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.