The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Water

My last post was about the rain barrel project I participated in with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.  Here is a photo of my finished rainbarrel, which will be auctioned off after touring the state with those by other artists, in a PR blitz sometime this spring:

 

Since completing that project I have been scheduled for a solo exhibition in September '10, at the Rider University Art Gallery in Lawrenceville, NJ.  Because it is the largest space I've ever been able to show in, it is an opportunity for me to expand the scale of my work in spite of difficult studio size limitations.  Water seems to be the dominant theme in my mind lately, and I am working on a mixed media wall relief of a river.  I say "a river" to be more geographically inclusive, but the only river I really know is the beautiful Delaware.  I'm crocheting parts of a river, painting parts, photographing parts, and making ceramic tiles for parts of this watery line that cuts between New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  

This week we were on the receiving end of the worst storm the area has seen in many decades, or so our long-time neighbors say.  A foot of snow came down on the several inches that were already there, but it was a heavy, heavy snow.  The 30 ft. tall bamboo folded down to the ground under it's weight, and then froze there.  Snow = water all dressed up in bridal whites.

It was immensely beautiful as twilight settled in.

Then we began to hear noises.  "Wasn't that just the bamboo brushing against the house as it lays down, laden with snow?  Shhhh!  Was that a branch falling on the roof - no, it wasn't that loud...probably more bamboo moving".  Soon the power went out.  Nothing new there, it does this almost every time there is a rainstorm.  It stayed off.  I found and lit candles, remnant ghosts from Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners past.  I'd never seen anything like this though:  in what should have been the darkness of night, long flashes of light illuminated everything brighter than any July dead noon glare.  Pink/white/green/purple light outside as if indeed, the whole world WAS a stage.  Was that lightning?   Was that some arching electric current?  Funny how the mind retrieves phrases stuffed away though not understood.  I didn't really know what an "arching electric current" was, but in grasping for explanations for what I was seeing, the phrase came to mind.  My daughter recalled the phrase, "thunder snow", which I'd never even heard of before, and I grew up near Chicago, Illinois, where people know their snow!

Hours later, the power came back on, feebly at first, and then for real.  We went to sleep amidst the silence that only snow can surround you with.  The next morning all of that wet snow's destructive powers were evident. For us, a tree hung alongside our driveway, branches lay everywhere, and another tree fell across and smashed a section of fence.  Down the street it looked like a tornado had gone through.  Branches and trees were down across the road, making it impassable for several hours.  One of the giant, tall pines that edge the street at the southern end and make our street so special, uprooted and fell, just the tips of some branches hitting the brick house it had stood in front of.  Yet all of this happened with so little noise!  In a summer storm we would have heard great loud crashing and thrashing.  In this wet snow-wrapped fury we only heard, "...shhh...was that... something_____?"  

Today as I was getting dressed I heard the tiniest "drip...drip...drip..."  Of course I looked up.  "Funny, I don't see anything".  Still, that unmistakable "drip...drip...drip".  I opened the shade, hoping to see dripping icicles magically throwing their sound inside the house, but the windows were all wet.  I took down the curtains and blinds, and water was dripping from the inside of the window mouldings.  UGH.  Nothing localized, where a bucket could catch it.

Well the past does haunt:  two years ago our handyman was up on the roof and said we needed some extension on the flashing, because the roofer hadn't done it right.  He added some sheets of aluminum.  Later, the neighborhood yard guy (who nobody likes to call because he is so unreliable and overpriced, but who everyone ends up calling in the inevitable pinch,) was on our roof for something I've forgotten.  He wrested the metal sheets off, thinking they were a roof job done wrong.  Afterwards, he insisted that we didn't need them.  Welcome the big bad snow of '10. Those metal bandaides would probably have saved the bedroom wall.  Now nothing can be done with the "situation" until all the snow melts.  I could be wringing out wet towels for weeks...

Ahhh, water, with your many faces!  So good, so bad, and now so ugly!

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.

The Reptile vs. The Lotus

Above:  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN, ©JoyKREVES'06

I've got to start 2010 (HAPPY NEW YEAR!) with a postscript to my last blog post:  I found this pertinent little item of information in the New York Times last week:  Van Gogh art scholar Martin Baily has discovered that "the artist inflicted injury on his ear after learning that his brother, Theo, was about to get married.  Vincent saw the marriage as a threat to his brother's continued emotional and financial support."  So we now know the famous ear incident was not an accident, after all. In other words, Vincent van Gogh acted out of that most primitive human instinct, FEAR.

