and you’ll take to the sky
July 11th 2024
Weekly Wrap:
This week I finished a painting! I wanted a break from what I had been doing. I wanted to play, to try something different, in this spirit I started with collage. Using scissors I cut up magazines and catalogs and arranged the pieces, then I snapped a photo and collaged digitally until I was happy with my reference photo.
There has been baby crows nesting in a palm tree outside my window. I included them in the digital collage but when painting it seemed too cluttered, they were abandoned. Crows, butterfly, and ladybug had me thinking “oh maybe this painting is about flight, air.” I thought about a lot of things while painting. One thing I think art can do is hold several and also contradictory truths and meanings. It’s why art is important—it’s open.
I started listening to the book “Art Monsters/Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art” by Lauren Elkin this week. The audio book begins with an explanation/definition of the mark “/“ or slash. Elkin says, “I have written this book under the sign of the slash. To remind myself that fracturing and connecting are the essence of art. That it is the work of the writer and the artist to lay bare the experiences that divide us but also those that unite us… The slash presents a space of simultaneity a zone of ambiguity.”
This feels so right. As I watched the figure in this painting becoming (made out of fragments reconfigured) I found myself musing that she might be casting a love spell or a hex, but also that her eyes seemingly cast straight into the soul and also straight through the body. She really can’t be bothered with any of our nonsense—it is her narrative after all.
This week I also played around with some smaller paintings and dug back into a painting I had set aside for a bit.
Open call:
The Pollock Krasner Foundation
Deadline: rolling
Fee: none
Lee Krasner never forgot the personal and professional advantages she and Pollock received on the WPA, and was mindful of the lack of such opportunities in the contemporary art world. In planning her legacy, she envisioned a charitable organization that would serve a similar function: to relieve the financial burden on recognized professional artists so they can practice and advance their work. Her prudent management of Pollock’s estate, as well as her own successful career, provided the initial funding to make that vision a reality.
Requirements for consideration are the online application form, a cover letter, a current resume including an exhibition record, and ten digital images of current work with a corresponding identification list created in the last ten years.