I am having another Open Studio, really a reason to clean up my space and make it presentable. Also a chance to display my recent work and get some feedback. Please come if you can.
Observations from the sketchbook
"It all comes down to the same thing, every new drawing is back to square one, every drawing is in the now. Finishing a drawing means nothing to the new drawing. There is a false feeling that success will carry over, but there is the reassurance that it means nothing"
" Sometimes drawing is a waiting game- waiting until the parts that you liked become ordinary, waiting until you don't care anymore and you can be brave enough to stomp on the parts you once prized. Courage is required and a lack of fear. Why should it even be an issue to worry over the preciousness of a creation, but total destruction is not the answer either. Its a balance, no fear , yet astuteness to recognize when courage has gone far enough and a gentler game needs to be employed. Freedom is always required"
The piece below is called "Kundalini Rising".
Water Works 2 at the Porch Gallery, Ojai, Ca (opening May 9th 2015)
"Hello my name is Wendy Smith. For a lot of my career as an artist, I have focused on large-scale drawings. In the past I have made sculpture and worked with installations.
One of the goals of my work is to simplify the complex world we live in. I have over time developed a visual language that involves a lot of layering. I am always trying to balance my work; to move the layers into the background or foreground as seems appropriate.
I use my spiritual exploration as the basis for my work, but draw on the body and also cultural, scientific and mythological themes, to enrich and make sense of our world.
I am currently a part of this show Water Works ll, I am very honored to be a part of this exhibition. California as we all know is facing a very serious drought. In my piece for the show, I have taken the tack that we should not feel separate from this issue, we are 67% water ourselves , any impact on the planet effects us directly. We come from water, are made of water and in some ways we return to water."
This is my practice talk for the opening.See below for the piece that got into this juried show, the title is 'The Life Aquatic #4'.
There are 54 artists represented with over 70 pieces of work .The show is at 'The Porch Gallery', 310 East Matilija Street, Ojai, there is work in several venues in the town The opening is on Saturday May 9th , there is a panel discussion moderated by ViCA (Venice Institute of Contemporary Art) Director Juri Koll next door to the Porch Gallery ,at 'Modern Folk Living' at 4-5pm . The opening reception is at 5-7pm at 'The Porch Gallery'. The show is up between May 9th -June 8th 2015. Everyone is welcome to come and see the show.
The Gap
Going back to my drawings done in the 1980's, I have an obsession with the diptych and triptych format. At this time there was a personal quest ,to see if I could make two or three pieces of paper relate to each other ,as one complete piece ,using the minimal visual means.
This formal concern has continued into my more current work, although the diptych format has recently gone away. Let me clarify , the kind of diptych where the two pieces of paper butt up against each other, so that at first glance the work looks like a continuous piece of paper. I am now interested in getting pieces of paper to relate together with a space between them.
The triptych you see below "The Universal Eye" has two gaps. There is an optical illusion going on here. The elongated elliptical eye shape that stretches across the three pieces of paper, looks like a continuous shape ,as the brain fills in the space, even though ,the eye also sees the gaps.As usual, I am following my spiritual explorations in a very concrete visual way. Learning the importance of the gap is becoming crucial, everything we do has this pause, very noticeable with the breath. I love that the London Tube announcer says "Mind the Gap" when the train is in some of the stations, so passengers can see the space between the train and the platform.
Georgia O'Keefe and other thoughts
An old friend and fellow artist recently left a comment on my Facebook page, saying my work was provocative. I asked him what he meant and he left the following comment.
" Provocative because you make me think, beyond what the surface is doing. Your work is not eye candy, its bold and I envy your gutsiness to fill whole walls with lots to chew on. Thanks"
By Vance Komula
What a lovely comment I must say. At first I had this assumption that because the word, "provocative" came up that he was going to mention Georgia O'Keefe, strange association you might think and let me say that I love her work, its a joy to have her name mentioned in any reference to my work. That aside however ,there is a Georgia O"Keefe= Flowers=Female=Vaginal shapes, link that I rail against. We do not say David Smith's work is all about the penis, although many male sculptures make reference to upright objects, usually large, what are they trying to say?
