Sunday, April 7, 2013

One Person, Many Selves


    My brother has become an art blogger too! http://www.opticalbits.com/ He had previously focused his talents on music, computers, and communication.  It is really exciting for me to see his photography.  In his blog, his geeky side comes out too- in the best possible way- he is very knowledgeable about the various settings on his camera.  Then, he takes his readers through the post production steps that he took on his computer to get the final photographs to look like they do.  

My brother, Jeff Parkes took this photo and posted it on his art blog recently!
    In other news, last night I was at the DuPage Symphony Orchestra & Naperville Art League wine tasting and auction.  I was one of a few artists selling their work, and we donated 25% of our sales to the DSO.  It was a nice opportunity to get to know, and help out my community.  All of the other artists had very distinctive styles, most people were very surprised to learn that I had made everything on my tables.  Partly, that is because of my job- I teach 2D and 3D art to our freshmen, which means that I have to teach and be good at a wide variety of art media.  The other part though, is that is just how I am.  I love the variety of creating art with photoshop, sewing, painting, drawing, ceramics, carving, jewelry, etc.  It keeps my art and art-making fresh and interesting.  If I was forced to pick one thing, I wouldn't know where to begin or how to choose.  I feel also, that a lot of my favorite artists work in a variety of media too.  Warhol, Picasso, Richter, Michelangelo, Alighiero Boetti, Dee Clements, Cai Guo-QiangTim Hawkinson,Diem Chau, William KentridgeDo-Ho SuhKara Walker, and Rebecca Carter.

Me, with my art at the DSO auction.

     Speaking of art sales, you, dear reader, are invited to my annual Spring Art Sale!  Friday will be a bit more fun than Saturday with wine and snacks.  It is 'open house style,' so please pop by whenever you're free.

You're invited!
           On another note, I graduated from my yoga teacher training! I am now a 200 hour certified vinyassa yoga instructor. Yes.  We posted photos on Facebook, and there was so much interest in our shirts that I will hopefully print more soon and have them for sale on-line.

With my instructor Rolf Gates. 2 thumbs up because 'we want our students to be successful.'

The graduates.
     I recently altered a dress.  I was so fortunate to be a bride's maid in my wonderful friend Alex's wedding last week.  As you can see, we had unique dresses in synchronized colors.  I found a dress I liked in the right color, but it was the last one on clearance in a petit.  Out came the sewing machine!  I made a slip to lengthen the dress, and then added a belt, and hair clips in matching colors to create some unity.  It was a gorgeous wedding all around.
Third from the left, I was a bridesmaid in one of my best friend's weddings, in Jamaica!     
“I, who was acquainted with many Albertines in one person, seemed now to see many more again, reposing by my side. Her eyebrows, arched as I had never seen them, enclosed the globes of her eyelids like a halcyon’s downy nest. Races, atavisms, vices reposed upon her face. Whenever she moved her head, she created a fresh woman, often one whose existence I had never suspected. I seemed to possess not one, but innumerable girls.” ~Proust, The Captive.
“It is I suppose comprehensible that the letters which we receive from a person are more or less similar and combine to trace an image of the writer so different from the person whom we know as to constitute a second personality.”  ~Proust, The Captive.  All 4,000 pages could be yours on ibooks for $1
          I think it's very special that my recent posts have connected very much to what I'm currently reading.  Makes sense too, what I'm reading and thinking about are bound to be similar.  Throughout the entire book, Proust has given me much to think about in regard to the self.  Within each person, there are many selves.  It depends on the moment we're in in life, on our company, the time of day...  Even within my identity as an artist, as mentioned above, there are many, many selves.  I am also a yoga instructor, art teacher, a friend to many different people, a daughter, etc.  My brother has become an art blogger- I would not have predicted that 5 years ago! 
    I have other favorite artists who have committed to one identity in their art; Rothko, Frida Kahlo,Elizabeth Peyton,Egon Schiele, Klimt, Casey Ann WasniewskiDeb SokolowMark BradfordJulie MehretuCindy ShermanRichard Notkin, and Ghada Amer.  They are artists I love, I have such respect for their ability to deeply explore one medium or point of view.  I know however, that that is not me. 
    This is such a rich concept in Remembrance; one that I have noticed, and enjoyed highlighting as I read.  We are all inherently, more than we think we can be.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

In Chicago!

