Hail the Arrival of Austin's False Spring!

Today marks the beginning of the last week of January, 2015, and the beginning of Austin's false spring.  Temperatures daily are in the 70s by mid-afternoon, and the citizens of this fair city are trading their sweaters for shorts, relieved to be rid (temporarily, at least) of the cold, dank conditions we've endured for the last two months.  The warmer weather creates a longing for the real spring, and reminds me that it is not far away.

Last November, I completed a commissioned painting of last year's first sign of the season.  I call this painting Wisteria - Harbinger of Spring.  Wisteria, like flowering quince, announces the arrival of the vernal equinox.  This particular wisteria makes its home just north of Austin, on the outskirts of Leander.  The wisteria is glorious, but my favorite part of this painting is the blue tree in the woods behind the cabin, by the creek.  Not many people can say they own a blue tree!  The tree is actually a blue-grey, seen here through the whimsical eye of the artist.

Celebrate with me the anticipation of the season of rebirth.

It's All About Lines...

Working in a series is a cerebral endeavor that connects thought with experiences and evolves into an exercise in visual and verbal association.  When I worked on my Memories series, I went back in time to remember significant vignettes of my life, as I wanted to paint the sensory image as well as its continued impact on my life.  It was an enlightening experience.  After finishing a series, I will often reflect on its purpose and what I enjoyed about the process.  There is often a co-relationship between a prior work and how I choose to move forward in another series.  Painting in sequence is a means of focusing the mind, as well as the heart and the hand.  

I think I am at an age where looking backward occurs more frequently.  Looking back was certainly at the center of Memories, and this concept is present in the new series, It's All About Lines.

This particular group of paintings was inspired by the perceivable motion of Freedom, a memory painting celebrating my blue Schwinn bike and the wind in my hair when I rode it around Groves.  I call this series It's All About Lines to represent the many ways lines occur in our lives.  

Begin Again was the first in the series, and went through a number of visual changes as I decided on the direction the painting would take.  It has rich, deep hues, thinly layered, that can be seen by the viewer in person more readily than in its photograph.  Layer upon thin layer, it is tonal, requiring white light to release its color nuance.  The gold signifies illuminated thoughts and ideas, as if a person was waking from a place of misconception and illusion to a point of acute awareness, an epiphany of enlightenment.  I've always found a state of illuminated wisdom is a great place to begin again.

I often heard, as a child, that the lines in our hands foretold our life's experience in health and longevity.  The second painting, Life Line, plays with that concept, along with the visual image of DNA seen as a ribbon twisting and interwoven, holding the secrets of our unique genetic code.  

As a child, I was fascinated by the thought of a person's life line representing the individual's vitality and length of life, but more importantly to my romantic nature was the endless possibility of the hand's heart line.  It is thought that this line indicates the person's ability to give and receive affection.  This third painting, Heart Line, reflects a nest of sorts, where the visual heart rests, protected and secure.

The fourth painting, Moon Waves, celebrates having confidence, finding the authentic self within, and the strength and courage needed to step out of the secure nest, to speak up, to be who we are.  There is a quote that I love - Don't worry if you're making waves simply by being yourself, the moon does it all the time  (Scott Stable).  We need to be true to ourselves, authentic in what we have to say and do, and like the moon, make waves.

A week or so ago, there was a hurricane that made landfall on Mexico's Baja Peninsula, with its effects reaching as far as central Texas.  Growing up on the upper Texas Gulf coast, hurricanes and various tropical storms were a part of life.  In Squall Line, I chose a cool palette and created the turmoil and energy with bright yellow.  The rain and howling wind brought flooding water into our creeks and lakes, overflowing into our streets.  The energy released outside was matched within the confines of my work life as dramas played out with a familiar cast.  In some respects, I was secure in the calm eye of the storm while the squall swirled around me.  It is not easy to leave the negative energy as it seeps into our inner being just as the dampness begins to close the cracks in the dry earth.  Every squall line has outer bands of thunderstorms that form ahead of the cold front.  This is true in working relationships as well.

