On a bottom shelf in the corner of my studio, I have a collection of accordion files that hold echoes of a life in the studio – ephemera, scraps, postcards, tear sheets, this and that, what nots. The physical archive is slowly dying out – I certainly don’t accrue like I use to before I had the world at my finger tips in my pocket. But even so, twenty-four years into the 21st century, I still seem to gather, store and sift through stuff.
I use this archive in all kinds of ways but I often use it as a starting point, and this week feels like a I’m starting to slowly form some ideas for what’s to come. I pulled out a few fragments I want to play with and look at over the course of the next six months or who knows, maybe the next couple of years:
- the blue and green of Dr. Spock and Captain Kirk
- Lavender fields in France
- Stacks of storage containers
- Begonia red and oakleaf hydrangea pattern
- Mark Morrisroe
- Poppy in the rough
- Copy machine glitch pattern
- Line drawing over neutral wash
- Painting with arched lines – neutrals with color
- Colors in a Munich napkin – maps
- Stack of circles
- Still from movie Sweet Life
- Note to self: drawing marks to canvas
I’m also thinking a lot about art and ambiguity.
Someone recently asked me “what does your art mean?” and I was struck frozen like a deer in the headlights.
It made me think back to a fantastic studio visit I had with a fellow Memphis artist who asked me so many great questions about my process and how I generate ideas. Just before she left I said with relief, “We talked about so much but you never asked me what my work means.” She shrugged, as though the meaning is obvious – it’s in the process and the meaning is ambiguous at best. We burst out laughing. I’d never before felt so seen as an artist.