I was an intern at Los Alamos National Laboratories,
a little mesa town with the largest PhD per capita in the world. I spent my lunch hours outdoors, playing catch with friends. I hit bridges with sledge hammers during the week, and house-sat for a couple who had a fully automated irrigation system with the controls in the master bedroom closet. On one trip to Taos for the project I was on, we had a drag a cow carcass out from under the bridge we were working on.
That summer I sewed my first (and last) quilt, and met Gil, a graduate student who introduced me to painting with oils. This work, Lens, was the first canvas I ever stretched and was my first large-ish work in oil (it’s 24 inches by 34 inches).
The piece is based on a sketch of 5-6 objects, the first one a kidney bean. I started noticing variations on the same form, mathematically called a lens, an elongated ellipse with pointed ends. Gil taught me some techniques for capturing various textures, and I like the way the juxtaposition of things and textures turned out. I gifted most of my early surreal work, but this one has stayed in our collection for over 20 years.
This post has started out a little bit different, because . . . guess what? I’m in my very first juried art show! Whoa.
I haven’t put any of my art out there in decades,
and somehow it feels a lot more vulnerable than a lot of the other “out there” things I do, like sing or play an instrument in public, or give nerdy presentations about things like My Scrummy Family. Even that one time I won a costume contest dressed as a huge tube of toothpaste, well, that didn’t feel as exposed as this does. Many of these paintings and sculptures usually aren’t entirely planned like presentations and song arrangements are. There is a lot of spontenaity and unpredictability with each one, and the pieces rarely feel “done.” Every one starts with a seed of an idea, a sketch, a small spark of inspiration, and makes its way into a more developed art form.
The title piece, Embrace, is a small carving from pine that I finished with watercolor. So while I had a sketch of the concept, the piece of wood I picked (purposefully with a strong grain) determined the depth of each figure. As I pressed the rotary tool into the wood, the dust flew, exposing the shape and variation of the grain below. It was such a neat experience when the variation already in the wood seemed to work with my idea. Sometimes magic happens like that.
The whole body
and all parts of my brain work together when I’m making art, and I especially like using industrial tools, techniques and materials in the fine art context. Making mobiles and kinetic compositions is my favorite, and hopefully I’ll get back to it now that we have more space for a small machine shop. Embrace was made in the machine shop at Rose-Hulman, where the Engineer and I met.
These and a few other works (mostly paintings, maybe a few handknits thrown in) will be with me from noon until 7 PM at this year’s inaugural Ethos Celebration of the Arts in Franklin, this Saturday August 24th on the square. Join us! I’d love to answer your questions or encourage you to let your wild ideas roam until they converge into something beautiful, off the conveyor.