Getting to Utopia

RIVER LIFE, mixed media drawing ©Joy Kreves, 12"X36"

When was the last time you thought about Utopia?  What does Utopia mean to you?  It's an idea that comes to roost on my shoulder now and then.  In the birthing class I attended years ago as preparation for our daughter's arrival participants were instructed to visualize and thus create in our imaginations a Utopia to go to, in order to ease the pain of childbirth.  I'll bet you that a pure, sparkling river was a common feature in all of our imagined refuges.  Rivers have long been part of our collective vision for a Utopian landscape.  How Utopian are our rivers really now though?  Most of their clear waters have been contaminated to some degree by all sorts of organic and industrial wastes, plastic garbage and now, increasingly with fracking poisons.

Olana with Views, photo ©Joy Kreves

Olana exterior details, photo ©Joy Kreves

Painter of large, magnificent landscapes, Frederic Edwin Church (1826 - 1900) built his mountaintop Persian style mansion, Olana, overlooking the beautiful Hudson river. He charged entry fees whenever he (literally) unveiled a new painting in his home studio. According to the docent at the now historic museum site, he made sure the viewers got their money's worth by incorporating a multitude of visual intrigues in each painting to hold and reward their gaze.  I'd already been rejecting the less is more path to creating an aesthetic experience in favor of much more is even more ideal. The docent's comment about Church's attitude appealed to me!

I was visiting Olana for the Artist's Talk of a friend, contemporary painter Dan Ford.  Dan has studied the Hudson Valley School of landscape artists (in which Frederic Church was a key player) and has evolved a body of work that matches their lushness while incorporating witty, contemporary references in the scenes.  Therefore, this was the perfect venue for him in which to reveal his connections to and departures from the Hudson Valley School of painting.

Both Ford's and Church's paintings have things in them just waiting to be discovered.  You look at Church's painting and your eyes keep finding things to alight on that are an unexpected delight to behold; in Ford's idyllic landscapes your admiration of the beauty of nature is suddenly interrupted when you spot the little gas station or fast food joint that has cropped up along the mountain stream.  Whose idea of Utopia includes a view of the Golden Arches?  Our culture and conveniences extract a huge cost from our dreams!  I wonder, if Frederic Edwin Church were painting today, would he paint the idealized, Utopian version of whatever landscape he was working from, or would he include any of the contaminants of contemporary civilization?  The docent had reported that Frederic Church had done lots of nature editing (cleaning up, rearranging trees, etc.) to enhance the breathtaking vistas surrounding his magnificent house. Getting to Utopia requires lots of editing!

As I completed my mixed media drawing, RIVER LIFE, this week (photo at top of page) I kept thinking back to those ideas that Olana had brought up for me: themes of Utopia vs. of the Here and Now; More CAN be More, and Prolonging and Rewarding the Viewer's Gaze.  I added another turtle, a ceramic one, and I felt compelled to add some bits of plastic wrap to the composition; it's a more realistic portrayal of the condition of our contemporary waters. Yes, there is purity and beauty there, but there is also pollution and garbage.  The sparkle of the plastic related to the gloss on the collaged photographic area anyway.  Pollution isn't always ugly!

Tiny Quarter-Sized Smashed Turtle, photo ©Joy Kreves

Maybe getting to Utopia is actually less interesting to me now than the actual journey there.  Currently I'm less interested in creating a sublime vision (in spite of my past exhibition title!) than in creating a time-released experience of little discoveries and multiple focal points.  That's why Japanese hand-scrolls are so appealing though it's a format I haven't tried yet.

It's amazing, the little discoveries one simple walk can hold.  Once there was what appeared to be a smashed  coin on the road ahead of me but when I got there it was a tiny smashed turtle no bigger than a quarter.  Although saddened, I was amazed to see that such a small creature had been trying to cross the wide road probably en route to the creek yet another street downhill from there.  I wondered how many of these tiny turtles make that journey successfully each year, and where it was coming from.  Had my car been the one to end it's journey?  How many lives do we obliterate without even realizing it?  Later in the same walk I heard some creature calling from a tree.  It almost sounded like a kitten, but maybe not quite.  I could not locate the exact place it came from, but it was regular and persistent.  Perhaps it was a baby squirrel.  I couldn't see anything moving in the treetops.  A bit later I witnessed the canal-side take-off of a large heron.  If you've never seen a heron alight you've missed one of the most sublime visions there is!  The emotional keys touched on in this one walk included sadness and wonder, concern, and awe!

The unfolding of that walk is the way I'm currently thinking about my artworks.  I want to create multiple interests that are there to seize and ponder and simply to relish, in a time-released fashion. Instead of painting one show-stopping moment in time, I am combining several moments that reveal themselves over a little span of time.  The cinematic ribbon-like journey of a walk or of a river is the model that continues to inspire my compositions.  Does that lead to Utopia?  Who knows?  It seems the Realist in me is most interested now in what's on that journey. What ideal is steering you?

Needing Old MacDonald's Forest Song

Autumn Fog on the Delaware River, photo ©Joy Kreves

A sudden duet of animal call and electronic alarm pierced the otherwise still night.  I'd forgotten to take the house alarm off before I ran downstairs to open the sliding glass door to better hear the strange animal noises from the back yard. They'd started around midnight, and it must have been around 2am by the time I finally decided to get up for a better listen, since they were keeping me awake anyway.

It's hard to tell where sounds are coming from at night; they seem to echo off the river that isn't far away, and bounce off the mountains and were probably not coming from our back yard.  My first impression was of lowing cows, but the nearest cows that I know of would probably not sound this close or we'd hear them often.  Wouldn't we?   There seemed to be more than one and I judged the noise as having to come from a large mammal.  We do have the occasional bear come around, and way too many deer.  I decided it was most likely a deer mating call.