Right along with recognizing the root cause of the storm is realizing that there are lines of demarcation that, although they are not clearly defined, we see them in stark reality for the truth that they are for us individually.  In my sixth painting in this series, Line in the Sand depicts the subtlety of nuanced color.  When we step back, the line is drawn just as clearly as the line William B. Travis drew in the dirt at the Alamo, long years ago.  The Alamo's defenders stepped over the line consciously, committing to what they believed, and refusing in any way to be a part of what might have been the easy path.

Last but not least in this series, It's All About Lines, is the painting Coloring Outside the Lines.  I have worked at my individual expression since I lifted my first Crayola at the age of 4.  I was encouraged at the age of 7 to throw away my coloring book, to draw and express myself. Therefore, staying within the lines holds little appeal for me.  Don Miguel Ruiz, in The Four Agreements, takes it further when he encourages us to toss out all that we have been told.  We have been so inculcated with rules, standards, decorum and beliefs that it is no wonder we have taken it in and that it became our rules of engagement.  Until we closely examine and analyze the effects of these constraints, we are basically committing to living in the prison of standards prescribed for us.  We owe it to ourselves to do this.  Lines are as we draw them, and can be a circle, a never-ending line, symbolic of infinity, where the possibilities are without end.

A Meditation on Memories

This February, as I have done for the past 10 years or so, I picked a theme of visual meditation to explore as my Lenten introspection.  I was a bit slow in developing the vignettes with their individual images for this endeavor, as I stayed open and responding to various stimuli that jogged significant memories. Therefore, this journey took longer than the 40 days of Lent, and longer than the additional 50 days from Easter to Pentecost.  I have often said, ‘the wine in its own time’ and applied it to this visual meditation process.   It is July 7 and my visual meditation journey is completed.  Each of the paintings in this series reflects a specific memory and has an ethereal quality, as if time stood still for me to capture the moment and preserve it for eternity.

When I started this last February, it was loosely thought through and began with early memories.  In this blog post I will attempt to tell you why I chose to depict a particular memory, what it meant then and why I remember it as special, as well as the significance it has in my life today.

Let me begin with a memory from first grade.  My teacher, Mrs. Hartzell, was a jolly young woman who made me feel at home and comfortable in my classroom.  She was a loving and caring person, and as her name might imply, had a special affinity for Valentine’s Day.  She made the most beautiful heart box and covered it with pink crepe paper.  It was my first encounter with this medium, and in her hands, I thought it was magical.  She then made lighter pink and rose colored roses out of the paper, complete with stems and leaves.  They were exquisite.  She completed the box on the last day of January so our classroom Valentine box would be ready to receive our many cards beginning the next day.  I fell in love with hearts, roses and all the romantic notions that Valentine’s Day holds.  It is still one of my favorite holidays.    The Valentine box is captured in a dream-like state, not so much as I remember its details but at its caring core.  I call it Romance, with the memory of the excitement and anticipation the holiday held at its roots.

In second grade, the local steel workers went on strike and the new elementary school remained unfinished, so my class was going to be held in the Sunday school rooms of First Baptist Church of Groves.  It was around the corner and 3 blocks down on Grant Avenue.  Becky Gonsoulin (Bell), who was to become my lifetime best friend, lived on Grant Avenue and walked to Parochial school at ICS.  She was often ahead of me, walking with her brother and sister.  I had an opportunity to observe her walking and was quite fascinated with the fact that she wore a hat.  I wore a hat on Sunday but I did not wear one to school.  Her hat was navy blue and had white and yellow flowers across its brim.  The net was knotted in the back of the hat and it swung back and forth as she walked along.  She was a friend of a girl in my Blue Bird Troop and I had met her at Pam’s birthday party but I did not know her then.  I call this painting of Becky’s blue hat Fascination, to celebrate the curiosity that a child wearing a hat to school held for me at the age of 7.

