Wall Art

Why is it that art takes you? It's like a lover sometimes who, with a gentle stroke along an innocuous body part, sends tingles through you and totally changes everything you thought you were doing into something else, or something more. Everyday I go to work. The studio is littered with yesterday's debris, metal cutouts and grinder dust, empty water bottles and sanding discs. I never have enough strength at the end of the day to clean it up and I never, at the beginnning of the day, feel I have the time. There is an ache in my bones, the inevitable metal sliver lodged between a callous and the tender skin on the tip of my finger that nags at me but is too deep to remove with the heavy tools in my studio. I feel the weeks of build and grind in my back, my shoulders, behind my eyes and deep into my sinues. Still, I begin. And I think I am going to do something, turn out a small standing piece because that is what is lacking at the moment and there is little time to fill the demands. I start to move toward the metal, the long strips of four inch that look like tounges sticking out of the mouth of the garage door, licking the stones of the gravel driveway. But I am distracted. There is gentle touch, a tremor, and suddenly I am digging though my scrap pile, shoving plastic bottles and discarded discs out of my way, clearing the rubble to find my tape measure, soap stone, eye protection. Because somehow, I am somewhere else, deep into a new piece of metal wall art, moving round and round, cutting bits here, adding bits there, kicking myself. Now I am another day off my build schedule and one short of the number of small pieces I need to meet the next deadline. There is no order to it, no reason. Still there is the tremor, the beginnings of something new, the sharp points of the form careening like daggers into space and across time. Today, yesterday, there appeared the abstraction of morning, the collison of dream and reality, the sleepy, one-eye-open taking in of the world that was finished this afternoon in red and black and silver. Hardly morning colors, or exactly morning colors. Dawn, promise, harsh reality and caress of sleep, the body stretching before it remembers the aching muscles. I don't know how creativity happens. Its as improbable as a kiss while you are doing the dishes and just as dangerous. Because if the kiss is good enough, the dishes don't get done. And my standing pieces aren't getting done. Its funny how it shifts. The standing pieces are so intuitive, emotional. The wall art is different. First, like the metal sculpture, they are a mood, a feeling, the hint of a memory. Then they shift, my mind is engaged and I am looking at that mood from every angle, trying to capture it from every perspective. In one instance, my favorite position, the piece is sleepy, tender, open. In another, it is sharp, edgy, tensing already against the onslaught of the dogs who need to go out and the email that needs to be answered. Still again, it is spreading, flying, full of inarticulated and out of control promise. This is what I love about the wall art. Its like taking a photograph of a moment from every angle simultaneously so that ultimately, if you take the time to look, you can see the whole thing.

I have thought for years that art should transcend politics. For me, metal sculpture has been about creating a window through which one can view the ideal, or know a moment when time stops. The concept that art should be about ideas immediately relevant to an historical context seems somehow static. And yet, faced daily with the financial news, an unprecedented presidential election, the prospects of global warming and the inevitable transition of my children into young adults, I am thinking that my sculpture needs to be exactly that. I think there is a hunger in the world for something of substance. I know so many people who believe in doing the right thing, who want a greater good, who love with all their hearts, and who stop to watch a sunset. But so much of that kind of thing has been sentimentalized or politicized that we no longer cling to it as a necessity. I think we lack a movement that demands these aspirations from each other, from our leaders and our media, from our educational and governmental institutions on a daily basis. So how does one transform a quest for beauty into a political statement? How does one make the pursuit of the highest attributes of humanity a daily reality? Should I, as a metal sculptor, and should my colleagues in Santa Fe and artists globally start using our art to talk about where we want to go instead of merely commentating on where we are? Can you imagine what an impact we could have?

I was supposed to go to a panel discussion tonight on the use of the feminine in art. I didn't go. My excuse was exhaustion. But really, I didn't go because I didn't like the subject. Even though I am a woman and a metal sculptor living in Santa Fe, I have never been able to identify myself as a "woman" artist. Point of fact, I have never made a vessel that is a metaphor for the womb. Getting involved in the issues surrounding women in the arts seemed a convenient refuge for not being able to effectively compete in the real art world. Yet because I am a woman, people question the fact that I do my own fabrication. They offer to help me lift the works that I lift easily on my own. They ask to feel my hands and inspect them carefully when I let them. Direct metal sculpture is apparently something not a lot of women do.
I was thinking about this dichotomy as I cleaned up the kitchen, took the trash out, fed the horses and switched the laundry. How could I not embrace the feminine in art? It occured to me that perhaps I was thinking about the subject all wrong and suddenly it seemed that the use of the feminine in art is exactly what contemporary art has been missing.
There are qualities inherent in the feminine that can balance and enhance the language of ideas. The feminine brings sensuality, fluidity, openness, and ultimately beauty to concepts which, by themselves, are stark, rigid, and merely confrontational. And it is precisely this balance which makes a work of art whole, interesting and relevant. Consequently, I realized that not only should we be discussing this subject, we must be discussing it. Because art without beauty or balance is as static and informative as white noise.

Compulsion to work

I am trying to learn how to appreciate down time but its not working very well. In the month since I broke my hand I have commissioned a new web site, written four chapters of a new book, driven to Tucson for a solo show, and developed new marketing strategies.

You would think I would go outside. Walk. Breath clean air. Cook sumptuous meals and discover new pairings. But I don't. I sit in front of my computer. I clean the house. I sit in front of my computer some more. I don't even read. It has been said, mostly by my children who are too young to appreciate these things, that all I ever do is work. True. I made the doctor cut the cast off so I could do patinas.

Yet it is the work that I love. The everyday dirtiness of it. Noise and dust, sparks flying, sweat and cuts, the all too many cusswords everytime I burn myself or can't get a piece to make sense. In that environment, I am free from my mind. And in the work there is quiet that can not be obtained anywhere else. In my studio, I am alone with everything I know, everything I feel, everything I want. And it is this mix of images and memories, dreams and desires which stirs and stews until they become a vision and finally a sculpture. Then, there is a beauty I can touch--a sunset that doesn't fade, a flower that never wilts, a universe or a poem. When I'm walking, I am always going somewhere. When I'm working I am still.