When I googled deer rutting sounds, the first video that came up was of a red-tailed deer in Scotland.
 http://youtu.be/jf7bOSPihrk
That did sound very much like what I heard, but audios of the white-tailed deer we have here in New Jersey, did not come close to the sound at all!  How odd that the two kinds of deer would have such different "roars."  Days later, I don't really think the sounds could have been from our deer.  The next day neighbors confirmed hearing the noises also and they were equally confused.   Maybe it was cows after all; it's still a mystery.  
In further pursuing an answer I came across this audio track of Shakuhachi, traditional Japanese bamboo flute, used for meditation and traditional Japanese music.  This audio is part of a traditional piece that evokes the calls of deer in the autumn forest.  The music sounds nothing like what I'd heard, of course, but is very lovely and appropriate for this season.  "Distant Cry of the Deer":
http://youtu.be/f6ljwJoG8zU

According to the International Shakuhachi Society website   the "Distant Cry of the Deer" was composed by Ueda Hodo who began the Ueda Ryu School with his brother around 1917.
What an image this music creates for me!  I see the two deer standing in the midst of a forest of trees that are clothed in brilliant autumnal reds and oranges.  A misty fog lingers between the mountains, hovering over a small creek that separates the deer. As they call to each other, leaves slightly quiver on the trees before they release to gently float down through the fog.  It is a love scene full of longing, and the breathy bamboo flute sound aligns in my mind with this misty image.

Music can be so much like painting!  In high school I had a wonderful violin teacher at The Chicago Conservatory of Music, Ki Joo Lee.  I was having a bit of trouble with a passage in some concerto I was playing.  Mr. Lee finally stopped me and described a scene...I wish I could remember exactly what he said now, but maybe it was something about walking through a shadowed forest, going around some turn, and then suddenly seeing a mountain range...perhaps there was a sunrise there, too... with a feeling of freedom at hand.  Mr. Lee clearly related to the passage in the music in a personal, emotional and visual way, and I immediately played the passage much better, having realized on many levels, what it was (or could be) all about.  Of course the best visual art touches us in those same ways.

The incident with the unidentified animal noises has brought home how little I know about my surroundings.  In this way I am like so many American suburbanites, living amidst many plants I can't name and many animals whose cries I can't identify.  We don't know our own environment!  This year it took a more nature-aware friend to point out to me that our usually brilliant red and yellow autumn leaves are all dotted and disfigured by the drought we had last summer.  There is a new term for our condition of ignorance about our environment, called "Nature Deficit Disorder," caused by living too much of our lives indoors.  I am sad to find myself afflicted.  Maybe we need a new version of the song every child is taught to learn farm animal identification - a version for city dwellers and suburbanites:

Old McDonald had a forest / EIEIO / and in that forest he had some deer /  EIEIO /  With a ? ? here and a ? ? there .... everywhere a ? ? ...

How many American adults can sing what the deer, the bear, the bobcat, the opossum....the raccoon....the squirrel....the skunk... the coyote...the tree frogs...say ?

Shame on us!  We Americans should know all of these and more!  The composer of "The Distant Cry of the Deer" knew what deer sound like before taking artistic liberties with that sound.  I am saying that creativity comes from everything the artist has experienced as well as everything the artist knows.  To be deeply touching, abstract art also must stem from an understanding of the environment the artist lives in.  I've seen a lot of superficial abstract work!  People often think it is easy to create abstract work because it doesn't have to conform to the visual rules of realism, but actually it does have to stem from that same realism or it rings false.  My violin teacher understood that and the bamboo flute composer and player in the track above understood it.  I am beginning to understand it in a much deeper way.

I Am My Car and Other Terrifying Ideas

"Whooo!  Whooo!  Whooo!"  The owl outside my window was echoing the question ringing inside my head.  Self-doubts again!  Don't people ever get too old for those?  This time they are about ...well, self-doubts are always essentially about the same thing aren't they?  What is my place in the universe, who will I be in the future; how will I be remembered?  Somehow that owl just knew I was grappling with all the hairpin curves of that question, "Who, exactly, am I?"

TRANSPORTED, mixed media, ©Joy Kreves '12

This particular bout of doubting was instigated by my stupid old car that called it quits. Living in the suburbs as I do a car is a necessity.  Ugh.  I don't enjoy paying this much attention to cars.  I'd rather be transported on a magic settee; I suppose TRANSPORTED, above, is kind of a self-portrait. That's a new revelation for me.  The fact is, artists need cars to transport not only finished works, but supplies.  I've spent hours looking up safety records, cargo space dimensions, finding pictures of how much the wheel wells stick out into the cargo space, and the now all important mpg for various models.  I've interviewed friends about their own Art Car solutions.  I had a hard time making a decision whether to base my choice on mostly practical needs or to leave room for some fantasy.  In other words, choosing a vehicle turned into a marathon self-assessment.  "Am I really going to make any big pieces in the future that would need a truck/van/large SUV, or could I commit to a future of modest-sized (and more ecological) artworks?  What kind of artist will I be from now on?  How much do traction and safety matter to me?" 

Years ago my self-hypnosis teacher asserted that in dreams, one's car represented one's Self.  Here I've found myself, not dreaming, having to re-assess who I am, just in order to replace what one friend aptly described as "a container to move oneself from one place to another"!

