Art meets Play

Art is how I play at Life. Life doesn't make any promises, and some of the packages it delivers are just plain hard to take. That doesn't mean they aren't delivered to the right address. We have the ultimate choice of learning from everything. But when I am stuck on wanting my own way, I have to bust through it and art is how I do it.

My serious nature is best composted through regular exercise of the ridiculous. I love the humor of animals, very young children, pantomime, rhyming and puns. I prefer Deaf humor and the Blue Man Group to most other funny business, because it is so intensely visual and physical. My cat is the comic yogi of all time, in his enchantment with wiggly objects. He has a ruthless hunger for play only punctuated by his...um, distinctive appearance. This pan-faced, flatheaded cat looks bit like a bass with hair...in an owl hat. He received honorary membership in Fred Flinstone's Order of the Water Buffalos as a kitten. Though I find him totally adorable and cunning beyond belief, he looks...funny!

When guest curator Elizabeth Lamb contacted me about a show of works on paper called "Play for Keeps" at the Tribute Gallery in Portland's Pearl district, I immediately thought of favorite author, James Thurber. I grabbed a 1957 book cover I'd salvaged from a torn edition of the delightful allegory, "The Wonderful O". It is a must-read tale of how the letter "O" is stolen from the alphabet, begetting all kinds of communication mayhem and what happens to restore the O to the people of the island. It is classic Thurber: exquisite, linguistically superb, hilarious and intelligent. The title alone evoked a tangent of visual puns in paper that broadcast like waves of music, enjoining other humorous takes on the meaning of "O". How can one resist a little scintillating innuendo? But I noticed after it was done, my deep connection to the orgasmic humor I enjoy because of my cat. And, well, another double entendre. Good, deep humor is as sensually tantalizing as any other joy. Smart girls know the value of a good O:

"The Wonderful O
should not be so, so.
Nay, rather it be,
spectacular glee"

Then I noticed what the piece looks like! Puns. Wow.

Art meets Woods

The artmind takes over when I stare at trees. Branches stretch out and crisscross, delineating negative space and making abstract mosaics that range in compositional feel from brusque to intricate. I am mesmerized by forests.

After a hiatus, I began interpreting coastal trees again with scrap paper, magazine and upcycled titanium slag a few years ago. Some artists like the view skyward, but I prefer sidelong profiles. I like the vertical rythym of their groupings, literally their families. I take my place beside them, in the company of trunks and branches, wandering like I would the eddies of a crowd of people or a family reunion. Tree people at lunch, or in intimate discussion at a party off to one side.




I note arboreal conversations. Changing from collage to eglomise (reverse glass) painting for a recent series of nature pieces, the role of light has become a stronger means of showing their intersections, as well as open space that separates them. Connections occur at any angle, as limbs extend and fragile twig-fingers mingle. I think back to the long hikes I took throughout my childhood in some of the worlds most beautiful forests of redwood, hemlock, larch, cedar, pine and fir. I absorbed hours of forest smells, scenes, sensations and the gentle shushing of winds high overhead. My body enveloped in green, I felt sheltered in the woods, imagining the large, slow moving beings as my relatives, protectors and playmates.
My mother was born in Thuringia, what was formerly part of the Eastern block, known for centuries as the "green heart of Germany" for its groves of mountain ash, larch and needle trees. Her ache for these places brought us into the woods every month to walk and hike the sub-tropical rain forest regions around which we moved. Lonely for a sibling, she gave me a sister when I was six: a native Hawaii'an Ti plant log, which we planted and tended. This is the one member of my birth family still alive 47 years later, through her many offspring which still live in my home.

I know trees as the lungs of the world because I was brought up to seek time with them. I paint treescapes though I live in the era of urban tastes. I do this so that people who seek recreation or comfort in virtual environs will be drawn back into real and powerful places wherein life happens in rings of centuries. If we slow ourselves whenever we can remember to, we can feel roots in the ground and then we know what is necessary. What things of nature feel like kindred to you? How do you focus on these relationships or share them with others? What have others learned about our environment from knowing you?

Art meets Parts

Art comes together piece by piece. I pulled some antique clockworks from bin in the studio last night, searching out elements to upcycle in the fabrication of a pin for a steampunk medal commission. It was the best excuse for playing with my Smith minitorch using oxyacetylene. With oxyacetylene gas, metal temperature moves from the solder point to fusing in a split second; it's really just too hot for most applications. But periodically, there is nothing like exploring the nature of such enormous heat in a fine-tipped, exquisite instrument like the Smith mini. I was part surgeon, part reckless adventurer. Thats an addictive place for a jeweler.

It is said you have to know the rules to break them. Flux is the layer of ground glass used to stop metal from oxidizing and preventing the union of one metal surface with another when soldering. There was plenty of excitement in fusing the clockworks to fashion a simple spring mechanism and soldering a steel flange into the jaws of a brass fitting for the catch. The surprise to me was in the finishing. I loved the combined patina of brass skin and flux. Under the high heat of this particular gas, the brass had accepted the flux, shading it like a burnished layer of enamel that captured the microscopic copper brought to the surface in the near molten metal during the process. Copper reacts to heat more quickly than the other metals, so it left its fingerprint in a most painterly way which the glass captured, melted into the thinest glaze of enamel, like a slide would what is under a microscope. Usually one cleans off the heatskin, filing, sanding, and polishing to reveal the shiny surface beneath. I could not bring myself to remove it everywhere because it fit the coloration and dimpling of a warm, autumnal planet, serving the thematic nature of the medal which captures a stormy moonlit night. It just FIT the piece. So I broke all the metalworker's rules, keeping this rough, worn, organic surface and using it as an artistic element. This is not to apologize. Why not break them in the service of this gleeful, natural magic?

I say, give me your poor (old clocks), your tired (steel coathangers) yearning to breathe free. I was in Halloween costume enjoying the treat of my amazing torch. Picture this silvery haired Deaf lady liberty: jewelers headset on, but bent over the work, the magnificence of a Smith minitorch in her grasp. Exhileration and freedom. Chemistry + art = metalwork, just like art + reUse = smart. That's the equation of this kind of liberty, to make of each piece something distinctive. A fun trick, too.

Here's my challenge: what new can you bring of your tired, poor or castoff lifestuff? Bring some liberty out of the parts and pieces. Make it count. Here's a mental medal for your efforts.