Fear and rage are governed by our oldest and smallest, "primitive" or "reptilian" brain.  I first learned about our three brains when I read Robert Bly's woonderful book, LEAPING POETRY, many years ago, and I remain fascinated by this fact:  our oldest brain-part is identical to a reptile's entire brain.  We have evolved two other, newer brains over this first, innermost one.  Why do we have three brains?  Evolution!  Our more recent brains overlay the primitive one, and take charge of much more sophisticated tasks.  The reptilian brain functions from a basic, survival mode.  These ideas led me to create my TurtleBaby series.

Left: Original TurtleBaby, ©JoyKREVES (circa 1984)

Is it Necessary? Mud and Van Gogh's Ear

A friend of my husband's recounted that as a young man he had intended to go to The Art Student's League in NYC, but when he got there everyone was sitting on the floor, and this convinced him it was not the place or the career path for him.  He became an engineer instead.

left: Terrible Tragedy, porcelain paperclay

Last week, in making what will be my new batch of porcelain paperclay, I expressed my dislike for sticking my hands into the thick slurry.  Another clay artist there offered her own hands, saying how much she loved that feeling, how it brought back the happiness of playing with mud as a child.

Did I never play with mud?  All I can remember about mud is how we used it as a balm after bee stings.  My sister and I would rush to the hose, blast it into the nakedest soil we could find, and make mud as fast as possible.  Then we globbed it onto the sting site, where it seemed to deliver some measure of relief.  It was necessary.

below:  Celadon Vase, porcelain paperclay.

That didn't work the time a huge bee landed near my eye.  I stood like a statue, supressing the inclination to outrun the buzzy beast, while my mother cautioned, "Don't run or it will follow and sting you; stay still and it will leave." I can personally attest to that plan being based on false notions.  The bee did leave, but only after stinging.  (Was it angry that my blue eye was not a flower after all?)  That sting caused my eye to swell shut like a tennis ball in a matter of minutes, just in time for the arrival of our dinner guests, two of whom were children.  Their stares told me this evening was going to be seared into their memories, years later coming back up in         conversation as, "Remember the time we went to that family's house and their daughter was a monster with a deformed eye?"  "Oh yeah, I remember that!  That was scary!"  Without the mud balm, it took a week for my eye to fully deflate.

But I digress.  I was writing not about swollen eyes and social disasters, but about whether an artist needs to get down and dirty or what it means to not do so.

My daughter, a budding artist, gets some measure of glee from getting coated with charcoal.  Black streaks smear across her face, hands and arms on a regular basis. It seems her way of proclaiming her artistry to the public.  Does physical intimacy with one's medium lead to better, more powerful art?  It sounds romantic to answer "yes", but I'm not convinced.  My husband has often reported to his colleagues that I could "paint in an evening gown without risking its ruin."  It is true that I rarely emerge from my studio covered in whatever I was working with, and were I to move out of my studio tomorrow, future occupants would likely have trouble discerning what the space had recently been used for.  The floor is not spattered with paint and there is no odor of lingering turpentine.  The main thing I'd leave as evidence is the hundreds of small pushpin and nail holes in the walls, but these are easily filled.

I have been considering the aspect of making art in a state of physical abandonment, but there is also always that sibling state to consider:  the state of mental abandonment.  Here we arrive at Van Gogh's ear.  The big Q:  Was it really necessary for him to experience those emotional imbalances in order to make brilliant paintings?  An artist/psychologist friend of mine who has extensively researched Van Gogh's creativity thinks not.  In fact, he took such offense at my offered birthday game, "Pin the Ear on Van Gogh", that he refused to accept it.  He found no kernels of humor in the game and scolded, "He did NOT cut off his ear!"  (Evidently and possibly only by accident,  he only injured the tip, which produced enough blood to launch the legend.)  The "PUBLIC" seems to desire a certain amount of emotional polarity in artists, and after all it is so much more interesting for a bio to read that an artist cut off body parts in a fit of instability than, "he/she led a calm and balanced life".  Of course, visiting the emotionally dark places is something we as humans must experience sometime, to some degree, but is it necessary for artistic brilliance?  I'm not sure...

If someone who likes to play in the mud is around next time I mix clay, I will again accept their willing hands to do the dirty work.  If not,...I'll get clay under my own fingernails, because it's a necessary step, and someone's got to do it.

The Rumbling Thunder of Creativity

 CLOUD ©Joy Kreves, sumi ink on porcelain

A full storm of creativity is rumbling around the corner.  I can feel its gathering energy, its electric, growing thunder; it's a kettle headed towards the rolling boil.  It will be an immersion in the loud-ish bath of a sparkling, bubbling spring beneath a steady rain.  It will be these things for me. 

TWO CLOUDS ©Joy Kreves, sumi ink on porcelain

Meanwhile, I am holdng something in mind, something I first found in a little paperback, SELECTED POEMS, chosen at whim from the bookstore years ago.  One poem by Mark Strand remains my all time favorite:

EATING POETRY

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.

