Winter Kill 2008

Winter Kill:  to die as a result of exposure to winter conditions, especially the cold of winter.

I think this image is about loneliness, and about waiting, and hoping, but to no avail.  The two figures are male and female, the male is on the left with his arms raised, and the female figure is on the right.  He is imploring and she is waiting.  She is afraid that he will never turn to her, and he worries that he will never be answered.

Tough Woman 1998

I have never smoked and I have almost never worn pearls, blue eye shadow, lipstick, or high heels.  But with that being said, I have to say that Tough Woman is a very accurate self portrait.   Those who don't know me well perceive me as being affable, somewhat granola, a little (or perhaps a lot) hypochondriacal. .

The real me lurks not far beneath that friendly, seemingly open surface.  She is stern, critical, and not about to budge from an idea or a perception of reality unless proven otherwise(and sometimes not even then). Bossy comes to mind. The real me is a little feared by my family because nothing slips by, "And why is it that the clock in your car is still set for daylight savings even though we switched over three months ago?"  (husband and daughter).  My mother can't wait to get off the phone with me, "Are you drinking enough water?  How much sugar have you had today?  Did you make it to the gym this week?  And why not?"   More of the same for my 83 year old stepfather. Constant bullying in the form of endless conversations about how important it is for him to work on his core muscles.

At times I despair of this woman who can't let go of things, can't be easy, flexible, or "fun loving",  who hounds her students and her daughter (youngest)until they end up with best possible image they can pull out of the creative void.  Whose jaw sometimes hurts from clenching it so hard.  But, at the end of the day, although this woman is not always the easiest person to live with, I'm glad  she's in my corner.

Passing 2009

 

This piece started with Minnie's head.  Minnie was a pinto mare that my friend Colleen had happened upon during the six years that she and her family lived  in Albuquerque.  Colleen knew next to nothing about horses, and I know a lot, so over the period of time that Colleen's family owned Minnie, I taught Colleen how to ride and much about the care and feeding of a horse.  Colleen was head over heels in love with Minnie, and in middle age, had became passionate about horses, something I hadn't felt for years.  Minnie was in her 20's when Colleen got her(she was a gift) which is rather old in horse years, but she was in good shape, calm, pretty, and fun to ride.  When Colleen's husband found another job in the Midwest, they gave Minnie back to her original owner, sold their house, packed their belongings and moved on. I had no other friend quite like Colleen, and even though I knew we would keep in touch, it wouldn't be the same. 

Because of her advanced age, I knew that Minnie might very well not be around anymore.  When I came across Minnie's image in my studio, I found myself thinking about a  painting that would have to do with dying.  As a young adult, I had read the book I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven.  In the book, Craven used owls to symbolize death, which has evolved into my own world view. I'd photographed some concrete owls at a roadside stand a few years earlier, so I started my image-building with the owls and a photograph of Minnie's head. The painting evolved slowly and painfully-as usual. But gradually, the visual order became clear to me, and I understood where I needed to go. The geese became helpers, who were accompanying, and even lifting Minnie and her rider through the gates.  The owls watched quietly over it all, and the Navajo rug in our family room became the portal that Minnie and her rider strode through. I had thought the painting was about Minnie's passing, and about death, going through that portal, whatever that is.  However, I realize now that the painting also has to do with the smaller losses that all of us experience, the things we lose that we know we can never have back.  In my case, it was losing the day to day closeness of a  personal relationship; my friendship with Colleen.

Man with Heart Attack 1989

My friend Kay had called, it seemed, just to chat.  We spoke often on the phone, and our conversation was fairly mundane:  how was my corn growing, were we going to go for a ride that day?  However, this time, after we talked, Kay asked if he could talk to Bob .  I put Bob on, and listened with some concern as I heard Bob say, "I'll meet you at the hospital as soon as you can get up here".  Bob hung up and told me that Kay had been having chest pains and his arm hurt, classic signs of a heart attack.  Bob was getting ready to head back to the hospital and meet Kay(Bob had walked home for lunch), when he said, "Somethings wrong. I'm going down to Kay's".  Kay lived about five minutes away by car,  so Bob took off.

Here's what happened next:  Bob arrives at Kay's, sees his car in the driveway, so Bob knows he's home.  Kay's mean dog, Jack, is barking ferociously, loose in the yard.  Kay is not standing on the porch holding Jack by the collar so Bob can come in. Kay is not standing anywhere. Bad sign.  Kay always comes out to greet his guests.  Bob steps out of the car, thinks of himself as bigger and meaner than Jack, and manages to get inside Kay's mobile home without having Jack tear his leg off.  He finds Kay on the couch, arms splayed, mouth open, not breathing.  He pulls him to the floor, lays him on his back, and attempts CPR.  He realizes he has forgotten to pinch his nose shut when the air he exhales into Kay's mouth comes shooting back out of Kay's nose.  He pinches Kay's nose shut, tries again. More breaths, this time going where they need to go. Kay gasps and then vomits. Bob knows Kay is back on the planet.  He calls the hospital, gives them Kay's name and says "heart attack".  He hangs up and attends to Kay.  The ambulance arrives within minutes and Jack has to be distracted so the paramedics can get out and get to Kay.