As a kid I devoured biographies.  Reading about other people's lives made me wonder if my own would be half as interesting.  I hoped for an interesting life, though perhaps with less drama than those I read about. After all, I could see that dramatic excitement came with a hefty price tag of personal trauma.  Who wishes for that?  Well, I suppose some people do but I'm more risk-adverse.  I'm pretty practical. 

I suppose I have thus far gotten the life I wished up:  a fairly comfortable but not flashy or extravagant life, an interesting life without an excess of sorrows.  An examined life.  Luckily, I married someone intelligent but not unbalanced or bizarre the way it seems so many super-intelligent people are. We talk about The Big Questions over breakfast and dinner often enough that I don't feel swallowed up by the necessary but mundane activities of life.  My daughter is a "good kid" who didn't drag us through arguments over theft or drugs or any of the typical pitfalls of teen years.  I've led/am leading a pretty stable life.  It occurs to me that this is just not very good biographical material!  What an attention turn-off stability is! If my car choice reflects my life, well then, I suppose safety, reliability, and practicality must be part of the equation.  Apologies to my readers for the unexciting biographical material.

I'm feeling extra sensitive to labels of UNADVENTUROUS, or BORING lately, because I have found myself doing...gasp... needlepoint!  (Actually, I'm not sure if what I'm doing is needlepoint or cross-stitch, having embarqued upon the activity with no lessons whatsoever but I'll continue to call it that).  Needlepoint, that craft (still a dirty word in high art circles), that your grandmother or maybe even your great-grandmother did as a creative outlet after all her chores.  And that's not all:  I REALLY LIKE doing needlepoint!  There is something profoundly soothing about stitching little Xs over and over again to build up an image.  That's right, I'm not even doing needlepoint in a modern, abstract way!  I've been making needlepoint CHICKENS, for God's sake, and I'm not really young or hip enough to be making them ironically!

Work in progress, photo ©Joy Kreves '12

The artwork the chickens are meant to be part of began as an abstraction of a waterfall.  The natural shapes on the wood grain panel suggested water, but also the ragged shapes in the work of  painter Clyfford Still.  I planned to follow those ragged shapes, but to coat them out with smooth, slick colors suggestive of water, and leave it like that.  Raw wood contrasted with glossy blue.  I like abstract art.  I do.  It's just that Images keeps knocking at the door and I'm loathe to turn them away, loathe to rudely send them back out into the vast netherland of untethered signs and symbols.

Detail, right upper side of work in progress ©Joy Kreves '12

I cut the "window" hole out of the panel to penetrate the upper right surface space. That caused the main square panel to take on a house-like feel, and the "water"  to pour over and through it.  Something about a watershed?  Sorrows?  Looks like a drenching.  I'm not sure yet what the water is doing.  I spotted a tiny needlepoint rooster on some old napkins in my studio.  The colorful rooster feathers had an affinity for the brilliantly colored autumn leaves already pressed into one of my ceramic elements in the lower edge.  The rooster was tiny, and visually and conceptually lonely, however, so I "needed" to make another.  Well, you know two roosters would be unlikely to share a roost, and so two roosters suggested a tension I didn't want.  Therefore, I am making the 2nd bird a hen.   

Detail, top of work in progress ©Joy Kreves '12

The rooster and the hen are how this artwork informed me that its content is something about the empty nest that my husband and I are experiencing, our only daughter having gone back to college.  The poultry parents seem to be confronting the sudden space between them!  Great!  Now I see I am a chicken!  What a self-portrait!  This kind of thing is what makes creating art so terrifying.  You always are what you create, somehow, even though you might not know it consciously at the time.  Artists are always standing naked in front of the viewers and themselves.  So far, this unfinished artwork has shown me that I am a chicken experiencing an empty nest.  I can hardly wait for the next revelation.  No wonder so many artists talk technique in public.  At least that is wearing underwear.

Oh, this art is not finished yet, and could change drastically; I need to integrate the needlepoint textures into the main body of the piece and haven't resolved the position of the yarn/twines yet. I haven't resolved the edges at all, etc. etc. etc.  Creating artwork is a dialogue, and the dialogue often turns very personal.  Here I am in the flood of time, as a chicken, confronting my empty nest and all the self-doubts that situation inspires.  What now?  Where am I at in my life?  Am I ... BORING? What kind of car best represents and serves all that I am?  Assessment time seems to have arrived, courtesy of this particular flood of visiting images, alighting associations, and via my stupid old car. Magic Settee- -  get me out of here! 

Figurine Detail from TRANSPORTED, ©Joy Kreves

A Relationship With Rocks

This week I've realized that people have many ways of conversing with stones, not always involving sound. Rock walls were the first art surface, and modern people still enjoy looking at cave art and wondering what those image-filled surfaces are saying. We have a rich relationship with all kinds of rocks.

TAIHU ROCK, Chinese, Qing dynasty, 1644-1912, Gift of the P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art, and museum purchase, Asian Art Department Fund [2008-65], Princeton Unversity Art Museum.

Recently I visited The Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey.  After viewing the brilliant special exhibit, "The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art, and Society",  I went downstairs to the Asian art collection.  At the bottom of the stairway there is a magnificent decorative garden rock, riddled with holes.  Of course I've seen these rocks before in Chinese gardens but I was surprised to learn that that these limestone "Taihu Rocks", were formed by collaboration between man and nature.  This rock would have been drilled with holes and then immersed under water in Lake Tai in Jiangsu province for perhaps hundreds of years until nature carved, smoothed, eroded and shaped it into its present form.  The resulting "Chinese scholars' rock" was probably displayed in a garden where one could ponder the fascinating shapes it presents.  Surely these rocks must speak as the wind whistles through their holes? Surely they tell stories from their water years?

