Performance art came from seeing the becoming of a painting as ritual and also a commentary of a current way of seeing. As a painter primarily, I am privy to watching paint and my handling of it perform. It is that intimate relationship with nature, the laws of becoming that both mesmerize and excite me.
Through a life dedicated to art making I live outside the bounds of security. My performance art arises from a stirring to articulate eco-feminist ideas and social / political conclusions I have come to, on war, ecology, veganism, world resources. All my performances urge the viewer to feel global issues as personal issues, choices.
The language of my performance is paint with me inside it. My body is not the brush, I am inside the creative process itself, no separation.
I do not rehearse a performance, and perform it only once. I spend months organizing, finding soundtracks, color, choreographing, planning etc but the final performance has to have the same spontaneity and thrill as I experience making a painting in my studio. I want to bring the viewer into the intimate and sacred act and imprint upon them a concise message.
A picture can paint a thousand words and my impulse is to throw my body into it, fully commit to the paint, to the art making process and let my life as a female artist contextualize; historically, culturally & philosophically the message particular to the piece.
My portrait / figurative painting documents intimately the human experience, abstraction documents the natural forces of life and my performance art unifies the two and provides a conclusion particular to a contemplation.
"Light, space and time blur into one, seeming to be truth but really it is just
blurring - painting."
20 years ago I had my first exhibition. My paintings were figurative. Figuration was my apprenticeship. Through 10 years of painting representationally I learned the magic and technique of painting.
I explored the brush stroke, to make portrait, figure or scene, until I just wanted to explore the brush stroke itself. I didn't want to arrange marks to make an image of something known. I chose painting to show me what was unknown.
In abstraction there is nothing to copy. Abstraction is like jumping off the earth into the universe, letting go of mother's hand and stepping into the ether of thought.
I find myself in the great void of potential. This subject does not dictate its structure to me but demands I release all ideas of knowing and open to new ways of seeing. When I paint I feel like an explorer of new paths and am privy to the experience of beauty unfolding in ways I have never seen.
The medium becomes almost irrelevant; it is the intent that gives my work consistency. My approach is not about finding a style but rather using style and medium as a vehicle.
As a child I wanted to be a scientist. My parents supplied me with science kits. I would sit on our concrete driveway warmed by the sun, ignite the Bunsen burner, set out the elements and chemicals, discard the instruction manual and endeavor to make dramatic explosions of color and froth.
I had to have an immediate reaction to feel I was going where no one had gone before. I longed to be delighted and surprised by the result and then think back to understand the technique. Experiment led to technique - not the other way around.
My parents bought me my first oil painting kit when I was five. We would go out as a family and set up easels to paint en plein air. Dissatisfied with science kits, not wanting to work with manuals I returned to painting. It was dangerous, it was not child proof and it gave me the thrill like nothing else could.
In this series I work with the flow of water and the reactions of certain colored inks added together by an eyedropper. I layer paper to manipulate the stream and create shapes (inkling # 1 & 2, Shuffle, Merge). I remove the layers and they become works in themselves (Road Trip came from Stone, Frond 1-3 came from Greenhouse.) I have disconnected from the surface. As Leonard Shlain explains in Art and Physics, "The crack between cause and effect, a brief moment occurred which was out of control, like the gap in a spark plug, this moment is what Aristotle once proposed as Potentia."
Dr Masaru Emoto in his book "the Message of water" photographs the molecular effect on water by thought. His results show the dramatic effect thoughts have in shaping water molecules.
Painting with the basic element of life intensifies the experiment of creating reality with thought. I pour water, it pools to rivulets running with colored inks that merge in curves of paper becoming landscape, geological and biological, mirroring nature in the unifying patina that suggests both the outer and the inner world.
In physics, mathematics and nature there are shapes and structures which appear irregular and random, but nevertheless have a special pattern of regularity called self similarity. The term fractal was invented by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975.
One God is made up of 112 ink drops causing fractalizaton. It represents the cornucopia of souls that make up humanity and is also reminiscent of the individuality of each and every snowflake or of stars popping in the night sky. God is every particle; I am reminded of this by the uniqueness of every humble ink drop.
Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix once speculated "it would be worthy to investigate whether straight lines exist only in our brains". Leonard Shlain writes "The Western adherence to the illusion that the link between objects in space and events in time is a straight line is similar to belief in a religious dogma". There are no straight lines in nature, except for the horizon and even that is curved.
American minimalist painter Agnes Martin has me enthralled by her work. Her straight lines are tinted with human frailty. Imperfection blurred by seeing the painting as a whole, iconic and essential like the horizon. Her repetitive, delicately dispassionate minimal lines are sublime and move me like the ocean's current. I feel it but do not have the reserve to express in that considered repetitive way.
The cut out and placed strips I use to create Strings 3 & 4 add repetition with out forcing me to meditate on the mundane. With this technique I can utilize structure while maintaining my passionate and explosive approach.
The strips started in 1983 where I applied masking tape diagonally on canvas and spray gunned paint, in 1994 I represented trees and buildings simultaneously with single lines and in 1996 I made 14 Foot lines by rolling on a dolly on my back, with the canvas above, making a continuous line with an 8 inch brush while in motion (On the Way To the Awakening series). In 1998, with the Nature Behind Bars series, I made splatters and daubes with a row of ordered lines in front. And in 1999 in Four Digging Sticks, four vertical lines represented my four appointed aboriginal mothers (I was accepted into a Yolngu clan in 1990), symbolized as digging sticks, the female tool for harvesting water from the earth.
Now in 2005 Strings 3 & 4 reflect on the theory of super strings. String theory requires the universe to possess more than three spatial dimensions and offers the first self-consistent approach to combining quantum theory and general relativity into a single unified theory of all physical phenomena.
When I was a child I would run around on hot summer days in my Aunty Agnes's back yard with my cousins. I would run by the old wooden paling fence. What was behind was obscured, dissected and abstracted by the spaced intervals of line. As I ran past it created a strobe effect. Foreground and background were separated but inseparable. Straight lines represent our assumption of sequential time. As I ran by the fence, form and order became music and what was clear and upfront became unknowable like behind.
A unity of self occurs while painting and through that state comes art. Rene Magrite called this "presence of mind". This state is the heart of being an artist.
Art like science is an endless experiment, and it is never finished. Life and truth are constantly evolving and I am committed intently to continuing the experiment.
1/2/2005
TANTRIC PAINTING
I am on a date with God / Goddess. Paint is the copper wire conduit
connecting me to the divine. Painting - a prayer or mantra, yet
active and ecstatic. It combines the desire to unite with God with
the sensuality of physical being. It strikes a balance between
humility and ego; recognizing the doorway, intuitively selecting a
color, making shapes and marks without hesitation. And like pools my
paintings reflect back memories of the transcendent painting process
- celestial and molecular, they explore deep within my own biology,
to the vastness of the universe, to the comfort of earthy nature and
its cycles, to intellectual awakenings and esoteric truths.
The true reality of The Void is attained by observing and
experiencing the oneness of diametric opposites: the union of
passive and dynamic, mind and matter, male and female, the base and
the sublime.
Sadhaka (the Tantric adept) uses tantric paintings, among other
tools, to achieve the religious experience of liberation from being
chained to the false realities perceived by the human senses. The
sadhaka's meditations inform him or her that the nirvana he seeks is
non-existence, the great bliss of The Void. Through contemplation
and ritual - seek what philosophers have called "enstasy." A term
that embraces both ecstasy and profound attainment of wisdom, the
state of enstasy is, in fact, that state of nirvana when one
recognizes The Void, the absolute reality that everything is
nothing. Meditating on the ecstasy, feeling a surge of joy or thrill
bringing it from the base to the crown, harnessing ones divine
energy to clear the body, cleanse the mind and revitalize the
spirits.
These paintings follow in the tradition of ancient Indian Tantric
painting, as meditation aids to further enlightenment. I hope they
transpose my painterly voyage to deeper wisdom fueled by ecstasy to
unleash spiritual liberation, and that they act upon you.
3/25/2004
Figuration/Abstraction.
