Chicken Art

Back in October 2006 I was at an open studios in a nearby town and one of the artists had done a series of chicken paintings which were very whimsical and colorful. I was very smitten with one particular piece: that of a mama hen with a series of baby chicks stacked on her back to the top of the canvas, but it had already been sold by the time I got there. After talking with the artist, who had painted these pieces intending to donate all the money made from them to Heifer International, it turned out that that painting had been sold to a neighbor of his. He said she loved them all and didn't seem especially attached to that particular one, so he gave me her phone number to see if perhaps she'd agree to take another canvas so I could buy that one. (I spoke with her some time later and she felt the way I did, that this was far and away the best of those works and wouldn't even consider swapping. I didn't blame her one bit, but it was worth the try!) I did end up talking to the artist for a bit about his birds, his art, my own chickens and photos and paintings I have taken and done of them over the years in between more "serious work" and then I left, never giving him another thought.

Flash forward to December 2007 when out of the blue I received a phone call from a man whose name I didn't recognize and had absolutely no idea who he was until he reminded me of that chicken painting he had done of the hen and chicks that I was so fond of. Ahhh! Now I remembered. Turned out that a gallery in a local town was having a large group show of just chicken paintings. A show that turned out, surprisingly, to be one blockbuster of a show, the opening so packed with people that they were lined up down the street to get in. So many people in fact that the owner of the gallery who had flown in from Spain that evening and had arrived late to the opening was not allowed in to his own gallery because it was too full to admit even one more person and was instead forced to wait outside with the crowds until the evening came to a close. Who would have thought that chicken art could be so compelling?

The piece above (Untitled, acrylic on wood, 2007) is a composite of two of my hens, Zelda Pearl and Trixie Bee.

Encaustics II

Another encaustic in the same series, from the same show.

Encaustics I

All the Pretty Broken Glass

David and I got home late this evening and as per habit, he turned on the TV to unwind for a bit, and after scanning through a few channels, he settled on The History Channel (a good choice) and it was midway through a segment of what was probably a really cool show, though we had missed most of it. Normally, I wouldn't have even given the show more than a second's glance, not because I don't enjoy a good documentary (I do), but because the show was nearly over and I hate not seeing anything from the beginning. But this was very interesting and I found myself dropping to the chair, riveted to the screen.

Apparently there is this husband and wife, James and Cynthia Andela, who both hold degrees in engineering and who invented a machine that pulverizes glass. The machine has a series of hammers within its main turbine which is shaped like a long cylinder, and the glass makes its way through this tube starting at one end as bottles and dishes, etc, and comes out the other end smashed to bits to one degree or another. The machine sorts the refuse to remove the garbage and to be sure that like is being demolished with like and is even capable of separating the glass by color as well. Even the inside of the machine was a work of art: the hammers were handmade on a metal lathe that was over seventy years old and was found on a decommissioned warship.

Depending on where the degree of destruction is set on this machine, it can pound the glass into what looks like smooth, colored pebbles or glass so fine it's smoother and softer than beach sand. One woman said she uses the larger glass pebbles as mulch in her gardens because the machine has softened the glass like the ocean makes beach glass from our litter, worn down and smooth to the touch, but colorful and beautiful as it catches the light from the sun. It looked as though the earth had become a kaleidoscope around her flowers. The finer glass is used to sandblast metal objects, and is also used in concrete and even paints, but the larger glass, which is about 3/8 of an inch is amazing to behold.

There were endless shots of huge vats of glass in pebbles no bigger than my fingernail all sorted by color. Vast piles of blues and greens, clear glass and whites with some yellows mixed in, and reds, oranges and browns all mingling together. It was absolutely breathtaking to behold and all I could think was how much I wanted to be there in person to see all those amazing colors making prisms in the light and run my fingers through it all. Depending on the size of the machine, each pulverizer can process between one and twenty tons of glass per hour. Just imagine what that much luminescent glass looks like separated into groups of dazzling color.

