Portfolio
DEPARTURE: MAPS, TERRITORIES AND TIMELINES, 2020 and 2021
“How do you survive a disaster?”
“Hide under the path.”
Zen Koan
Karin Clarke Gallery Biennial Award Winners One Year Later
Meyer Memorial Art Collection Catalog
Art, some say, speaks of its time. This time, with the pandemic, mass shootings, police brutality, racial injustice, climate disasters and an insurrection exerts its influence. My dilemma: How do I work while preoccupied with the disturbing events happening all around me?
Messing around with materials (what artists call work) with nothing worth preserving eventually proved successful. The painting called Departure was just that-a new way of working, with only the materials determining the textures, colors, and placements within the painting. Not thinking. Nothing concluded. Nothing explained. An amalgamation of materials, poured, sprayed, spilled and carved imitate nature. These paintings are territories. Like the land I live on. The ground under my feet. These paintings are made with wax, water, pigments. These paintings would seem only dark, but surprise as the metallic pigments give them a different kind of light, one that changes with interaction and movement.
The lighter, mostly white paintings are more like maps. They describe ideas, places, things and the times. They are reflective of my thoughts. Objects may seem sparse, but most have zeros and words superimposed onto the wax, Some also include paper, fabric, and hardware which hide beneath or rise to the painting’s surface. These paintings satisfy my need to understand and bring order to my world.
Here is a timeline, the work of my past year and a half, an18 month period quite unlike any other.
2018-2019
It’s hard for me to categorize the work of 2018-2019. It’s full of body parts (hearts and hands and the hint of whole people), seeds and flowers, maps of internal journeys, words, grids. The work reflects my searching for the source of love and life. I try to describe the way time feels. I am wanting to express my most true self which seems to move from sophistication to primitive.
These things I can name:
The hands-cave paintings both ancient and modern (specifically the boys trapped and rescued from a cave in Thailand)
The hearts-life itself, and love
The flowers and birds-nature
Maps or landscapes-the journey, the path, the way home
I will give it another name later, when I can say where I have been and where I was going.
The Grazeland Pictures
Wyoming. The goal, for which an uninterrupted, focused period of time was necessary, was to depict what has since, by physicists, been termed the multi-verse.. Without a fixed perspective, depicting various levels of focus, things appearing, changing, and vanishing as a result of time or attention, the problems of painting mirror my own discursive existence. A hollow in the landscape full of cattails and some gnarly old cottonwoods provided the material through which I could begin to view the greater landscape and just a little bit of the life teeming within it.
Luckily for me, cattails grow near my Oregon home as well. Here, the landscape is covered in runaway vegetation, a cacophony of rock, greenery, and water. Here abundance hides entire universes. The ongoing project, painting the landscape as I experience it, continues. “Here”, a subset of the series, gives a bit of focal relief.
Seeing Without Knowing
My artistic practice for the past decade has followed a continuum. Guided by a sense that some places, the Columbia River Gorge where I live amongst them, affect me deeply and imbue my work, travels, and meditations with a spiritual geography. My spirituality is based in the teachings of Zen Buddhism; I am drawn not only to the freedom and creativity it espouses, but to its logic and connectivity as well. As I look at the world and garner material for my work, I practice “seeing without knowing.” Painting is for me a process of discovery; I learn through the act of making my work. I study the conceptual and physical worlds through exploring and painting relationships. The paintings offered in this exhibition fall into two distinct yet related categories. One group describes aspects of mind, i.e. ideas, processes, or mental constructs. The other, from direct observation, represents some of the things I encounter as I wander my neighborhood. Patterns of nature and mind reveal themselves as they are reconstructed in the work.
Full Circle
HOW:
Adapt for painting the Zen practice in which the adept views then discards each thought as it arises with the simple statement, “Not me.”
Make marks: Paint, wax, crayon, gouache, shoe polish, lipstick.
Work the surface: Rub, push, scrape, heat, tarnish.
Moisten: Water, saliva, solvent.
Wipe clean the surface. Allow to remain only that which is essential.
Repeat as necessary.
Stop when done.
WHAT:
Reductive, the coil/loop/spring/spiral signifies any thing.
Structure within which patterns emerge.
WHY:
I am looking for something essential. Unambiguous. True. Real. Unadulterated. Something that stands on its own. That feels just right. That I recognize. Finding it within the painting process is the way I grapple with the universe.
