Studio Notes

Online journals are much like Times Square.  Sooner or later, most everyone passes through. Earlier this week I received a pleasant jog of memory about a project that I began back in 2004 and never finished. It was a pamphlet-bound journal that I sent around to nine artists, asking them to answer twelve questions about being an artist, and to contribute a one-page visual entry. I promised to publish the pages online, and also send copies to all the participants.  Because of a software crash at the site where the project was hosted, I lost the project definition, put the journal away in a safe place, and forgot all about it.

Thanks to a gentle nudge from one of the participants, I quickly located the journal and am going to serialize the entries in Studio Notes, and hope to reach all the participants.

I’ll present the journal pages in order, beginning with my own responses. This is what I wrote in 2004:

What drives you to create? You mean I have a choice? But the ideas are so insistent that I can’t ignore them. THe only way I can share my impressions and my expressions is to show you what I see in my mind. All thought and memory have color and texture. I do not create art for the market or for anyone else; I do create art to communicate and I do create art from me. And sometimes I crave release from those insistent ideas.

Do you have a formal arts education? Yes, a BA with a studio arts minor, the better part of a BFA, and countless hours of books arts apprenticeships. These taught me the technical skills but did little to help me connect my vision to my art.  That has been a process of self-discovery, of un-learning.

How did you begin creating art? Why? I can’t remember, but sometime around age two, according to my family. The past three years have been an arts rebirth for me. I had been blocked for a long time, creating superficial works that were based on technique rather than inspiration. Collaborative projects unblocked my creative spirit.

How does the creative process work for you?  Do you sketch first? Make thumbnails? Doodle? How clear is your initial vision? I begin with a concept, usually a color, and one or two clear details. Then I let the emotions to lead me to honor the page with an abstract blessing of color. I work the background from that initial expression, still painting from feeling, then I go more slowly into the middle ground, actually thinking about value and composition now. Each addition is more careful, more considered.

What was your biggest challenge in writing your Artist’s Statement? Reconciling my diverse styles and techniques was hard to explain. Although I am not a brilliant landscape painter, it is an important part of my art–sharpening my senses. Relating that to my collage and altered art style is strange.  They are just my two extremes, and they keep ne balanced between observation and imagination.

If you had to choose only three pigments/colors, what would they be? Indian Red, Yellow Ochre and Ultramarine Blue. It’s a dream for landscapes–rich browns and greens and very grey purples.

Name three recurring symbols in your work. What do they represent? Random numbers and mathematical symbols are my idiom for confusion. They are cold and abstract. Eyes symbolize truth and certainty. I see is a synonym for I understand. The debris of everyday life, ticket stubs, lists, found scraps, celebrates the power and mystery  hidden in the most mundane of objects. My landscapes usually include a view of the ocean or a lake, also symbols of certainty.

How has your work evolved in the last 5 years? 10 years?Five years ago I had no work. I was at the bottom of a burnout. I had been a calligrapher and book artist, with a crisp, serene and controlled style. When I came back to art, it was not as a scribe, hunched over the drawing table, thinking of the world one letter at a time. I stand up to paint. I use big brushes, sponges, crumpled paper, even my fingers. I am painting from within.

What materials or techniques have you always wanted to try, but haven’t? I would like to work on canvas. I am pushing paper to its limits. I also want to use beeswax as a collage medium .

What artist inspires you most? Why? Lynne Perrella, whose loose, multi-layered, gritty collages are inspiring me to work more freely and be more bold. She uses a strong contrast of negative and positive forms, and presents the scraps and remains of making art as art materials in their own right. It’s all about the artifacts of the process.

How do you motivate yourself when the inspiration falters? First, I put on some music, usually an eclectic mix of down tempo electronica and new age. I sort through paper and ephemera, and select a few things. Since I fear white paper most of all, I choose a color and sweep it over the paper.  Then I’ll go for a walk, or out for a coffee, and usually come home with an idea.

What are your artistic goals?  Small goals? Big goals? Are they realistic or way out there? My goal is to have art at the center of each day. Commercial success isn’t important to me. Within the next 10-15 years, I will have time for this. It’s totally up to me to decide how real this goal becomes.

With the autumn equinox less than a week away, I am highly attuned to the colors of autumn. Browns and yellows don’t thrill me, but I love terra cotta, the color of baked red clay, and all other shades of orange.

While The Aerie, my home and studio, are primarily filled with shades of AQUA, each room has several terra cotta accents. I love simple, unglazed flowerpots. On the hearth, I have a terra cotta candle holder.  In the kitchen, spoons and utensils stand in simple clay containers. Outside the window, I see the roof tiles of our gatehouse, and of the inn across the garden.

I often say that English is my second language, that I speak more fluently in color than in words. But the language of color is a very personal one, and might need some occasional translation.

AQUA is good. It’s my serenity color, my visual mantra. Most of The Aerie is painted in muted aqua, ice blue, and pale robin’s egg. Can you guess that I also love the sea?

I can sit for hours, entranced by the waves. I don’t often journal at the shore. I use the time to recharge my creativity, and then spill it out when I’m back in the studio.

As a collage artist, I communicate by finding and transforming what others leave behind. There is a risk of becoming co-dependent on your source materials, of starting to feel what you find, rather than finding what you feel. That was especially true when I was pushing myself hard to create a journal page every day.

So, I’ve slowed down, gone back to the basics of speaking in color, and started drawing more.