Cerebral Art Part II
Posted on | February 5, 2012 | No Comments
I have been thinking about how I think about the past for days now as can be gathered from these posts. Today specifically, it became clear to me that my past collections of moments are so much more vivid than the moments I am experiencing in the present. Possibly its this way for everyone. Possibly its because I am an artist. These montages of past moments stored in my mind’s gallery are equivalent to the painter who paints abstracted still lives, portraits, and landscapes. The objects and people painted in brighter, and unusual colors. The lines distorted in just the right way.
I feel this need to get these collections out. As if I may lose them if they are not pulled outside of the cerebral and placed in a visual form, or words. A painting would be too still. The words are a reminder, a doorway to visit and experience the vivid translation into imagery through my mind’s eye. What would another reader create? Could the cerebral compositions of my own ignite those of another?
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Hidden Candy
I am a little girl. I am walking through the woods. I enter an old chicken coop filled with strange and random things. It smells like easter candy. The whole composition is in candy color. Pastel, like those hard sugar dots stuck to long strips of paper.
Harlequin
On the way to New York. A business trip of my father’s. I am on the floor of the VW bus looking up at the structure of the bridge we are crossing. In my hand is a small mirror encased in a wooden shape. The back is a sad harlequin. This mirror is the center point of the experience. We stay in a powder blue hotel room with soft,thick carpeting. I am still holding the mirror. Everything is blue.
The Ring
I am in England. Wet air. Dressed to code in my navy skirt, white shirt, gray cardigan, and black, low top Doc Martin’s. White socks. I am stepping up on to the red double decker bus. I sit across from this beautiful and tough looking blonde. I am focussed on her big, silver russian wedding ring as she rolls it along her finger, back and forth.Years later I will buy one just like it from a vendor in Boston, and I will think of her.
Moe
He would visit us once a week and stay the night. He drove from London. Short and skinny in a very fitted black leather jacket. A grin would expose crooked and discolored teeth. He always brought a bouquet of half-dead flowers, as if he had stolen them from a grave or a batch discarded from a flower shop. He smoked hand rolled cigarettes. He had wisps of gray hair. I see him against all the many colored kalims that covered the walls and floor of the guest room, rolling a cigarette while he looked out the opened french doors at the gray sky.
Love
We sit in the closed stairwell of our highschool. I am looking down at my combat boots and torn fishnets. We had been spending time together for months. It was the safest and warmest I had felt in a very long time. Just the night before I had posed for a drawing. I had taken off only my shirt. He had ran his finger down my back and told me how beautiful it was. On those cold, hard stairs with the air smelling of whats left behind after the crowds of students depart, I told him I loved him. He asked if I really knew what love was. Something inside me wrinkled with shame and despair.
Thin
Running fast, faster. Sweat beading up on my exposed, flat stomach. My body all muscle and bone. I felt weightless. I ran for miles. Then I would get on my bike, and bike for miles. I was escaping. Traveling far away, but not going anywhere. This was my ritual. Returning home, my heart thumping through my entire body, I retreated to my room. Lit a stick of incense, and played Cds as I lay in bed feeling the endorphins radiate. Hendrix. Ravi Shankar. King Crimson. This was my first drug. I became so thin I was androgynous. I would not speak of love again for a long time.
Foundation
My last year in highschool I leave early to attend foundation classes in the Fine Arts Department at the local university. It feels good to leave the crowded brick building, get on my bike, and head out of the suburbs. It is here that I really learn to draw, to understand how a single line could be captivating, pulling the eye along to read the image like a story. I wish I could say that there I met someone. A beautiful, and somewhat dark aspiring artist that would help me to understand love. I was through with highschool boys. But you can’t meet someone when you are invisible. You can’t begin to feel your way around when your hands are tied behind your back. My pencils travelled across sheet after sheet of fine paper. Every contour shaping my journey.