The Oughts
The images in “The Oughts” are a random selection of some of the work I made in the first bit of the 2000’s, the new millennium. The work of those years was a mix of oil paint and cold wax or encaustic. Those years were marked as well by a move to the Columbia River Gorge, a place of majesty and magic. Though given a portfolio of its own, I began making small figures in leftover wax. They were a personal response to the attacks in 2001.
neurotica
I call this collection of little accordion books “neurotica.” Full of musings, non sequiturs, Zen, psychology and daily life, a stream of consciousness experience cut and pasted, sewn together, each one tells the story of some bit of time in my life. They’re highly personal while the concerns are universal. Best of all, however, is the humor.
Poignancy: The Human Route
Coming empty handed, going empty handed, that is human.
When you are born, where do you come from?
When you die, where do you go?
Life is like a floating cloud which appears.
Death is like a floating cloud which disappears.
The floating cloud itself originally does not exist.
Life and death, coming and going, are also like that.
But there is one thing which always remains clear.
It is pure and clear, not depending on life and death.
Then what is the one pure and clear thing?
— “The Human Route” as taught by Zen Master Seung Sahn
This poem, its questions, speak to me of poignancy. The paintings in this portfolio are recent, images extracted from my life. The relentlessness of the pounding waves, the rose and its thorns, the view from my window, all tell my story. The last 18 months have been so full of joy and sorrow…ecstasy and tragedy… they all boil down to poignancy.
What I Saw. How It Was.
What I Saw. How It Was, the work of 2015 and 2016, is evidence of my wanderings and how some of what I saw moved through me. Plants, spaces, places and moments emerge from the deep pleasure of making a gesture with paint and ink, brush and finger, adding and subtracting.These paintings are what I see with my eyes closed…
New Work 2016: Mixed Media Nature and Nature of Mind Based Works on Paper, Fabric and Wood
Changing homes, neighborhoods, worlds…Aging….Maturing I hope…..There are new things to look at and think about, old things to recycle, old materials used differently…nothing definitive to say but some new things to show. Nature has softened. Magnolias, water, seeds, tendrils, pitch and amber, ducks and geese invade my universe. Some are visible here.
Small Figures
At the end of August, 2001 I started using some of the wax I’d scraped off my encaustic paintings and made some small sculptural heads and figures out of the scrapings, satisfying both my desire to make sculpture and my reluctance to throw anything away. As I attempted to digest the events of September 11, 2001, molding the “lost wax” took on an urgency that hadn’t existed before. As I listened to the radio reports, I, like many others, was incredibly distressed by the lack of reports first of the wounded and finally of bodies and/or remains. The stories told by reporters and the interviews they conducted with friends and family members who were last known to have been in the World Trade Center and hadn’t made contact with loved ones took on a haunting tone. Daily reports of the number dead remained miniscule, the number missing large and fluctuating. Finally, the media reports turned from the personal recounts of horror, loss, and fear to accounts of armies and anthrax. And the missing remain…
These little wax figures are my personal response to the loss of lives in the World Trade Center on September 11. Each figure represents a person from one country that lost a citizen to the terrorist attacks. At present, many are in collections and households throughout the country, including one in the possession of an engineer who worked at the World Trade Center.
Coming and Going Are Like This: The Waiting Game at PDX
All dressed up and ready to go, here is the story of part of the journey of some of the “friends” I made from Bridal Veil all the way to the Portland International Airport.
I’d envisioned these wax figures with some as yet unmade paintings. Instead they may be found with other imaginary friends in an installation prepared by Greta Blalock, the Port of Portland Art Coordinator, titled The Waiting Game. Eight of my wax sculptures, up to 48″ tall, mix it up with ceramic figurative work by Jackie Hurlburt and Sarah Swink. The group, enclosed in a 40 foot black lined glass case just inside security at the D and E Concourse, is playful, charming, sophisticated and thought provoking. Most of all, though, it is dramatic.
Real life is full of its own drama and surprises. How figments of one’s imagination come to being is a mystery always-that is the magic of art. There is another magic at play though- in the midst of one’s own life with all the interconnected universes doing their things- from the ants doing their ant things to the moles, autumn leaves , best friends and enemies doing theirs- the connections one to the other make the real magic.
These figures represent the work of one year of my life. They embody the bonds of love, family, friendship, history, and tragedy as well as mistakes, both wonderful and awful. 1,000 joys and 1,000 sorrows and everything in between.
