musings from the studio and beyond ~
dawn chandler’s reflections on art and life. . . .
1.21.14 ~ is it any wonder i haven’t been painting?!
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| Even in the midst of chaos, I can |
My studio is a tornadic explosion of stuff.
STUFF EVERYWHERE!
Not just my studio but every room of the house!
AAAAAAACK!!!!
The reason?
I’m MOVING!
I’ve been TOTALLY CONSUMED for the past month with 1st, the build up to The Decision: To Move or Not to Move?
and then, once The Decision was made — YES, Time To Move — I’ve been consumed with the WORK of going through stuff.
Stuff and
stuff and
stuff and
MORE STUFF.
Which has led to more Decisions: Keep? Toss? Donate? Gift? Sell?
And then cleaning of STUFF.
And then organzing of STUFF.
And then packing of STUFF.
And then delivering of STUFF either to Goodwill, The Dump, The PostOffice, or to Recipients of Stuff.
My goal is to purge — one way or another — half of my stuff. EGADS!
That’s a lot of stuff.
Not sure I’ll make the goal, but I’m determined to try. Already I’ve rid myself of over half of the clothes and books in the house.
I made my decision to move a month ago, and I’ve hardly lifted a paintbrush or made a sketch since.
🙁
There’s a part of my soul that’s a knot of leaden anxiety about it.
But when I return to painting in a few short weeks, in a gorgeous new clean and tidy studio with good walls and great lighting, my muse and creativity will SOAR!
I can hardly wait.
Now back to dealing with STUFF.
2.14.2014 ~ two great loves
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| My parents during their engagement c. 1953 |
Today is Valentine’s Day. The day, sixty-one years ago, my parents “came to an understanding” after just two weeks of “going steady,” that they would spend the rest of their lives together. And they did. For fifty-three years they shared their lives. Not once in the forty+ years I knew them did I ever hear them raise their voices to each other. Never did I hear them argue. Disagree? For sure. Become irritated or frustrated with each other? Of course. But always the occasional displeasure was tinged with humor and goodwill. Yet never did I hear them argue, never did I hear them fight. They were respectful of each other always.
Always.
Theirs was a great love.
And while I’m sitting here thinking of them, a bit in awe of the caliber of their fondness and affection for each other, I find myself thinking of another great love.
The relationship between American painter Joan Mitchell (c.1925) and Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle (c.1923) was the antithesis of my parent’s marriage. Mitchell and Riopelle were lovers for twenty-four turbulent, alcohol-infused, volatile years.
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| Jean-Paul Riopelle and Joan Mitchell c. late 1950s |
They inspired, criticized, lifted up, beat down, tormented and delighted each other artistically, intellectually, sensually, physically. Ultimately their love affair would drown in an ocean of hurt feelings, misunderstanding, disrespect and disloyalty. Mitchell would stay in France and live her elderly years in relative isolation despite critical acclaim and increased attention for her paintings; Riopelle would settle back in Canada—he was one of the icons of Canadian art of the 20th century—pursing women, wine and art into his 70s—and achieve yet further recognition for his work.
And then Joan Mitchell died.
She died of lung cancer on October 30, 1992.
“A few days after learning of his longtime companions death…Jean-Paul Riopelle would undertake, in her honor, the monumental L’Hommage a Rosa Luxemurg…A narrative sequence consisting of thirty canvases totaling approximately 131 feet wide.”(1)
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| A panel of “L’Hommage a Rosa Luxemurg” ~ by Jean-Paul Riopelle |
When I read this, my eyes welled.
And when I viewed pictures of this immense sequence of paintings and imagined the pain and passion and love and sorrow that went into their creation, they welled yet more.
So moved was I at the artistic height to which this man’s feelings were elevated by the raw passion broken loose by the death of his long-ago lover.
To imagine this elderly artist, perhaps arthritic in his hands, unable to move as easily as in his youth, overcome with the need to paint, to release his throbbing emotions. Swirling paint and colors and shapes into an colossal expression of his heart in a “complex mediation on love and the passage of time.”(2) The thought of it moves me to tears.
