Spirals: Re-considering the Past

Spinning the wheel, spinning the prayer cycles, spinning the threads for the web of life. 

I started to use tiny pieces of things, broken bits of china, a coin, a little turquoise stone, along with woven pieces of a Tibetan prayer flag in four paintings on washed linen, in 2006. The pieces were like relics or remnants from some place, with earthy elements embedded into the paint surface. I worked on them on the floor of my studio, painting imagery and then adding the found objects to the surface. I am like a crow, who likes to collect shiny things and bring them back to the nest. I am always drawn to building texture into my work and the suggestion of history those acts evoke. I am part painter, part sculptor. I am a layerist.

These four pieces: A Bird in the Heart I-IV, became part of a mini-retrospective that year. From there I developed a new body of work, a series of seven pieces, using elements of broken china adhered to the surface of oil paintings on panels. I showed this series in a one-woman show called Rota Fortunae in 2010. They were in part an homage to the artist/fimmaker Julian Schnabel whose work influenced me in the 80s to go to graduate school.

Friends gave me broken china dishes, and some bowls and cups that they had saved, beautiful pieces--treasures they couldn't quite part with. I also found many broken pieces of china, they would show up as I walked with my dog along trails throughout Albuquerque, I always wondered of their history, how did they get to be there. A favorite vintage dish from a beloved friend that I accidentally broke became the basis of a painting called Milk and Honey, True Love. The dish pattern is called Etruscan Vase, we had traveled to Tuscany together to visit his sister and soak up Renaissance art. (Fidelity Investments purchased this painting in 2009 for their corporate collection and it was more recently gifted to the Albuquerque Public Arts Collection where it resides in the city's convention center.) 

By the end of 2008 the world economy seemed irreparably broken, we were in a sea change of experience. People have said, maybe this work was a comment on the state of the world at that time. Perhaps, yes. But, in a positive way considering ideas of regeneration, reconnection, reuniting, reusing and/or reinventing.

A white porcelain cup with a gold handle, from my Grandmother or maybe my Great Grandmother, broke in my hands while I was washing it. The break was clean, a perfect line almost exactly in half, a happy accident, it became one of the primary elements for a painting I titled, Rota Fortunae. Another lovely yellow cup, English bone china, was given to me by a friend, a writer. It was from her mother-in-law, sent to her in a cardboard box with the whole set, nearly every dish arrived broken. I think there must be a poem in every piece. I know there are stories of domestic life, nourishment and harvest-time held within the glazed surfaces.

Paintings are often ahead of me, they reveal themselves more in time. I am grateful when they continue to speak to me like a horn of plenty. The Wheel of Fortune is a tarot card, the meaning in part implies ʻa positive turn or changeʼ. It seems we are in deep change once again, post-Covid, and not entirely certain where to head, I plan to spiral back to the form of the Medicine Wheel and spin through its directional wisdom one more time.