School brought to the forefront a problem with my eyes.  I had ‘lazy eye’ or a muscle imbalance from birth that became more noticeable as I grew, causing my left eye to grow tired when focusing on a subject, i.e.: a blackboard, words in a book, or flash cards, etc.   When my eye grew tired, it would literally wander off in another direction, causing my right eye to do all the work of seeing, learning and guiding.  Over time, the vision in my left eye had weakened to the point that my doctor was concerned that I would literally loose the vision in it. By third grade, I was very cognizant of the problem and worked mightily to learn to read.  My mother had placed me with a reading expert, Mrs. McMahan, as my third grade teacher. I’m not sure what she did or how she did it, but I found my focus and learned to read, and read well.  About that same time, I discovered the game of Jacks!  It was a game of concentration and coordination and helped me focus.  Over time, I became pretty proficient at Jacks, which was a triumph of mind over matter.    Depicted here is the magic circle where I played Jacks under the sheltering Cedar trees, next to the old Groves Elementary.  This painting honors concentration and determination and is called Focus.

During the summer between third and fourth grade, I had the surgical procedure to correct the lazy eye.  Dr. Keith tightened the muscles in both eyes so that I could focus and continue to read and generally get on with life.  At that time metal shoe skates were the rage and I, like most soon-to-be 9 year olds, wanted a pair.  There was only one problem – due to my eye surgery, my summer was spent healing, applying warm compresses and doing eye exercises.  I was not allowed to get overheated, and most summer fun in the form of running, swimming…or skating… was denied.  I was given the skates because I longed for them, but I was not allowed to use them.  By the time my eyes had recovered and I could skate again, my feet had grown and the skates no longer fit.  My skate painting is called Patience, and celebrates the items we long for in life but for whatever reason are denied.

About this same time, I developed a new relationship with glasses and they became my best friends. Thank goodness, my mother let me pick them out, and of course I chose some of the most glitzy, over-decorated frames on the planet. That didn't matter to me, I loved them!  Early on I had been prescribed glasses in first grade but hated their round gold frames and did not wear them.  They were created to reduce my eye strain and not much else.  They certainly would not have cured my lazy eye…so I carried them around in my satchel but did not wear them.  This painting celebrates the somewhat out-of-focus view that I had of the world early in my life.  Seeing what I wanted to see and leaving the rest behind created a rose-colored view that I have retained to be pulled up on occasion.  I have learned to face the dragon of reality square in the face, but put on my rosy glasses to see the goodness that abounds if we take the time to look. This painting is called Clarity.

I love color.  I always have, and most likely always will.  That is a fact.  I love how Crayolas look, how they smell and how they feel in my hand.   When I was young, a Crayola Box of 64 represented all the luscious color in my world and oh, how I longed to own that assortment!  The next painting, Choices, represents those colors and all the time that I have spent making art with them.  Crayolas still mean a great deal to me, as that is the media I chose so long ago to begin my artist’s journey.   I keep a pristine box of them in my studio to remind me of all the possibilities, then…and now.

We just celebrated the Fourth of July, America’s birthday.  When I think of that holiday, I am reminded that the figs are ripe and need to be picked.  I spent many an early Independence Day on a ladder in the top of my dad’s tallest fig tree picking figs.  I did not care for them but my mom was a mother who canned and preserved fruit for winter cooking and baking.  Figs were her favorite!  She loved them but did not like to pick them because it was an itchy, scratchy job…and besides, she had her minions to do it for her.  I call this painting Itchy to celebrate the tradition and time spent with my dad climbing around in the fig trees on Jefferson Street.  The irony is today, I have a fig tree and I treasure that itchy memory.

When I was in fifth grade I received a brand new blue Schwinn bicycle for my summer birthday, to my utter delight.  I call this painting Freedom, as it celebrates the feeling of riding wherever I wanted to in Groves with the wind in my hair and a sense of true happiness in my heart.  Those wheels opened up my world and let me see how others lived and played in our little town.  Today, I’ve traded in my bike for a chili-pepper red hardtop Miata but the feeling is the same…with wind in my hair and such a sense of well-being filling my heart and soul.  As the Suzy Bogguss song 'Give me some wheels' goes, “If I can’t have wings, then give me wheels and a man who will let me drive!”