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| “L’Hommage a Rosa Luxemurg” ~ by Jean-Paul Riopelle |
And were my father a painter? I have no doubt he would have painted four times those thirty canvases to express his feelings for his own lover, made his own sixty-one years ago today.
(1) http://www.patriciaalbers.net/writings
(2) http://www.canadapost.ca/cpo/mc/personal/collecting/stamps/archives/2003/2003_oct_riopelle.jsf
1.27.14 ~ the hot eye of vision boards
I’m heading to Ojo today. Ojo Caliente.
Ojo = Eye.
Caliente = Hot.
A friend gave me a free pass that I have to use within a few weeks, so, even though my head is spinning with deadlines and a growing list of projects I need to tend to, I’m unplugging and retreating for a day. I’m hopeful that the thermal waters will sharpen my mind’s vision as well as ease some anxieties that have overwhelmed my sleep of late.
Friends will join me, and later in the day we’ll gather over good food and drink and art supplies and create “Vision Boards” for the year ahead. We did this last year about this time and so delighted in the process that it seems to becoming an annual event.
What’s a Vision Board? It’s essentially a collage of images and words that you want to manifest in your life. Usually the images and phrases are cut from magazines, though they don’t have to be. But magazines are handy and make for quick, easy and abundant visual fodder.
My vision board from last year got tucked away for a while when I moved my studio at the end of last summer, and when I found it again recently, I was taken aback by a small section of it. There in the upper left corner I had glued the words “ARTIST IN RESIDENCE.” Being an artist in residence had not been even remotely on my radar for probably 20 years. It’s a concept I had simply and completely forgotten about. Yet, flipping through magazine pages last January, my eye fell on those words and something inspired me to cut them out and paste them to my board. 
What’s even more interesting is that I glued those words “ARTIST IN RESIDENCE” plumb next to a photo of a bird sanctuary — a beautiful still body of blue water and blue sky, edged by auburn reeds and dotted with snow geese. And that’s exactly where I ended up late last year: as an artist in residence at Playa, which is in the heart of an enormous bird sanctuary that looks exactly like that photo. And that experience has ended up being one of the most extraordinary, inspiring and uplifting experiences of my life. Yet when I cut those words and placed them next to that photo, I had hardly heard of Playa, let alone had hardly thought about being an artist in residence.
Did gluing these things down on my Vision Board have anything to do with my becoming an artist in residence at Playa? Who’s to say? Certainly my father, I know, would flat out deny that. I can hear him now, “That’s post hoc reasoning.”
I know, Dad. I know.
And yet….
The purpose of a Vision Board is to get you centered on the positive life you want for yourself. It’s a way of creating focus for your ambitions, your wants and your needs; all that you hope for.
It’s an alter to your dreams.
Place it somewhere where you will see it every day, and it becomes a powerful daily reminder of what you are striving for.
Gluing these things down did not, by themselves, cause them to happen. But adding them to my vision of what I want from life, and reminding myself daily of what I want, surely helped to put my own mind energy in motion.
“Luck is nothing more than opportunity meeting preparation.”
Knowing what you want helps you prepare, and makes you attentive to and ready to grasp opportunity when it arises. A Vision Board helps clarify and energize your dreams…and your Life.
And besides if nothing else, creating a Vision Board is a great excuse to get together with friends over good food and drink and laughter, and immerse oneself in the creative ojo caliente.
Cheers!