Her eyes are sad

and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.

The light is dim.

The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,

their blond legs burn like brush.

The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.

When I get on my knees and lick her hand,

she screams.
I am a new man,
I snarl at her and bark,
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

-Mark Strand

When I am under the spell of this poem I believe that a person can truly exist on the creative realm alone, no further nourishment needed; a person really does not need to keep a stocked refrigerator, laundered clothing or a tidy house.  These tasks are just annoying, buzzing flies - distractions from reveling in one's essential being.  I do believe I smell ink now...

Reading Tea Leaves & Works of Art

Every now and then something happens in my life that seems to have been foreshadowed in my artwork. Admittedly this is magical, but it's also very spooky. Perhaps appropriately timed to the re-emerging Halloween mood, this just happened again.

Recently I created a ceramic wall installation, ("Electron Madness") for an exhibition perhaps ominously titled, "Asking For the Fire". This piece's "issues" seemed to mirror "issues" I was having with a friend at the same time. The amount of red I was using in the piece bothered me all along because it looked too violent and angry, and I spent hours gazing at it, imagining ways to keep red's lure without so much of red's in-your-face fierceness. At the same time I found myself tiptoeing on eggshells around my friend's increasingly unstable violatility. Our once entertaining friendship was turning into a mine field already sprinkled with the remains of many of her other acquaintances.

As was probably inevitable, I somehow did crack an eggshell and she blew up and unleashed a mercurial anger unmatched by anything I've personally witnessed outside of a movie. I have led a sheltered life: a polite Midwestern childhood, an intellectually alert family life, and yes, some of that Midwestern emotional flatness that matches the endless stretches of cornfields that are so much of the Illinois landscape. So this in-your-face redness of my artwork and of her anger was something new to me.

I know that artworks try to tell you things, try to tell you their desires, and you just have to listen and learn to hear them. In "Electron Madness" I listened and wrote our "conversation" on the wall as part of the piece. My art was fighting with me over the theme and direction of the work. It was positively crabby. All of this I recorded in pencil, on the wall. I don't thrive in struggle and most of my artwork leans towards calmness, so this process was not my typical creating process. I got the idea to turn the tone of the piece by very consciously adding small touches of spring green to it. The whole thing did seem to calm down just enough. What a relief! Sadly, I can't say the same thing about that friendship. Whereas I succeeded in taming the fires in my artwork, I did not succeed in tamping the fires of a temper gone awry. I decided to give up on attempting to keep up a friendship with someone so high maintenance. There is that spooky feeling, though...The artwork is finished, the friendship is finished, but did I hear EVERYTHING "Electron Madness" was telling me? It's enough to send shivers down my spine...

"Electron Madness" was born while I was thinking about the science movie, "Down the Rabbit Hole", so I was musing about electrons and time and space in quantum terms. Not that I understand quantum theory well at all mind you, but it interests me. The movie brought up the issue of the directional flow of time, and whether the past and present and future can all exist simultaneously. I wonder: if time passing IS only an illusion, and events from all times actually co-exist, could this be why one's art might reflect one's present and even one's future?

(For the complete text copy of the wall installation "Electron Madness" see the next post. It is also on my website: http://www.joykreves.com/large-single-view/Installation%20Artworks/258954-5-21051/Drawing/Pencil/Expressionist.html

Electron Madness Wall Writing

THE FLOWER REBELLION
“Electrons are the subject of this piece”, I said.
"ELECTRON REVOLT-no- MADNESS... ELECTRON MADNESS."
First they were electrons, moving, crazy, but they all wanted to be red
I gave them a good title: “Electron Madness.” They had their own ideas, though. Before I knew it they were all turning into flowers into pretty little things and soon they were out of control.
I struggled. There was a power grab.
Yes, there was some violence.
They just wanted to manifest manifest manifest.
I tried to discourage them from evolving BUT they had an impulse
To fulfill, a desire, a fate…they were compelled.
“Electrons,” they stated sharply, “are not shy.”
I found them too bold – after all, red is very fierce. (my friend Joan says this)

“Okay,” I said, “but I must maintain control of this piece; I am the artist. So just ONE flower, like an exclamation at the very end. The rest must remain electrons! Well…a second flower snuck itself in and everybody knows you have to have one, three or five, never two or four (unless it’s a very formalist piece) so now there are five… All that red was just disturbing, too. It was all blood and strife
Finally I understood, the flowers taught me this - green always lies beneath red (even symbolically).
When I added bits of lively green
the whole piece breathed relaxed sighed.
The fire of transformation _ GREEN !