Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Reclamation (February 1st - February 4th)


The Haircut (February 1st - 4th)


This event was very painful for me. I was taken to a relative's house for a haircut. My beautiful shoulder length hair was cut into a "Dorothy Hamill" wedge. I was so traumatized, I sobbed at the end of it. My relative gave me a SuzyQ to make me feel better, as if sugar and carbs would make things better. I lost my identity that day. When I look back at pictures, all of my confidence and self esteem was tied to my hair as evident by my smile and my proud attitude. When my hair was cut, I was often mistaken for a boy. My subsequent pictures show a scowling face or a sad face of a child who does not know who she is anymore. In the lower left hand corner is a representation of a jungle gym. I felt most powerful when I could climb that, my long hair whipping in the wind, and feel like I was the queen of the world.

Fun

Portraits to be loaded.

An Expeller




Untitled


Sunday, February 1, 2009

The Three Judges (January 25th - February 1st)

The three judges represents three people in my life who always judged me. No matter what I did or tried to do, they would comment or disapprove. The three figures in the front are all me. I felt fractured, trying to be what everyone wanted me to be. That is a difficult thing to do.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Thursday, January 22, 2009

The Beginning (January 22)

This is the beginning, where it all starts. It is hard to understand the moment that an event begins or a thought process initiates. Could it be as early as birth? The first time you are held, can you be imprinted so hard that the mark scars you, gradually fading as you grow up but never really becoming invisible?

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Trapped (January 12th - 15th)

The emotions that you suppress for years never go away, they lurk under the surface, waiting for an opportunity to push their way out, exposing you at the most inopportune times. Trapped is the way you hope they stay, just out of reach, simmering but never reaching a boil.

Spew (January 7th - 8th)

Some days, the wrong person says something at the wrong time and you react with a verbal vomit unequal to any snake venom. Enough said.

The Criers (January 1st - 5th)



The Criers are the storytellers. They cry out the news as the mood dictates. They are the half-brothers to the Watchers, less dangerous and more informative. They are the emotions that announce themselves unexpectedly but with great bravado at the worst times. They feed off psychological baggage and use it to make themselves heard.

The Wailers (January 1st - 5th)

The Wailers are those who complain and bemoan their lot in life. They verbally vomit their pitiful existence until it becomes their song. They are also the emotional vampires who suck the life out of those around them.

The Expellers - (December 30th - 31st)




The second series of the Expellers deals with anger, hate and wrath. Each of these masks is expelling toxic packages but they are more dangerous looking, with nails, wire and steel wool. The intent was to give an impression that these packets were as difficult coming up as they were originally to swallow. This purging is much more difficult because we like to hold onto our anger. It helps us survive.

The Expellers (December 28th - 29th)





The Expellers are divided into two series. The first series is about purging the pain, hurt and angst that builds up in life. The faces are expelling tightly wound packages of toxic emotion. The idea is based off of my acupuncturist’s notion that the body cannot rid itself of all toxins so the ones that stay are wrapped up and set aside and become your benign tumors. Only through eliminating the poisonous can we go on to heal.

The Watchers (December 27th-28th)


The Watchers, all four of them, were painted simultaneously. I wanted to have a suite, a group that could stand on their own even though they belonged together.
The Watchers are friends/enemies. They are the ones who keep you in line providing the automatic dialogue in your head that keeps you in check. They are the manifestations of the comments made by others that bounce around your brain and pop up for no reason. Comments like "You will never amount to anything" or "Don't you ever think you are better than anyone else" are safeguarded and perpetuated by The Watchers.
They only receive the title of friend through default. They lived inside your head so long, you do not know what you would do without them.

Happy Holidays and Emotional Overload (December 26th - January 4th)


The Saturday after Christmas was the start day. My refrigerator was stocked with necessities and a pot of coffee provided the caffeinated jump start. I sat down with a prepared board that had glued nude color tissue and coffee grinds on it and began. I was interested in creating a wrinkly skin like texture that I could use to tell a story. I was thinking of animal hides and how Native Americans used them as the base to describe great hunting battles. I wanted that organic, accidental feeling. I did not know what I would paint, I let the textures show me what they wanted to be.
I call this Purge - Madonna and Child. It is about struggling with pain and memories. I wanted it to serve as an exorcism of sorts so I decided to label the emotions that the child was purging. The parental figure has warpaint on because this is a battle of control, of assertion.
This piece took about 10 hours total. It was bursting out of me the minute I started to paint.

Back on Track (November 2008)

It took several sessions with Dr. Great Art to open up and settle into the routine of discussing my thesis project and what I was afraid of revealing, to myself and others. I decided that even though I was putting the pressure on myself to graduate in the Winter, I definitely had to adhere to that schedule, take the plunge and get it done.

I dabbled again, afraid of what might appear. Then I made the decision to take the week off between Christmas and New Year's and create like a fiend as that is the way I create, in solid blocks of time, not short 1-2 hour spurts.

Sooo...I fastened my seat belt and got ready for the ride of my life.

