Imagination Loss Prevention
Hallo butterbugs,
I bring you a picnic basket bearing the harvest of what the heck I’ve been up to the past five months.
When I joined a small gallery in Newport near 2 years ago, I was encouraged to, “paint whatever you want!” To which my little heart panicked like a prodded sea anemone. For over 20 years, I’ve prioritized what people pay me to paint: Restaurant menus, grape vine murals, dog portraits the size of a dime.
Whatever I want? How does one do such a thing? And isn’t that selfish, or frivolous at best?
So I did some thinking about fear and expectation. Our minds are rather like hoarder houses, and this kind of thinking is akin to sorting out a closet; it gets messier before it gets clean. In the end, after a few trips to a mental dump, I was left with two small epiphanies.
I am afraid of losing my imagination (petrified).
If everybody doesn’t “get it”, then my art is no good.
Therefore, anything I produce that is abstract, oddball, or even whimsical provokes the second, while exacerbating the first. You can’t be everyone’s cup of fruit punch. And I do want to be fruit punch.
Imagination loss prevention, that’s what happened next. Not dissimilar to muscle loss, one need exercise. I started thinking up exercises. Stare at a chair in your house, give it a name, a mood, and imagine how it would greet you. Observe strangers and decide which type of fruit each would be. Go for a walk and view objects as active participants in society - ah, that poor bicycle is incarcerated at the lamppost jail, that garbage can clearly overate and is now vomiting, etc.
This began trickling like groundwater into my artwork. In the winter I made two small paintings of ocean buoys as little free libraries for sea lions (I’m bemused by the idea that animals are up to marvelous and intelligent things when we’re not looking, or that we simply don’t comprehend). I hid these paintings. I showed no one, for I felt so shy! A few months later, I took them out for a walk, and it was like everyone wanted to pet my new puppy. I made prints and they got gobbled up. Then my puppy started to have puppies.
This is a long overture into what I’ve been up to. Now I’ll clamp my ham and dole out the visual evidence.
This bottom pair is titled Sea Level: Before / Sea Level: After. They are part of an exhibition called Cycles of Nature at the Pacific Heritage Maritime Center in Newport, about human impact on the rhythms of our natural environment. These paintings were a long, slow burn of my processing the news and science through a children’s book narrative style.
It takes me a loooong time to formulate the visual idea, then make up the setting, lighting and details. But my fear has subsided, and the fruit punch is percolating. There’s more, but for now I’m still shyly hiding the rest of my puppies.
xo, Kh