas but the challenge now will be to add structure without losing the atmosphere. I am looking forward to Monday, when I can dedicate another full day to this project.

Made from Local Clay

Last semester, I had occasion to teach a ceramics course at South Carolina State University. Although my terminal degree is in painting, I had done a lot of work in ceramic sculpture so it wasn’t too great a leap to offer my services. As I reviewed the text book I became fascinated by the section about using local, found clays. Shortly thereafter, I was passing by a construction site and saw what appeared to be a vein of good reddish buff clay in the mounds of dirt piled up by the side of the road. I went home to get a bucket and returned to this site to dig out my find.
After some months, I broke up the dried chunks and sifted them through a strainer. After mixing the clay dust with water I wedged the clay on a clean table. It seemed to be fairly plastic so I made a few small pinch pots to test it out. Alas, they cracked while drying and so I rolled everything up into a ball and put it away.
They say that clay improves with age. That may be so, for six months after I abandoned the ball of clay I took it out of its storage bag again and found it to yield to the kneading process with much greater plasticity than before. It was still an unknown clay and could not be counted upon to stay whole when dried or not explode in a kiln when fired if it did dry to a greenware stage.
So not wanting to expend too much energy on an uncertain product, I filled a plaster cast of a friend’s face with the stuff. Remarkably, the clay retained its shape well enough to work with it.
Releasing it from the mold, it bore the visage of a familiar face, but with only the bare essentials of shape.
When looking only at the shape of someone’s face, stripped of coloring, sounds, and movement, a structure appears that usually goes unnoticed. I’ve done numerous casts and am always amazed at what I find in a face. They are always smaller than in my memory. Often they are surprising and even a bit alarming. The disjointed noses! The jaw receding too much - or truly off kilter. Whether it is a natural desire for symmetry or a superstitious belief in the curative powers of changing an image to effect a change in what that image represents in reality, I cannot say, but I usually exploit the plastic quality of clay to correct these little imperfections. So I cured the deviated septum on my friend’s face in clay by slowly pressing and knocking the nose back into the center of the face. There was this secret, primitive feeling that by doing so I was relieving years of sinus pain.
After my little plastic clay surgery, I added and subtracted minute bits of clay on the face, avoiding any dramatic embellishments. Instead of smoothing out the surface as I usually do, I let the clay determine the patterns on the face by the way it naturally cracked or creased with movement. I emphasized this by rubbing the dried clay with black iron oxide. The clay was at an ancient home on this face - a facade that hid Native American blood.. It seemed oddly significant that a visage was made with the stuff that her ancestors walked upon and used to create their own pottery. Will this unknown clay survive the fire without cracking or exploding? Possibly but I’m not counting on it. If the clay does mature in the kiln then I will use it somehow, some way in the future.

Fool for Flowers

I am a fool for flowers. I come by this by natural means. My mother came from a family of florists. My father came from a family that farmed. I tell myself that my garden is "an investment" - after all, I am a painter and can use flowers in my paintings. But in fact digging in the dirt and hauling away debris is respite from my work.
Readers may find it odd that teaching and creating art can even be described as work. Indeed, these are the pursuits of leisure in many respects. But to produce income, these pursuits involve a considerable amount of record keeping, advance planning, advertising, product testing, meetings, and producing a product whether one is in the mood or not. Work, in short.
I have had a considerable amount of work in the form of small teaching contracts and have spent a large quantity of time organizing schedules while looking for even more contracts. It is difficult to say "no" to even the smallest of jobs when the Great Recession looms ominously.
When prioritizing becomes paralyzing and work overwhelms I take respite in the beauty of the irises that grow in my garden. The one pictured at left I captured just before the heavy rainfall pommeled it into oblivion. It is unfortunately the only one of its kind among my many irises. It arrived as a free bonus iris when I ordered a group of blues - which incidentally have not blossomed yet. Perhaps they won’t. A recurrent theme of my garden is the survival of the free and those plants that cost next to nothing. While an expensive ginger lily never so much as broke the surface of the ground, a strange violet flower that looked like a miniature hollyhock flourished. I had pulled the latter out of a crack in the sidewalk in Charleston I dearly wanted large black elephant ears plants. The one I purchased from the now defunct Cross Seed company faltered after one season and never returned. Meanwhile a pot of expired Asiatic lilies that I purchased for forty cents from the local BiLo proliferated into over a hundred sturdy plants. Ah! I thought, this soil is for Asiatic lilies. My husband concurred and purchased a few somewhat exotic specimens. They performed with not much enthusiasm, didn’t blossom, then expired. But another one that I found growing gratuitously between two rocks did just fine, producing enormous yellow blossoms. The blueberries bushes that I purchased died in short order. The peach tree that grew from a pit in the compost pile has taken their place.
Could it be that those things that have survived harsh treatment are innately hardier than the pampered rich? No, this is not social commentary. It simply seems to be the law of the jungle in a small garden plot. Lately I’ve been clearing out a new garden area. In the slow process of building a wall, repairing concrete, and removing debris my imagination runs towards what remarkable botanical specimen will grace this area. An herb garden? A Chinese medicinal herb garden? A pomegranate tree? A persimmon tree? Or perhaps a rescued pot of what not from the side of the road.

Packing up the Road Show

As the exhibition of photographs and paintings of abandoned houses draws to a close, and I write final reports to grant agencies, I feel as though I am putting a bookmark in an incompletely read novel. I often have to do this in my creative work - come to stopping places with stories not completely told. Because the business of being an artist must go on, with other exhibitions to launch, commissions to start, and courses to teach, ending a line of work can seem somewhat abrupt at times. But continuing in the analogy of reading, the work is not really ended, only halted temporarily in order to meet other obligations. Would that I could devote a whole year on nothing but an art or writing project!
The exhibition in Blackville was enjoyable, and I have to thank Grace Jameson, Director of the Rivers, Rails, and Crossroads Discovery Center, for all her hard work in promoting and setting up this exhibition. I especially liked her power point presentation of the paintings that I had completed in the genre of bucolic scenes. There were over a hundred paintings displayed on a wide screen - which presented a comprehensive overview of my work on the subject of abandoned architecture. The work spanned over a decade of recording, sketching and painting these houses. I have included a few from years past.
This Saturday, I’ll be heading back down to Blackville to pack up the exhibition. Once again, it seems like a lot of work, and once again, it is forecast to be pouring down rain when I pick it up. Oddly enough, for the past two decades, it has rained every time I have to deliver or pick up art work. It has been so certain that I have come to believe that I could break a drought in any geographic location just by turning up there with art to deliver. It is uncanny.