(The Learning to Speak series.)

The body of work I am currently focused on is a manipulative and playful integration of the materials around me.  It is an exercise in my cognitive development as a painter. As an artist, a mother, a student, a woman, a person on this Earth for that matter, I have a multifaceted and chaotic lifestyle that is reflected in the piecing together of my work.

Organized chaos. Maybe that describes it, too.

Whatever you want to call it, my art is imitating my life. In these paintings I have found a way to discuss this beautiful mess. For one fleeting moment I can be everything that I am; all of my selves can exist in a state of delicate and harmonious simultaneity.

Bleach, paper, acrylic, and lipstick are the media of choice in my paintings. The initial smaller pieces I created were fast and impulsive. Working with bleach and lipstick was an alluring formula due to the contradictory lush and corrosive qualities of the materials. They represented, in my eyes, the duplicitous nature of being a woman. The heart of my smaller studies was the media, but in my larger pieces I realized that the process itself had become the emphasis. In tearing, collaging, reworking, drawing, and painting, I found a way to work that embraces the way my mind operates. I am an arranger. An organizer. A mess-maker with a Bachelor’s degree. These are child’s play for me. They are fun.

They express most clearly (without being so illustrative) the way I feel about my life.

It’s all ripped up collaged paper, happy accidents!

(Modus operandi.)

In an English class we typically hand in a rough draft that gets mauled by red pen, handed back, and thrown away. We never see it again. It is inferior. This is not the way the mind of a painter works. We think with our eyes. Our red pen is a paintbrush. Or whatever thing we can get our hands on at that particular moment to make a mark on a surface. It is important to look at and be impacted by the work of other artists, and even more essential to examine the way an artist feels about the reason they make their work. This is sometimes where the dialogue between us stops. I feel that the writing of an artist is just as inherent in understanding their images as the work itself. William Kentridge struck a chord with me. His drawings are more representational than my work has become in recent months, but his mark-making is just as urgent and impulsive.

Fresh.

The artist feels an urgent need to make things, and that need becomes very evident in the work itself. When this sense of urgency pervades the piece and connects with the viewer, the dialogue can be ongoing. It can inspire.

There is, for me, an inherent need to be hands on. In the studio I can be myself—a complete and utter world-rocking mess. Cleanliness represents sterility. Doctor’s offices and waiting rooms are sterile, and they are the most boring places in the world to me. I connect with things by touching them and altering them, and letting them alter me. My work is in a state of constant change. I go through phases as an artist, and this phase is probably the most exciting one I have ever been in. The current body of work I am working on is, and forever will be, incomplete. I would like to think that I can come back to this place and visit, but I don’t want to overstay my welcome.

I did this collage piece in class and my friend does all these really funny drawings and writes on all of them what he thinks about them so I told him to make me one. He made a joke about me ripping it up and putting it in my paintings because I rip up ALL my drawings and put them in my paintings. When he left class I ripped it up and put it in my painting. I love this one. The picture isn’t too hot, but in person it’s actually a pretty cool piece. Everything I’m doing right now either makes me insanely happy or laugh. This one makes me laugh.

Just painted bleach onto inexpensive black craft type paper. It loses pigment easily, so the bleach works well on it. I haven’t done anything like it too recently because the few papers I’ve tested it out on haven’t let go of their color so easily.