Looking back to forge ahead

Several experiences lately have me visiting the past in order to spring ahead in to the future.

 Of course, there is often something comforting about the past: we have a sense of familiarity and the comfort in having learned some lessons that have carried us forward until now. 

There is also a danger in that confidence: what if we are blind to possibility in the now and we become too secure in an outcome that can never be guaranteed? 

Joannah Mae

This past weekend I took my daughter and niece back to my Alma mater to attend workshops for juniors in high school to support them in their college search process. The workshops were so helpful to the girls and to us parents who are beginning this daunting task along with them. I have to admit that I welled up when the first speaker suggested to the parents that this is the first step to letting them go and that this would be a time to begin backing off to allow them to fly. It's not the letting go that I necessarily have a hard time with it's the fact that it got here so damn fast! I swear it was just yesterday that I was strapping her into her car seat while she sang "Baby Beluga". It's the whole, "my God, have I done everything I can for her?!" questions that nag at me.  

Joannah and Claire

As I toured the art studios with the girls and my sister, Sally I was again over come with emotion. The smells are exactly the same as they were twenty-five plus years ago. The stairwell railings are still painted red. The stools and floors and easels are still gesso and paint splattered. There are still students working away on drawings of still lives and large figure paintings. There are also new things: Apple computers for digital photography and graphic design work, beautiful new stainless steel printing tables and an improved pottery studio. Joannah wants to study photography and business. I can offer advice to her about working hard this next year to impress the admissions staff. I can share memories of my college days and things I wish I still had in my life and things I am glad are behind me. But, I also have to step back and allow her to have these experiences on her own: make her own mistakes and have her own triumphs. I have loved every moment of her "becoming" thus far and I look forward to the woman she will continue to grow into to. This excitement will get me through the next year of looking at colleges, helping Jo through the application process and the final decision. Not sure how it will help with the dropping off and leaving bit but we have a while before that.

In my studio at home I have been revisiting old ways of working in order to propel my work forward. I am working on small-ish pieces for an up-coming group show I have been asked to be a part of in New York State this summer. I have been doing small sketches I am calling, "100 Squares" project in order to play with some ideas before landing on final pieces for this show. I have been using vintage maps, ripped colored tissue and various scraps and ephemera which I haven't used much in recent years. I am using it in new and bolder ways and it's been freeing. At first, I thought going back to this way of working with paper scraps was going backwards and therefore somehow wrong. I quickly realized how silly that is: even going back to a space we once occupied or a medium we once relied on is inherently going to be a different experience - because WE have changed. 

This is a given. 

Change is inevitable even if some elements are the same. 

detail - "100 Squares Project" # 9
5"x5"
acrylic, water color and vintage maps on gessoboard
(unfinished)