A more balanced outlook

I am glad you found your daughter and that all was not lost.

I too have come to a much different understanding of things since my last entry.

Re-reading Krishnamurti's "Education and the Significance of Life", and finding endless inspiration from it. Feeling the growing life inside me and getting filled with anticipation and love. Can it be that after winter's slumber I have renewed unbridled energy?

Synchronicity abounds...all judgement dissolves. Tensions leave me. Creative thoughts begin to connect with previous work and projects yet to be undertaken. I am so excited. The middle of the night is now an excellent time to work! I have never been awake this consistently between 3-6AM, but for whatever reason, canvases are still getting worked on, and ideas are being consolidated that have been dormant in my mind. Seeing the black sky slowly turn blue each morning is uplifting, even though there is still terrible unrest in the world and many people are dealing with homelessness, radiation fallout, famine, disease, and war.

I had tea with an artist friend yesterday.

It was a lovely afternoon, and we talked about many things. She is currently participating in NYFA's MARK program, and has had a very positive experience so far. She mentioned that the program has helped her in terms of presenting her work to groups of people who don't know her or her work. She spoke clearly, articulately, and confidently in a way I have not witnessed before. A huge weight seemed to have left her. I was happy for her, and was encouraged by her this change.

As the afternoon wore on, there seemed to be a mutual sense of relief of knowing what we are both doing with our work, and now never running out of ideas to work with. As both of us have had the tendency to take things a little too seriously and to become very hard on ourselves, we have recently realized there is no sense of having to recreate the wheel every time we step in front of our work. Better yet, I felt like there is more space to get out of the way of our work!

I told her about my most recent revelation, while installing my most recent piece at a gallery in Rosendale. Something that hit me in a very profound way was that I have really been working with the same thing my entire life. I have always been interested in transforming something I understand in my mind into something I can feel, understand, and communicate through my body. Since 1996 this has taken the form of painting, mixed media work, and performance.

It all connects: in 1996/7 I remember loving small text pieces I began 'on the side' that didn't have anything to do with my painting (typed words on handmade organza baskets); the methodical process of stringing beads to cover texts I found offensive to women; intervening on The Scarlet Letter by making a 500-page necklace out of it; salting another version of it and hanging it in a grid; the mediational and repetitious actions of embroidery in Airing Dirty Laundry, the endless counting and meditation of the Morse code pieces...it all has a lineage I just realized for the first time.

In performance work as well, Meaning Cleaning takes the concept of 'doing public service' and actually realizes it through often grueling outdoor manual labor: sweeping, scrubbing, packing, sorting. It is actual participation rather than an idea of participation.

Finally, In painting: I've understood how to express vulnerability and compassion in my work by allowing those aspects of myself to be exposed, softened, transformed. In 2007, I overcame my deepest obstacles. Because of that decision, I have been able to understand what universal empathy can feel like in a painting. I am beginning to understand why the Hanging Meat painting from Rembrandt is so important; I see Fran Angelico in a much different way now. It's the knowing without getting caught up in the concept of knowing - it's the realization through one's body of what is truth.

In 1996 I began painting the back of the head, neck, and torso as a way to highlight this investigation; paintings of fragmented body parts followed, fragmented undergarments, slips (with words either painted on them or behind them), shoes, and a lot of angry process work. Concepts of death and rebirth were investigated through paintings of black cats, ravens, and jackels. I kept things separate - there was not an awareness that everything was the same. The anger I felt in my body scared me, and I didn't want to work with it. What I presented through my paintings were removed from the series before it. It is really in the last month that I have understood that everything is the same. Everything has equal space. Everything is connected and is in relation.

As you know, I stopped painting for five years, from 2004-2009. Since I have returned to it there is such a deeper investigation of how to articulate my questions of how the body understands one's experience of this world. Even at my most critical, this question comes up in my mind. I understand as I work, I understand through the work.