Silence greater than that of my backyard at home.
I was fishing in Northern Canada at a remote lake with one cabin on it, miles and miles from anywhere. Untamed shorelines, no piers, boats or people.
Shorelines with uprooted twisted bleached trees and roots.
Large rocks that have been left here since the glaciers.
Backgrounds of tall jack pines and reflecting gracefully on the glassy water.
Tall horsetail reeds, and yellow lily pad flowers.
Featured image: Sky, Earth, River
Where is your card? In your artwork? In your life? Do you have a wild card?
I sure have one. It’s my spirit, my unconstrained spirit, which is also my sense of freedom. These exist in the individual. Whenever I am challenged, I bring up my wild card, the individual.
A constrained vision for others is moral. Why? Because constrained visions usually come from others who want to control, govern the individual and put them in order.
Constrained visions for others hold others back and from reaching their full potential.
My unconstrained vision is a moral vision that leads to an individual’s vision for themselves. If an unconstrained vision is held by an individual who wants others to be constrained so that they, the individual, being constrained cannot reach their full potential – this I believe, is simply immoral. They are restricting an individual of their individual rights and their personal sovereign self.
The constrained vision limits high ideals. For me, high ideals include exploration and discovery that lead to better lives for all.
Most of my growing up years were constrained which is why this is so important to me. I wasn’t able to recognize my individuality until later in life. All of my teachers, with the exception of my kindergarten teacher, thought that they knew what was best for me and how to work with me based on their training. They were all wrong and it affected me for most of my growing up years. I just learned differently than most people did. Once I figured this out, learning was a piece of cake.
As individuals, we need to realize that we are all different in many ways. We need to keep that in mind when we think someone is wrong.
Rethinking History -
Recently when considering art exhibitions in which I would submit my work, I came across a call from an art center in California that was inviting “artists to submit artwork for Reimagining History. The idea of reimagining history is not new in the world of art and literature.” This art center went on to give examples of “works of artists such as Robert Colescott, Cindy Sherman, and Enrique Chagoya examining issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and political identity through their visual retelling of iconic images and historical figures. In literature, examples span from Herodotus' The Histories in 440 BC to Tolstoy's War and Peace to the contemporary Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.”
What a grand idea and what an outstanding way to approach history! When I was in graduate school the trend was to rewrite and rethink history. I questioned the idea of rewriting history. It is something I am totally against. Things happen and they are written about. Artwork is created telling the story of what happened and histories are written. Yes, historians have a personal bias when they write. Yes, artists have a personal bias when they create, BUT …. that doesn’t change what happened during a particular time and place. That doesn’t change how individuals at the time depicted the events. Time can’t go backwards just because we wish or factually know or believe that perhaps a history or artwork was done with a particular bias. The only thing that can happen is that we write and create today how we think, know, believe and wish things had happened back then. We can create and write about the difference and move forward in our thinking, writing and creating with these differences in mind. We can’t erase time just because we wish that we could.
In art there is an excellent example of attempts to erase time. Robert Rauschenberg erased a work he owned by de Kooning. It is said that Rauschenberg was making a statement about how the tradition of drawing did not have to be the foundation of a painting. It was also said that Rauschenberg could not appropriate the work of de Kooning. Think about it, once the de Kooning was erased, whose work was it? And now since Rauschenberg and many others of his time made the point that the tradition of drawing did not need to be the foundation of a painting.
I rarely use a drawing as a foundation for a work. And when I think about history and the recent events in our current history that destroyed historical statues in the United States, I told myself, “That is no way to go about protesting how history was written!” I would prefer to think of history, and how it has been written as artists in the past have done, by approaching the past from the present and making a statement of how we can think differently.
My recent works highlight individuals, and how individuals, individuality, and independence does exactly that. My work reexamines and asks others to think about how individuals and the concept of the individual is thought about and I ask others to think differently about the concept of the individual.
Featured image: Your Mind Sings - Listen
Take two things, put them together and create an entirely powerful different thing. That’s how I think about art. I am taking two things and creating an entirely powerful different thing.
