Art stuff first.
I'm most definitely working on a new series of watercolors and gouache. They're gelling. Abstract, beautiful, beautiful, abstract. And by beautiful, I mean relatively pure conceptually. There is no horizon line, no landscape or portrait. They are clusters, maybe explosions, maybe implosions. Titling my watercolors has always felt a bit wrong, like I'd be wasting a perfectly good title on a painting that needs no title. It would be like naming blades of grass, which just now reminded me of Whitman's
Leaves of Grass, so perhaps my series will be titled
Blades of Grass. Plus the title factory gets irritable when they feel pressured to perform just for the sake of appearances. With few exceptions I've never titled a series prior to actually making the work, probably because I never consider myself to work serially, but for now, I'm going with
Blades of Grass.
Someone noticed a similarity in my watercolors and the watercolors of
Ann Ropp, which when I first hit the link, was like looking into a mirror, especially for some of my 2003 wc's. You, can tell by the washes that our initial process is similar. It's a response to the paper and the pigment. That's why watercolor is so meditative for me. It's the fluidity of movement, along with the subtle perception of pigment meeting paper and water that I find so engaging. And by engaging, I mean obsessively sucking me into a void where I cancel out the rest of the world. The materials lead me. The decisions I make aren't really mine. I follow along, following cues. It's all very poetic stuff until I get to the gouache stage. At that point, I begin navigating deeper more troubled waters and eventually wander off-road, so to speak.
Moving onto things in the life category. I am officially single. The news was confirmed in an email last night. Perhaps you may be thinking this is way too personal to be blogging about at large, especially for an art blog, but it's all about connections. Since I wasn't going to pop open a bottle of champers, I thought FB would be a simple and benign way to mark the occasion. For the most part it was, save for a RL friend who noted that it was sad news, but at least it was over. That hit me like a brick. The last 2 years were weighted with sadness, and I was looking at the news of my official singleness as being a ray of sunshine on what had been a rather bleak landscape.
I then realized that perhaps the psychic I went to in my early twenties had it just about right, though she was off by one marriage. I don't remember much of what she told me, but I do remember quite distinctly that she said my first marriage ended in death. Then without missing a beat, she went on to say a thing or two about my second marriage. I was so relieved to know that at least
I had made it to another marriage, that I never asked details about the death. I informed my first husband of this ominous tale during our very brief partnership, which I suppose for good reason always had him a bit freaked out. We divorced, he lived, and I assume he's still going strong some 15 years later. But the second marriage did indeed end in death: first his parents, then my mom, and as I found out a few weeks ago, my lawyer's mother, as well. All in all, four deaths during the course of a 2-year divorce. So yes, I'm pretty happy to be single again and feel as though the news of my singleness is most definitely a cause for celebration for all parties involved.
