“The Story is Me” July 2022 Release
For some time, I have felt like my art was somehow less than others because each piece doesn’t, in and of itself, have a meaning. There is no compelling story, lesson, a call for social change, to each piece of any given collection. We were discussing the meaning of our art in my art group the other day, and I mentioned that my process is the meaning. I started reflecting on that statement more and realized there is so much of me in the process of creating my work. And from that, this collection was born—"The Story is Me.” This nine piece acrylic and collage collection explores how my artistic process is the story of each painting, and the process is reflective of my own mind. I further examined how I collage, paint into, and re-collage a composition as a very authentic means of creation for me and my brain, exhibiting characteristics of myself such as big picture perfectionism, absorption, fixation, and obsession.
I am, like most people, a deeply layered and complex person. I am an obsessive thinker and obsessive worrier which I’ve spent the last three years trying to work on in my developing mediation practice. I’m what I’ve coined a “big picture perfectionist,” I have no patience for tiny details and tedious work but instead focus on the larger, end result. My obsessive mind is efficient to a fault—my brain is constantly calculating the fastest way to finish any task, then recalculating. While this allows me to accomplish many things, it also leaves me exhausted. I’ve come to realize that often, there is no prize for speed, and focusing all my efforts on the goal of “finished” just takes me out of the present moment. So much so that taking things as slowly as possible has become my goal, and really trying to enjoy the journey itself of creating, working, and living.
I take complex issues and simplify them, I cannot make myself tell a long detailed story if a few sentences will suffice. Is that why I’m drawn to simple shapes and color planes? I often worry, like many abstract artists, I’m sure, that my work isn’t complex enough to exhibit talent. But my eye sees beauty in simple, clean compositions, and there is immense restraint in creating that.
I’ve written that my art is a work of competing tensions—masculine and feminine, dark and light, geometric and organic. I strive for interesting compositions, but if left to its own devices my brain will compose and compose until I’m left with almost a mirror image cut down the middle. Collaging brings me the spontaneity I need to compose.
For this collection I used a new process of creating a dozen plus collage compositions. Then I discovered that collaging and cropping those compositions further could give me even more an unexpected result. I love the freedom that resulted from the discipline of doing so many studies—it freed me from the anxiety of working out the composition on a larger scale. From that point on, enlarging the compositions onto a canvas was a meditative process of taping, painting, and refining the edge relationships.
An artists’ (truly authentic) “style” is so closely related to the way the brain works. The process was very much me, using the way my own brain works to the best of its ability. In this way, the story of each piece is made up of all my complexities, thoughts, ideas, hopes, and frustrations tied into each line, form and color. What comes easily for one person is a struggle for me. But with this process, I tried to embrace my strengths, and I’m looking forward to refining and repeating this process in the future.