Music has always played an important part in my life and when I am happy, I sing...off-key and a bit flat, but making a joyful noise all the same!  I sang, ‘hello, mellow, Jax little darling’ (not knowing or caring one bit that it was from a radio beer commercial) to my dolly because I liked the sound of the words.  I sing today most often in my car where most folks can’t hear me...often to Mark Viator and Susan Maxey on ‘The bottom of the blues’ or ‘If you were a bluebird’, singing along with my car CD player.  I really love music!  I learned to play the flute and managed to qualify for the marching band in junior high and high school.  I still get chill bumps when I hear Sousa’s ‘March grandiose’ or ‘The Stars and Stripes forever’.  I love music…all kinds, and although this painting was inspired by the song ‘Autumn Leaves’.  It was originally a 1945 French tune entitled 'Les feuilles mortes', written by Joseph Kosma and lyrics by Jacques Prevert and whose English lyrics were written by Johnny Mercer and recorded by many singers, including Nat King Cole.  It celebrates the various musical elements of jazz, and the chromatic relationship between music and color as well. I call this painting The Song in my Heart.  It illustrates how music lifts me up.  How fortunate I am to have friends who love music even more than I do, who play, who write and sing for and to me and celebrate the gift that music is, right along with me.

Last, but not least, let me pay homage to what it meant to attend a high school that received a charter from the Cherokee Nation, indigenous to the banks of the Neches River, where our school (called The Reservation) was located.  We had a fight song called ‘Cherokee’.  No one took it lightly, and being allowed to represent the school, our tribe, was an honor.  This spring, Don Dorsey, a friend who was a classmate in high school, was presented an Eagle feather by Native Americans for his work in securing their representation in the Texas Capitol Vietnam Veterans Monument that honors all Texans who served in Vietnam.  There are many alumni of Port Neches - Groves High Scool who carry that same spirit today and fight the good fight for the good of others.  We are older and wiser but each one is A Warrior Still.  We may not all have an Eagle feather encased on our mantel, but we celebrate the brave warrior spirit just the same.

Memories are precious.  These painting meditations cannot do the memories justice. However, when I look at them, I am transported back to a different time when life was simpler and less commercial.  They were good times, filled with special people.  Our memories are a collage of our experiences.  They make us who we are, what we feel and how we choose to live our lives.  I hope you have enjoyed this stroll through some of my most treasured memories, simple and plain.  I have tried to encapsulate the emotions and true joy these memories bring to me through these visually conceptual paintings.  

Present and accounted for...

You may have noticed a drought in my blog posts over the past year;  I, like the rain, went elsewhere.  I had the opportunity to create work for a one woman show that opened last September at HPBC as a part of their neighborhood outreach and celebration of the Arts in the Austin community.  The exhibit was grounded in liturgical music, originally designed as a part of an Austin hosted Choral Conference, hence the name, A Visual Doxology: The Faith and Fabric of our Life.

The exhibit was a collection of works of a universal spiritual nature.  I took my visual intent and assigned a hymn and scripture to each painting.  There were 40 works in the exhibit with some pieces representing my work over the past 10 years and over half of the show recent work from the time period of April – September 2013.   It was not only a spiritual journey for me; it was a trip of enhanced awareness filled with experimentation. 

These are the walls and staircase of the wonderful exhibit space at HPBC and the entrance that greeted visitors to the show.  

Judith Latimer was the curator of the exhibit and I am most grateful for her encouragement and guidance.  

This photograph was taken of me in a rather saintly pose (I honestly didn’t know this was possible!) as I did a walking tour for a group of visitors.  The painting is The Heart of the Matter and was done in February, 2013, as a part of my visual Lenten meditation, exploring matters of the heart and how we manifest care and affection in our relationships.

Other works from last year’s Lenten meditation in the exhibit were:  I Can See the Goodness of your Heart...

Convergence...

and Heart Shield...