This couple have also made a larger glass hammering machine to break down toilets and sinks, as evidenced by the huge piles of milky white porcelain that were shown, and even a machine to pulverize old car windshields (this was not as exciting to me). The toilet chomper though, made me think of how many pieces of everyday porcelain and fine china I have found digging in my gardens, objects broken and no longer useful and buried so long ago here on my property. I am always excited when I find a piece and wonder who the people were who used them, but to see tons of it on TV all made small and smooth was amazing.

The eco-friendly green girl in me is thrilled when I see innovations that allow us to recycle and reuse formerly useless objects, or even garbage, in new and exciting ways, and while I know this glass pulverizer is a purely industrial application, the artist in me is just thrilled to think of all that color, all that light, all that beauty in one place.

The Ugly Side of Beauty

I just finished reading a book about finding the spiritual in the mundane and being fully engaged in life, every moment of every day. No one lives their life soulfully from one moment to the next because, frankly, its impossible to do, and while artists are for the most part the same as everyone else, I do believe that we have a tendency to very often see things from a more soulful perspective than others. It comes with the job. I have frequently said that the reason why I have such a hard time selling my work and seeing it forever go away is because every piece carries in it a tiny piece of my soul, the essence of who I am, and to let that go is difficult at best. But seeing the soul of even everyday objects, seeing the poetry in something generally thought ugly (or not even thought of at all) is a gift for which I am truly thankful.

Paper bags. Utilitarian and plain, yet beautiful all the same. They aren't just brown, but carry woven within them a multitude of colors from the pulp fiber used to create them. Their cheap little hairs poking up and out from their surface, the little ruffle on the bottom edge where they have been glued together and the inexpensive ink that's used to print the shop's name that sits lightly on the surface of the paper, not rich enough to penetrate and seeming to want to keep as much distance as possible between it and the bag itself, as if the ordinariness of the brown paper somehow embarrasses it to be seen there.

Old flyers posted on lamp posts and trees by the residents of a town. Sheets of colored paper flapping in the breeze, their tape and tacks now barely holding them on, faded from the sun and the rain, and contained within them a stranger's hopes and dreams, joys and sorrows. Directions to a party, a yard sale, a lost dog or cat. Have their happiness and sadness, their aspirations and celebrations faded away like their long-past announcements? Or do they still feel the shadow of happiness that party warmed in their hearts? Are they wistful about their prize possessions, sold to strangers on a sunny morning? Has their sorrow yet healed at the pet that has forever disappeared or even better still, are they still reeling from the joy of the pet's miraculous return? Are their feelings as transient as those posters abandoned on public street corners?

Rusty pieces of metal. There's a metal junkyard in my town and it sits on the "bad" side of town, where just about everything is ugly and full of unhappiness: row houses with peeling paint, children without proper yards playing in the streets, noisy traffic, people shouting at each other. But the pyramid of rusty metal that towers behind and high above the fence that surrounds the metal dump calls to me and so I drive by there regularly, watching its metamorphosis from one week to the next. Car parts, tools, fencing, poles and appliances, building materials and the skeletons of old metal furniture that all used to have individual identities but are now all the same shade of sunset orange, all with a previously useful past and now equally forgotten and discarded. It's one of the most beautiful things here in town. The neighbors around it complain about the ugliness of it, but they simply can't see its soul, see the poetry in its existence.

A pile of bones left on a harborside rooftop. Old cigarette packets, ballpoint pens, candy wrappers, stones, bits of tar from the roof itself, shells and bones, all washed clean by the elements and blown by the wind into one corner of the roof where it sits in a canted pile resembling a tiny sand dune comprised of little pieces of garbage transported here and dropped by the many swooping, screeching residents. Now bleached mostly white, but with some small yet startling bursts of color from a scrap of paper or a piece of tin not yet faded to obscurity.

