Don’t mind me if I continue to talk about my show at Colleen Buzzard’s Studio. In another ten days most of it will be in boxes. “Los Inmigrantes” are featured on the brightly lit, white wall directly in front of you as you enter the gallery. If you were to turn 270 degrees to your left you would be facing a small black wall with a white pedestal in front of it. I knew this would be the perfect spot for my self portrait and it looked especially good in the daylight when we stopped by the other day.
If Studio 402 hadn’t invited me to participate in their ”Self Portrait” show last winter I probably wouldn’t have titled the piece as such. I was already thinking of the driftwood pieces as bodies, the ones that frequently wash ashore in southern Spain when their overstuffed boats capsize in a desperate attempt to flee poverty. I mounted the more sculptural found pieces, the ones that hold your interest when viewed from all sides, on long finishing nails (like the piece shown above.) And of course that led to creating my own small body.
I picked a piece of oak firewood out of our stack and brought it into the garage. I put in the vice grips and went at it with saws, chisels and files and then drilled a hole in the bottom and mounted it on a nail. I was determined to create a piece as interesting as the ones I found on the beach.
The pieces in this show could easily be read as a disparate collection of work but I get to connect the dots. I think of my “Arcadian Forms” as forms and not shapes even though they are flat colors and two dimensional. The forms are reductions based on the figure, like the self portrait that followed from “Los Inmigrantes.”
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