Scream - The Turning Point (October 2008)


After the initial pieces, I began experimenting with glue and coffee grounds on the canvas. I wanted something gritty, something to reflect what I was feeling, what was stirring beneath the surface. I mixed paint, the grounds and glue and began to paint. And when I finished, I was stunned.
Scream.
That was the first title that came to mind and it scared the hell out of me.
This was what I was struggling against, why I did not want to do this. I cannot hide when I create, everything pours out of me without the normal filters, and that frightens me. The pot of emotions that I had successfully kept on a low simmer was threatening to boil over and I had no way to clean it up.
So I went into therapy, the best place to deal with overflowing emotions you did not know you had, but suspect lurked in the dark recesses of your soul. And fortunately, I hit the jackpot with a therapist whose lobby was decorated with abstract expressionist art and whose office had several Alexandra Nechita lithographs. I knew she would be instrumental in my journey and understand that art had to play its role.

The Rules (September 2008) Painting-The Flower Man


The rules I set up for myself seemed straightforward at the time. Here they are, directly from my proposal:

"For my special project, I will explore this methodology by creating thirty pieces of work. The art must be created in accordance with a set of rules that includes not purchasing any supplies, but rather using what is available in my environment and what I can obtain free through friends or on Freecycle. Each piece will be comprised of objects that I have found in the Chicago streets. The object of this exercise is to respond directly to my environment and the pieces and develop art that is more reactive than intellectual. I will photograph the materials I find, photograph the finished piece, and juxtapose them in a book with a rolling commentary. The intention of this collection of art is to strip away the planning and training in art, allow “happy accidents,” and to recover more of the fresh, raw feeling of outsider art. It will also push me to adopt a more creative process and allow for fresher ideas.
The finished product that I submit will be this visual diary with the commentary on what my process was and how I made the decisions I did. The object is to explore my creativity by stripping down to the basics that outsider artists utilize.
The critical paper will be a review of my methodology. It will also be a commentary on what I have discovered during this process. I will be interested in discovering how difficult it will be to create on the fly and still feel proud of the work I submit."

All of that was well and good until I began scouring the streets and alleys of my neighborhood looking for materials to spark my creative juices. Besides two fabulous window panes, I did not find much. Every morning while out with the dog, I would dumpster dive, trying to decide if I really wanted that piece of lumber with the gooey brown stuff on in it that smelled toxic or if I could come back with my car to pick up that wooden desk later. Living in a university neighborhood on the fringes of poorer neighborhoods made my dumpster diving a competitive sport that I did not have the stomach to engage in wholeheartedly.

So, I gave in and went to the mecca of all art students, the art supply store. Or in my case, the downtown Blick Art store. I bought small, cheap canvases and canvas board, resisting the temptation to purchase the 5' by 6' gigantic canvas. Store brand paints and some cheap brushes completed my haul. Since I never worked in acrylics before, I figured I was not really compromising, just reevaluating my options and my deadline.

I brought everything home, converted my dining room into a studio and got everything ready. And there it all sat, for a week.
Mocking me.
Daring me.

Until finally I got the courage to begin dabbling.

I remember the first stroke of the paintbrush. The seal was broken and the blinding white of the canvas was less intimidating with each subsequent flourish. Only one of the first pieces was worth saving - the face on a map.

What was I thinking??

I am in the part time Masters program at the University of Chicago. I always wanted to get a degree from the U of C and I was elated when I was accepted and began classes. I finished all of my courses within three years and went back and forth about what form my thesis should take. At my entrance interview, the dean suggested an artistic special project, but I thought, hell no. Although my undergrad was in art, specifically drawing and photography, I did not want to ever that again. I was content to make an occasional piece of jewelry and shoot vacation photos with my digital camera. No way I was delving back into that world, the tortured artist existence that kept me up nights, praying I would finish my assignments on time.

But then, almost a year ago, something happened to change my mind. I went to the Winter quarter thesis presentations and ran into Linda, a classmate, who had been in several of my classes and who struck me as an amazing person. Her thesis topic was "Not the Person I Was: Memoir as Tool of Recovery and Discovery." I was, in short, bowled over by her effort and the product of her long hours. Knowing her background and that she published a book about her upbringing in a dysfunctional family made me even more proud of her ability to open up and use this program as a stepping stone to reach out to other people. Although she is not aware of it, her special project sparked the idea for my project.

I started to write my thesis proposal, initially thinking that I would write about outsider artists and their journeys. Then it became apparent to me, finally, that writing what had already been debated by critics and historians was not what I needed to do. I needed to paint, to create, to understand. I wanted to capture that rawness, the purity of truth, what I felt that I was missing in my own art. I needed to take the plunge and create again.

My original proposal, with the my rules governing my creative process was accepted and I settled in to begin my journey.

Introduction to this journey

This blog is part of my thesis special project for my Masters of Liberal Arts. I will post the pieces I am working on with a commentary of my process, the challenges and what I learned. At the end of the project, I will have created 30 paintings and hopefully seen an evolution in my art. Perhaps this is a lofty goal, but I am excited nevertheless.

The idea of a blog is to input information daily, but unfortunately, these first pieces were created within such a short time that blogging about them could not be done. So, instead, I will reconstruct my thoughts based on my notes and try to give the truest picture of what was going on at the time they came into existence.

I would like to thank the following people for being so supportive and nonjudgemental during this process - Lori, Amanda, Charlie, Pat, Debbie, Liz, Dr. Great Art and G. I love you all and thank you from the bottom of my heart for your feedback and encouragement. I truly could not do this without you.

Before going further, I think it is important to clarify what I mean when I use the term outsider artist. I am referring to self-taught artists as well as artists who are not part of the social norm, nor the artistic community. These are artists who exist outside of mainstream society either because of mental illness, incarceration or physical isolation.

And we begin...