Still Kickin'

Possibly you think I've gone to the great beyond or at least that I'm on vacation. In truth, I'm just finding my way back to the real world after the encaustic conference and the huge amount of creative input that stirred my recalcitrant brain. And I've been tired. Maybe all that thinkin' taxed my limited energy.


This week I've been in the studio working. As I mentioned before I went to the conference, my intention is to make some new work that combines encaustic with a kind of tribal, fetishistic work that I made in the 1990s. It's coming along pretty well. I won't show any of it yet because I'm only on my second piece and want to see how things develop as the series goes along.


Here are some of the inspirational pieces I've been looking at:

These are two Tatanua masks from New Ireland, near New Guinea in the South Pacific.

I had never seen masks like this before and really love them - not for the faces, but for the fabulous headdresses. These masks are made for dancing and worn mostly by men. A crest divides the headdress in two and each side is different so that when a line of dancers turns, they display an entirely different look. I find the idea of that striking.

The work I'm making does not look like this, but these masks inspired me to the possibilities and potentialities of various materials.

I've also realized recently how linked my work is to textiles and how inspired I am by them. I knew already that I loved the work of the fabulous el Anatsui, and I found one of his works online that was new to me and that looked less metallic.

(...much time expired...)

Well, I went looking for the image and couldn't find it, read some exhibition descriptions, answered a couple of emails and played around with a fun site that Lisa Pressman just sent me. (Once you get there, press any letter to start and then keep clicking to get a different color. Pressure on the mouse makes the lines thicker or thinner, etc.)

So there you have it, a distracted blog entry.

I'm going to put us all out of our misery and go watch the second playing of Rachel Maddow to see what she has to say about all those tomcat Republicans that just got knocked off the presidential shortlist for 2012. I guess Sarah Palin will outlast them all.