When I was a kid my parents always planted a huge vegetable garden in our Illinois backyard.  One day they found a rock that looked exactly like the potatoes my mother was digging up for dinner.  In what was an out-of-character mischevious mood, she heated it up with the other spuds and served it to my sister who promptly burned herself with it and did NOT laugh.  A long string of apologies did not allay her offense at having received a stone instead of a potato on her plate.  My mother had no comic talent and felt terrible at her misjudgement.  Whenever I see a "potato rock" I think of that prank gone awry.  Perhaps this story has something to do with my enjoyment of making ceramic "rocks" and mixing them in with real rocks as I did in my Solastalgia installation:

Rocks detail, SOLASTALGIA, ©Joy Kreves 2010

One of my in-laws was buried this week.  At the graveyard  a woman with a green emerald-ringed hand (emeralds symbolize harmony, wisdom, love, reason, and prophecy) placed little rough stones on top of the smooth tombstones of other family members.  I'd forgotten what that meant, and asked.  "It says we've been here, visited..."  Of course!  That is simple enough.  No obscure symbolism there.  The stones speak for people, these with their rough surfaces in contrast to the polished granite headstones, saying "I was here". 

 
I was at Ringing Rocks Park in Eastern Pennsylvania again this past week. The land there is riddled with boulders large and small, deposited by glaciers so long ago... In the middle of a boulder-filled forest

Boulder field at Ringing Rocks Park, Pa, photo ©Joy Kreves

you come to a clearing, a field of boulders where nothing grows.  These rocks hold their own mystery.  When hit with a hammer, some of the rocks ring like a bell, others do not.  Many of them are riddled with dents from the number of times people have tried them, hammer to stone.  The ringers and non-ringers have been

Rocks pitted from hammer hits. Photo ©Joy Kreves

scientifically analyzed and found to contain the same elements.  It does not matter what size or shape they are.  It doesn't matter where or how they rest.  One theory is that it depends on the stresses inside of the rocks.  Basically, it is a still a mystery why the ones that ring do so.  There have been performances there, incorporating sounds of the rocks, but when humans aren't there striking them and forcing sounds I have to wonder, what are the ringing rocks saying?  What histories do they speak of?  What is their role in this unique environment?

I have a large heart shaped rock that came to my attention shortly before my mother died.  For me, this rock symbolizes her presence and I placed it beneath a tree that I can see out my kitchen window.  Once when I did an internet search I found that there are lots of people who have whole collections of heart rocks. That isn't my goal, but I appreciate the one that seemingly found me.

At our grave sites we ask the carved and polished headstones to mark where we lie, and the pebbles to tell we came to visit. We throw them in anger.  We skip them on water and live in houses built from them or have counters topped with polished slabs of them; we value their sculptural forms and we find "special" ones. We wear polished, faceted gemstones if we can afford them, for their symbolism.  The Taihu rocks were eroded by natural lake water in a gentle conversation between man and nature.  Here in the United States our bedrock is now being fractured with a man-made toxic stew in our desperate grab for more natural gas.  I don't know what our energy solution is but surely it cannot rely on this method that too easily poisons us and our environment! 

Rocks are holders of meaning.  It seems all people are attracted to them and we each have our own relationship with them.  I am thankful for the continual evolution of my own relationship with rocks. 

Art as Armor

With summer vacations taking people away, I've been thinking a lot lately about my friends and how much they impact my life.  I know I don't tell them enough how much they are appreciated.  Besides their absence while vacationing, nothing makes one appreciate a friend more deeply than when that person has been somehow threatened.  Suddenly you think, "What could I have done?  What can I do to protect this friend?"

Running wild dog drawing, ©Joy Kreves

I have a number of female friends who live alone.  Some have dog companions; some do not.  When a house repair is needed, they know that they are fairly vulnerable to the workmen who come in.  Women are simply vulnerable at any age.  One female friend recently made sure to say "we" whenever talking about herself in front of the repairman who showed up at her door, but in doing so realized that her house shows no evidence of a man's presence at all.  This particular repairman acted just odd enough that her personal radar went on high alert.  Nothing was overtly wrong, but something about him wasn't quite right, either.  She stayed on the phone with a family member, then me, for most of his time there. This particular woman has a lot of skill at reading people, having had job experience working with disturbed people.  She has been a great friend to me, and a huge help during some pinches in recent years, and it distressed me that some creep could so easily be her undoing. We agreed to be physically present for each other during future "situations";  I am gathering some of my husbands extra belongings for her to put out on display and I have an idea to arm her with my art:  I remembered how it seemed my sculptures had once helped to deter some criminals.  Perhaps drawings of those same images might have some power also?

Snarling Wild Dog drawing, ©Joy Kreves

In the 1980's I lived in NYC where a composer friend, Larry Simon, called on me to play the violin part in some music he had written to accompany the reading of a poem by Frederico Garcia Lorca.  We performed this in some galleries in SoHo.  The poem (which I sadly can't find now) had a chilling line about snarling wolves that inspired me to make "stage sets" for our performance.  I drew some fierce-looking wolves, making them as menacing as I could with curled lips and spike collars, and then cut them out of foam core, life-sized, to stand up around us as we played.  An artist in New York needs friends with vehicles, and a couple of my friends had a big old van.  Graciously, they transported my ferocious canine sculptures to the gallery for the night's performance.  At the end of it we loaded them back in and agreed to leave them in the van overnight before driving them back to my place the next day. 