As an artist who happens to be a woman ,I am prepared to use anything I have ,to make the work. So I am glad that "provocative" didn't lead in the direction I feared it might, thanks Vance for confounding my assumptions.
Reactions and Forces
My son was home for Spring Break , a busy time as we were celebrating his 21st Birthday, a week early. He is now a physics major and has tried to explain some of what he is learning to me. He was talking about atoms and all the minute pieces of the universe that exist, so that if I touch a wall I am not actually touching anything. The wall seems solid to my touch because the forces of electrical energy keep all the atoms and electrons in place. In fact the forces between my hand and the wall push back, giving this illusion of solidity. We know that the reality of the atom ,is a vast space between the nucleus and the electrons. We experience the effects of these forces.
This made me think of an example of experiencing the effect of forces beyond our control. My Mum at 82 was thought to be a relative by a woman who saw her walking along the street. Apparently my mother looks very Danish, so she conferred among her sisters and discovered that her father's, father , my Great great Grandpa was in fact Danish. One of the dishes I loved that my Mum made was, cod in parsley sauce served with mashed potatoes and peas, the fish is cooked in milk, I know this is a very Nordic way to cook fish and wondered if this family dish came originally from Denmark. So even though consciously no one realized we had Danish genes, we experienced eating a meal directly related to that heritage.
Below is a large drawing that I am currently working on, it is the central panel.
Hung Liu
I went to see Hung Lui's show at the Palm Springs Art Museum "Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Lui", last week. It was an excellent show and quite thought provoking for me. She moved to the US from China the same year I did, 1984. She works on large scale paintings, that are really statements about the reality of the lives of the Chinese people with a sort of cultural overlay. She would use a photo of a peasant women with two children in baskets , maybe at a market selling her meager wares, also on the paintings are symbols of old china, stylized birds, cherry blossom. I found her work to be very political , if political work critiques the human condition so brilliantly. I was also struck by her skill in evaluating each piece , so that its completion was totally individual. She may have incorporated a bird cage in one piece, or shelves for a teapot and cups in another, yet there was never a sense of the resolution of the paintings ,being a blanket solution. I was especially taken by a painting that showed several women exercising using strong diagonals. She used a shaped canvas to outline the women and then put a red rectangle at the bottom.I took a photo of the work and will show it at the end.
In the basement of the museum there was a show of photography "Jennifer Karady: In country ,soldiers stories from Iraq and Afghanistan". Apparently she worked with returning Veterans to recreate a story from their wartime experience, and then photograph it with their family right there. This has the effect, similarly to Hung Lui's work of combining two disparate worlds in the same image. Lui's were modern day China with China's past , in these photographs, past war stories with the current lives of soldiers, depicted like a stylized tableau.
Feathers
So I have continued to make feathers. I keep thinking of the phrase ,"the battle between good and evil will be won by the weight of one white feather". It certainly seems as though the world is plunging into darkness. I did find a hopeful story about a time of great kindness, to counteract all the darkness around at the moment. The Choctaw Indians , completed their long march, a journey called the "Trail of tears", forced by the US army to relocate to Oklahoma. Thirteen years later the Irish Famine began, that would be 1847, at this time ,the Choctaw tribe elders sent $170,000 to Ireland to help feed their people . To commemorate this generosity an Irish sculptor, Alex Pentex , has made a large piece consisting of 9 steel eagle feathers called "Kindred Spirits". It is located in Bailic Park , Midleton , county Cork. The piece shows these large feathers forming a bowl shape. Here is a link ,so you can read more and see an image of the sculpture.
http://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/features/a-famine-time-kindness-repaid-in-cork-to-native-american-indians-315377.html
Below is a just started piece where I am thinking of how to use the feathers I have made
Fallow Times
I have been in a bit of a funk since finishing the second chakra series. I am not quite sure what I expect of myself- I am not a robotic art producing machine. Sometimes I need to have a rest, take a break from the studio and that's the beauty of fallow times. I need a transition, so now I am doing small drawings and seem to be obsessed with making paper feathers. I am not sure where this is leading me and that's OK
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Questions
Q: Please tell us about your career track as a visual artist.
