February, 2022, Denver. Finally – snow. This is the back yard this morning.
Valentine’s Day is two days away. I was going to wait to comment but I couldn’t sleep last night so got up at 3:30 am to do some art and wait for the sun to show. There was an amusing meme I recently saw that read: Some people are mad because they have no Valentine on Valentine’s Day – well, almost no one gets a Groundhog on Groundhog’s Day. Check your privilege.
It made me laugh. I do have a groundhog, a beanie Punxsutawney Phil with top hat and cape. I used to have several but am down to one. No idea where these got to. Maybe my muse took off with them. My muse does that.
Here’s a photo of me in January 2014 outside the Denver Art Museum freaking people out because
they thought I wanted money. I’d flip over the sign which read: Performance Art – don’t worry. It was freakin’ cold but hilarious when people would stop to talk and laugh about what I was doing. I’d ask
them what they liked about art, especially the folks exiting the museum. They would stop and think then say: colors, shapes, big pieces, the modern ones… every sort of thing but no highly intellectual blathering, and I was happy about it. Why did I do this? Stand in the cold with a card board sign watching some people avert their eyes and rush passed me? It just struck me that morning and I asked my husband if he’d mind documenting the happening and he did. It was funny and telling. At least I’ve never seen anyone doing an art cardboard sign asking for ideas. Art is like that. It should engage the viewer. It is part of human life; for sure it is for me.
Tomorrow I’ll be one of the women giving an Artist’s talk at CORE, oddly timed right before we dismantle the show, but that’s okay, too. (Just about anything that isn’t killing you is okay. I should make a cross-stitch that says this.) I’ll not mention Valentine’s Day in the talk. Instead, I’ll say how I’ve been trying to understand abstraction and for once I chose not to experiment on giant canvasses. Instead, I drew tiny art…by the hundreds. Some of them will make great paintings and I look forward to the translation to canvas. One of the pieces at the show, a repurposed photo album of 200 plastic sleeves now filled with tiny art, there are also comments about art and life. I had originally asked some other artist friends to contribute but they self-censored maybe much and backed out. One friend, however, an attorney, sent a long brief on the patriarchy, feminism and why she became a lawyer. Hard to fit all that on a 3 x 5 card, so I distilled it down to “Eve was framed.” She said- “Yeah. Go with that.”
Another idea in the show is my Emergency Art concept. These are also tiny art in plastic sleeves you can keep in your purse or car and pull out to look at when the situation is annoying. Save Yourself with Emergency art – to keep sane. More later. Thanks for stopping by.
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