The delicious burdens

Phew. My new series is done, and I even found a title for it: Fathom.

Have I mentioned how much I haaaate creating arty talk to go with my work, i.e., an artist statement? Oh, yes, I have.

But it is a necessary evil, so here for your amusement (and hopefully a little insight into what I’m thinking) is my statement for this series.

In this new series, Fathom, I am veering away from my usual materials to create these almost sculptural pieces that visually unveil what lies beneath the tangible surface of the world around and between us. Navigating the layers of this world on a delicate geometry of thread are silhouettes in a style ubiquitous in advertising but with their false perfection removed, resulting in figures that hover somewhere between ordinary life and archetype, leaving the viewer to determine their role.

I’m not completely unhappy with that paragraph, which is a victory for me.

Then I signed and got wires on these three Commence pieces.

They’re all heading up to Point Reyes on Monday for Art Contemporary Marin’s Bay Area Painting exhibition. It will be up through the month of August.

That largest piece actually had one silhouette missing (argh) so I went over to Pagoda this week and got that one cut as well as testing out some skinnier wooden silhouettes.

Can you see how that top panel is thinner? I am interested in mixing the two depths, especially in my works on paper.

This week, in moments of exhaustion and anxiety, I found myself reaching for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It always helps, and what better can you say of any creation than that? It leaves me less alone than it found me.

Anyway, I will leave you with this that I rediscovered from his Song of the Open Road:

Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing…

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill’d with them; and I will fill them in return.)

Here’s to all of us with our old delicious burdens. Us as individuals and as a nation. And here’s to the many ways we find to be less alone with them.