1.14.14 ~ burning paintings & the journey, iv ~ playa slideshow
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| A fireplace in the studio brings out the latent pyromaniac in many a de-cluttering artist…. |
Two weeks into the New Year and a huge chunk of me has lain dormant in the memory of my art residency at Playa. I’ve been distracted since returning home, hardly able to focus on any serious Art-making. Rather, my focus these five or six weeks has been on the mundane work of organizing stuff: filing paperwork and digital info, scrolling through spread sheets, tallying receipts, crunching numbers, tidying, cleaning, putting things away in my home, on my laptop and in my studio; distributing clutter to goodwill (happily), the landfill (reluctantly) and even my fireplace (demonically joyfully), where not a few paintings have been laid to burn. All of this with the goal of clearing clutter and creating space, physically and mentally. When my physical and mental space are decluttered, I seem to achieve a sort of spiritual and creative de-cluttering as well. The fact of that outcome makes the long days of not lifting a paintbrush just….…………………….barely.………………………….tolerable.
By far the most pleasant project I’ve undertaken these first days of the new year has been to sift through my 2000+ (!!) photos I took at Playa. I wanted to select a few of the best to share with my fellow residents, and with Playa, too. Finally I culled the photos down to about 130, and decided — for fun — to create a slideshow of them. I share it here with apologies for some redundancies as well as the length — it’s about 10 minutes, of mostly scenes of the land and the views from my cabin and walks. But it’s 10 minutes that make my heart and muse and spirit soar.
Not a bad way to start the new year.
INDEED. Happy New Year, friends! Thank you for your interest in and support of my heart’s work; I count you — my readers, followers, patrons, fans — ALL OF YOU — among my blessings.
May the new year hold for each of us insightful journeys.
Click here for Dawn’s Playa Slideshow
12.30.13 ~ the journey, iii: the gift of time ~ playa
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| The creative community of Playa sits at the base of Winter Ridge and the edge of Summer Lake in Lake County, Oregon. |
Where I was headed was Playa, a residency program for creative individuals.
And what is a residency program?
A residency program is the priceless gift of quiet, of time. Time away from appointments and commitments and social obligations. Away from the inner-ear ping of devices, of knots of power chords, of the clatter of updates and news streams and text messages and comments and “Likes”; of the foot-stuck-on-the-accelerator of mindless, depth-less interactions.
It’s a place to hear yourself think.
To breathe. Again. And Again.
And do so deeply.
It’s a place to work, to concentrate.
A place to take risks. To challenge yourself and meet those challenges.
A place to dream and to come closer to those dreams…
It’s a place where creative minds — painters, sculptors, film-makers, writers, poets, musicians, and, in the case of Playa, even scientists, can come and focus uninterrupted on their heart’s work.
Founded in 2009, Playa first accepted residents in 2011 and entered my radar in late 2012 when I read Cherly Strayed‘s brilliant Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Life and Love from Dearp Sugar. In the acknowledgement section (I always read the acknowledgement section), she thanks Playa for her time spent there.
“Playa? What’s that?” I wondered, but didn’t really give it another thought until my friend Shawn Demarest — an gifted painter in Portland, Oregon — attended a fellowship residency there about the time I was reading Strayed’s book.
Shawn’s photos on her blog of Playa were beautiful. But desolate.
Too desolate, it seemed to me, to draw me there. Just so FLAT. And maybe even — dare I say it? — a little boring.
So much horizontality, with hardly a tree to interrupt the long line of FLAT _____________________________________________________________ .
Not the kind of landscape that could excite or inspire me — of that I was sure.
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| Distant alkali dust clouds draw a white curtain, connecting land to sky on dry mud flats of Summer Lake. |
But then.
But then come June, Shawn asked me if I might like to go to Playa. For the 2013 autumn residencies, Playa was interested in inviting people nominated by alumni. She thought I’d be a good candidate, and was willing to nominate me if I was interested.
Despite all the excuses raging through my head telling me not to apply, I did anyway.
And thanks to letters of recommendation from Shawn and Joan Fullerton, I was offered a five-week fellowship residency, beginning November 3rd and ending December 6th.
So for thirty days I lived on the edge of prairie grass and white alkali silt, staring out on the shimmering horizontal line of Summer Lake, and falling in love not only with that incredible horizontality, but with peace and quiet and thinking and writing and painting and breathing — deeply — again.
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| Looking out across the mud flats to the grey-white line of Summer Lake. |