OK, everybody knows, I am a baaaaad blogger. I have these amazing friends who visit my studio, and they have helped me decide to
come screaming into the digital age. Scream! Eeeeek! So now I promise to blog and upload studio happenings every week. That's right, I said it, every week. I am all about screaming. And blogging.
For the past few months I have been working on two new projects for my show in October (at McGuffey, with my friend Andy Faith, fabulous, fabulous....). The first is a series of sumi-e ink and acrylic paintings on recycled glass, kindly donated to the free corner at McGuffey by my new best friends at Albemarle Business Machines. When their happy customers purchase new copy machines, they recycle the old ones instead of tossing them into our landfills. Fortunately for ME, the recycle folks are not interested in the tempered glass plates. Lots of layers and lots of fun ways to add texture, color, line...I plan to show around 25 of these in the October Show (once I tweak the installation details). I think a gift to Albemarle Business Machines may be in order. Here's a couple of the first ones, hot off the presses!
The second project that's taking up my studio time is a large painting in a poured style, again with the sumi-ink, acrylic, and my new favorite medium, walnut ink. (Thanks to Lindsey Mears for the gift of this warm, buttery ink). It has gone through some growing pains, and has been a wonderful learning opportunity for the girl who never knows when to stop painting.
You know, things are going really well. You're painting and dropping and pouring, and then a very quiet voice in your head says, "Maybe you're finished, Nina"; but you don't listen to that! Oh, no! You continue adding and dropping ink until you have passed the point of "finished" and you have reached the land of "Oh, shit, can't I hit the undo button?" And then, you think, "Well, I can fix this, right?" But you can't; you can't go back with this way of painting. It moves and changes from moment to moment. Time is as much a medium as ink is a medium. Ink lives only in the now. Eventually moved through into the "Well, then, I'll just do something totally different in that section" reworking phase (doesn't work either).
Now I have finally awakened to the fact that since I can't go back, I can only go forward. I can only move forward and forgive myself my exuberant excess. Now I say, "Thank you, Morris Louis and the Washington Color School. Thank you, Insight Meditation of Charlottesville." So this painting becomes a parable, still unfinished, about living in a state of open awareness of the current moment. Hence its name, "Parable for the Washington Color School". Here are some detail photos to preview!