   I currently have work in a show in downtown Chicago called What Those Who Teach Can Do, it is through the Illinois Institute of Art.  I went to the reception with my friend and fellow art teacher/artist Kathy Parenti.


At the reception with "Lyon, France: Birthplace of Antone de Saint-Exupéry."



At the reception with "Free to Love"


At the reception with Kathy, her painting of her grandmother is on the right.

    At the show, Kathy spoke beautifully about her work, and the way that her grandmother slowly reversed her memory as she passed from Alzheimer's. She became a young Italian girl again, and was fortunate to remain very happy and optimistic throughout.
   As I continue to read Proust, my favorite character has emerged as the grandmother.  For herself, but also for what she allows others to see and feel.  This is one of my favorite moments in the book:
“Alas, this phantom was just what I did see when, entering the drawing-room before my grandmother had been told of my return, I found her there, reading. I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence, and, like a woman whom one surprises at a piece of work which she will lay aside if anyone comes in, she had abandoned herself to a train of thoughts which she had never allowed to be visible by me. Of myself — thanks to that privilege which does not last but which one enjoys during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being a spectator, so to speak, of one’s own absence,— there was present only the witness, the observer, with a hat and travelling coat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that mechanically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us catches them in its vortex, flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. How, since into the forehead, the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind; how, since every casual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what in her had become dulled and changed, seeing that in the most trivial spectacles of our daily life, our eye, charged with thought, neglects, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not assist the action of the play and retains only those that may help to make its purpose intelligible. But if, in place of our eye, it should be a purely material object, a photographic plate, that has watched the action, then what we shall see, in the courtyard of the Institute, for example, will be, instead of the dignified emergence of an Academician who is going to hail a cab, his staggering gait, his precautions to avoid tumbling upon his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he were drunk, or the ground frozen over. So is it when some casual sport of chance prevents our intelligent and pious affection from coming forward in time to hide from our eyes what they ought never to behold, when it is forestalled by our eyes, and they, arising first in the field and having it to themselves, set to work mechanically, like films, and shew us, in place of the loved friend who has long ago ceased to exist but whose death our affection has always hitherto kept concealed from us, the new person whom a hundred times daily that affection has clothed with a dear and cheating likeness. And, as a sick man who for long has not looked at his own reflexion, and has kept his memory of the face that he never sees refreshed from the ideal image of himself that he carries in his mind, recoils on catching sight in the glass, in the midst of an arid waste of cheek, of the sloping red structure of a nose as huge as one of the pyramids of Egypt, I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always at the same place in the past, through the transparent sheets of contiguous, overlapping memories, suddenly in our drawing-room which formed part of a new world, that of time, that in which dwell the strangers of whom we say “He’s begun to age a good deal,” for the first time and for a moment only, since she vanished at once, I saw, sitting on the sofa, beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and common, sick, lost in thought, following the lines of a book with eyes that seemed hardly sane, a dejected old woman whom I did not know.”  ~Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, from The Guermantes Way.
        I feel that this idea has been very true in my own life.  I see people in the way that I feel about them and remember them, far more than I see them objectively.  Especially for myself, sometimes I feel I have no idea how I look!  (Like the heavyset person who doesn't realize it until they see a photo of themselves)  I don't feel this about weight so much, as I sometimes wonder if I appear to be the person that I am.  In my art as well: can other people who see it catch the same idea and feeling that I hope to inspire?  I will never know what it is like to look at my own art.  I will never know that because I slowly watched it being formed.  I already know my intentions, and hopes for the viewer.  It is an interesting thing to have one's art on display with no explanation, no knowledge of myself- just one work out of a series added to the mix.  At the reception each artist took a moment to talk about their art, afterwards several people commented that it was so much more interesting after they heard the explanation.  I think that's ok.  A virgin read of the art, and then a more considered response. 
   In March I was a part of 'Writer's Week' at my school.  I wrote a 15 minute speech with a powerpoint essentially about becoming a blogger, and how writing has helped me as an artist.  Here is an excerpt about my favorite painting, it also needed an explanation before I realized how much I loved it.

