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?

Cubism and The Ornery Logic Of Water

Every time there is a natural disaster, water has to be one of the very first needs to be met.  With the recent earthquake in Haiti it is once again a most valuable commodity.  I was already thinking about precious water this month though, because I am participating in a rain barrel project with the NJ Dept. of Environmental Protection, Division of Water Supply.  The idea is that artists will paint recycled barrels (they once held cranberries), turning them into beautiful works of art to be auctioned off, thus encouraging people to save and reuse the valuable rainwater that would otherwise run off the roofs, out of the gutters and into the sewers.  While  relief agencies are setting up delivery systems for getting bottled water to Haiti, I am in the process of painting a design on my barrel that I hope will inspire someone here to use it to save more of the water we get from rain.  The drawing I submitted for approval was basically a combination of two

   above:  detail, THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT, acrylic on canvas, ©JoyKREVES

below:  CEDAR MOTHS, acrylic on linen, ©JoyKREVES

already completed paintings, adapted to the water theme.  It seemed like an easy adaptation.  I would paint something similar to "Cedar Moths", but the cedar cuts would be water rings - the kind you get when you throw a pebble into the lake, and the background would be sky, perhaps with butterflies flitting about in a gentle rain... (no matter that as far as I know butterflies are so delicate that even the gentlest rain would likely pummel them, wouldn't it?)

I painted the barrel with a beautiful blue clouded sky as the first step.  It looked great!  Right away, the art policeman reared his ugly face though, and I ran into difficulty with this seemingly simple project.  I had neglected to thoroughly work out just how I was going to combine an atmospheric background with a flat  design, on a round surface. After painting a few dark blue glazes of ovals over my sky for beginnings of the water rings, things weren't looking promising:  the art policeman told me that water rings only make sense on the horizontal  ground, not up in the sky, and I could see that the round barrel was quarreling with the mixture of flat patterns and illusions of space!  Logic is so ornery! Water clearly follows many traffic rules and I was already in a violation.

I decided to proceed with the flatter design route so, I painted out my entire beloved sky, ending up very close to the medium pthalo blue color that the plastic barrel had started off with!  Square One.  Today I painted water rings, this time as a linear design.  Each is at a different perspective, flying every which way over the blue like Larry Poons' ovals. The cedar cuts in my previous painting had worked well that way, I reasoned, and a vertical barrel, after all, is not the ground beneath our feet, so no need to pretend.  At this point I became insecure about my water rings, though.  Round water ring images do have a way of being more firmly tied to perspective; they are only ever oval because of our viewpoint, and so appear to us in perspective only horizontally.  I hope that I won't have to paint them all out again, to redo them as more logical elipses.  I hope they will "read" as water rings, no matter their mixed up orientations!

When painting, I often find myself having to make decisions about visual vs. mental logic.  i.e., can I get away with this shape here, and then repeat it from the same perspective over there where in the real world it really would be turned?  The art police come knocking.  You'd think I would have learned to deal with them once and for all as part of my art studies in college, and certainly in graduate school, however they continue to visit me intermittently, making all kinds of threats, and each time I have to learn all over again how to deal with them and their charges.

When Picasso decided to forgo unified perspectives within his "Cubist" paintings, what freedom he must have felt! The nose could suddenly be sideways when the painting asked for the line that shape, not when the "reality" of the face dictated it's frontal symmetry.  Why then, don't I take a hint already given?  Isn't the key here actually play?  If one is playing, one can bend and throw away rules to a joyful result.  If one is slaving towards a logical art, (and isn't that an oxymoron anyway!), then one must maintain a unified perspective;  one must present water as we know it to be.  Logistics.  Water.  It's a serious job to collect and get water to Haiti, but my project can just celebrate the freedom of art, and be a barrel of fun! It's sort of a Cubist revelation - again.