Although my college degree is in architecture, I have been an artist most of my professional life: twenty-five years now. Resilience is the key to a career in the arts: I have exhibited at numerous high-end galleries, designed textiles for world-wide distribution, and even in the education area have shifted from college to museum to arts-in-the-schools work.
There are two things I particularly love about art. One thing is getting lost making it: just being present. The other thing is finding a deeper meaning: beginning a painting with one layer of visual metaphor, but seeing another layer emerge through intuition that brings a greater insight into my life. Painting for me is an unfolding of the soul.
Art is important because it is a view into our inner lives. We live in a complex time, and yet as a society, we eschew complexity! It is a great irony: we are in a rush, and we tend to polarize issues, and want things delivered to us in simplified sound-bites. Well, nothing is truly that simple, is it? Art slows us down, art asks us to hold complexity, nuance, ambiguity, sometimes just to embrace a state of questioning, sometimes to shake us up and tell us to ask more questions! Art is an inherent part of what it means to be human. Our current civilization often degrades art to nothing more than a commodity, but at its best art still has the potential to inspire and make us all our best selves.
Apart from defining our humanness, Art education is critical because it gives people the training to think in an intuitive modality. There are several modes of thinking, and one needs to learn all of them to avoid becoming locked into one or two modes of thought. Most schooling focuses on analytical thought, which certainly has its applications. But in life there are situations where the creative thought processes encountered in art-making are invaluable, where analysis is sluggish. In art education, I believe in grappling with vision immediately, and learning technique as the vision demands.
My work exists in the shadowland between technique and vision, emotion and intellect, the physical realm and the spiritual one. My inspirations are auditory, tactile, and introspective as well as visual. A high school student recently interviewed me, and said she had trouble coming up with new ideas for paintings. Almost all my paintings for the past twenty years have had the same idea: the landscape as a metaphor for the inner life. Fall represents emotional release and the realization that what is beautiful does not always last; clouds represent the possibility for swift transformation; night represents intuition, enchantment and intimacy. One idea holds a lifetime of exploration.
The future holds paintings of birds as cosmic messengers and a diptych landscape of clouds and cloud shadows. My ongoing education work is a study of the way people create art throughout their lives. Of particular interest A) the impact new research on neuroplasticity will bring to bear on this subject and B) creativity of pre-school children.
West End Gallery, 12 West Market St., Corning will showcase my work in December.
