expressions

What an incredibly well-attended and managed show this is. Sharon McCoubrey and her hardy group of volunteers organize an event with over 300 artists and 2000 pieces of art. Local galleries, individual artists and local musicians provide an amazing weekend of appealing to the senses. The cost to get in is minimal and the opportunity for children to create art, talk to artists and hear great performers is rich.

Another benefit of this wonderful show is that it is the one place that artists in the valley can get together to see new work, to talk with one another, to exchange ideas and network.

The crowds started immediately. Lines had formed before opening at 10 am and there were people still drifting around after the official closing.

I cursed when I saw the cheesecake man. Damn, I said to myself. He has heavenly gluten free cheese cake and I have to have it. There goes my diet/fitness pledge. The only problem is that my eyes are rolled back and I am totally dedicated to sucking the sugar off of the fork while I am eating it. Makes it hard to communicate with the art-tourists who are coming by.

We finally got my screen working so people can see some of the pictures that I shot in Europe. Today the sun is shining. The people will be there and maybe….maybe even some gluten free cheese cake.

Group and Solo Exhibitions

Chicago, Illinois- Woman Made Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of a new group exhibition, “One Planet, One Experiment,” and solo exhibitions by Lynda Cole, Jean Nerenberg and Leslie Sobel. The Artisan Gallery is showing “Object of Desire,” curated by Mary Stoppert and Carmen M. Perez.

In addition to group and solo exhibitions, Woman Made Gallery presents a poetry reading hosted by Nina Corwin on Sunday, September 14, from 2 to 4 p.m.

Please join us at the artist reception on Friday, September 5, from 6 to 9 p.m., at 685 N. Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago. Works will be on display until October 2, 2008.

Regular Gallery hours are Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 12 to 7 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 12 to 4 p.m.

Woman Made Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of its new juried group exhibition, “One Planet, One Experiment.” The show brings together the work of 34 artists and includes sculpture, painting, etching and photography.

The show’s title is inspired by the writings of American ecologist E.O. Wilson, which examine the threats that human activity pose to the environment. >From the colorful found object installations of Efrat Hildesheim, to the eerie photographed sculptures of Cynthia O’Dell, this group show presents a variety of perspectives on humans’ often destructive interactions with the physical world that they inhabit.

Jurors Lynda Cole and Leslie Sobel are both practicing artists whose knowledge base extends beyond the realm of visual art and into that of the environment. Cole is both a member of Michigan’s WSG Gallery and a former landscaping business owner, while Sobel is one of the founders of Art Alchemists, a collective of artists who use digital technology in the creation of their works. Both artists will exhibit a body of their work simultaneously with the group show.

Exhibiting group show artists are Tomoko Abe, Katharyn Addcox, Jane Ingram Allen, ATYL, Sandra Bacon, Arden Bendler Browning, Nicole Clare Campbell, Sage Chettle, Marnie Victoria Fender, Julie Ganser, Christie Ginanni, Cherie Hanson, Michelle A. Hegyi, Efrat Hildesheim, Emily Keown, Deborah Landry, Kim Laurel, M. Lennington, Sara Mast, Carol McHarg, Susan Norton-Scott, Cynthia O’Dell, Margaret Parker, Jennifer Gioe Peper, Catherine Prose, Maryruth Prose, Sepideh Salehi, Liz Ghitta Segall, Bricelyn Strauch, Allison Svoboda, Susana Taratuty, Liz Vercruysse, Katherine Weston, LaDawna Whiteside and Gail Willert.

Woman Made is honored to have Cindy Melk, founder and CEO of H20, serve as Award Juror for this exhibition. Melk is an avid art collector and successful businesswoman with a strong commitment to the environment.

The Artist Reception is on September 5 from 6 to 9 p.m. and works will be up through October 2, 2008.

Images: (top right) “The Experiment” - wood-fired native clay, by Liz Vercruysse
(top left) “Oklahoma Sample I” - screen print, photo transfer, drawing and painting, 32 x 32 inches, by Catherine Prose

Exhibition Dates: September 5 - October 2, 2008

The day is bright. The dirt is snuggled into corners of the house, under furniture. Summerbugs hang festooning the triangle corners of the entryway. Spiders have their receptive nets in place. Everything invites confusion. Do I spring clean? Do I crawl back into bed? Is the sun really only momentary? Grabbing the moment by ….maybe just writing about it.

Focus. Focus.

Living in the head

I think my mind is me

but all the heads,

Like Easter Island

enlargements of a self

facing outward

from a deforested land

largelips curled over words of the wind

blow back into flattened features.

We are erected by the culture

long lost to us

the history of DNA carved into stone

We think we are alone.

The eyes cannot turn

to see others

All Head-On Erections

visionless

lining our peripheries.

We are ungrounded of the ground.

The questions of Why, by whom and how

Are not asked nor resolved.

So much of my life has been a life of mind. Either living in my mind or in fear or mentally tumbling into the future. Like cleaning the next room and not the one I am in. Living with lists moving from item to item feeling only good when something is crossed off. For that thirty seconds there is relief until the flood of anxiety, fear and fury return to spur me on to do more. Each item on the list lifted up and off the agenda but the next floods in to take its place.

My eye travelling across the landscape of vision seeks imperfections. Weeds here, dust motes there, a picture not aligned, a splotch of sandwich on the corner of a mouth, a part in the hair which has departed from the line, one toenail longer than the rest, fluff on the inside of a sweater.

Like a spider, I move out into my day from morning’s support on one side to evening’s cessation on the other to weave busy lines and fill them in. If anything tears or destroys my vision, I will repair it after a period of grief, illness, sulking or laying in the dark cave of recovery.