  

Works that were created for the show and inspired by favorite hymns of my childhood were Shelter (hymn:  A Mighty Fortress is our God)...

I Will Lift You Up (hymn: On Eagles Wings)...

Hills of Gilead  (hymn: There is a Balm in Gilead)... 

...and Circle of Life  (hymn: May the Circle be Unbroken)...

  

I used my favorite painting for the cover of my exhibit brochure:  The Face in the Mirror (hymn: Here I am Lord)...  

This work was done using a brayer painting technique that I experimented with during the past year.  

These next three are small, basically intuitive paintings where I respond to the thin layered color and textures that occur when paint is applied randomly with a brayer.  I took this technique and developed a series with the added dimension of using a hand carved linoleum block print.  This process created images similar to that of batik fabric...

I was honored to have C. D. Weaver (Dean Emeritus, Student Life) invite me to exhibit my show at the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in January through mid-March 2014.  The show, which offered the opportunity to exhibit my work in a different environment, was in the main hall and staircase of the McMillian Center during the annual homecoming conference of APTS Alumni.  Here are some photos of the hall, including the staircase, which was a wonderful exhibit space for the tonal paintings that require natural light to allow the darker nuanced color to be discerned... 

An example of these tonal paintings is seen in the Road to Golgotha, from my first Lenten meditation series...

A couple of other favorite paintings from that series are Prayers from the Garden...

...and two of Easter: View from the Tomb...

and View of Calvary...

Since the show closed, I have been working on a series that began as this year's Lenten season visual meditation on Memories.  Selecting a limited number of experiences from my childhood that have bearing on who I am and how I choose to live my life today, I set about making an effort to interpret them in watercolor.  As with many of the paintings in my exhibit, a significant element is my interpretation of feeling and giving that emotion a visual image.  We know and recognize the feeling of joy, of grace, of a blessing and such but do we know what they look like? 

These are my visual expressions of the roots of emotion that accompany those memories.  This first one came from riding my Schwinn bike at the age of 9, wind in my hair, free to explore the paths and byways of Groves, Texas.  I call it Freedom...

This second one conjures the pleasure I anticipated, dreaming about owning a box of 64 Crayolas at age 7.  Choices...

...and the third recalls the concentration required to learn and succeed playing jacks under the sheltering cedars at Groves Elementary as a 8 year old, 3^rd grader.  I call it Focus...

And lastly, the utter disgust I felt at the age of 10 on July 4, picking ripened figs in the humidity of a Texas Gulf Coast Summer day, Sticky (this is a work in progress, so it may evolve further)...

The free expressive style of these watercolors was inspired by the painting Heart Shield, from last year’s series about relationships  (see top of post).

The inspiration for the memory paintings was a result in part of seeing the Irish film I Could Read the Sky, directed by Nichola Bruce, with its wonderful cinematography, staring Irish author Dermot Healey  (click here for a sample from the film).  I was further influenced by my memory of attending pre-primer kindergarten at age of 4 in Groves, as captured in this painting of some years back, No Sanctuary...

Memories are of significant experiences, little vignettes with the power to influence us all the days of our lives.  Some memories are good… some, not so much.  But it is what we do with the lessons of those memories that matters.  All of the experiences that I shared in this blog have met my personal bucket list in some fashion or other, all significant.  But most importantly, I did not miss their lesson. 

Last, but certainly not least, I'd like to express my appreciation to all those who attended one or both of these exhibits.  Your presence was a gift, and I was touched by your comments and support.  Thank you so very much.

Committing to the Creative Process

Master teachers do not teach lessons;  they teach how to work.  They can 'enoble the art of practice'.  Isn't that an encouraging phrase?  As a Saturday's child, I have often felt that I work much better than I play.  I think this is largely because what I love to do most is a form of work.  I am committed to honing my skills, so my work becomes playful.  It also brings me joy, fulfillment and satisfaction, and really does not feel like work at all.

