Every now and then something happens in my life that seems to have been foreshadowed in my artwork. Admittedly this is magical, but it's also very spooky. Perhaps appropriately timed to the re-emerging Halloween mood, this just happened again.
Recently I created a ceramic wall installation, ("Electron Madness") for an exhibition perhaps ominously titled, "Asking For the Fire". This piece's "issues" seemed to mirror "issues" I was having with a friend at the same time. The amount of red I was using in the piece bothered me all along because it looked too violent and angry, and I spent hours gazing at it, imagining ways to keep red's lure without so much of red's in-your-face fierceness. At the same time I found myself tiptoeing on eggshells around my friend's increasingly unstable violatility. Our once entertaining friendship was turning into a mine field already sprinkled with the remains of many of her other acquaintances.
As was probably inevitable, I somehow did crack an eggshell and she blew up and unleashed a mercurial anger unmatched by anything I've personally witnessed outside of a movie. I have led a sheltered life: a polite Midwestern childhood, an intellectually alert family life, and yes, some of that Midwestern emotional flatness that matches the endless stretches of cornfields that are so much of the Illinois landscape. So this in-your-face redness of my artwork and of her anger was something new to me.
I know that artworks try to tell you things, try to tell you their desires, and you just have to listen and learn to hear them. In "Electron Madness" I listened and wrote our "conversation" on the wall as part of the piece. My art was fighting with me over the theme and direction of the work. It was positively crabby. All of this I recorded in pencil, on the wall. I don't thrive in struggle and most of my artwork leans towards calmness, so this process was not my typical creating process. I got the idea to turn the tone of the piece by very consciously adding small touches of spring green to it. The whole thing did seem to calm down just enough. What a relief! Sadly, I can't say the same thing about that friendship. Whereas I succeeded in taming the fires in my artwork, I did not succeed in tamping the fires of a temper gone awry. I decided to give up on attempting to keep up a friendship with someone so high maintenance. There is that spooky feeling, though...The artwork is finished, the friendship is finished, but did I hear EVERYTHING "Electron Madness" was telling me? It's enough to send shivers down my spine...
"Electron Madness" was born while I was thinking about the science movie, "Down the Rabbit Hole", so I was musing about electrons and time and space in quantum terms. Not that I understand quantum theory well at all mind you, but it interests me. The movie brought up the issue of the directional flow of time, and whether the past and present and future can all exist simultaneously. I wonder: if time passing IS only an illusion, and events from all times actually co-exist, could this be why one's art might reflect one's present and even one's future?
(For the complete text copy of the wall installation "Electron Madness" see the next post. It is also on my website: http://www.joykreves.com/large-single-view/Installation%20Artworks/258954-5-21051/Drawing/Pencil/Expressionist.html
