Mexican Folk Artist, Anonymous 2012

No Te Rindas en La Primer Caida: Don't give up in the first fall.

In December of this year I was invited to give a workshop in Oaxaca, Mexico at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACO).  I hadn't been to Mexico in years, and was reminded how much I loved the Mexican people-their warmth, their humor and their openness.  I was also reminded of how much I have been influenced by Mexican Folk Art.

In Oaxaca I found a number of  little paintings on aluminum  and bought seven($6 each).  Based very loosely on the Mexican Retablo, a Latin American devotional painting, they are humorous, often sexual, and truly wonderful, all six inches by five inches, hung with a piece of heavy thread from a small nail hole in the metal. They are where I want to go with my own work:  essential, honest, and simply painted with no fuss or muss.  I love the loosely painted yellow background on the slick metal surface with the overpainting of the bossy little skeleton wrestler .  Red, black, and white-how much simpler can you get? In real life, the Mexican wrestlers wear masks much like the one our little skeleton is wearing, so he is able to be both a "real" skeleton and a "real" wrestler at the same time. And finally, what a great life message, "don't give up in the first fall".  Truly words to live by.

Sphinx 2011

A sphinx (Greek: Σφίγξ /sphinx, Bœotian: Φίξ /Phix) is a mythical creature with, as a minimum, the body of a lion and the head of a human or a cat.
In Greek tradition, it has the haunches of a lion, the wings of a great bird, and the face of a woman. She is mythicised as treacherous and merciless. Those who cannot answer her riddle suffer a fate typical in such mythological stories, as they are killed and eaten by this ravenous monster.... a unique demon of destruction and bad luck. Wikepedia, the free encyclopedia.

Its been a tough year.  December particularly rocky:  two days after the death of my father, 27 people were gunned down in Newton, Connecticut, 20 of them young children, only days after a mall shooting in Portland and four months after the Aurora Theater shootings(I thought of my father wondering at the sudden onslaught of young souls). This fall, Sandy made us all aware of the destructive side of global warming. When I opened my Internet browser yesterday, one of the headlines told of the rape and murder of a young Indian woman, a medical student on a bus on her way home from a movie with a male friend. The crime stood out because it was so horrific, not because its unusual for women to be raped and beaten to death.  On a more personal note, I've just "unfriended" a  personable and attractive young relative whose posts are filled with hated and vitriol against President Obama.  Global warming, gun violence,  the abuse of women and political dissonance are all things we have lived with for years, it's just that this year all seem bigger, heavier and more out of control than in years past.

I wonder what our riddle is?  Is it something like, "What has two legs, walks upright and ruins everything it touches?", or perhaps a little more in keeping with the original, "what walks on four legs at dawn, two legs during the day, three legs at dusk and can't seem to understand that its days are limited if it doesn't start behaving in a responsible way?"

Woman with Wolf Dress 2011

Self Portrait:  a portrait of oneself done by oneself http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self-portrait

Today, the day after my 61st birthday, I wanted to use an image that would best describe me as I am now.  This image, done over a year ago, combines many things:  a self portrait after applying facial cream taken when I was in my late twenties; the side profile of one of my daughter's high school boyfriends; and the fur and paw from a dead coyote that my daughter Teal photographed.  The images were printed on ink jet transparencies which allowed the surface under the photo to come through.  In this case, the painting was a crackled surface using two different colors as the crackle contrast--subtle but effective in dividing the little painting in half. The cooler side contains the young man's face looking down, eyes almost closed.

The painting is about aging--drying up, cracking, and finally blowing away, fine dust in the harsh spring winds. 

Man with Child Inside 1994

On Wednesday, my father died.  He was 86 and had recently suffered a fall, cracking three ribs in the process.  He was ill for about six weeks, and finally, I think, had enough and asked to be taken off  life support.  He died within about 24 hours of his request. 

Man with Child Inside was based on a multiple photographic panel of my husband and our daughter Ramey when she was still quite young.  In this image, the father figure nests the child inside himself.  The child is calm and peaceful.  Content, she knows she is cherished.

Longing 2000

In my late 20's I lived both in Mexico and then, a year later, in  Ecuador.  I was young, blond and, most significantly, American.  Walks on the street would inevitably attract Latin men, either in groups, or alone, calling out, whispering of their love, trying to get physically as close as possible to convince me of their passion and ardor.  Because I was an American woman that meant I possessed lose morals and with just a little urging,  I would probably do any manner of things of an explicit sexual nature.  Kissing noises, hands on private parts, arms around my shoulders.  Every once and awhile a breast squeezed in a crowded space. All this to excite me?

Over Thanksgiving, I was hiking with my daughter, her boyfriend, and my husband.  We were on a low cliff trail overlooking the flood plain of the Rio Grande River.  Below us were two young Hispanic men.  One waved to me, I waved back.  Then, from below, "Can I suck your titties?". Giggling, they ran, losing themselves in the thick growth of Tamarisk that grows along the river banks. I wondered if they knew just how old those titties were that they wanted to involve themselves with.

Man with TV 1984/ before and after

 

My husband Bob and I have always had issues with the TV.  We are addicts, Bob worse than me.  We have tried different techniques over the years to try and keep our addiction under control, but now, past midlife, we have finally given in to the dark side and have a flatscreen TV and cable.  Our only nod to our addictive selves is that we don't have a huge TV, just a mid-size one--kind of on the smallish side.  This painting is about that addiction; the little TV with the rabbit ears our attempt to keep the importance of the TV to a minimum.  Of course we both watched it all the time, so it was kind of silly. 

 

I recently found a slide box full of before and after images, showing what the photographs looked like before I painted over them.  In this photo, Bob had collapsed on the couch, tired from doing some kind of physical labor. The painting is so much more elegant and interesting than the photograph, although you can see the connection between the two.  For example, one arm is "real", the other wiped so that the cushion on the sofa becomes the structure of the arm.  I think what is most interesting in Man with TV is that the painting reveals something that couldn't be described otherwise:  a reclining man in a gray world completely absorbed in the small square box in front of him.





Black Snake 1999

I hadn't seen "Black Snake" in quite some time, and had forgotten just how much I liked it.  I was visiting a friend who happens to have a large collection of my work, this being one of them.  We walked around to the different rooms with my paintings in them, and when we came to this one, I stood in front of it for quite some time.  My friend began to talk about the painting, and what it meant to her.  She talked about the snake and how it could mean so many things:  betrayal, heartbreak, money problems, rivalry, revenge.  She felt that each girl was reacting differently to the implied threat of what the snake meant.  I listened, fascinated.  When I made the painting I had photographed  my daughter, Ramey, when she was four with her younger friend, Emily.  They had been making faces, using their hands to twist their features into bizarre shapes.  Once I started combining the paint with the photographs of the girls, I realized that they needed something to look at, so I  added the little black snake.  I thought what my friend brought to the image was  more interesting than what I had thought about when I made the painting, and I liked that it spoke in a stronger, clearer voice living at her house than it had in mine.