What excites me most, rust, old deteriorating, bleached, flaking paint, worn, used, hand touch, used and loved. Nature is a wonderful artist and no matter what man does or makes, nature touches and has her own palette. I am an archeologist at heart, but I imagine our left over objects of today as the artifacts of tomorrow. What will generations try to understand about the object that we leave behind. Often as they age and bleach out in the sun, rust in the weather, on the bare bones are left. Then we are left with the basic structure of a form or object and each piece tries to tell us a story. But also as things age they take on a life of their own, with a myriad of hues changing in the light and sun. rain makes pathways of metal giving way to rivers of rust, contrast and highlights begin as one color fades and another doesn't.
There are colors that are only born out of aging, bleaching and rusting. Look closely at the picute above with fading black turning to a blue grey or reddish orange, and yellow and grey. Look at the repetition of the rivets at the top, how the light hits the tips and draws a long shadowed line underneath. Soldiers in a line looking from above as the light cast their shadow, wharf posts in the bay, people walking along a rice patty in Viet Nam, dotted along a road as seen from a helicopter. A tenuous line of barbed wire at the bottom...delicate against an open field of reddish orange.
The pictues are from a trip I took to Mississippi to see relatives. In this town on this railroad my Grandfather one worked bringing milk from his diary to ship by rail to near by towns, his lumber from his lumber mill once was carried on these rail cars. I got out of my car and walked the line of old rail cars thinking of him, his life and times. Camera in hand snapping pictures of an earlier time and place
Rust calls to me like a beautiful sunset might to someone else. I see a painting and work of art in each piece. I would have taken it home, but unfortunately a rail car won't fit in my studio! But I will work with the images and you will see them some where in my work. I am not the artist who knows an exact plan to follow to make a piece, I am the artist that follows the lead of my intuition to the piece that forms and lends itself to me. It is a journey that I open myself to, listen and feel. I trust the process and the journey. It is a dialog with my creative spirit that has become very sacred to me.
I look at things for how they speak to me like Michelangelo looked for the stone to speak to him. When he carved he wonderful scuptures, he believed their was life in the marble, all he had to do was listen to the stone and it would tell him what it wanted to be. For me it is like, that I listen and travel into my object word...they tell me how to speak their past.
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