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!

My Mother, My Shadow and Me

One of the hardest parts of creating art is deciding when to stop working on a piece.  When is it finished?  The question also comes up when a piece is damaged.  Do you throw it away, do you try to perform heroics to restore it, or do you compromise and take the hint - see where the solving of that crisis takes the piece?  A professional art restorer is going to disguise the damage and try to get the piece back into it's original "finished" form.  An artist, however, has to consider all the options when it comes to damage on their own work.
If only I could get better at "seeing" what life literally puts in front of my eyes!  A couple of days after one of my artworks fell off the wall,  I visited Dia Beacon in New York, and was very interested to see Andy Warhol's HUGE installation of paintings of a shadow, in 102 variations. 
http://www.diaart.org/exhibitions/introduction/98  I didn't even realize until just now, writing this, that seeing Warhol's shadow was a timely lesson for me: there are hundreds of ways to recreate a shadow. I only needed to decide on one - the bottom corner of my piece was smashed in the area where I had shadows from a white cloth.  I did not consciously realize this connection when I viewed the Warhol shadows, though; the lesson was absorbed completely subconsciously if at all!

(left: the undamaged bottom corner)
My large collage, "Biography of a Moth", had hung securely for months, waiting for it's exhibition in my show at the end of this month. My trusty E6000 glue, that has never failed me before, gave way, and the piece came down on a section of shadows.  I hadn't even heard it fall off the wall, and discovered it the next time I went downstairs into my studio.  It was impossible for me to ignore that the destruction occurred around the time of a particularly vehement argument with my daughter, and that the artwork has something to do with my own relationship with MY mother.  I know this in a way that is beyond reason.  I know this in my gut.  Oh oh, this is the kind of "knowing" that gets people into all kinds of trouble!  One person "knows" that their truth is THE truth even when it conflicts with someone else's truth, and they both "know it in their gut".  Therefore, I allow myself to indulge in my "gut feeling" about this artwork while simultaneously letting my big skeptic balance on my shoulder. 

Another aspect of something meaningful being in my face without me even seeing it was the title of the piece.  I had titled it "Biography of a Moth" a long, long time before I realized that that title is also short for "Biography of a Mother".  Am I going blind?  Really!  How much more obvious does my own creation have to be, for me to "get it"?  Duh!

(left: same corner, "repaired".)
I felt confident from the beginning of my damage survey that this smashed corner was something I could deal with, and that the artwork was no lost cause.  My decision was whether to entirely disguise the event or to embrace it in the repair.  I decided to add a visible rectangular layer of mat board to the front surface, but to restore with colored pencils the shadow images that had been there originally as a photograph. I guess it was a sort of compromise.  The surface is changed where the repair is, but I retained the content of the area.  In fact, when seen in the entire piece, I like the addition of that subtle geometry to the surface there.   I also added more support to the backside of the same corner.  Probably MOST importantly, I (bravely) drilled and screwed right through the front of the artwork, to attach a more secure wood strip to the back for a better hanging solution, and then concealed the screws on the face of the artwork.

A sideview portion of "Biography of a Moth" can be seen on the right side of the announcement card for my show, "Translating Nature".  The show will be at the Rider University Art Gallery, on the 2nd floor of the Bart Luedeke Center, Westminster College of the Arts at Rider University, 2083 Lawrenceville Rd., Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and it opens September 30th, 5-7pm. There is an artist's talk scheduled for October 7th, 7pm. The exhibition runs through October 30th.  My mother, my shadow and myself will all be in some form of attendance.