A Little Out of the Ordinary

Every year I participate in two art auctions: one for my alma mater, Massachusetts College of Art, and the other Icons+Altars for the New Art Center in Newtonville, Mass.

The MassArt auction is now a Very Big Deal with expensive tickets required for admission to the auction, a festive buffet with wine, a well-known auctioneer and prime collectors attending. The auction is actually juried and requires that three images from each potential donor be submitted in advance so that one of the three may be selected if the artist is allowed to participate (i.e. donate). Both an online and a printed catalog are prepared, and images must be submitted in November for the early April event. I made three (reworked) oil paintings to submit for jurying but haven't photographed them yet. I'll show you when I do.

Home Sweet Home, encaustic with mixed media and found painting, 16 1/2"H x 6"W x 1"D. (In case you can't quite make them out, those are aligators or crocodiles swimming in the pool below the tranquil scene.) (And that's plastic lace so it shouldn't need laundering.)

But meanwhile, I sent off my piece above today for Icons+Altars. This event is not actually an auction because all the works are sold for one fixed price. (This year $250.) When you buy a ticket, you are entitled to draw a number which indicates the order in which you may select an artwork from the 107 pieces that have been donated. The work is supposed to represent either an icon or an altar and the size is to be kept fairly small, but after that, anything goes.

I usually spend an inordinate amount of time making the piece and get way too involved. This year wasn't too, too bad because I came across that saccharine painting in the cardboard pseudo-wood frame when I was clearing out my mother's apartment. It is actually 3D with dimensional mountains, birches and fence, and it looks just like our sweet little home (nestled close to the western Mass. Alps, on the shores of Lake Superior). It's truly an icon, representing both the idyllic vision of home we all have and the more realistic pool of aligators we find ourselves in after we own the damned thing.

Let's Get Serious

OK, enough with the shoes and the aging mother, let's get back to Art.

So, here are five works in a series I'm calling Iconic Books. These are constructed pieces with encaustic and mixed media on wooden panels. The top panels look like open books (with some exaggerations) but have no text. The bottom panels are continuations or extensions of the visual ideas used in the top panels. (You may recognize some panels that I had in different configurations.)

These are all 21"H x 12"W x 1.5"D, on two joined wooden panels with black rubber strips and tacks on the sides instead of frames.

Tale of Shadows

Phantom Story

Redacted

Primal Memory

Bound Up

I began this work thinking about the way memory loss takes away content and eventually even removes form, but then I realized that books themselves are becoming artifacts and iconic forms as digital media takes over content. No matter how much easier it is to read on Kindle, nothing will take the place of a real book in the hand - the smell, the feel, all the surfaces of the cover to be explored, and the physical interaction with the pages. This physicality of the book as object can't be duplicated electronically. We're talking dimensionality here, not pixels.

LOL and/or Really?

I couldn't resist posting these beyond belief images of shoes from a blog article in today's NY Times. A few weeks ago, when I saw some Bill Cunningham photos of actual women wearing heel-less shoes on the street, I thought that was the ultimate limit, but today's photos prove me wrong. Fashion-smashion.

Remind you of someone?

The NY Times article has some interesting excerpts from various writers, historians and shoe experts who comment on women's shoes, damage done to women's bodies by shoes (bunions and tendonitis anyone?) and why women's feet seem to be the locus of so much focus. Talk about yer foot fetish!

Home At Last

Finally the long struggle to cope with my mother's declining ability to care for herself has come to some resolution. This past Monday we moved my mother to a nursing home in Amherst, about a half-hour drive from where we live. All told, it took six or eight months to get the move accomplished. First, and still continuing, the struggle was with my mother, who failed to see the necessity of a move to a nursing home. Secondly, I worked very hard, and seemingly without progress, to find a home that I liked and to comply with all the paperwork required.

Eleanor's new home.

So this is not to say that I am now without stress over my mother's condition, but I hope that the stress eating diminishes somewhat since she's now in a safe place, and I can lose the 30 or so pounds I gained during the lead-up period. There's nothing like soothing yourself with comfort foods except they do not go down without a trace - unfortunately.

All I have left to do (hah!) is to go to the apartment she's lived in for the past 31 years and clean it out. No problem!

Studio Visit With Myself

I checked in with Joanne Mattera's blog and enjoyed seeing a report of her studio visits to Pam Farrell and Steven Alexander - two of my favorite artists. Looking at studios is always fascinating to me and one of the main reasons for this blog. So I thought I would post a few images from my own studio that I took last Saturday since I am also one of my favorite artists. (Blushing modestly - but if I didn't believe it, why else would I bother?)

I took these photos because I had work hanging on one side of the studio that was all strong color and on the other side were the blacks and browns of the new rubber+encaustic constructions. Working between the two contrasts, I got a color jolt every time I looked up.

The color wall View 1.

Notice the third piece in - a vertical with red on the bottom. You will note that the top is now just brown wood with a spiral mark on it. That is the remains of glue that held a painted panel on it and that just fell off one day. The painted panel (encaustic) was undamaged except for a small chip. Just shows how durable encaustic can be if it's fused correctly. (I was glad to have passed the fall-off test.)

The Color Wall View 2 - the other end of the wall, complete with dying plant and photo area.

Here's the dark side - part 1.

And Dark Side Part 2. Above the piece at the right is a photo of great looking sculpture I pulled from a magazine. It's the same color as my piece but has an interesting shape.

This is a closeup of my worktable with one of the Subliminal pieces in progress. It all makes a wonderful mess - but that's what a studio's for, right? Oh, yes, a mess in service to a higher purpose.