I have often said of students who want to paint and voice that desire, yet lack the commitment to practice daily, that you must work at acquiring skills and face the blank white paper often.  It is a creative tabula rasa.  By doing so, you create a rhythm in your work.  The momentum you build by working regularly creates a different kind of mental work zone where one is able to reach higher, finding a new and greater level of creativity.

Painting is like any other art form.  It takes listening and hearing, and the willingness to work at seeing more clearly.  When I have personally experienced these flashes of insight, I lovingly call them epiphanies.  Any master who can instill the desire to fulfill the art of practice in another person is truly worth their weight in gold.  Somehow, these masters find the words so that the student who is listening can hear.  When I think back on the professors who had the greatest impact on my own professional growth, I can hear their voices.  Robert Levers, saying 'You are resting on your laurels', when I wasn't doing enough to prepare.  I can still hear his voice today telling me to stop and take note, 'Less is more, less is more!'  I understand that today.  I did not at one point in time.  Peter Saul once told me, 'You are complacent, and risk nothing.  It is time to risk!'  I once had a young master teacher say, 'Be brave and be bold!  What do you have to lose?'  These words changed my life!  What, truly, do we have to lose?  Our sense of control?  Our sense of order?  Our sense of what we've been taught is truth?  Those are very false premises, and until we can let them go, we will never achieve our full potential and reach the heights of our abilities.  An ancient Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki, once said, 'There should not be any particular teaching.  Teaching is in the moment...' 

Master teachers are not infallible superheroes.  Master teachers are master teachers because they're good learners, as well as effective communicators, constantly reaching out to build the ultimate skill in another person, who has shown potential and is serious about becoming more skilled.  Master teachers construct and help build on the talent of others.  They know how to do this because they were able to apply it to their own talent and were lucky enough to have had a master somewhere along the way who showed them the path to committed work, to see the benefits of constant self-assessment and re-assessment.

Keeping an open and ever-learning mind is the key to refining and building creative skills.  Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist Way, encourages the individual to take a creative time out for an artist's date with oneself, and go to a new environment and quietly experience a different creative form.  It can be amazing how looking and exploring can open one's mind to new possibilities.  If you have never done it, I heartily recommend it.  It is a simple task and can provide amazing insight and inspire ideas to rapidly form.  On an artist's date, I once visited The Paper Place at Central Market.  I wanted to build a dream bowl.  They had several that were constructed totally of paper products, for display purposes.  I examined them closely, noting details and points of construction.  This is the dream bowl I created as a result, seen from two angles. 

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I call it my Zebra Bowl because it is so difficult to change my stripes (habits)!  The idea behind the dream bowl is to create a place, literally, to put our dreams until we can make them a reality.  I love that concept.  I loved it even more after making my own dream bowl.  I used hand-carved wooden exotic animals, beads and shells, suspended on copper wire, to further enhance the bowl's visual presentation.

A similar idea is to make a creative altar to honor and inspire the creative process that we wish to follow.  I'm sharing my own creative altar for honing my skills as a visual artist.
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There are many things present here that are near and dear to my heart.  It hangs in a place of honor above my drafting table, where I paint most of my work on paper.  It serves as a reminder of my commitment to my own creative process.

I took a similar approach to making a creative square that defined my core values as a visual artist.  It is a three-dimensional collage of paper and found objects,  A very important aspect of this square was the miniature dress form covered with words of artistic inspiration, and also a bumper sticker I found that says 'No limits!', which is my own personal mantra.
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This slogan helps remind me to work every day with an open mind, and to reduce any self-imposed limits on my abilities.  I find it very helpful to be reminded.

There are many ways to affirm our creativity once we have found it.  When we are committed to allowing our creative self to have the freedom to reign and roam freely, we add a wonderful dimension to our life.  Life and living can become richer and much more interesting as we move through our days.  When you commit to a creative life, don't be surprised if others find you more interesting and full of verve.  Who knows where creativity may take you?  It helps me, and it can help you, to remember to be open, to listen, and to keep learning.  Find a mentor who is willing to talk with you and share insights, then set about to do it...every day.  This decision could be the most important first step of the rest of your life, opening new paths of discovery, fulfillment and joy.