To refer back to my last post, I have not started a sculpture, but I have started to work on a collage -- a self-portrait collage. No, this is not a creative visualization collage with pictures of beautiful homes and beaches and the ideal boyfriend. And it's not going to be surrealist. My whole life has been surreal, so I can't go there. No, this will be relatively realistic. I'm going to try to do what I have done more successfully in oil painting and drawing, which will be to create three dimensions through shading. My skin will be made up of little snippets of color magazine photographs shaded to look from a distance like paint. The background will feature images that have some reference to my life so far. I even found a photograph of Manhattan from the air, and was able to cut out my old neighborhood on the Upper West Side. What's great about collage is the serendipity of finding images and textures that you don't expect and couldn't ever have planned ahead for. I don't know if this will all "work" but all I can do is try. I was pleased with the preliminary sketch that I did. I am pleased that I can still do art.
Yesterday was a powerful day all around. The devastation of the hurricane, the drop on Wall Street. The western shores of Lake Superior were pummeled with wind and ocean-sized waves. It was not a good day to be a manmade structure on the water's edge. I may have been up the hill, but I could feel the battering within me.
I think I have said this before, so forgive any repetition. I don't like hearing references to "Mother Nature's Wrath." I cannot speak for Mother Nature. She may well be angry. (I've just started Rebecca Traister's Good and Mad and it's helping me put my own anger into a larger historical context.) But our human understanding is so limited, and this terminology can play too easily into an "us against nature" or a "she is ruining all our plans" mind frame. She isn't. We are part of nature. Earth is part of us. We are all one. Yes, she is scrambling desperately to restore the kind of balance that makes our life on this planet possible. We can work with her, be part of her, and help her restore that balance respectfully, or not.
