Not Just Wax, Cattails, and Epiphanies

Where Am I Going and How Am I Getting There?

    Almost exactly one year ago, I made my way to Wyoming to spend a month at the Ucross Foundation as an artist-in-residence. I had carved out the time with the intention to develop work that replicated my experience of place. It seemed important to me, and still does: perhaps as the experience of being somewhere is duplicated on a surface of my own making I will better understand the experience of living. Disentangling the myriad interwoven aspects of billions of forces, beings, sensations, and thoughts and then replicating them in some new order seems to be the project with which, through some years and disparate seeming styles, I am engaged. 

Grazeland: Cattail Epiphany

    As luck would have it, serendipity colluded with the seasons to provide my first up close experience with cattails.  In a little dip in the land (undoubtedly marshy in spring) between the rock studios and the Ucross offices  grow some gnarly old cottonwoods and a profusion of cattails. I took a few of those cattails into my studio. As days passed their brown fuzzy tops faded. One day, stroking the now ash colored puffier top, the whole thing burst, erupted, uncoiled. I jumped-the thing was alive!! I was shocked and delighted. But even more than that, because the innate properties of the cattails began to symbolize many things for me. I began to wonder, and still do, whether the way it lost its physical integrity was a viable metaphor for other lives and deaths.  Whatever it was that had held it together and made it recognizable as a cattail was gone-it was dispersed. IT was no longer.  The little bits of fluff that remained (through much sweeping and vacuuming)in my studio seemed to me the cattail soul. While at Ucross, through a process of trial and error (including a huge trial to my very tolerant and kind next door studio neighbor Gabrielle Mayer) I found a way to begin what has become the first of this new cycle of work. With its' many layered, multi-focused, in and out, painted, screwed, glued and assembled aspects, this work resembles the way things appear, grab my attention, and then fade from consciousness as other aspects take their places. 

   

  Since returning from Ucross, I continue to work within the same parameters, trying to replicate some of the many ways I  experience place. A good many of the paintings done this past year are part of  Not Just Wax, an exhibition at Butters Gallery in Portland, Oregon from November 2- November 26, 2011.

 

                                                                    

A Little Update...or, some shameless self-promotion...

At Butters Gallery, through the month of May, on display have been some of my recent paintings. Dandelion is the most recent of the large botanical paintings shown last May. As well, two new works from a series alternately thought of as Amulets or Bardo Paintings, have been on the walls.

I also have paintings on view at Terwilliger Plaza, a retirement community in Portland. Curated by Suzanne Tufenkian, printmaker, the exhibition includes work by Margaret Shirley, Tom Cramer, Sally Finch, Suzanne and a few others. The paintings I am exhibiting, are Our Eden and Temptation, both from my 2008 exhibition Of the Body, Of the Mind.

In addition, my work is well represented in Encaustic Art: The Complete Guide to Creating Fine Art With Wax, Lissa Rankin, published in August 2011 by Watson-Guptil.

And finally, in February, I participated in an on-line residency where my work can be viewed at http://www.365daysofprint.com

Time and the River

It was last spring that we, the neighbors in Bridal Veil, spotted California Sea Lions on Phoca Rock, named by Lewis and Clark for the seals they saw on this rock those many years ago. It was the first time in anyone's memory that sea lions had been seen here and the neighbor's collective memory goes back 30 years. We all got out telescopes, binoculars and cameras to watch with awe and delight. This spring, the sea lions reappeared, as did our viewing devices. They came just ahead of the salmon run, awaiting the salmon and sturgeon buffet just below the Bonneville Dam. The terrible irony, which we knew and they didn't, was that any sea lion caught gorging on salmon 3 times could be killed in an effort to save the salmon, whose numbers are much diminished as a result of our damming the river. A terrible irony it is.

This painting is the first in a series of the Columbia. And the first I have ever painted that is so closely related to the state of this particular dilemma, the state of disconnect between our human advancements and the toll that takes upon the natural world.