My Hand and My Grandmother's Crocheting, photographs

Every once in a while I do a little photography. I intend to use these shots of my grandmother's crocheting in my iPad work, which I still am going to do, but they turned out to be photos on their own. I like the texture, light, pattern and the meaning of the handmade, connotations of warmth both personal and from the shawl. The sparkling threads of silver in the white yarn and the flowers remind me of snow and snowflakes. The top photo has my hand resting on the crocheting by my kitchen sink, light coming from the unseen window above. A hint of my grandmother's cranberry glass is in the upper left. Her name was Lillian Romano, which I add rather than letting her go unnamed as so many women who leave their crocheting behind do. I think I'm thinking of her because her birthday is April ninth. She took care of me until she died when I was six. I think those six years I spent largely in the kitchen with her made some kind of impact. I watched Days of our Lives and The Price is Right with her and she taught me to make meatballs, sometimes for Italian wedding soup. I love the sounds of cooking, water running, dishes, and people (dogs too!) in the kitchen. It's peaceful, home. The kitchen is supposed to not matter much anymore. It's a place women fought to get free from. It's a workplace where money doesn't get made. We are busy and so many families struggle to find time to eat together so it can be a place to walk through, grab something from. Still, it is where people gravitate towards at a party. I think it's where the heart is.

That Maple Again (3rd image private collection)

Maple 18" x 12" charcoal on paper

Late September Maple 12" x 12" oil on panel

That Maple Again 18" x 14" oil on canvas PRIVATE COLLECTION

It's not bad for an artist to be obsessive. I've already painted the maple in my yard a few times and the dots are certainly obsessive. I'm not tired of them yet, although sometimes I need a break. The maple is hard to grasp. It's more complex than one would think for a singular object. There are all those leaves, just beginning to fall, and the light that changes the color with each moment. The back lighting was tough this time around. One of my studio windows faces east, the light coming over the tree line and hitting the maple from behind. It's dark anyway and this type of lighting flattens it. I wanted to get what volume I could and needed to do the charcoal drawing to figure it out. The drawing has a breeze in it while the tree in the paintings is nailed, the color-movement coming from me. The dots aren't mechanical. The process may be controlled, a bit stiff, but the experience of looking at the finished painting is not. I paint them as playful units and the patience involved in their exacting delivery is done with the knowledge that each dot leads to a stronger feeling, an amplification.

I don't subscribe to the old-fashioned idea that the amount of time taken to craft a painting is an indicator of quality, however. Paintings can be overworked as well as conceptually poor. After Duchamp conceived of the ready-made, craft went out the window. Photography parallels the philosophy of the ready-made: the idea that the artist's selection of a form embodies his/her intent. Art critic Clive Bell says as much in his essay Art, in which he argues that form is what distinguishes art.

Although many photographs are manipulated in the dark room and now in Photoshop, there are plenty taken directly in a quick point-and-shoot process. It took time, therefore, for photography to rise to the level of high art in people's minds and "fine art" photography first imitated painting in the movement known as Pictorialism. Alfred Stiegliz, Edward Weston, Berenice Abbott, and Edward Steichen were pioneers and moved beyond Pictorialism to "Straight Photography" i.e. photography behaving as itself, not derivative of another art form.

If you get a chance, visit the International Center of Photography in New York City. They always have incredible exhibits* including the photographs of journalists and political work.

Appreciative of the medium but not a photographer, I'll keep building from the ground up.

*[Currently on view are "Rediscovered Spanish Civil War negatives by Capa, Chim, and Taro, September 24, 2010–January 9, 2011 and Cuba in Revolution September 24, 2010–January 9, 2011]

Self-Portrait With Camera #2 & #4

digital photographs

The lower self-portrait, #4, seems a little sci-fi with the metallic eye. It is representative of the artist's vision, a special lens through which to see the world. The flash of light is like the bright idea light bulb. Hands have figured prominently in past paintings and I like the way my hand holds the camera at the top; it seems more pressed to the foreground, the hand that is the physical maker, laborer, tool for the eye. The limited palette works well, turquoise background playing off the shiny camera.

The top one, #2, is direct. Intense. Looking straight at the viewer I am confident with my identity as artist; my sense of self deepened with age. I like the light most of all and didn't want to let it go by without snagging it. The magenta and turquoise reflections float on the surface like paint, pieces of colored light. They help define the composition along with the hand, round circle of the camera lens, and the angles of the neck. I'm not quite sure where the photographs are going and if the landscape ones I take as notations for paintings are art. I enjoy making them and that is usually a good sign. It's all about searching, anyway.

Self-Portrait 9 2009 #1

photograph

Of great interest to me are passing bits of strong light that make geometric shapes, particularly on walls. The shape of the light here in addition to the inclusion of the door connects to a previous painting, Another Door Opens. Both images are angular and luminous in the center with dark edges. I step into the picture in the photograph like the green in the painting. I typically don't set out with a camera as I think more about painting and drawing, but sometimes an ephemeral image stares me in the face that wouldn't be the same in any other medium but photography. I see myself ghostlike, a flash of life within the long continuum of time. Occasionally I need to "dust the relatives", what I call it when I take the old pictures of my family and my husband's down for a quick brush off. They are compelling; some are people I've never met. In making pictures I think about what I am doing in the flash within the space of the doorway, my frame in the time-line that someone might dust off to consider.

36" x 24", oil on panel, 2008