As is pictured in my autobiography, "The Divine mistake" the first Self portrait in Blue I painted was at 14 years old. I used to paint a Self Portrait in Blue about every 2 years until 10 years ago. I had found that the depth of my emotion could sometimes only be relieved if I painted it out in this form. It was a surprise to me in January of 2002 that I commenced "self- portrait in Blue, NYC" having been a devoted abstract painter for near on a decade. I just finished the work, pictured here - oil on canvas, 26 x 52 inches.
Self Portrait in Blue, oil on canvas 2002 Self portrait in Blue #1, oil on canvas 1984
Beneath these is another portrait of my private commission subject, "Boy and Sky", oil on linen, 24 x 28 1/2 inches. He recently went into the hospital for critical brain surgery. I thought what better way to send him love and strength but to focus on him by painting him. He is home and recovering well and I feel closer to knowing his indomitable spirit. Toward the end of the painting I got emotional and dissatisfied with the image. I began to scrape it back. To my amazement it had mostly dried, which does not happen with oil paint in 2 days. As I was scraping with my palette knife the saying, as in art, so in life, rung true. My little subject is a miracle boy, he has survived every operation since his difficult birth, refusing to leave life and his face and spirit also refused to leave my painting. So I left it in tact with scrapes and peals, depicting his eggshell like fragility and his image blowing away but remaining.
Between the portraits I am working on a series of abstract enamels on aluminum that truly rock my world. I am utilizing the chemical reactions of certain colors to get desired effects.
It is odd to be doing both. I am critical of artists who do both abstraction and figurative work; I see it as lack of commitment and focus, flakey and hokey. And certain people see skill only in artists that can render the recognizable, I never needed to prove myself to anyone, I paint how and what I feel driven to. There are even those who assume that as I became disabled I also lost my ability to paint representationally, implying abstraction is a weakness rather than choice. In the past month between high productivity I have been tormented, questioning my motivation for re engaging the figurative and being disappointed in my wavering faithfulness to abstraction. Am I going backwards? Am I loosing consistency?
Now that I am gliding between the two disciplines I am no longer judging my self for working in 2 genres. Ultimately I love painting, I love the full spectrum of what paint can do through me. With a calm mind opposing forces inform each other. Skill and chance is a dualism I love to juggle, I became an abstractionist when I felt restricted by the form and now I do not feel restricted by it. I am experimenting, exploring and playing with the varied extent of my ability. You can not judge process just be transformed by it.
2/12/2004
Tomorrow I will be in ANTHEM Magazine wearing designer - LIZ COLLINS fab clothes. And there is a little interview too.
1/27/2004
CHOOSE TO REFUSE
Butchers Paper
Ecofeminism
Feeding blood to suckling calves, eating spinal cord in t-bone.
Hot dogs and pies, mass food
People don't think, don't know
Are kept in the dark
To turn a massive buck
To fund election
And we suck the blood
Of a deal
Made real
By advertising and normalizing.
I wrote this poem on January 3. It was the point on which I exited a night and day of hysterical crying. I often find that before a new series of work bursts forth I get hysterically emotional. I am grappling with ideas and thoughts that seem too big for me, lost by the endlessness of them I feel hopeless and frustrated. It is the birth of clarity. The catharsis projects me into my new work.
From this I now am developing a new performance piece, a short video and a series of paintings. Enamel on aluminum is the medium.
1/13/2004
I just finished a commission. It originally was to be two portraits but I became obsessed with my subject and did 22 studies in oil and 2 major portraits (oil on linen). When I began my professional career as a painter 18 years ago portraits, still lives and the nude were my thing. Ten years ago I got board with figuration and dropped the representational bag. I became more concerned with expressing and exploring philosophical ideas through abstraction (and later political ideas through performance). Abstraction liberated me from the mundane and from the world of the ego.
When I was asked to do the portrait, there was no doubt in my mind. I had already met the subject, a 2 year old boy who had defied the odds to be born. He was a little miracle and I was driven to paint him.
3 Months later all the paintings are with the family. They love them and my love for figuration has re emerged.