Thinking about the subliminal

Allow me to present the latest two pieces in my rubber+encaustic series. They are "Subliminal" and "More Subliminal." The first piece has things (my secrets) embedded in poured encaustic, then painted with oil paint and oil stick.

Subliminal, encaustic, rubber, tacks, patinated copper, oilstick, mixed media, 20" x 16".


More Subliminal, encaustic, rubber, tacks, patinated copper, oilstick, mixed media, 20" x 16".



The second piece has a more shallow center section because the embedded objects are smaller (beads - thanks to Binnie Birstein's donation).



Both pieces are covered with rubber on the sides, the same way I have treated most of the work in this series.

You can also see that the rubber protrudes and forms a channel for the encaustic section in the center.

As far as the title(s) go, I had been considering calling these pieces "Underfoot", but I think "Subliminal" is more to the point. I didn't want to refer to the literal landscape although this work (especially the first piece) looks like rocks or pebbles. "Subliminal" means:

"existing or operating below the threshold of consciousness; being or employing stimuli insufficiently intense to produce a discrete sensation but often being or designed to be intense enough to influence the mental processes or the behavior of the individual: a subliminal stimulus; subliminal advertising."

(according to dictionary.com). So you could understand this work to refer to those things that we don't really observe but just feel the effects of. I guess this would be comparable to those things in the physical landscape that we take for granted and don't look at closely, such as rocks or pebbles underfoot.

I have made a conscious effort in the rubber+encaustic series to give the work a vertical orientation, meaning that they refer to the body (versus a horizontal orientation referring to the landscape). My focus is on the body these days as I am paying closer attention to the way it breaks down and changes with age. Such changes are usually subliminal until one day we wake up and realize that old age is upon us. But at least we're waking up.

African Heritage

"Versatility", 2006, a work by el Anatsui, purchased by the Fowler Museum at UCLA in 2007.

Recently I realized how important textiles, or at least a "textile sensibility" (thanks, Daniella Woolf), are to me in my artmaking. Why this news flash suddenly came to me after all these years, I can't quite explain, but I think it has to do with resurrecting my work from the '90s that used strips of a material (notice I didn't say cloth) to cover wooden panels. I am now working in this way again, mostly using rubber strips and encausticated book pages (my new term) as my materials of choice.

"Twins", a work I made in the mid 1990s, of mixed and found media, about 13"H x 20"W.

This realization also came from looking at the work of el Anatsui, a Ghanaian sculptor who has lived in Nigeria for nearly 30 years. I have written about him before here and included some photos of his fabulous work. His best-known work is made with recycled bottle caps and colored aluminum wrappings from bottles of wine and other alcoholic drinks. The metal pieces are joined together with wire to form walls of great physical presence. They are sculptural but also similar to textiles.

In my search for more information about him and his work, I recently came across a great web link on a blog written by Robyn Gordon, a sculptor in South Africa, who carves wooden totems and panels (thanks to Leslie Avon Miller for Robyn's link). Robyn posted the link to a show called "Gawu" of el Anatsui's work. Gawu was organized by the Arts Council of Wales and the Oriel Mostyn Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in Llandudno, Wales. This show traveled to the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and the Fowler has put up the website that not only shows more of el Anatsui's work in one place than I have ever been able to find but that also has three podcasts of him speaking about particular works.

"Adinkra Sasa", 2003, by el Anatsui, aluminum, copper wire, cloth.

A Little Background and Some Definitions

Adinkra is a system of graphic symbols or iconic marks developed by the Asante people of West Africa. Originally the marks were used on funerary clothes and conveyed attributes of the deceased, cultural and philosophical meanings and religious beliefs. Stamps of the symbols were carved out of calabash rinds and charged with an ink made from bark and iron slag. Repeating, gridded patterns were stamped onto textiles originally woven locally and later imported. New symbols are still being created, although today, from what I could learn, most of the adinkra cloth is silk screened rather than stamped by hand.

According to the Fowler Museum site, "Sasa" can be defined as "patchwork", and Anatsui means this artwork to refer to the carving up of Africa into a patchwork by Europeans.

Adinkra cloth made between 1930 and 1950 offered for sale online.






Contemporary silkscreened adinkra cloth showing a much more graphic composition and some of the new symbols.



Meaning in Anatsui's Work

Anatsui's work, as you will read and hear if you go to the Fowler Museum site, has many complicated meanings for him that refer to the trashing and recycling of materials - many of the materials having to do with food and drink - and to the effects of "globalization, consumerism, waste and the transience of people's lives in West Africa and beyond."



Kente Cloth

Perhaps the most well-known African woven cloth is kente, which is woven (by men) on narrow horiontal treadle looms by the Asante people of Ghana and the Ewe people of Ghana and Togo. Strips of the cloth are sewn together to make a wider fabric. Anatsui's father and brothers wove kente in more muted colors used by the Ewe peoples, and this apparently influenced his creation of the metallic cloths that seem to be woven from the castoff aluminum wrappings he uses.

Example of kente cloth

Anatsui is quoted as saying, "I have discovered only much later . . . that cloth has been a recurring theme or leitmotif, and it is featured in so many dimensions."

You see that Anatsui and I have the realization of cloth's importance in common. I think the reason that it takes so long to come to this awareness is that cloth is so ubiquitous. Its importance doesn't quite dawn on us when its use is not addressed directly as in sewing, weaving, dyeing, etc. In my own case, I did quite a bit of resist dyeing at Mass. College of Art so I don't have this excuse, but it has taken me all this time to make the extension of thought and finally utter the DUH, or is it D'OH.