The aisles of a supermarket. A relentless visual attack by a million different products all screaming for absolute attention, a cacophony of color, a symphony of sizes and shapes. Our cupboards at home the bastard children of what the grocery store has to offer our hungry eyes and stomachs. Ever look in someone else's shopping cart as you pass them by? You can usually read a bit of the soul of that person by what they are pushing before them, a story that is sometimes lovely to read and sometimes terribly lonely and sad.

It's important to really see the world we live in, not only its beauty but also its dark underbelly, the side seldom considered pretty or worthy of our attention, because there is just as much soul to be found in a pile of garbage as there is in a Monet at the museum. See the world through an artist's eyes for one day and you'll be surprised what you find. All you need to do is look for it.

Spray Paint

I've discovered that I love spray paint. Good old fashioned cans of spray paint. While I haven't as yet incorporated it into any "serious" work yet, I've found that I'm using it more and more in my journals and in the test pieces I do in preparation for the real stuff, so it's only matter of time before I start to use it in the finished products too.

David suggested I buy an air brushing system because it would be far more versatile, which is true. I would be able to mix my own paints which would give me a virtually limitless range of colors and the numerous nozzle tips would give me greater control over my spraying (though with some "professional" spray paints, there are individual nozzles that can be fitted to the cans). Still there is something very hardcore, very visceral about a plain old can of spray paint in one's hand and making something beautiful with it. There is nothing quite like it, in my opinion. I recently was working on a page in an art journal of mine that was comprised of concentrated watercolor ink, watercolor marker, acrylic paint, oil marker, photographs, paper, and an oil based enamel spray paint that was unbelievably vivid on the page. The only down-side was that it took days for each application of even small amounts of the spray paint to dry enough to add the next layer. Patience is not my strong suit, and even though in the end it all worked out fine, having it take nearly two weeks to lay in the background for just a page in a journal was irksome.

Still, there is nothing like spray paint. Not only do I like to work with it, but I like to look at other people's work with it too. Two of my favorite things go hand in hand in this respect: art made with spray paint and trains. I love to stand by the tracks and watch freight trains from across the country rumble by, each car beautifully painted by an anonymous artist located somewhere between here and there, wherever "there" might be. And while the talent and the abilities vary wildly from graffiti to graffiti and from car to car, every once in a while a boxcar painting will come along that is substantially more articulate and intricate than all the others and I am blown away by the talent that that artist has and I always wish that I could meet the person who made it, or even better still, watch them work, can of spray paint in their hand.

From Bad to Worse To Great

Sometimes things just seem to fall into place after months and months of struggling. I don't know why this is, and I hesitate to question it lest things go south again fast. I have been working on the same damn piece for, literally, months. I think I know what direction it's going in, only to find that what I had in mind can't be done, looks like crap, or simply doesn't fit with the overall story I had in mind when rendering this piece. Then there is the endless time spent learning a new technique. I have been working on hand tinting some vintage photographs and let me tell you, the world of photography must have sat up and rejoiced when color photography was invented, because this is one technique that is not nearly as easy as it looks. Simple? Yes. Easy? Not so much. And time-consuming as hell. So that took time to master and make look effortless since I had never done it before with oils. I have struggled with everything on this piece from the entire background painting down to the tiniest little details.

I had finally started to feel good about it and was making some actual visible progress (look out momentum!) when all that rain that sunk the majority of the midwest last week rolled through here for an afternoon and caused a minor flood that dripped water- I kid you not- only in the ceiling directly above where this piece was laying covered with clear, weighted paper to protect it when I'm not working on it. No where else. So by the time I caught it, there was a puddle of water on the paper, which had leached through to the canvas and on the floor beneath the piece. All told, the pool of water was about the size of my fist. And it was all in one ugly spot on my canvas. There was a small amount of damage to the background in the top middle of the canvas, perhaps the size of a half dollar. Those who have seen it have said that it isn't at all visible to them, but I can clearly see where the paint has been altered. I was so upset, I cried. Angry, frustrated tears. After all this time, when things finally seemed to be falling into place this had to happen. And it sucked.

