Sharon Louden, “Windows,” partial view
This is the last photo I’ll post of Sharon Louden’s installation, although I took many others. This one differs significantly from the rest, and I can’t help seeing part of a Dali-style pitcher in the aluminum panel at right. Other than cropping and sharpening, I didn’t alter these photographs in any way….except for the one I turned upside-down. (But is there an upside-down when you’re looking overhead?)
Sharon Louden, “Windows,” partial view, overhead and upside down
A more comprehensive view of Sharon Louden’s installation, ‘Windows,” at the University of Wyoming Art Museum. Needless to say, this piece has a hypnotic and disorienting effect.
Granted, this is an awful lot of images for one post, but I’m hoping to simulate for people who have never been there the sensory-overload experience that City Museum offers. This place, like the Gateway Arch and the Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden, has become a unique must-see in St. Louis.
This cool mural is on the side of the Aims Community College building in downtown Loveland. The letters are shorthand for the four DNA bases (adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine); the numbers are the Fibonacci series through double digits—89, to be specific. Perhaps the doves are meant to represent human aspirations, since this is an educational institution. I’m guessing this mural was designed and painted by students, since Aims focuses on degrees in art and graphics.
El perico
El perico – crop
Palette 2-11-16
The face in the paint
Since I’m also taking Spanish, I decided to use Spanish for the title of my little class painting today. The parakeet needs more work, but is, I think, at least identifiable as some kind of bird. But I’m feeling very excited about doing the close-ups. I needed something like this just now to get back to taking photographs. Can’t always be on a road trip. And I can do this no matter how cold or nasty it gets outside!
I’m taking my first painting class. Acrylics. Phrases like “Baby’s First Painting” or “Baby’s First Paint Set” keep running through my head. They publish books with titles like that, don’t they? Anyway, regardless of whether or not I prove to have any talent, I’m finding that this is a peaceful and interesting activity. Since my aim is ultimately to paint abstracts (of course!), I’m much more pleased with the appearance of the “palette” from tonight’s messing around than I am with the actual painting. (That messing-around painting is not shown above, in case you’re puzzling over the colors. The top photo shows what is supposed to look like a sphere, painted the first night in class, and what is supposed to look like an apple, which I painted last night in order to practice a bit with dimension in color.) I’m thinking that I could put different colors of paint in a paper bowl, blend them in different ways, photograph them, and just skip the applying-them-to-canvas part. This class may not set me on the road to becoming a painter in a traditional sense, but it may give me a new way of being an artist.
No art lasts forever, but some art is much more transient than the rest.
A good friend of mine posted a link on my Facebook page tonight that shows photographs of a Van Gogh painting reproduced large on the landscape via vegetation planted on a 1.2-acre plot. The artist is Stan Herd, who specializes in “land art” designed to be seen from the air. Most of his pieces are eventually plowed under or grown over.
The same transience characterizes the work of the well-known artist Andy Goldsworthy, who works primarily with sticks and stones, leaves, ice, and other materials found in nature. Most of his works are not destined for long life either. They melt, get blown away, wither, or are destroyed by water. Even more transient than Goldsworthy’s or Herd’s works are patterns made by artists on sandy beaches or snowy slopes, some of which last only a few minutes before seawater washes them away or the sun melts their borders.
Some conceptual artists play on the notion of transience by doing conventional work but deliberately planning its destruction. And the very nature of performance art is transience. Only the photographs and videos documenting these various types of art have any longevity, although they too will die some day.
It’s supremely ironic that my friend happened to post this particular link this evening that led me to muse about the transience of art—because this evening, after years of uncertainty, I had finally brought myself to put some art into the recycling bin.
When my husband died, in May 2008, he left behind three big acid-free boxes stacked full with 200 to 300 abstract paintings and other artworks interleaved with acid-free sheets. Most of these works were done with undiluted watercolors on paper. Some were done with ink; some were done via photocopier. Many of the paintings are flaking; some are wrinkled. Some are quite good; many are not, partly because Steve never discarded any of his efforts and partly because his mother and I have skimmed off the cream of the crop. They epitomized Steve as much as anything did. They were the best things he ever produced. To whatever extent anyone has a legacy, they were his legacy. And even though we were divorced a few months before he died, they became unofficially mine upon his death.
At least, I took them. A friend helped me clear out the house that Steve and I once shared, which I’d deeded over to him in the divorce. But neither of us could pry open the high cupboards in the sunroom that I thought contained the boxes of paintings. In a near panic, I dragged in a neighbor who worked and worked and finally got the doors open. I wept in relief. Although I didn’t know what I would do with the paintings, they were the most alive thing left of Steve and they had to be saved.
But where does art go when it has no future?
I framed a couple of the paintings for my house. But Steve and I had no children. He had no siblings. His father died less than five months after he did. In short, after I took the boxes to his mother and let her choose what she wanted, I was at a loss to know what to do with the paintings down the line. Like my own photographs, which will be thrown out or deleted by someone unknown to me after I die, his art has no prospective home.
I’ve kept the boxes for seven years. It seemed unthinkable to get rid of any of the paintings. But I recently told Steve’s mother I would bring them to her, along with the quilts she made us, to ensure that they would still be “in the family” if I died. A smart woman, she hit upon the idea of taking some of the paintings to next year’s family reunion in case any of Steve’s cousins want some of them. She couldn’t take 300 of them, however, and most people don’t much care for abstract paintings. The reality is that most or all of those paintings will be thrown out by someone after my ex-mother-in-law dies.
As I was going through the paintings one last time, choosing a few more that I hate to part with, I found myself putting aside some that I knew would never find a home among Steve’s cousins. Then I began putting aside more that I knew wouldn’t find a home. And finally I assumed the role of Steve’s curator, deciding which paintings were best and which should be sacrificed to make things more manageable for his mother.
Who was I to judge that? But it seemed best for me to do it—a favor, a burden, a debt, an obligation. At one point I just sat down and cried, because it seemed I was discarding his soul, a concept I don’t even believe in. I’m not sure which I was mourning more, the art or the artist. In some dimension, they are one and the same.
VAPOR AND FLOW 