Monday, October 08, 2012

I am an artist

Over the years I have had many high school students spend their day shadowing me. Part of the experience is the interview. The student has to ask me questions so they can write a paper about what I do.


"What made you want to be an artist?"




And I answer the question: All my life I have always been different and animal skullI can't imagine my life as anything but an artist. I am not in it for the money- although it is nice to sell some work to pay some bills. I am an artist because there is this deep need in me to make things- to create. It's a 24/7 thing too. Artists look at things and life differently. You see a piece of paper blowing down the street and think of it as garbage. I stop and watch it move along the sidewalk and wonder what its story is. Like the day I was cutting across this abandoned parking lot behind a warehouse and saw this skull sitting on a trailer hitch. I took a photo of it because it reminded me of Georgia O'Keefe . When I got back into the studio I played in Photoshop with it .... one of these days I am going to print the photo and go in an alter it with my acrylic paints and create something but for now it's just a photo on my computer. 

eye
Suffer for My Art
 
 






I hear music and I see colors in my mind's eye and fleeting images. Sometimes I drop everything I am doing just to create a piece based on that music because it moves me so strongly. 




 When I worked on this cello Bach's Cello Suite played in my mind over and over. And then it played on my iTunes over and over until I finished the piece. 
Everywhere I go and see and do is a source of inspiration to me. I see colors, textures, lines and shapes. I want to capture the feeling of walking through fallen leaves on a crisp afternoon or the mellow mournful sound of a cello. I want to celebrate the fact that we are living breathing beings and we are surrounded by a universal energy. I want the viewer to be amused, surprised maybe even taken aback by the images I create. I want to make them stop and think for a few minutes. My name is not Picasso or Rembrandt or Van Gogh. My name does not matter. What matters is that I am an artist. And when someone walks into my studio and stares at something I have created and they say it speaks to them then I know I have done it right because we are speaking the same language.
dancing skeleton

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