But most unusually for me, I didn't wallow in my agitation. After my hissy fit I put the piece away and decided that I'd repair the damage when I wasn't so upset and I actually let it go. And the very next day, I went back to work and right off the bat, what I had planned for that day didn't work out, again. Things were going so horribly and I thought to myself, "Maybe this is a sign that I should be in another line of work. I can't seem finish a piece without a major struggle, the elements are now conspiring against me, so maybe I should quit." But instead, I tried something new. Something I didn't want to do, something I thought I wouldn't like. And you know what? It was perfect. I groused about how things were going the entire time I was working and yet it was exactly what had been missing from this piece for months. And when I had finished, even I could see that this was absolutely right. It's lovely and I couldn't be happier. And it worked out so well, in fact, that I haven't once looked at the damage I swore only three days ago had ruined this piece for good. I haven't noticed it, and thus might not even attempt to fix it. And now the piece is close to being finished. And then I can move on to the next piece and with it, all the beautiful torture that creating art entails.

Shaggy Muses

I just finished reading "Shaggy Muses" by Maureen Adams which was a delightful book about the dogs that inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton and Emily Bronte.* But what was truly intriguing was Adams' theory that as artists our dogs serve as witnesses to our creative work. She quotes Jungian analyst Marie Von Franz in regards to the hundreds of creation myths that contain "an active creator and a relatively more passive other, who does little but is still absolutely essential." She goes on to give the example of the Native American myth of Father Raven creating the world while a tiny sparrow whose only job is to ensure that Father Raven isn't completely carried away by the dangers of creativity, watches and acts merely as a witness to the creation.**

This is very true for myself. As an artist I can find myself consumed with the process of creating and all its inherent pitfalls and problems, primary among them the spiraling into an almost hyper frenzy as my creativity peaks. Having my dog with me is a very grounding element. He is calm, quiet, respectful, yet also takes me out of my artistic cycle when I break to play a rousing game of fetch with him, or even just lay on the floor with him connecting with one another in a quiet cuddle and conversation. My dog therefore not only is in my studio silently and stoically watching me as I work, but in simply being a dog and my best friend, is the one who can calm me when my creative fires burn too brightly and can break that cycle with a simple childlike game when my inner core becomes too intense.

I couldn't imagine working without a dog at my side. I couldn't imagine living without a dog at my side. With my dog bearing witness to my work and to my life, it makes my life worth living, my art worth creating, and keeps the essence that is me in near-perfect balance.



* Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton and Emily Bronte, Maureen Adams, Ballantine Books, NY, 2007.

** Creation Myths, Marie-Louise Von Franz, Shambala Publications, Boston, 1988.

When Things Go Terribly Wrong

I try to be fairly consistent when it comes to transferring my art files from my computer to CDs, but sometimes when I'm especially busy I can let the files pile up and up until there are literally hundreds of works that need to be saved and kept safe. I have files of artwork in progress, text, photos I have taken that I either have used or plan to use in my work, completed pieces that have had their final photos taken, even vague ideas that might never reach germination but are kept nonetheless just in case. And it doesn't take very long for things to get pretty ugly in here and before I know it, I'm looking at several hours or more worth of work to make sure all these files, folders and cyber bits & bobs end up exactly where they belong in my filing system. You'd think that being anal as hell would help, and while it does with the finished file system, the getting there can be hell because I simply have so much stuff that I deem essential to my art and won't discard for anything that the transferring of these things can become a very long and torturous process.

And when the works are finally transferred to the appropriate CD and filed under the proper heading, I always, always, always take that disk and take a good long look at everything that I have just put on it to be sure that every photo, every word, every sketch is not compromised but is working and available to be used again. And then, and only then are those files deleted from my computer (which always sends a shiver down my spine- if it weren't for the fact that my computer wouldn't have enough juice to even turn itself on without the occasional deletion of a massive number of files, trust me, I would never, ever delete a thing, just to be on the safe side).

