Last week I attended the opening of the Alaska Triennial, a juried exhibit at the Anchorage Museum.  My painting, Crab Pots at the End of the Spit had been selected and I was there celebrating and connecting with other artists/friends/colleagues. 

Talking with the juror, Mary Bradshaw, about how I paint got me excited to get back into the studio. I came home, re-mixed and refilled my paint markers with fresh color, and got to work on several paintings that have been floating around the studio space, waiting for my focused attention.

Here are some of those paintings in process:

Making is messy. The current challenge for me in painting is staying fresh, not overworking, while also rendering the subject authentically. 

I work frenetically, and I love starting a new piece. Sometimes a painting lingers on the edges of my studio for months before I know how to finish it. Sometimes, I know how to finish it but I have to wait for the right headspace to work on it. This happens a lot. Beginning things is exciting. Finishing them is a negotiation with how I feel, how grounded I am in the present moment, and - occasionally- what else I might be avoiding. Nothing motivates quite like procrastination. 

Bunnell’s 10 by 10 show is coming up and I felt inspired to work out some new pieces. The small scale, and unifying format of the exhibit frees me to approach each piece as an experimental opportunity to try out ideas that I’ve been pondering. Like a 10 by 10 petri dish for art.

The theme of the show this year is “in memory of” and I hold that in the back of my mind. There has been so much grief, and loss. The first step, for me, is to just try things and see where they lead:

Branches like veins/rivers, cutting stencils from orange paperboard, collecting and attaching birch branches together into a square nest or piece of sky. The papier mache barnacles I’d made this summer wrap around a panel as accretions. An unfinished drawing on canvas also gets wrapped around a panel, and I sew a zipper to scraps of an old painting, like a skin. The small breast forms that I’d made from ripped up checks are attached to a pale green ground, and then I’m thinking about equity in the home, child support, what love looks like, and the economy of care. 

I worked on about six different pieces, resolved four of them, and sparked some interesting concepts for future work. 

-CLK