Endings
My highschool prom is more vivid than graduation. I had searched thrift stores for a dress to alter. Finding some gauzy blue thing circa 1970s, I cut off most of the top. Armed with my hot glue gun I layered green artificial leaves on the bodice. My date had graduated the year before, and we were only friends. Through highschool he wore these brown moccasin boots. They were knee high. His silky brown hair was down to his shoulders. He drove a little maroon sports car, fast. When he picked me up he had corsage in hand and was wearing the obligatory tux. We met other friends at a marina in downtown Baltimore, and we all went by boat to dinner. The friend driving the boat I had known since elementary school, and for years his name had been used to tease me by my family. We had been caught playing in his basement in a way little kids aren’t really suppose to play. We stayed at the actual Prom for what seemed only a minute. A drunk and long lost childhood best friend stumbled to me with arms opened. A brief stroll on the balcony overlooking the harbor. Then back into the sports car to race back to my date’s house. I smoked my first joint. We had amazing sex without taking off our clothing ( I still remained a virgin). He drove me home at sunrise as I tried to comb out the enormous knot of hair at the back of my head using my fingers. This was the official end of my childhood. Relative to many I was late on the scene, but I came in fast and furious without looking back. In retrospect, a more gradual introduction, I believe to be more beneficial. It helps to be able to gather tools and skills before you bust out into the world on your own.
Summer
The summer after graduation I worked on an organic farm. Planting, harvesting, mixing lettuces. Some days it was so hot the sweat poured down like I was under a faucet. A friend and I were the only locals who worked there. The rest were polish boys who spied on us, and teased us. Our supervisor was a bit crazy. A very small, thin woman and an alcoholic, she routinely spoke of the fairies that lived in the gardens. Apparently they stole the gardening tools. The owners of the business lived on the property in a huge estate. They rented rooms out for weddings. There was a big in ground swimming pool ornamented with stone. On days that it rained we worked in the basement of the main house starting lettuce seeds.
The Past As Cerebral Art
Posted on | January 28, 2012 | No Comments
Often I read cautionary tales of spending too much time thinking about the past. When it comes to the painful parts of the past, I tend to agree, most of the time. But even with painful events, I can apply the following.
When I spend time diving in to my history, I am not really going to the exact place I am thinking of. Its not that I am making events up. Its that I am remaking events. We all are when we choose to pull up the past from the depths of our minds, scored with pathways connected to pathways connected to pathways…of memory.
It seems to me, to be a creative process. When I choose to really go back in, I am creating a piece of cerebral art. I choose the focus. I arrange the composition when my mind leaves out certain details. I can choose to focus on the captured memory of any one of my senses. A smell,sound,touch,taste or sight becomes the emphasis and then the layers build from there.
This happened yesterday as I was walking around my neighborhood. It was the quality of the sky at first. Then the smell of the air. Then the feeling of each step on the road. I was transported back to a day when I was walking to work, listening to music, on my way to pick up coffee first. It was Monument Ave. , and it was just that; full of monuments, and historical architecture. Just a year after rehab, and losing custody of my daughter, and ending up living back at the family home, jobless and obediently attending NA, and AA meetings. I was desperately and painfully disappointed with myself, and was quite sure I would never escape the rut I was in. Yet, there I was on that gorgeous day, breathing in the air as I walked to my job managing a boutique in a quaint little area of the city. I had the keys. I was being TRUSTED. I was also enrolled in school, and beginning to work on my Art Ed degree. Life had turned around completely, and it was me who fought my way out of that rut. Those years continued to gather a collection of “materials” for my mind to create with now. I loved those years immediately after pulling myself up out of the wreckage of my own making. The wreckage becomes part of the art too, simply by providing contrast.
So, yes. Living in the moment is a wonderful thing. And I can get behind the idea. But more and more, I am loving the freedom I have to travel back when a simple trigger of the senses becomes inspiration for the remaking of my own story. And once again, let me clarify, I am not speaking of conjuring up a fiction. My stories are true, but with the eye of an artist, I choose the emphasis, I apply the color. I find the balance. And these multi-dimensional collages are only for my own experiencing. I enjoy them just as much as I appreciate choosing the moment.