Growling, Collared Wild Dog drawing, ©Joy Kreves

Two Wolves, drawing, ©Joy Kreves

That night the old van was stolen.  I was horrified for my friends, whose livelihood depended on having that vehicle, and also for myself, having lost 5 or 6 sculptures in one blow.  A police detective told them it wasn't likely to be found since usually the thieves strip the vehicles for parts very quickly.  So everyone was extremely surprised when a few days later the van was found intact, having been abandoned somewhere in Brooklyn, down by the river, my sculptures still inside!  One was badly bent, but the others were fine.  The police speculated that the thieves had intended to use the van to abduct or mug somebody in, but did not have any such reports. 

Of course I immediately thought of what part my menacing sculptures might have played in deterring the muggers.  Perhaps, in the dark of the night, as they drove, they glanced into the back of the van they had just stolen and saw many shadowy guard dogs.  Real or not, surely those would have made anyone do a double-take, especially someone with bad intentions and likely high on who knows what drugs! In an alternate scenario, I imagined the thieves dragging a victim into the back of their newly stolen van, intent on mugging and robbing, but suddenly confronted with a whole collection of life-sized, snarling wolf sculptures.  It would have to have been a bit jarring, wouldn't it?  Maybe it was jarring enough to stop them in their tracks before they ran away?  I know it's possible that my sculptures had no effect at all and that the crime was nipped in the bud by something else, but as an artist, I need to believe that my work had some impact in that scene.  It certainly had some adventure, with scars on the one to prove it!

Leaping Wild Dog drawing ©Joy Kreves

Artists all believe in the life power of their work, don't they?  Why would you create a material entity if you didn't also think that you were creating some sort of a life?  When a work of art is destroyed it feels as if a life has been damaged.  I do believe that material objects, especially human-made objects, are imbued with some of the character of their creator and they have some sort of an impact on people even if a subtle impact.  And so I've decided to make my friend a guard wolf dog tee to wear when she has her next odd repairman come visiting.  It will be her talisman tee.  You are what you wear... if you come to the door wearing pretty soft flowers it sends a different message than if you wear a collection of strange, hopefully slightly menacing canines, does it not?

I am an artist, so those are the skills I have with which to appreciate and protect my friends.  I will make her an art armor tee.  Oh, I know my tee is not likely to cleanse a criminal mind!  In the best scenario, my friend will never have needed to wear the shirt; in another, it might be just the littlest thing to flip the balance towards her being more invulnerable.  That, my additional presence, her own good sensors, and the man's clothes that will not quite inconspicuously adorn her rooms on days when strange men must come fix things. She will be fine!

Now in Brooklyn by the river I have more recent art, hung with much intention.  My installation, ELECTRON MADNESS, is part of the juried COLOR show at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists' Coalition's  massive old warehouse space at 499 Van Brunt Street on the waterfront.  The reception is Saturday, July 28th, 1-6pm and the show runs through August 19th. I transported it there in my own trusty old SUV and the installation's porcelain "electrons" have nothing to do with armor...except, perhaps,...the power that the color red has...

View of Installation wall for ELECTRON MADNESS, mixed media, ©Joy Kreves

Dynamic Waiting

TIME + OBSESSION = ORDER/DISORDER, ©Joy Kreves

Time.  If you are a creative type, you know about post-event slumps that claim you for a time.  If you have been a creative type for decades, you probably know that those slumps will pass and you'll soon be back into your passion full force. I was thinking about time back in the 1990s when I made my Spiral Series, including the work above.  Spirals can be seen as a diagram of how time is cyclical. I'm in a post-exhibition slump right now.  It's not artist's block, since I have ideas and projects to pursue, but I'm currently involved in mundane art business requiring an imbalance of computer work, family and home issues, and have not been able to actually create new work for a little while.  One benefit of being the age I am is knowing that this awful feeling of creative discomfort will pass.

Spiral Drawing, ©Joy Kreves, Sold, Private Collection

You may have noticed that there seems to be lots of talk about "Dynamic" this and that.  Recent research has found that sitting is terrible for our health. Alan Heller has launched the ergoErgo chair, "dynamic seating" designed to overcome some of the terrible effects of regular sitting.  I've written about ergoErgo in past posts, and am happily (and dynamically) perched on my own black one as I write this now. Dynamic eating is also something I've embraced.  No more food fuel going into me that is not nutritionally dense!  Dr. Fuhrman's EAT TO LIVE book revolutionized my family's diet. Yesterday brought the realization that I am also practicing dynamic waiting.  This is a good way to get through an artistic slump until one can create in the studio again.  I'm not depressed and lethargic, but rather I am looking at and participating in big, energized art shows.  Last week I discovered art gems at Grounds for Sculpture, MOMA P.S.1, The New York Studio School Gallery, and Art All Night 2012 Trenton.  Time passes while practicing dynamic waiting, but is not wasted.  Maybe it's a bit like meditation.  Yes, your physical body will try to distract you with ailments, but in a sense they really are just distractions against the deeper experience.  Being creative will always be that deeper experience for an artist.

Thirst

My

parched eyes harbor gravel under lids

brittle legs seize up in sudden cramps

arthritic shoulders moan at simple chores

I am

the struggling fly, one leg caught in sticky sap

the tottering peacock displaying in gusty wind

the rosy bloom of snapdragon nipped off by summer rabbit

I have been

the ebullient stream that courses over rocks

the fluid panther leaping on its prey

the mossy, dew-filled mantle of the earth

I've yet to know

the underground rumblings of elephants

the  whooshing northern lights inside my bones

the impressive mud-packed footprints of a bear

How thirsty I am now

and how wounded

as time passes quickly yet so slow

each day lacks the order of my passion

I wait half-patiently

for time to spiral 'round again and

in orderly return, return to me 

What I've been and known before, and lost

   -Joy Kreves 6/'12

Perhaps if you are a creative type you will benefit from looking at activities in terms of their dynamic qualities.  Looking back, I believe I visualized the concept of dynamic time in my spirals, drawings done during the 1980's and '90's.  You can see more works from the Spiral Series in the "Line Drawings" gallery of my website:  joykreves.com and current studio information on my facebook page:  JoyKrevesArtStudio  Here's to your having a truly dynamic summer!

