Why would anyone make something like that! A derogatory statement once made by my father when I was an adolescent in the back seat of a car that he was driving. We had just passed an enormous abstract sculptural form that stood at the entrance of a university.
I started to wonder!
Why would anyone make something like that?
Little did I know at the time, that inverting a statement to a question was an act of transgression and the beginning of a life as an artist.
So in an odd way, it makes sense that I began this work exploring words since words are the materials that make a question. And words are symbols that can function as images. Their visual texture, shapes and colors are more important to me than their meanings. However, meaning can offer an entrance into making the work.
Theodore Roethke once wrote a poem about the drives and urges to make, which he titled, Cuttings*. His words held me through an exploration of mixed media drawings. I attempted to express the feeling of the words through the visual texture and rhythms of the word shapes.
*Cuttings
This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it –
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.
Words* of Henry Miller on his creative process held me as I attempted to capture the broken and steadfast qualities of desire using the words as an integral part of the composition.
*“I look back to a period when I had the most exalted vision of words written or spoken, but intact could only mutter brokenly. Today I see that my steadfast desire was at once responsible for whatever progress or mastery I have made.”
Robert Hunter’s words held me when I was commissioned by a Grateful Dead fan to interpret his lyrics* for Terrapin Station as I desired; his only request was that the words remain decipherable.
*Lyrics
Inspiration, move me brightly
Light the song with sense and color
Hold away despair
More than this I will not ask
Faced with mysteries dark and vast
Some rise, some fall, some climb