“Life Will Find A Way” 16″x20″ Silk on linen, cotton and metallic floss and thread
“Life breaks free, it expands to new territories, and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is.. Life will find a way.” Jurassic Park
Archival inks print on Canon Matt Photo Paper 8.5″x11″
I feel like “A Running Woman With Her Hair On Fire” And it feels GOOD! Thinking about aging and death inspires me to be creative every day!
Silk on silk with metallic and hemp thread and floss & glass beads. 30”x30”
This piece was created specifically for the “New Domestics: East Coast/West Coast” exhibition at the J. Robert & Barbara A. Hillier College of Architecture and Design Gallery at NJIT in Newark, NJ, October7- November 17, 2019.
For the forty years Mark and I have shared a life, we have always been gardeners. Over time our “roles” developed with our interests. Thus he is a master pruner and periodically I sort of just throw a variety of seeds into the ground, or pick and plant perennials. His work is always neat, precise and praise worthy, mine is, shall we say, interesting. A note about our past: when I met Mark he had 500, yes, 500 succulents or cacti in his apartment bedroom. As someone who was pursuing a degree in Land Use Planning, I found this was a hugely attractive hobby. And I still care for about 10 of these plants that have managed to make the 40 year journey with us.
Living in the northeast US, I get to truly love autumn! I love the smells, the colors, the cool temperatures and the winds that blow over the hill we live on. I especially the love the sounds of leaves crunching under foot. This piece is based on that sound.
Regarding the black circles, my synesthesia inspired art is always a dance between my mental visual images of sound, and my interior self-talk emotional, or cognitive understanding of what I am experiencing. Perhaps it is because I am a Gemini that I hold these two tensions, or maybe all syns do this. When I make art, I don’t worry that it is a “photo” of exactly what I “see”/hear, but it is usually some variation of the remembered pattern of what that sound looks like. I just take the trip, create and not worry about the outcome. As I reflect, I suspect the black circles reference the cyclical seasons, the oncoming apparent death of flowering plants and trees, and the unknowable “Mystery” of death.
Archival inks, Canson Aquarelle Rag paper 8″x10″
8.5″x11 Canson Aquarelle Rag, archival inks
I meditate on my own future, these minutes, hours and hopefully years before death, and I try to see what I might yet create. “The future”, as we have often said in my family, “is open”. Unshaped and as yet, unimagined.
I just returned from an hour of sitting in the sun at our local lake beach, visiting with neighbors, enjoying the play of oh so many 6 to 10 year olds, and just getting toooooo hot. Came into my wonderfully air conditioned home, got a glass of cold water with ice cubes and started to draw and voila………………………………