 " While writing my blog, I was thinking about the story I had intended to tell for writer’s week.  It was about my favorite painting:  A painting of a large, orange square, with a thin yellow rectangle underneath it.  Are you on the edge of your seat with that description???  Exactly.  If my favorite painting needs a little explaining, my own art would probably benefit from a few words mixed in as well.
 You see, it’s a large orange square, but it is also so much more.  I grew up going to The Art Institute of Chicago all the time.  My mother took me at least twice a year, and I walked past my favorite painting, “Untitled,” by Mark Rothko, all 9 feet wide of it, without ever noticing it at all.  By the time I was 19 years old, sitting in the Modern art room of the Art Institute, I don’t think I exaggerate by saying that I had likely been in the presence of this painting on at least 40 different occasions.  40 times, I had seen it, without seeing.  Eventually, in 2002 I was a freshman at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  I was on an in-museum field trip with my second semester art history class.  Quick side note, did you know that the school existed first?  They built that huge art museum in downtown Chicago (With a train running though the middle of it) just for the art students.  They built it so that art students could have the experience I was about to have.  Sitting, for the first time in my life, with my 15 classmates, and our Teacher’s Assistant, I finally saw Rothko’s untitled painting.  I heard about the intention of the artist.  He wanted to create a meditative space for his viewer.  It was not about the color orange, or about geometric shapes.  The painting was about filling the viewer’s whole eye and only that.  At 9 feet wide I can see the whole painting, and only the painting.  Throughout my 4 years as an art student, the bench in front of that painting was my favorite place in the world.  Better than a beach, better than a restaurant, better than the study trips I took to Florence Italy and Switzerland.  Rothko had tapped into something magical.  To this day, I think that it is the best place in the world to sit and think.  It is not just a square, there are drips, and fades, and transparent areas everywhere; so many interesting places for my eyes to roam, and rest across it’s 81 square feet.  The orange hovers weightless over the yellow, they both float towards me as the peach background hugs the wall.  For me, it is the perfect meditative space. One day as a junior, while sitting with my Rothko, a man with two young children walked past.  I chuckled to myself as I heard him say to them, “Now some people debate if the paintings in this room are really even art.”  I’ll have to teach those children one day, I thought -they will need to learn to see too.
It was only three years ago I began to paint.  When I started painting it was because I thought about my favorite art to experience, and I wanted to create something that made people feel the way that the Rothko made me feel. 
However, in the cold world of cyberspace, where viewers click through images a couple seconds at a time, who would ever give my art the time it needed to be understood?  All paintings are so much better in person, the scale, the texture; so much is lost when they are photographed.  I needed to find a way to regain what was being lost, and the way to do that, I realized was with words!" ~Writer's week speech, Heidi Parkes 


Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Weaving! Turning! Spinning!

Check this out:
Herron: S/S 2013 is here!: The spring thaw has begun here in Maine and with only one week left until the official first day of the Spring season the transition f...

     I met a fellow blogger in early March!  Artist Dee Clements taught a weaving class at the Chicago Weaving School.  It was hard work- with all the yoga I practice, my back was so sore from just a few hours of weaving.  We began by spinning a bit of yarn, the yarn I spun is shown on the right side of the photo below:

A close-up of the cloth I made.

My view at the loom.

Dee and I, both wearing scarves we wove ourselves!
    The week after, I visited my Dad in Madison, Wisconsin. A few years ago I tried a little something on the lathe with him, but this was my first real attempt at making something to keep!  He is a very talented woodworker, and has made many things in his home.  I wanted a handmade bench, and feeling inspired from Dee's workshop, I wanted to spin my own yarn for the seat of the bench.    

Me, using the chisel to cut my spindle.

Not exactly, the same, but pretty close!  

While I was on the lathe, my dad made the frame for the bench.

My dad stained it for me, and it is ready to pick up in April- now I have to start spinning!!!

     I am still reading Proust too, I'm on volume 3.  This small phrase struck a cord- it is so nice to have the time to make art whenever I please.  To be able to travel, and visit friends and family when I want.  Perhaps one day compromising will be nice too, but for now: the delights of solitude are many.  I truly value, and appreciate the time that I have available to learn new art techniques, and to create.  Especially in the spring, with summer so closely approaching! 
"I asked myself whether marriage with Albertine would not spoil my life, as well by making me assume the burden, too heavy for my shoulders, of consecrating myself to another person, as by forcing me to live in absence from myself because of her continual presence and depriving me, forever, of the delights of solitude." (Proust, The Captive, Life with Albertine)