well, the birthday celebrations have pretty much ended at this point, but it was a fun coupla weeks. my actual birthday was on the 11th, but i celebrated all weekend before with friends and good food and then took a quick 4-day trip the following weekend up to atlanta to visit more friends. we had such a great visit hanging out, eating yummy meals, playing with pets and seeing lots of folk art in and around columbus, georgia and all kinds of art at the high museum in atlanta. you can see my reports on social media about all of that but it was exactly what i needed – relaxing, connecting and inspiring.
i came home feeling a lot of energy to revisit my folk art roots. for the past decade almost i’ve been so drawn to explore abstract painting but even after all the classes i’ve taken and all the exercises and practicing, i feel like i still don’t know what i’m doing and am not that much further along in having a defined abstract style. but i’ve learned a lot along the way, especially when it comes to techniques and media, and i haven’t given up. i’ve realized i’m very drawn to mixed media especially involving collage but also i love minimalism. and that it’s ok to have a lot of varied tastes, even within the realm of abstract painting.
i have been thinking about my artistic identity quite a bit lately – largely because of my ongoing project of updating this website – and i’ve struggled to identify as an “abstract” artist or painter, even though that’s what i’ve been focusing on for years now. seeing all that folk art in columbus and atlanta made me remember how much i love painting in that style because there are few expectations about style and technique, it’s more immediate and intuitive to me, and i can easily convey a message or thought through the use of words and symbols. (i guess i could do all these things in a more abstract painting style but i haven’t figured out how yet.)
one of my favorite folk art motifs is eyeballs. i love eyeballs. i love eyeballs so much i used them as a theme for my mardi gras costume when our group theme was bauhaus art! (i loved that headpiece i made out of a top hat and giant styrofoam ball!) anyways, i’ve lately been kinda down on myself that i haven’t been making more art that addresses this crazy authoritarian moment in time we are living in here in the U.S. i haven’t made any new t-shirt designs or stickers because i’ve been so caught up in my exploration of abstract painting and the classes i’ve been taking. so something that kept crossing my mind last weekend was the use of the eyeball motif with the words “wake up!” maybe it’s cuz i feel like i personally need to see that but also in general i do think a lot of folks in the U.S. have just been so overwhelmed with all the awful that they are tuned out, on autopilot or in denial or just working hard to get through each day and not able to do much else… and yes, some are closing their eyes to it all, for whatever reasons. so the imagery of the wide open eyeball staring at the viewer screaming WAKE UP! is appealing to me.
i was sketching it out in my mind the whole weekend i was away and then as soon as i got back home and had time to hit the studio, i started playing around with it. my friends in atlanta, diane and dillon, generously gifted a bunch of their no-longer-wanted art supplies to me including a bunch of cheap canvases. a few of them are these adorable 4″x4″ canvas boards – i’ve never worked on anything smaller than 6″x6″ but i do love that size. so i started playing around with them first:
they aren’t perfect but with folk art it really doesn’t matter. i like the eyeball better on the blue one but like the eyelashes on the red one. at first i just had the words WAKE UP but then i didn’t like the blank spaces around the word UP and decided to fill that in with some more emphatic words. i like it better now. might even work this up as a block print or silkscreen or even better, stickers.
i’ve also finished a few 6″x6″ on quarter inch plywood. the same layout didn’t really work on the slightly larger size so i changed the wording but the sentiment is the same.
might see how working on more rectangular shaped surfaces works cuz squares are so confining. and i’m thinking i might try some eyeballs on some of the 12″x12″ canvases too.
stay tuned to see what else i come up with.