Fish Fall From the Sky and Dandelions Invade the Water

Thanks to the weekend's absolute weather perfection, my Open Studio Event May 19th and 20th went smoothly and a month of intense preparation paid off.  A most curious thing happened just a day or so before the big event, though.
I went to put the empty garbage can back in it's shed after collection day.  As I rolled the empty  container noisily down the driveway towards the shed I saw something lying on the pavers right in front of the shed doors.  Coming closer, I saw that it was an entire dead fish, about a foot long!  Flies weren't swarming on it yet, but no animal had scurried off just in front of my approach, either.  It couldn't have been there for too long.  I thought a wild animal would be reluctant to go far from such a catch even if it had been scared away.

Although it had a gaping wound just under the head nothing had started to eat it.  Now...the nearest creek is two blocks away, the Delaware River just a few but it's not like we live right on the riverbank!  Something would have had to run across a few streets and several yards with this river catch, and our pavers didn't seem much of a destination.

Being squeamish I decided to leave it there for HUSBAND to clean up when he arrived home from work.  A couple of hours later I needed to walk the dog.  At the beginning of the walk I checked on the fish again.  Still there.  Nothing had come back for this great waiting meal.  At the end of the walk I checked yet again.  Still there.  Nothing had even come to taste!  My dog didn't seem to see OR smell it from...8 ft. away.

I asked friends for their theories on how the fish got there and most guessed some bird of prey had dropped it.  Now I don't know about you, but I don't normally go outside even considering the possibility that I could be hit on the head with a falling fish!  Yet this now appears to be a real possibility.  Next time I see a heron patiently waiting in a pond for an unwary fish to grab I'll wonder how firm its grip is against the whip-lashing of a catch once airborn.

That out-of-place fish has something to do with my recently finished HAND OF NATURE, a mixed media assemblage that hangs on the wall.

HAND OF NATURE, ©Joy Kreves 2012 Mixed media assemblage

You see, I started this piece with the intention of making it with double waterfalls.  It was going to fit neatly into my "Waterfall Series" of ceramic relief paintings. The falls were going to be mounted on the birch panel that now holds green and gold watercolored "water".  I painted that on with Antique Japanese Watercolors following the natural birch grain pattern.  Then I didn't want to cover up that lovely panel, so the construction soon became much larger!  I mounted the painted birch panel on another board that has a hanging brace bolted across the back  Although all those "rocks" are actually hollow ceramic, the piece quickly got much heavier than I'd planned and I had to add more bracing to the back panel.

Because the (unglazed) ceramic water is a lacey, ivory white, (I squeezed the clay through garlic press extruders) I thought the addition of the hand-crocheted lace doilies worked well near it, and so the trail of pale blue yarn trickles down through the ceramic water and pools on the crocheted pond at the bottom of the piece.  The waterfall in the upper right is crocheted yarn over watercolor on ceramic.

Lower Waterfall Detail, HAND OF NATURE, ©Joy Kreves

I rarely throw pieces away if they don't "work" because so often they eventually come into use in other pieces.  The square panel on the lower right with the turtleshell image was like that.  I loved the painting, but it never quite seemed right on it's own.  I tried to make it part of my SOLASTALGIA Installation (on my website, www.joykreves.com,) but it didn't quite work there, either.  When it finally seemed to interact with other elements in HAND OF NATURE I was happy to let it live there.  It's as if the piece found its own address.

The ceramic dandelions were added in a similar way.  I'd made those pieces a long time ago, to be hung on the wall.  They were sitting around my studio in a basket, but never called out to be their own artwork.  I've tried them on several works already, and dubiously placed them on HAND OF NATURE.  They seemed happy there!  This didn't especially please me since it messed up my original conception of the piece being all about the waterfalls.  I don't think of dandelions and waterfalls together in the same view in nature, yet there were those dandelions from an earlier theme of mine trying to invade my new theme.  Every time I took them away from the piece it looked naked.  Invasive species, indeed!  I thought, "Okay, if they have to be here then maybe I can use my dandelion print in the background; the smaller image will add perspective to the work."  That dainty print wanted to be way down at the bottom left corner, though, and not cut up either, making a totally "unrealistic" space.  Well here we are, post Picasso's Cubism or Georg Baselitz's upside-down figure paintings and here I am post airborn fish;  my sense of space and proper place has been changed forever.  What is it the guru says?  Something about embracing the change?

Open Studio Lamentations & Celebrations

Last month I got the idea to have an Open Studio this May 19th & 20th.  I've been working on it nonstop since then.  It's way more work than I remembered, way more than the one other time I did this. It's been interesting and if nothing else it's the best spring cleaning my studio has had since I moved in 19 years ago. 

Joy Kreves Studio, 54 Montague Ave., Ewing, NJ 08628  www.joykreves.com

I'm showing a large variety of work from the past 5 years or so, in the multiple media I work in:  ceramics, painting, linocuts, art jewelry and mixed media.  The studio show comes on the tail of an artist profile Pat Summers wrote about me.  It was an interesting process to work with her on that.  Pat tried to visit my "Digging Dandelions" show a few years ago at The Bridgton House, but did not succeed in finding the Inn that is located immediately next to the  Milford, NJ-Upper Black Eddy, Pa bridge.  This encouraged me to put up some of the dandelion linocut rubbings and paintings left from that show in which I explored these primitive reptiles of the floral world. Dandelions worked their way into my newest artwork finished just in time for this show too,  a large mixed media wall assemblage titled "Hand of Nature".

