Part I “Ideas may be buried and surface slowly in pieces…Or they may burst out fully formed—and scare the daylights out of you.” –author, Ian Roberts In these words Roberts describes how I found my what to the topic Altered Terrain, a subject which I explored for such a long time. Buried within, the first…
My first recollection of saving and recycling occurred when I went for a drive to the Rupert city “dump” with my dad and a bag of empty tin cans in the back seat. I was astonished to see piles of rubbish as well as discarded furniture and clothing. While exploring the heaps, I found a…
One has to be constantly on guard for the thoughts of self-doubt. It’s the artist’s bane. Artists seem always on the lookout for the myriad of excuses made so as to be absent from the studio. I used to tell this to my students. I tell it to myself every day. Since we moved to…
Fantastic Plastic “Farewell to the broom made of heath…
Henri Matisse is one of my great teachers. First, I was attracted to his linear simplified drawings that showed form through line rather than modulation indicating light and shadow. Equally intriguing was his use of color patterns, relationships and spontaneous composition. While Monet was, in a sense, a slave to nature (Rene Schwob), Matisse submits…
After moving from Virginia to Wilmington Delaware, my task was to settle into a different house and smaller studio. Unpacking seemed to take forever, so my cluttered “new” studio lay abandoned for a while. Finally, driven by pandemic quarantine, I pulled out a few collages already in progress and made myself stick to a 5…
For the past few weeks I’ve been putting together a Blurb book Altered Terrain: Changes & Consequences. The mostly black and white images were made about ten years ago. I arranged them with commentary or poetry which I have done with the series from my recent solo exhibitions. The first poem is “At This Place”…
I relocated to Wilmington DE from the VA/DC area in 2018. My first exhibit (2019) in Wilmington, Transformed Terrain, was inspired by connections between an altered natural terrain and the people who change it directly or indirectly, from close by or from a distance, on purpose or unwittingly. Further inspiration comes from artist Rene Magritte…
Fire and Fog It’s January 4, 2020. A deep fog envelopes our house and garden this early morning. Outdoor sounds are muffled. Tiny tree branches blur against a wet sky that closes in like a blanket. It’s the way the artist in me feels when one train of thought ends and another seems so vague…
As cooler weather comes our way I am trying to shift off garden design to designing works in the studio. I often start with something already in progress and go from there into a new series. In January and February I made 20 small “portrait”collages formed from a composite of features. They are all 5…