Soon after they brought Kay into the hospital, I arrived and went to be with him in the small room used for emergencies.  He came in and out of consciousness--muttering to me he was worried about his socks being dirty. He had to be shocked several times to keep his heart going, and I waited just outside with the door open, terrified at what I was seeing.  My great and wonderful friend Kay, one of the kindest and warmest people I had ever known, literally, at death's door, in terrible pain.  A plane was summoned and it landed on the small runway adjacent to the hospital.  Within a very short period of time, Bob and Kay were in the sky, growing smaller, and then disappearing as the small plane headed West, to Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque.  Once there, Kay coded several times, but made it to the OR where a cardiac surgeon performed bypass surgery. Twenty years later, just two years ago, he died at the age of 80. He had lived those intervening years in Zuni in his mobile home under the big cottonwood tree with his little brown VW bug, his horse, and his dogs.  When he had his heart attack, he was the age I am now .

Shopping 2009

I don't think I'm quite at the level of needing to attend a Twelve Step Program (Hi. My name is Holly and I'm a shopaholic), but I'm close, especially if I'm not working in my studio.  I have in my DNA a need to look for things, to hunt, to find, to search out.  In a primitive society I would have been the one tracking the deer, calling out the alarm when warring tribes came to destroy the village, sniffing the air for fire or rain. But I wasn't born in a primitive tribe in the Amazon, I was born into the most affluent culture the world has ever known, chock full of things to be hunted down.  

So that's what I do:  I hunt for bargains, sales, things that I usually don't have any need for but that are  pennies on the dollar.  It's exciting when I start shopping, and often I find wonderful things, especially at thrift stores:  bicycle jerseys, shorts, and shoes; bikes, boxes of ink jet transparencies (20 boxes for $2 each), Dansko clogs, large rolls of printer paper, an opaque overhead projector, riding breeches.  If I'm not practising my hunting skills at real stores, then I'm doing it online, Craig's list being my favorite. At times, as I sift through hanger after hanger of clothing that I don't particularly like but is marked down 75%, I wonder just what the hell I'm doing.  It worries me.  And as I continue to shop, I think of all the things I could be doing that would make my life and the lives of others better.  What redeems me is knowing that once I start working in my studio, this powerful need to find things gets channeled into the making  of images and the solving of problems that have to do with those images.  It's the same attention and focus, it's just much more intense, lasts for longer periods of time, and I don't have to worry--at least for awhile-- about finding the right Twelve Step Program to join.

Bob as Blackie 1984

I got Bob and Blackie around the same time.  I had been dating Bob for just a few months, and one weekend we decided to visit friends in a remote, rural town in Northern New Mexico.  On the way there we passed several puppies by the side of the road.  We sped on.  Several days later, on the way back, we passed one of the puppies, now road kill.  I knew there had been more puppies and I began to look.  Sure enough,  a flash of black and white in the high grass along side the highway.  We stopped and gathered up an approximately  six week old female  Shepard mix.  We kept her, named her Blackie and she developed into an absolutely beautiful dog.  However, she did have some eccentricities.  She was fearless, and could face down any pack of semi-wild reservation dogs that would later, when we moved to Zuni, try to intimidate her.  And although domesticated, she had a kind of wildness about her that seemed to lurk right below the surface.  I was discovering some of the same things about Bob.  Although he didn't have a need to face anyone down, he did seem to be inhabited by a self that wasn't all that domesticated, and it seemed sometimes that I might lose him to his feral side(see Spiral Jetty 2011 October 30).  http://hollyrobertsonepaintingatatime.blogspot.com/2011/10/spiral-jetty-2011.html

The photograph that I used to start this painting was a full frontal face shot of Bob, but a little blurry.    When I was done painting, I had created a large Blackie head which lay over Bob's face, with only his blurry, slightly unfocused eyes remaining as photograph proof of his existence.  They both shared the same eyes, the same world view.  I realized that it was Bob as Blackie, and Blackie as Bob.

Man with Baby 2001

I was not someone who had always wanted to have children.  Babies especially frightened me.  I had no idea what to do with them and the thought of actually owning a baby was a little more then I could handle.  So, I waited until I was 35 to have my first daughter, Ramey, and the decision was made more out of fear of waiting too long and not being able to have a child rather then racing to embrace motherhood.  My one comforting thought was that my husband, Bob, would be able to deal with the child through baby and toddler hood and then I would take over when it was, say, nine, an age I knew I could (probably)deal with.

So, Ramey was born via C-section after a long and difficult labor.  When I first woke up out of the anesthesia I saw Bob with a baby girl in his arms, both staring down at me with  concerned expressions on their faces. I had not had even a glimmer of the power of what a baby could extract out of her parents. It was, of course, complete and utter love at first sight.  Oh those hormones I guess. Now, 24 years later, I wonder why I sold this beautiful little painting.