So how on earth did an entire file of trees I have photographed, altered, painted and doted on go missing in its entirety? I have no idea. I remember copying the folder those works were in onto the CD. And I clearly, without a shred of doubt remember putting that disk back into the drive and opening each and every file to be sure those pieces were there and workable. I even remember thinking as I perused the now-transferred pictures, that one particular photograph was perfect for a piece I have been struggling with for weeks. I labeled the CD, I filed the CD, I deleted the original files from my computer secure in the knowledge that my work was now safe in a filing cabinet where it could slumber till needed. Then a few weeks later I decided to pull that disk and open that photograph of that specific tree only to find that not a single file from that disk is anywhere on this planet anymore. And trust me, I looked. And looked. And looked. And then freaked out big time. Where the hell did that CD go? I even in a fit of desperation went through (and I kid you not) every CD I have that has anything even remotely related to trees on it. And then just to be sure, I randomly went through a few dozen more disks with subject matter that has nothing to do with the natural world at all on the off chance that I just might have accidentally transferred that work there by accident that afternoon. And then I went through them all again the next day just in case in my hysteria at having lost dozens of photos that I can never get back again, I might have somehow missed them on a disk, any disk, somewhere. But alas, they're gone for good. I still can't figure out how this could have happened given my regimented and highly psychotic way of making sure that this sort of thing never happens.

So today I went out and shot some photos of some of the trees I had photographed before. The particular photo I was looking for was shot on a very crisp, early winter day and while today was equally lovely with a bright sapphire blue sky, the light was not even remotely the same as those first pictures. Still, if there is a silver lining in this very dirty, shitty cloud, it would be that besides getting some beautiful and very workable shots this afternoon (including some that may even be superior to those taken many months ago), I will be sure to not only double check those CDs before deleting any work, but to triple and quadruple check myself until I am ready to drop. It's a terrible feeling when you realize that you have inadvertently thrown away months and months of work with the single tap of a key and that's one feeling of helplessness I'd rather not experience again.

Where Did All My Talent Go?

Well the rush had to end at some point, didn't it? After weeks of streamrollering through one collage after another and my mind being an endless wellspring of ideas, my imagination has dried up and with it my motivation. It was a good run while it lasted. Suddenly I not only have not a lick of ideas, save for those mediocre ones that I keep trying to make worthwhile to no avail, but I really have very little interest in even working on anything at all. It isn't that my current ideas are particularly bad, it's just that they all seem forced and artificial. I do have a piece that I was working on and which was coming along nicely prior to this creative crash and now I've become somehow physically uncoordinated and clumsy with it, so it has been safely tucked away from any damage I could do to it in my current state and will remain so until I'm back to my old self once more. I know these spells come with the territory of being an artist or a writer or anyone whose job is to create, but they still really suck when they happen. The best thing is to just let it be until the juices start to bubble again, but it's a real bummer while you're waiting to once more feel like yourself, especially when you're currently feeling all fuzzy and lazy and (nearly) completely disinterested in art. I say "nearly" because there are still embers of my creative self in here and they occasionally flair up and I think "this is a great idea" and I start to work on it, only to flounder and stumble over the details, abandon the piece and then ultimately give in to the inertia once again. And the self-doubt that can eat away at you during prolonged periods of block are the worst part of it. That nasty little depressive voice that worms its way insidiously into your psyche and tells you things like: "You have no talent anyways so who are you kidding?", and "All your work is nothing but crap so it doesn't matter if all you do is watch TV all day" and "what if this never ends and you never work again?" and the queen mum of them all "If you were a real artist you wouldn't have to struggle so much." And as awful as it is, I know there isn't a thing I can do to speed this along and bring it to an end, beyond not panicking and giving in to this block and all its ugliness. It's almost an organic thing with a life of its own that needs to run its rotten course until that part of my brain that makes art that's sometimes worth looking at and that frequently buzzes with images of what I'm going to create next wakes up and functions again fluidly and without hindrance.