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

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