It is a curse and a cure. It has kept me alive and almost killed me. It has kept me passionate and exhausted. It has created attention and deprived me of friendship. It has incited admiration, adulation, fear and envy in others.

Perhaps the best thing I have heard of late, while exploring the idea of metta sutta or loving kindness even unto self, is to realize that the self has a balance of cycles. It is just important to stand back far enough to see it.

Life might not be balanced hour unto the hour. The balance may be over a week or a month or a year. There is a pattern.

All each of us can do is gently try to teach outself, entice ourselves, reward ourselves to move from the place of compulsion into a place of compassion. Oh, and let the weeds growing under the flowers be. There are part of the landscape. Enjoy the shimmer of the rain on all of the leaves.

Tomorrow I take the pictures down to Summerland to hang in the one woman show. Opening reception is September 28th from 7 until 9 pm. The Arts Council is doing a great deal of the work and I am very appreciative. Getting the Bean Scene North show hung, preparing for both Summerland and for Art Walk in Winfield has been very “crowded” in my day.

I hope a lot of people come out to see the new work in Summerland. I have been preparing for six months to have the images the way I imagined them.

I have hung my photographic work at the Bean Scene North on Ellis Street. When one work depicting Florence sold, I put another image of an old fence with lichen on it. The larger photos for Art Walk in Winfield have come out beautifully on the canvas. As soon as Cameron gets time, I can put up one of those in the Bean Scene.

The one woman show in Summerland and the Art Walk exhibition are the two large collections that I need to complete. …

The piece for Woman Made Gallery has still to be stretched.

So many things to do, to complete. As I was mowing the lawn, the heliopsis were spectacular in the last light. They seemed to burn with a vibrating energy from within. Funny, I was thinking just two days ago of shearing them down… too floppy. But tonight as I moved around them in a circle with the push mower, they were like candles of color. Brave. Brilliant.

There is so much impacting in my life. Tasks, objects that I have collected, ambitions, old habits of drama that I wish were old habits of Dharma practice. After another visit to emergency and a night with pain killers dripping into my veins after four tries to insert the IV, I am again in recovery mode.

The residual scaring from my cancer surgery seems to be the cause. Just as it is the residual scarring from my childhood that leaves me feeling alone, embattled, frantic and constantly trying to control life. What a futile and pathetic waste of energy. The ability to begin with self and give oneself a strong physical basis for all action, is a spiritual practice.

I keep likening my body to a horse. “I want to get it under me,” I sob into the felted paper tray I am given in the hospital to vomit into for five hours, ” I want to ride with my body in ease.” But I keep returning to debilitating states of exhaustion and recovery.

As I was pruning back the stubborn thorn tree that I mistakenly thought was a good idea because it presented itself as a rose bush, I reflected on the process. I tried to dig it out but the roots were too wide and deep. Lacking the physical strength and the place to stand to leverage the amazingly lethal plant out of my garden, I have adapted the strategy of pruning. First I prune for others. I cut back the razor thorned branches where they will tear at strollers and senior citizens walking past my fence. Next I prune for the other roses. I cut back where a more benigh, less exotic rose bush was planted.

As it loses strength, I am now able to prune it back for me. Cutting the weakening branches in this third year of work, I can begin to see that there is space to plant the giant Lupines that I love. The deep blues and purples harken back to another, gentler time when tall stems of flowers stood in an English garden or Victorian settings. It is a time and a style that holds my heart.

So like the rose bush, I have to learn to be patient with myself and my habits. Congratulating myself for every minor pruning for every small change.

This morning, I was victorious. Insteady of cleaning the house and weeding the spam of 50 chances to gamble from the comments on my web site, I drug my screaming ego out the door and went for a walk. Only 30 minutes, I promised the ego that clung to the threshold of the doorway. I dug my fingers off of the molding and out I went.

The trees in the early morning light were luminous and transformed my spirit. I met a silly cat that followed my progress up “her” alley by sticking her head through the square holes in the lattice spaces one after another monitoring my walk. An old dog, blind in one eye was glad to see me… however he saw me.

Then when I got home, I pruned that gothic rose bush, weeded my web site and fed my blog.

I am so grateful that the media carries columns by Ross Freake and Stan Chung. These two spiritual practitioners provide the public with a gentle call. The chance to awaken and observe self is now in the popular media. It is a sign.

We need nurturance, pruning and the ability to weed out from our lives…well you know what is growing in your own garden. If you don’t, stop running and walk around for a look.

Always, the exploration of art leads inward to an exploration of self. The interaction of the exterior field of action, technique and externalizing vision makes the “statement” of perceived reality. The magic of art is that it is not discrete. It contains so many elements that the artist who gets very quiet at the centre, comes to see. Music, dance, kinesthetics and aesthetics do, indeed, become one form.
The process of creating visual art has been a path of self-discovery. One can liken it almost to archeology or the uncovering of the bones of self with brushes. Removing that which one does not identify as part of the central form leaves a true definition.
It is with this “archeological exploration” in mind that I suddenly had an epiphany. My work has always had a movement across the surface and a shifting of planes. Movement transforms the background, mid ground and foreground as they exchange dominance on different areas of the canvas.
I assumed that this was from my history as a dancer and choreographer. However, when someone asked me, “How do you get these vision?” I found myself understanding. “When I was very young, I began to see visions of colored shapes dancing whenever I heard music. Now, as a sixty year old, I have been able to reproduce the synergy of art, music, dance that I saw behind my eyes all of my life.”
Not unlike the process itself, I discovered the answer to what drives my work by turning off the rational mind and simply answering the question.
As in physics, all forms partake of all other forms. The flow of language, the clarity of visual impressions, the dynamics of music are all one. It is only someone who cannot “speak” the language of another manifestation of aesthetic, who places one form above others. They are all the soul’s work.

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