When I Was a Bird

When I Was a Bird

collage on multi-media board, 8 x 14 inches

ingredients: vintage book pages and hand-written letters, image transfers, magazine cut-outs, gampi paper, water color crayons and pencils, stitching

This one looks pretty much the same as the last time you saw it; I just added some stitching, the birds, and tweaked a few other things. Trying not to overwork it, as I sometimes tend to do.

You may have noticed that people with wings, angel-like figures, and girls with one wing appear frequently in my work. I tried to get to the bottom of this obsession in a past blog post titled, "Where Wings Come From", which you can read here if you're interested. Someone once said that all of the figures an artist paints are reflections of him/herself, and in some way, I believe this is true.

detail of first spread from my handmade book, Book of Dreams

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. ~Henry Ward Beecher

a page from Not an Open Book

In trying to find quotes for this post, I came across a very interesting website called Every Pianter Paints Himself: Art's Masterpieces Explained. The home page text states:

Every painter paints himself, a saying first documented in the early Renaissance, has been mentioned by artists ever since. Both Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci used it, as Picasso did too; Lucian Freud and other contemporary artists still cite variations today. Yet despite its great significance to artists, art scholars rarely discuss the saying or its meaning. Those who do seem to have no choice but to deny it: painters don’t really paint themselves, they say, but their sensibility. But why would a phrase that meant so much to great masters, and still does to their followers, require re-phrasing to mean anything? The truth is, as this website demonstrates, it is the images of these visual artists that are veiled, not their words.

Here's an example from the site where they discuss some of Basquiat's paintings in relation to his life. I plan to go back and read what they say about other artists and their work. Just something to think about, you know?

So Far...

Despite drowning in a sea of product tags, focus keywords, alt attributes, meta descriptions, and SEO titles, I have managed to make a little more progress on When I was a Bird, a collage I had started for an art challenge a few weeks back. I took photos of it with my phone, and they did not upload to my dropbox. I have no clue why, but it is surely aggravating. So I took photos with my Panasonic Lumix, and couldn't get them to upload to the computer! Just one more thing, you know?

But I have managed to grab little snippets of time here and there to work this collage, mainly to keep myself sane. Now, back to work, and maybe a bit of studio time! I'll keep you posted!

Where Wings Come From

When I was a child, I was not very good at discerning what was real from what wasn't.  My parents often remarked that I had "lots of imagination." In some ways, I suppose it could have been an advantage, as I'm sure it must have been a large part of whatever combination of influences and  natural proclivities ultimately made me choose the life path of an artist.  I would lay awake at night, convinced that there were all sorts of monsters inhabiting my room. After finally exhausting my parents' patience, I knew there was no use calling them for help; grown-up eyes were obviously unable to see these creatures, and they were no doubt bound to tell me to go to sleep, because there was "no such thing" as monsters.  And though I tried very hard to convince myself that my parents were right, the monsters disproved this theory by continuing to appear in my room after dark.

Callanish Stones on All Souls Night

 Chrysalis
 
  

When I was about six, my next door neighbor and so-called 'best friend' revealed to me that I was actually an alien from another planet who had secretly been left here and adopted by Earthlings - the man and woman I now mistakenly regarded as my parents. Soon, she said, my real alien parents would return for me, snatch me from my bed at night, and take me back to my home planet.  Absurd as it seems, I believed her. I did not tell my parents about this - I don't remember why - but I must have driven them crazy with my frequent nightmares and tearful pleas to sleep in their room. I don't know how long it was until I got over this fear, because as we all know, child years and adult years are not at all the same, but it felt like a very long time to me.

Icarus Reborn

I was thinking about all of this today because I have started another piece depicting a person with one wing. It's a theme/motif I've been working with for many years, and is for me a deeply personal symbol of my inner self.  I knew these winged or half-winged figures were emotionally connected to me, but at first I thought they were just a representation of my favorite fairytale, Hans Christian Anderson's "The Wild Swans", which I had read over and over again as a child.

 A wonderful illustration from the story, by Russian illustrator Nadezhda Illarionova.

Here's a short summary, if you don't want to read the whole story, but it basically involves a girl whose 11 brothers have been turned into swans by - who else? - their wicked stepmother.  A fairy tells their sister she can reverse the spell by knitting shirts out of nettles for her brothers, but of course everything goes wrong, and she has to dress them in the shirts before the last one is finished, leaving the youngest brother with one wing instead of an arm.

Book of Dreams, first page spread

At some point, I realized that that, subconsciously, the one-winged figures represented more than an attachment to a favorite storybook character; on some deeper psychological level, I identified with them.  Too bad Carl Jung's not around to figure that one out, I thought. I briefly researched Jung's archetypes, but none of them seem to shed any light on this. Perhaps I unconsciously see myself as  not fully human; it's true that in many ways animals make more sense to me than people do. Some sort of transformational process feels closer to the mark, though; maybe it represents the hope for change, a desire to become something better than I am. Or, could it be that my neighbor's alien theory wasn't so far off after all...? :~)


Anyway, here is the new piece thus far:

No, she doesn't have a wing yet - but stay tuned; I will post any further progress as it happens.