Waterfall Detail, HAND OF NATURE, ©Joy Kreves 2012

I also just completed and hung up "Nightingale's Song" which is the 2nd ceramic painting in my series of "Landscapes Bronzed For Posterity". 

Detail, NIGHTINGALE'S SONG, ©Joy Kreves 2012

I've put up my entire recent series of twelve "Earth-Brain Events" which are small lamentations on the dramatic climate change that we and our earth are experiencing.  Four of those were shown recently in a show at The Princeton Brain & Spine Care Institute's ArtTimesTwo Gallery but the rest are making their debut. 

FLOOD LAMENTATION from EARTH-BRAIN EVENTS ©Joy Kreves 2012

During this furious spring cleaning I discovered that I have several rolls of generic white drawing paper I didn't know about, and I re-discovered two old drawings.  Those were done on parts of two giant rolls of paper I'd bought from my college drawing professor.  It was the best paper I ever used, made in France, with one creamy white side smooth and the other with a slight tooth.  I tried to find more of it at some point, but he must have bought it on some closeout because nobody could match it. It was perfect paper; it held up to heavy erasure drawing, hung tightly onto the graphite powder I was using liberally then, and it was heavy with enough body to make a great deckled edge tear.  I haven't drawn much since.  Perhaps that is because I have to mourn the absence of that paper each time I draw now.

In spite of my climate lamentations and paper mourning, I think my studio looks pretty upbeat, though.  My work basically celebrates the earth's bounty.  For example, "Hand of Nature" is an environment that is part of my ceramic waterfall series, and it includes two of them!  Much of the  "MyMuse" art jewelry incorporates ceramic beads I impressed from my spring loves of dogwood flowers and maple seedlings.  

MyMuse Pink Dogwood Necklace ©Joy Kreves 2012

I hope studio visitors will see that I am really having a blast and will join me in celebrating this richness that our earth provides as they browse my creations. 

Viewers interested in attending can see additional information on the EVENTS page page of my website and can contact me through the CONTACT page there:  www.joykreves.com .  Another option is to contact me on my facebook page:  https://www.facebook.com/JoyKrevesArtStudio .  Please click "Like" on that page if you do!

Dancing in Destiny's Footsteps

Sculpture maquette, ©Ivia Sky Yavelow 2012, folded paper on wood.

She is almost 20 years old.  She is a little taller than me and wears her father's complexion outwardly but my complexion internally.  Occasionally I am startled by her evolution.  Very often I see my father in her and too often, myself.  She had the patience and talent to become proficient at speaking  Mandarin and playing  both the violin and piano, but has now gravitated towards a more visual expression.  Exposure to a artist parent's struggles sometimes serves to turn a child off to the career, but my daughter has decided to follow the siren of her heart's song and be a visual artist like me.

Mixed media throat house drawing ©Ivia Sky Yavelow 2012.

She arrived home for spring break from Bard College in a car loaded with artworks.  Our house, already bulging at the seams with our creative by-products, accepted them all, in the same way as I imagine one would greet one's grandchildren arriving for a long summer with all of their gear.  The artworks' presence has enlivened our home environment with a fresh new energy that is also oddly familiar.
At this point in her life her artwork reflects her strong interest in architecture.  I am struck by the genetic threads she carries.  Unconsciously rendering those genetic threads visually, she employed colorful embroidery floss in some of her new sculptures.  The thread's role seems part harp strings, part space delineation, and part genetic bondage.

Variable wall or pedestal mounted sculpture ©Ivia Sky Yavelow 2012, wood & thread.

Art and architecture threads run through Ivia's background.  Her grandfather (my father) has designed and built several houses and there are architects and artists on her father's side of the family, too.  Her great-  grandmother was a farm wife who didn't make art until her late senior years, having moved into a retirement community, but then greatly enjoyed painting.  Her son, Ivia's great uncle, was a minister who painted his own murals in the churches that he served and embarked upon a self-study course in watercolor painting in his retirement.  One of her great-aunts was both seamstress and painter. Other relatives were/are furniture designers.  Although Ivia had equal talent and opportunity for science, the field of her father, she never exhibited the same interest in that subject and chose to attend visual and performing arts camps each summer.  Herein lie the mysteries of parenthood.  Why does this thread get picked up and not the other? 

Drawing ©Ivia Sky Yavelow 2012, graphite on paper.

Modern neuroscience experiments show that much of our "decision-making" is done unconsciously.  We think we are making a decision, but experiments show that the area of the brain responsible for decisions will light up before the subject has a conscious awareness of having made the decision.  This has great implications for personal "responsibility".  Perhaps we can only recognize the decisions our unconscious selves have already made!  Perhaps my daughter has only recognized her inherent artist-being.  She may have only made the decision that her unconscious brain released to her consciousness.  We may all be simply dancing in the footsteps of our destinies. 

Beena's Drawing ©Ivia Sky Yavelow 2012, wire & yarn sculpture.

Can any of us be responsible for our own decisions if those decisions were made unconsciously?  David Eagleman writes about that question in terms of law and justice in his book, INCOGNITO The Secret Lives of the Brain.  Tests on the brain of a homicidal sleepwalker proved that "high level behaviors can happen in the absence of free will.  Like your heartbeat, breathing, blinking, and swallowing, even your mental machinery can run on autopilot."  Eagleman goes on to write that "The crux of the question is whether all of your actions are fundamentally on autopilot or whether there is some little bit that is 'free' to choose, independent of the rules of biology.  The research suggests that NO part of the brain is independent and therefore 'free'".

