The Entrance to The Play With Scale is Through the Eyes...
- In Art Adventures Blog
- Post 30 Oct 2012
- By administrator
In both my large scale studio work and my smaller work, the eyes are the beginning. When paintings are taller or wider than I am, my peripheral vision is filled and my body is enveloped within the piece. I traverse, not only the surface, but also the dips, glides, tilts and tunnels of the space. As my work proceeds towards abstraction, it no longer homes towards a vanishing point, rather it ventures deep, or down inside slices of landscape, without a horizon or ground line for reference. Sometimes there is an experience of dream space with no fixed place to land. Shifting references to representation stimulate the imagination, but I don't want recognizable imagery and traditional perspective to overtake goal-less roaming in space.
Road Trip - Rock, Forest, Ocean, Sky, Rock
- In Art Adventures Blog
- Post 19 Sep 2012
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From Santa Fe, our route west was a diagonal to Idaho and Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve - a 52 mile long volcanic fissure. We camped there amidst the black lava rock and then continued west and north, diving our car into the verticality of Oregon forest. Next, we laid back in mist, sea and sand of the Oregon Coast for eight days. At the end, we headed back towards rock again - auto-ing for over four days on two lane roads. We drove a route through Utah that passes Arches National Monument and got out of the four wheeled vehicle to use our legs. We scrambled and rambled through stunning red rock arches. Arches, like Craters of the Moon, is an area that needs citizen vigilance to maintain its protected and nearly unmarred status.
Art, Imagination and Repetition
- In Art Adventures Blog
- Post 08 Aug 2012
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Jennifer is sketching. The photo above is from a plein air painting class at Ghost Ranch, NM. Jennifer was one of 11 participants. The assignment was to make three charcoal drawings of the same scene before beginning to work in color. Repetition is a very exciting and useful part of the creative process. Repetition helps in "seeing" and opens up the imagination.
Ghost Ranch-Strange Matter and the Nature of Transparency
- In Art Adventures Blog
- Post 17 Jul 2012
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I'll be teaching a one and a half day Ghost Ranch workshop on July 27th and July 28th. It is almost full. I will be teaching the same workshop at Ghost Ranch in early October. The October workshop will be stunning and sunny and gold in the aspens. Both workshops will include a studio warm up session in Santa Fe on Friday night and a full day painting out at Ghost Ranch on Saturday.
I ALSO have a residential workshop planned at Ghost Ranch in late September (Sept 20-23). There is something strange going on regarding the residential workshop. I only have two sign-ups and may have to cancel if I don't get six more people enrolled in the next week or so. I have been teaching this residential workshop for many years. It has many repeaters and has always filled at twelve participants.
The Ethics of Nature and The Creative Process
- In Art Adventures Blog
- Post 27 Jun 2012
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I began teaching "The Ethics of Nature" over ten years ago. I created this continuing education course to meet the requirements of the New Mexico Counseling and Therapy Practice Board. Each year I add new material - a few years ago it was poetry "My Cat Has Quit Eating" by Donald Levering (www.donaldlevering.com).
This poem elicits exploration on the part of the art therapists and counselors taking the workshop. They question their need to "help" and ask themselves when it is best to let nature take its course. This year I added material about working in toxic environments. I feel compelled to bring up "environment" in a course called "The Ethics of Nature". Toxicity can be within an agency, a disturbed family situation, or within the natural environment when we poison the oceans and the air and cut down the forests.
Images from Nature and the Unconscious
- In Art Adventures Blog
- Post 08 Jun 2012
- By administrator
This past Sunday I taught a workshop called "Taking the Inside Outside - Creating Images from Nature and the Unconscious." We began inside with a few expressive art activities designed to get people loosened up so that when we went outside, we would see nature, not only with our eyes, but with our whole selves.
The image that is featured on today's blog comes out of a personal experience where I had expectations for how "nature" should look. I had travelled to Lubec, Maine which is the eastern most point in the United States. Donald and I had rented a cottage with an "ocean view." I had spent time in Lubec a few years prior and was ready to work "en plain air." I had already done a large body of work based on the curve of the earth where the stretched horizon and the ocean meet. This time my ocean view was a small segment of tidal waters framed by beautiful trees. I sketched everyday, looking at the portion of water allotted me (when you live in the Southwest, you become needy regarding large bodies of water). The tides in Lubec are extreme, so the land would disappear at high tide and reemerge when the tide went out. I felt there was some secret hidden there, a secret that was hidden behind the trees, a meaning waiting to be revealed through the hour glass view of water which I had been given.