My art is like an everything bagel. I have found a hungry eye for additive complexity in the artworks I create. And though subjects change, my work reflects a sort of cerebral mental space... something substantial that takes more than five seconds to devour. Its not like those hotdog eating contests on TLC... I know you all watch them with your dad on sunday afternoons. *points finger* I'm in no rush to get through the gallery of my brain that fast! I am a visual outsider. I mean, who really orders an everything bagel everyday, and thinks about the seasonings that make that bagel what it is. I spend approximately 9 - 12 hours minimum on my artwork everyday. That is a lot of analysis of what makes that everything bagel... "Everything". And if you are working on more than one artwork at a time... well, that's a lot of "everything" to deal with.
While discussing my Intaglio Printmaking (Hard-ground line etching, and aquatint for the moment), Professor Chen and I discussed that we are all strangers to ourselves. We can sense our own strangeness... and man, AM I STRANGE OR WHAT?! I live to perplex people by switching between codes, schematics, and representation. I play with both Formal and Conceptual Experience... the familiar and the strange.... the legible and illegible... forward and backward... I think you the point. *smile* I want all of that to fit in one picture plane and repeat itself in series. Talk about high expectations!
I love testing the limits of what a figure or a drawing can hold. What is the capacity of an image??? Can that figure become part of the building??? How much power can you give the paper vs. your mind??? I can't seem to find the limitations or boarders of this craft! And in all of my muffled attempts where I am walking blind and making messes that lead to failure... that failure constitutes my art. There is always a meaning or a lesson in the process of making art. If you don't know the meaning of a work you have done, then it is not a real work. You have not put yourself in position to let that work grow. How would you feel if someone walked up to you and asked about your work and you didn't know why you did what you did? Ex: " What if it was about this... oh wait, don't you know? You are the artist!" How... awkward!
Professor Chen has also lent me wonderful books lately about our strange selves and connections to the art worlds (yes, there are more than one). I've found an understanding of an artist in particular. His name is Carl Jung.
(While I'm thinking about it... If you need reproductions of old Renaissance Prints with the original plates or old comic strips out of print... HIGHLY RECOMMEND EBAY! You don't have to be rich to have great art! I would know :) ... Anyhoo,)
Carl Jung stated that "the creative mind plays with the objects it loves". Professor Chen and I discussed Carl Jung's work on the topic of being "half born" this morning. By "half born", he means that someone may have been born into this world, but has one foot firmly planted somewhere else. Sometimes that place you are so grounded into is your unconscious... your dreams... another time period... imagination,etc.; Sometimes that place is a double life. For instance, when I sleep, I don't feel like I'm sleeping. I have another world that lives in my head. I'm not crazy, but I am firmly grounded in two places at once. I have a very active imagination; so active, that I feel like I am given a second chance to live my day when I sleep. Again, I'm not crazy. And I'm not two people. I'm the same person, but in my head people speak Elizabethan language, and I dream in black and white. *laugh* ... My dreams make me think a lot about how the US doesn't discuss the concept of class. Printmaking resolves around labor and sweat for a product... it is the only even playing field in art. You don't have to be privileged to print. This theory shows in my work.
The creative mind plays. According to Carl Jung, "Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being." My subject of play has been ballroom dance. I have always liked to dance... but now, I also enjoy drawing dance scenes while I dance around studio space for hours! Its like a production on paper. I'm giving up free time to take extra ballroom lessons, drive around the city and see theatre productions (professional and student based), participate in workshops, etc. And every movement I draw in response is specific/particular and yet loose and familiar, but so strange... that whole complexity thing is now traveling with me! Literally it was just in Chicago yesterday and in Iowa today!
My life has become an everything bagel... Art has become a big part of my life... and by testing the limits of Fabriano, Arches Cover/Text, Reeves... all those crazy European Paper companies... they let me fail. No... they HELP me fail! And every time I fail, I really do succeed. So I continue to probe and search through life to figure out what makes that "everything bagel" so wonderful... Professor Chen says its just me "absorbing things like a sponge with the ability to squeeze out all of its contents so that the world can taste the perspective of an artist" (WOW)
I remain undecided... for now. I have another 5 hour Art class that starts shortly and I am sure I will learn something new and come out of that class looking like a pastel rainbow. Maya Angelou did tell me to be the rainbow in the sky... Apparently I took that a tad too literally.
Much Love,
R.
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