Sculpture ©Ivia Sky Yavelow 2012, welded steel.

The ramifications for our expectations for family relations and of parenting practices might be profound as well.  If your child does not, in fact, consciously choose the path they follow, then your job is not to steer them but rather to be on the lookout for what their path might be and nourish it.  We parents like to think we have more influence and control than we probably do.  Our job may be no more or less than to be caretakers of our offspring.

Sculpture maquette, ©Ivia Sky Yavelow 2012, folded paper on wood.

Recently I attended a  concert of Music From Copland House collaborating with Music From China to "feature works written for hybrid ensembles made up of Western and Chinese instruments".  One work was a combination of classical Chinese music and the Blues!  My eager ears did not know what to do with the sounds.  Familiar snippets in a completely unfamiliar arrangement totally confused my aural wiring and it was as if I didn't know how to hear it.  I hope some new aural connections were forged from that listening.  It is known now that learning gives rise to anatomical changes in the brain.  This means that lessons and information learned cause physical changes that would impact choices and decisions...perhaps we parents are more powerful than the phrase "caretaker" would suggest.  I did after-all provide Ivia with a constant supply of origami paper and books throughout her childhood.  Origami was a constant fascination for her and those folding skills are clearly part of her  art vocabulary in recent drawings and sculptures.  Would she have "found" her folding paper passion without my support?  Would she have grown into her fate in spite of the quality of our parenting efforts?  Famous jazz musician Louis Armstrong was raised in extreme emotional and physical deprivation, yet he somehow thrived in his "vicious" environment to be a recognized jazz trumpet master.  There are many other examples of people who rose to greatness in spite of very little nourishment or parental care-taking.  Of course we will never know.

Untitled ©Ivia Sky Yavelow 2012, folded paper & conte' crayon drawing.

Ivia's creations are visual hybrids of the familiar and the radically new.   The choice to create them may have been simply written into her biology.  I can't come to any conclusions about this until the science progresses further, but watching the internal threads of generations being expressed in my daughter's life as well as watching her express a pull of threads artistically has been an intriguing part of being the artist mother of Ivia Sky Yavelow, my artist daughter.

March is Coming in Like...a Gorilla!

Each end of February I hear the echo of my mother's voice wondering, "if March will come in like a lion or like a lamb".  In Illinois where I grew up, winters were often tenacious and March tended to come in like a lion often and like a lamb, rarely.  This old picture shows me bundled against the Illinois cold with my siblings as late as May!

My mother's notation on the photo back.

This past New Jersey winter has been as mild as if the whole flock had lambs at the same time, thus spawning wide speculation about a wicked spring coming along to balance things out.  On a rainy February day last week a friend sent me an email that came through my inbox like an invigorating March wind gust, "short notice: The Guerrilla Girls are going to make a presentation at Princeton University this evening.  Want to go?"

I've been a fan of the Guerrilla Girls, "the conscience of the art world", since I first heard of them.  Their attention-grabbing posters and billboards that illuminate the art world's inequities through creatively presented statistics and graphics have plastered many cities since 1985. The posters point out things like the shockingly low number of female artists and artists of color whose work is exhibited in major museum and gallery solo shows each year.  This number has barely budged since they first began their educational work 25 years ago!  This group of artist/scholars has done their research and found plenty of examples of stunningly talented artists in those overlooked groups, proving that the Western art world has operated all through it's history as a good old white boy's network, continuing that way even now.

Guerrilla Girl Frida Kahlo

Guerrilla Girl Kathe Kollwitz

These guerrilla artist/scholars have maintained their individual anonymity by wearing gorilla head masks whenever appearing in public.  The masks have powerful expressions, and like their individual wearers, each is different from the other.  "Frida Kahlo Guerrilla Girl" wore one that was fierce and fang-baring.  (Oddly, it's open-mouth sometimes seemed to express laughter,too.  Evidently, reading expressions correctly relies upon hearing the accompanying sounds.)  "Kathe Kollwitz Guerrilla Girl" wore one that expressed an old, wise, much calmer primate.  Wearing the guises, the artists  presentation was part slideshow and part performance art.  One can't help but get drawn into thinking about how they navigate the befores and afters of their events... When and where do they take off the guise?  Isn't it uncomfortable?  Both times I've seen them they were asked about the comfort aspect.  They admitted to being very hot under those masked hoods.  Art commitment often means suffering!  More importantly, they tried to make suggestions for "creating trouble", such as "leave notes enclosed in the pages of books", or "put sticker labels on items telling how they were produced"..."don't compete with each other but rather work collaboratively", or "don't take part in the gallery/museum system; find your own ways to get your work out there." In other words, when things are monumentally stacked against you, go guerrilla!

After all their talking about the art world needing to be inclusive of all kinds of artists, there was still the audience member who asked, "Do you have to be a lesbian to be a Guerrilla Girl?"  All of the heads in the audience turned to behold the person who asked this bizarre thing. Frida and Kathe's stunned expressions somehow showed through the masks at this dimwitted question.  They repeated to this proper-looking Princetonian woman their commitment to inclusiveness.  Another lesson:  you can't force a person to hear what you say if wind has never cleared the jabber out of their head!  

Well, the gust of Frida and Kathe did blow through my creative thinking and although March is still a a week away, it looks like this year March is well on its way to coming in like a gorilla!