Saturday, February 6, 2010

I will not fear pink paint

Ive been eying a bag of new paints I've pruchased with cautious fascination and maybe a little bit of suspicion.
I'm continuing to challenge myself as an artist. Two days ago, I bought a jar of permanent rose acrylic paint on clearance. For those not familar, it's pink.
I have determined that I need to push myself by using more than the nine colors I have relied on for over a decade (alizarin crimson, cadmium yellow, titanium white, ultramarine blue, vandyke brown, sap green, burnt sienna, naples yellow,and cadmium red)
So i've been collecting colors that I've rejected becuase I assocaite them with decorative art: purple, cadmium orange, magenta, pthylo green...and finally, rose.
I was recently inspired by a young college grad who created art during and after her trip to India in response to her experience. Reflecting the very busy and colrful environment she found herself in, her paintings are full of bright colrs and much purple, pink, and orange. Which reminded me about a comment made by an Indian woman who was employed to make home decor and clothing by a fair trade business: "Why don't we do brighter colors? These are so dull!"

Saturday, January 30, 2010

reapproaching the portrait

So, I feel like I'm really starting to get back into art and a way of life.
I had been stuck with all these ideas and feelings and no entry point. Really, I hadn't been seriously making space for it. Actually, it wasn't just that I wasn't making space for the art. I wasn't making space for myself. I hadn't been extending the grace of listening space that I had been giving to others, to explore and ask questions to awkwardly, but surely give my own voice to what I've been observing in myself and others.
Coming in to my creative time, I had two concepts in mind. I had been trying to figure out how to start exploring the questions in my heart about life and situations within that still overwhelm and sting and mystify me. I know enough to know that I come to the canvas and paper with questions, not perceived answers.
On the other hand, I have been thinking about returning to portraiture in my assemblage pieces. I have considered doing full size portraits of people in my community, with the challenge of exploring and expressing them and not all the labels on them. Like my friend Jesse, who pushes a shopping cart for Jesus and whose home is all of Dinuba. I was thinking that I would ask them to do a self-portrait that would be incorporated in the piece. Then, in some way, invite others into each piece in an interactive way beyond simply viewing and touching it.
Today, I realize that I cannot adequately start trying to see others, as needed to be obedient in these portraits, until I start with myself.
This actually freed me from the burden of trying to figure out how to approach myself through a conceptual space.
My challenge: to see myself through the act of portraiture. I have to look at myself, really look, and have compassion enough to bring out what is going on in my soul through the rendering of my face and gesture.
I'm approaching this with the aid of a suggestion given to me by a friend two months ago. He encouraged me to minister to myself by looking in a mirror or sitting in front of a empty chair and treating myself with the same compassion and attentive listening I would give to another person who may seek my care.
I realize in portraiture, that I ought to be attentive to what's going on in the heart, as expressed by the eyes and body. However, in really loving, I cannot reduce the person to their emotions, reducing them to a caricature, and as such, must see the beauty and constant qualities that reside in the face that shows the temporal states of joy, sadness, pain, exhaustion, vitality, anger. heck maybe somehow the challenge is to capture all of these at once, as they are present in the person.
Father, teach me how to see and teach me compassion.