Still
Posted on | October 11, 2011 | No Comments
Overcast days seem to be a salve on my sadness. The depression is still here, its a chemical sadness. I am waiting to climb out of this sticky shell laying at the bottom of the pit. I imagine sometimes that it is a punishment. I was way too happy. I was way too content. I did selfish things. So the fates twist it around for awhile. Make it real after what felt like magic.
I continue to draw, but have not been in my studio very much at all. I am not the type of artist that is fueled by depression. The drawings I still have to make myself do. The painting is dormant. I go in to my studio and past days echo at me like unwanted reminders. The smell of the paint overwhelms. Sometimes I will make a mark, or a few, on something. Then I turn around and leave. That is that. It is how it is for now. Still.
Here and Now
Posted on | July 28, 2011 | No Comments
For more than a moment I felt closer to the stars, closer to the answers, closer to understanding. My feet nearly off the ground, I had a clear view of the spiral of my existence, and I thought I had reached another level. Walking for hours the last night of my spell, rain heavy at times, and I was with each step as if it were written for me to experience. So with everything. So with myself. Feeling a strength within that was unbreakable. Feeling entirely independent of anyone. Every moment mine to breathe. Things were changing.
And then, it was all snatched away. Tamped down hard, and made silent. This time and place has no space for crazy.
Or is it really just a different plane of awareness? Which ever, it is gone.
I am left here to put out the fires so to speak. To take on the badge of dishonor. I misbehaved. I did not follow the rules. I dream of a place, a space, where I could roam free-
I crave fantastical beauty. I crave the mingling of extraordinary moments. I have never been one of the ordinary ones ( though there have been times I have wished it for the sake of blending, for the sake of ease and connection).
I could think of this as dormancy instead of depression. I am just waiting still.
I have no drive for my art. I walk in to my studio and look around and it feels unrecognizable. There is a discomfort that makes me switch the light off and walk out. Yesterday, when I went in, I made myself draw a figure on a small canvas. No specific gender as usual, the person is bent forward tossing seeds to the air. I left after sketching this out in soft pencil, all smudgy and available to change.
What am I to learn? What am I to do?
I seem to just be here with this, however uncomfortable, in the here and now.
Birds In Flight
Posted on | May 12, 2011 | Comments Off
I have started a sculpture project for the public school where I teach. It is a contribution to the beautification of the school, as well as a visual testament to the possibilities of reclaimed material. I am also trying to make it kinetic. Three different birds with a 4-5foot wingspan, the wings sculpted to catch air, and the mechanism underneath causing motion. I began the brainstorming process about two years ago. I created sketches, and made a ceramic prototype. I presented my idea to a local sculptor that also lives right down the road from the sculpture site. He agreed to help me to manifest my ideas.
The past few weeks have been spent thinking about funding. Though the project materials will be almost entirely reclaimed, there are other costs involved that need to be covered.
The first bird is almost complete, and the next set of metal is cut and is ready to begin forming. I am enjoying learning the process. I have worked with many different media throughout my life as a visual artist, but have never worked on larger scale metal sculpture.
Cabinet of Curiosities
Posted on | May 8, 2011 | No Comments
I started a new project a few months ago. Well, actually a year ago when my father-in-law was living with us. His presence in our lives kept me at home more than I usually am, and it inspired much ,much creation. I feel gratitude to him for that. I finished a series of six panels in 3 weeks.
