The Post-Exhibit Awakening

Knitted Head, 11 x 9 x 4 in, paper wrapped wire, 20206

After showing recent paintings in March, my energy plummeted. This tends to happen, after the work of getting a show ready. But this time it felt different, like the exhaustion of holding up a mode of practice that I have, in some ways, grown beyond.

I'll be completely honest: After looking at all the work produced in the past year, mostly I thought, "Yeah, no..." The reason, I discovered, is because it became too illustrative and conceptual, simultaneously. It's hard to admit that publicly for some artists. Fortunately, being in a cooperative gallery, I'm afforded the time and space to NOT feel pressured to produce sellable results, which, at this time in my practice, creates a wonderful opportunity, to pivot as quickly as necessary to follow the work as it leads.

In this case, the pivot is in embracing the curiosity and compulsion to render the feeling of form in 3-d. How I explore and feel the form--as if I were doing body-work--is by feeling through the lines that I draw or paint. I discovered this by it's negation: that is, by creating form without the structural lines I have been using to build my sense of space. These lines rarely make it onto the finished painting. They show up in drawings and ink paintings and sketches.

Forest Heads Installation was a chance to create those forms in 3 dimensions and it felt like I was drawing in space! Forming heads with cane and sticks, bent branches and wire gave me a sense of my inner and outer "practices" of art and thinking and moving a coalescing path forward.

Further form explorations have grown out of knitting. Really. Not sweaters and hats. Knitting heads. My rudimentary knitting skills have had to advance enough to incorporate the techniques required to shape a skull, a nose, the chin (all while taking--practically illegible--copious notes of the process). I hope to be able to share the pattern some day soon, in case you or someone is interested in making a knitted head, but I'm still working on it: changing, adjusting and coming up with different ideas for it.

Some go on the wall. Some stand. I like this direction, along with the 3-d drawings, for which the word "sculpture" might more aptly apply.

Let me know what you think:

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