Bumpy may best describe it. I went to undergraduate school in Nottingham England and ended up at RISD, Providence Rhode Island for Grad school in sculpture. Then I was in Houston to do a residency program affiliated with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. I would say there my career took off. I sold some pieces to the Museum and a lot of work to collectors; I also did a commemorative wall for a synagogue and lots of other things. Since having my only son in the early 90’s my career went on a hiatus, until he was about 13 when I started to work seriously again. I have had my current studio for 5 years now and have been working mainly doing drawings. I had a solo show in Claremont last November.
Q: Please tell us a little about the work we've chosen to feature on our cover.
The piece you see on the cover is from a series called “inside the Brain”, it is from a series of 4 drawings, there are 4 series, so a total of 16 drawings. I got interested in the father of neuroscience, a man named Golgi; he was the first scientist to dye samples of brain tissue so that neurons could be observed. In my drawings I used washes of color in different orders,to think about his process. This is not the first time I have done images of the brain, in fact I did a large set of Brain drawings in Texas which the Museum of Fine arts owns, so I could say I left my brains in Texas.
Q: What are your other works like?
I work with a visual language, so things that wouldn’t make any sense in words, have their own logicality. I have many interests, so this is a wide-ranging question. I have always been interested in what lies at the heart of things. I am very curious and will get obsessed with many things. I have often used different cultures as reference points, In Grad School I was very interested in the Yoruba Culture, and a series of spoon women sculpture came out of that. My most recent other work has ranged from a huge triptych about the great battle between good and evil that mythologically has raged on this planet. I also got very involved with thinking about evolution and the piece that resulted is a series of pieces under the title “Fetus Octopus Heart”.
Q: Do you think there's one thread that binds all of your work together?
One of the threads is making the unseen, seen. For example lately I have been obsessed with the light in my work. In the latest series of Chakra drawings, halfway through everything changed and the piece now is also about coming into the light
Q: How have you seen your work evolving over the years?
Starting as a child I always made things out of what was to hand and drew. My interests were to always understand complex structures. In many ways I am still working with the same concerns, my interests in the spiritual path have deepened and trying to visually present very complex ideas is important to me. My work also deals with the body; I am always exploring literally how the body works. I also explore the mind, in a series of triptychs I worked on after the “Inside the Brain” series; I became interested in seeing if I could portray how the mind worked. I use the mind side of things to get curious about cultures or myths and then use those references in ways that interest me. For example I worked on a series using the Pandora’s box myth recently, in the original Greek the word was actually “pithos “ which means vase, this information then informed how the drawing turned out.
Q: Is there a specific thread that runs through all of your work? (If not, it's okay; I'm just always curious.)
The one common thread is to take the incredibly complex world we live in visually and condense it in my work to an understandable visual experience
Q: Do you see an intersection between written creative work and visual work? (If not, it's okay, too.)
I see an incredible link in all creative work; it comes from the same source. I was involved with a musician for ten years and the core place that both of our work came from was the same. It was wonderful to be able to communicate this with another human being. Often these conversations are difficult and I admit I don’t really have anyone I can talk to like that currently
Q: Wendy, you and I met as a result of a professional group oriented around goals. Can you tell us a little bit about what your goals are as a visual artist?
I would like to get my work out to the people who are interested. I would like to have the opportunity to make sculpture. It is a difficult profession to be involved with, the art world. I have done a number of record covers and CD covers in the past, which is a wonderful way to get the work out, Mostly I would like to have exhibitions where I can show what I do, and finance this in some way either by selling the drawings I do or doing commissions. I have also done a number of tile pieces for the local parks where I live.
