not telling anyone abt planning a trip to vienna cause i need to be alone and Experience.

Art in the Absence of Space

I have, over the past 3 months, been moving from Japan to the United States. It’s nice going back to my home country and living somewhere with a familiar language and customs (at least for a while).  But I’ve been without an art studio or good access to art supplies for almost this whole time.  First because I had to pack everything up in my studio and put it on a ship, then because while everything is on the boat I’ve been taking the time to travel and experience the big world.  

At first getting away from studio life is a nice vacation.  Art is work.  It’s creative, expressive, and can be a lot of fun, but it’s also intellectually and physically draining, and isolating when you’re spending hours alone in the studio. Art leaves a big absence when I don’t get to practice it on a daily basis.  I still take time to sketch ideas and draw, but I was really accustomed to having at least 5 hours of my day given to painting.  And when I needed to clear my head of my studio work I had fiber projects that I used to let my relax while maintaining creativity.  

As someone who needs to create to feel fulfilled I am not satisfied with just a sketchbook and my bag of pencils.  I don’t handle a pencil as intuitively as I do a paintbrush; but now when I really don’t have much choice about how and when I can produce my art I’ve found ways to fill in the gaps and hopefully grow myself as an artist in the meantime.  I’m doing this by actively viewing the art of others, researching my own ideas, and planning for all my future paintings.

Traveling through Europe is a great way to see a lot of really good art close up.  I found that I was viewing art in a more intentional way than I typically do when visiting a gallery or museum.  I went to the Leopold Museum in Vienna to see their incredible collection of Egon Schiele paintings and instead of just looking and moving on I got really close and and really tried to figure out how he used smeared layering of color to create a solid form.  The same was true in the Fine Art Museum where there were famous Rembrandt and Bruegel paintings.  The more I looked and the more actively I looked the more I could see.  The act of looking and dissecting the work in front of me became in itself an act of creating.  The downside of all this active observation is that now I’m more anxious than ever to get back into my own studio and apply some of that observed wisdom in my own work.

It’s lead to a lot of research and thinking, though.  I rarely plan out my images.  I am a very intuitive worker.  While I go into each painting with a general (often VERY general) concept in mind I allow the act of painting and the way the materials behave to inform the overall content of the image. I’ve got a friend who plans her images- details, shading, layout, pretty much everything- before she ever starts making the final image. I will probably never be able to work that way, but stopping to think about my work (I don’t have much choice right now) has been a good thing for me.  I’m taking some of the amazing images I’ve viewed over the past month and the personal experiences I’ve had to plan some images I’m truly excited to start making.

While my personal experiences always play a big role in my imagery by thinking about it I find that I can more easily talk about my work, which is something I’ve always struggled with.  I’m able to show sketches to my friends and point out where I’ve been influenced by Italian renaissance imagery and how I’m appropriating those concepts.  Or articulate why I’m choosing one color over another.

As said before, all this thinking about art and how art is made is making me more ready than ever to get back in my own studio.  But the added thoughtfulness in my sketching also helps to make the wait easier to manage.

This sketch of deer girl (she has hoofed feet) holding a fawn was influenced by the Madonna and child images I saw in Vienna and the idea of what innocence means in our world, a concept that I think about a lot in my work. 

This is a rough sketch I did about a friend of mine where I used his crazy over grown antlers to symbolize his wisdom and openness. The original ideas I had for this image were very different  before I really sat down and considered what I was trying to say,