"Les gens pensent, 'Ils sont mieux!
On veut danser avec les deux!"
This year I've made quite a number of these, and now that they're starting to crowd us out I realize it's time to share them with others.
The drawings are a way of spelling out some kind of subconscious script. I'm still learning about what it all means. The title, "How did you get here?" is what I imagine myself, and the other people standing on the front of the box, asking the two women who are kneeling on the ground.
Ostensibly.
But there's also a chance that I'm asking myself how I got here, how did I end up making so many boxes and painting on them with a brush.
There is a history to all this, and I'll relate it as efficiently as I can.
My father was an art teacher, landscape and portrait painter. He also made quite a few boxes, out of wood, utilizing old desk drawers and packing crates, which he installed with bits of sculpture and objects he collected. He was a great admirer of Joseph Cornell.
When he attended meetings at the school where he taught, he was typically very bored. So he used to sit and doodle until all the faculty were dismissed. We called these drawings his meeting drawings.
Dad's meeting drawings became a record of his subconscious content. I could always see the difference between the freedom of his meeting drawings and the straight classical rigors of his portraits.
His boxes escaped the problem by not involving drawing or figurative form. Dad even ripped off some of my sculptures and put them into his boxes so that he wouldn't have to deal with the 'I'm making a figure" strain on the ego. I"m doodling in just the same manner as my old man, letting the psyche breath, letting the soul expand, letting it grow and take on nourishment.
I soon realized after starting ceramics that if you want do do brushwork on porous clay you have to be totally free. You cannot think. You have to just let it pour out. So I make the problem different by transforming it. I'm not about designing anything. I'm only trying to draw and not really be conscious of what I'm drawing.
We'll see where it goes.
