Poking Around in the Past

I've been looking through photos, old papers, scrapbooks, recipes and all kinds of stuff that I took from my mother's apartment. I'm in the middle of making a new kind of more sculptural work - sort of an ultra or uber combination of panels, including encaustic paintings, dimensional components and all kinds of things. The idea is to have all the parts relate and make a narrative on the wall without narrating - the viewer reads the components and puts together the narrative which may be just a visual journey or a discovered biographical story.

So much for the heavy explanatory lifting. You'll have to see it when it's done.

Here are some pix of my mother that I'm working with.

Here is Eleanor a few years back looking very calm and happy - on a cruise, I think.

This was a formal portrait by Purdy, a famous Boston commercial photographer, taken when she was in her teens.

And this, of course, is my favorite. The idea of my mother on a horse is so ridiculous and unexpected that I was astonished when I found this (cropped and de-colored by me and Photoshop). This strange event must have happened during one of her many trips in later years. I showed her the photo to see if she could tell me more about it, but all she could say is, "Who's that horse?"

Luxuriating in Color

Before I fell for encaustic, I used to paint with oil. I still love the gooey mess of oil paint and the aphrodisical smell of it. So I dug out the oil paint to rework three paintings to submit them for jurying into the MassArt auction. (See my earlier post about it.)

"Sticky Situation", 24"x24", oil, cold wax and oilstick on panel

"Conjunction", 24"x24", oil, cold wax and oilstick on panel

"Glory Passed", 36"x36", oil, cold wax and oilstick on canvas

I did have fun playing around and obliterating the (failed) work underneath. It was a treat to see red and yellow again after all the somber browns and blacks I've been surrounded with. But it did make me appreciate all over again how easy cleanup is with encaustic.

Which one do you think they should pick?

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.