I also tried to rescue a baby bird, that hatched in my hand, that I found when I was running to CVS on the downtown Mall. That excursion was one of those blessing in disguise events. I got a chance to head out on my own, without the baby, to well, honestly, pick-up a fresh batch of adult diapers. I walked down the mall feeling unencumbered, but also with a hurting heart. Don ( I liked to call him Pirate Don my ever faithful scrabble companion…) had been on the sofa when I left, skeletal and fetal at the same time. Draped in a thin blanket, hand around the side of his face, a habit I was never sure was an act of comfort or hiding. There was no telling when he could die. Some days he slept so still on the sofa, I would stand and watch him for signs of breathing.
Two waitresses in front of Rapture were exclaiming in sighs. I could see they were looking at something on the ground. I walked over to look with them. There on the bricks was a cracked blue egg, the pink featherless creature trying to wiggle from the shell. Its ok, I said, let me take it. I scooped it up and preceded to walk around CVS building a sterile nest, while it rested in my palm. Every once and awhile I would look at the bird and be overcome with fascination at how human it looked, pushing and stretching from its shell.
The bird lived for about 24 hours. Then I collected up silica and buried it in a little box, and placed high on a shelf. For almost a year. Last week I took it out. I encased it in resin. And so began the cabinet of curiosities. Well, it really began with the upstate NY frog found frozen in mid-leap, now residing in a resin pond with bits of plant life.
The cabinet is growing steadily. Its a learning process. My latest creature I created with fresh. We’ll see if the lack of oxygen, and the thick resin, keeps the decay at bay. A baby turtle, a rescue we named ” Biscuit”. Two punctures in the shell infected with shell-rot. He lived for only a day too. We gave him a sterile home, swabbed his wounds with povidine iodine, and antibiotic ointment. He even ate lettuce from Delu’s hand, and drank droppers of water.
I set gemstones in his shell punctures. I gave him a dried black widow for a crown.
As I said, its a learning process. My studio has become saturated with the smell of Nag Champa , to disguise the faint, but unusual smells of the collection. It really is faint, and I have a nose like a hound dog, literally. Eventually , when they are all sealed in their hinged-box environments, they will have no smell at all…
But, right now, much work to be done. With a very generous donation from the Bio lab where I teach ( middle school art) , I now have a variety of creatures to create with…
I am just going to put the images on FB, because its easier.
Be.
Posted on | March 28, 2011 | No Comments
MIxed Media Painting
Web
Posted on | September 17, 2010 | No Comments
I am building a google site, because the one this blog is linked from has been under construction for too long! The google program is so user friendly, it seems a more efficient and convenient option. Then we will have to decide here at Off Center Design, whether to let go of our domain. I think the .org address has probably been leading things astray, may be? .com was not available and Rob was very set ( and I agreed ) on “offcenterdesign” straight up. Ok, this is just useless babble. If you happen to have some advice on this matter, please share. I would love some advising. Maybe we just need to start over, and see if OCD.com is available! Probably not, but If it were it could potentially lead to hits by some interesting people!
https://sites.google.com/site/pollysart2be1/
New Work
Posted on | August 31, 2010 | No Comments
I am almost finished a series of 6 pieces created on reclaimed cabinetry. 
As I Wait
Posted on | February 3, 2010 | No Comments
Again I find myself in this place that has now become so familiar. Unlike previous times, I am now beginning to trust that I will find my way out again. Where am I? In this place like a deep hole…no , thats not it. I am in a glass box high above the world. I can see how everyone continues to move along. I wonder about them as I push my hands and press my face to the glass. Who are they? How can they keep going like that? I can’t keep going like this, but I do. Each day another day another day another day. I wait. I manage. I do what I can. I feel my way around in my feeling too much.
I hold my baby-breathe in his amazing smell and warmth. Then I feel the fear run through me like a sharp pulse. I could lose it all again. It takes so much to put the pieces together again. I will keep it together. I will do just this, and then this and then another day will pass. I can sleep this time so far, and that I am grateful for. It helps to write this- somehow it tames the beast just a bit.
I know I have made it through before, so I can make it through again. But once again, will I think it will be the last? Will it be the last?
For now I am trying for a drawing a day as I wait to make it out.