21 March 2008

friends and grandmothers


Thanks to a dear friend, new folks are being lured here. If you’re looking for my artwork, here’s the link. There’s a contact link there too if you want to e-mail me, get the documentary or see work in the galleries…

Meanwhile, I am still doing anything but the Pure Work. Infrequent studio time has me chipping away at new things but more often than not just pulling together other pieces for more upcoming shows. I have to remember that so much Other Work gets done in these in-between times, as I’m always reading, drawing, and thinking aloud amongst good people. If only I could stop fretting and know that all these other experiences are in the bloodstream and feeding my higher Art brain. Rebecca Solnit has good things to say about just this, in A Field Guide to Getting Lost (which I’m reading for the third time now…)

Art history in particular is often cast as an almost biblical lineage, a long line of begats in which painters descend purely from painters. Just as the purely patrilineal Old Testament genealogies leave out the mothers and even the fathers of the mothers, so these tidy stories leave out all the sources and inspirations that come from other media and other encounters, from poems, dreams, politics, doubts, the childhood experience, a sense of place, leave out the fact that history is made more of crossroads, branchings and tangles than straight lines. These other sources I called the grandmothers.