My Chronicle as an Artist

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

∞T.S. Eliot

28: Digital Collages

I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.
~ Mary Oliver

When the 2020 pandemic shut down the world, it was almost impossible to see art in museums and galleries. Of course most of us artists had been sharing pictures of our art online for years before CoVid hit, but this has never been a substitute for showing the actual work. The life force is inextricable from the physical work; I missed hearing about and attending my colleagues’ shows all year. I felt the void and the depression everywhere. I am lucky to live in a city that opened its art museum last summer 2020, and I experienced some amazing exhibits. But the local art galleries remained shut down until May 2021.

I decided to take this past year as an opportunity to update my printmaking skills. In previous blog posts I have written about my early training as a printmaker ( blog posts 7 and 8 )

I subscribed to the PhotoShop app this year — paying a monthly fee was an incentive to learn enough skills to create an image. I had done a little PhotoShop before this, making cards and posters, but nothing that I would call “my work”. PhotoShop is the modern printmaking medium for me — it is silkscreening without the solvents and inks. Of course, I will never be anything close to a master of PhotoShop, for it is truly a wonderland of infinite magical possibilities — and all the overwhelming frustration that goes with this. I had to discipline myself to keep my boundaries quite limited so that I could concentrate on building an image that I could live with and be willing to share.

Whether I am painting or silkscreening, image making is a process of adding and subtracting many layers of various objects. Each of the 5 images shown on this post contain pieces of individual works that span my portfolio over several decades, as well as my own photo studies of landscapes and objects that I have loved and collected in my visual diary. Photos are forever, even if I no longer own an artwork anymore, I own the image and I can recreate it in a different context or setting.

So, I digitally cut up photos of past works and recombine them with my photo studies into a single piece, the same way I did traditional collage in the past.

All my work, no matter what medium, starts with an imaginative concept and ends when I can go no further. That is, I know the work is finished when I cannot do anything else to make it better and attempts to do so make it worse.

Discovering the end point in any work I do is an integral part of my process. When I surprise myself I feel a glimmer of success. In the end, the goal is never to let anyone see or know my effort; I only care that they enjoy my work.

I am grateful to the developers of this marvellous tool of Photoshop. It has not replaced my drawing and painting by any means, for I will always prefer the tactility and presence of a painted surface to a digital one. But it has given me another way to represent my vision, a different way that I can only exploit in PhotoShop, and this has contributed greatly to how I see and imagine my next endeavour.

above l to r: Between Heaven & Earth, Starling Rock, Explorer, and Bargaining for Stars.

27: A New Dark Age

***Between Heaven and Earth. ©️ 2021 LSAuth.***

“O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant…” TS Elliot FourQuartets/East Coker III

✍️I love the night when it is luminous and full of light. Thousands of nights with points of light have filled my head with visual inspiration, fueling so many of my works.

I found solace and hope in these nights.

I am struggling to see the light these days — even on the most sun-drenched days.

Art can only survive with freedom of expression, which is freedom of speech, which houses freedom of thought.

Otherwise, the luminous night turns to total blackness. Sun-white days turn to blankness.
I am still holding onto the flickers of light within — dying embers to be sure, but not ashes — at least, not yet.

The struggle to find the light never ends.

26: Birds of Paradise

Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we refuse to see it. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

Birds of Paradise ©️2020LSAuth — ***Birds of Paradise*** *©️2020LSAuth*

I have never seen the exotic birds named Birds-of-Paradise, native to eastern Australia and Papua New Guinea. But while in Santa Monica, CA, two Januaries ago, I saw the plants by this same name on every street. So many green stalks arced over neighbouring yards and sidewalks like the outstretched necks of cranes and herons. Their flowers were uniquely beautiful: Brilliant yellow-orange petals mimicked feather plumes, vivid blue-violet arrowheads targeted unsuspecting prey, and sword-like variegated bills waited to skewer the fallen victims.

I sketched and painted these plants often that month of January. I found their beauty beguiling because there was a subtle edge of malevolence in their elegant, yet hostile, gestures. I had to stop and stare at them every time I walked outside our building. I soaked up their color and warmth in hopes that it would sustain me for several months when I returned home to the dreary Connecticut winter.

I have been thinking about this place called paradise. I have been there millions of moments in my life. Seeing something beautiful brings me there, even if the experience dissipates quickly. Paradise starts with that beautiful sight or sound, which is usually one in the natural world. And then, often, that initial sensation triggers a memory of another time, another place. Paradise and visual poetry are, for me, one and the same.

Over those few weeks in Santa Monica, the birds of paradise brought me to the endless acres of the green and ripening cornfields of my childhood, when my parents and siblings would take occasional Sunday afternoon drives to the country in our overstuffed station wagon, with all the windows rolled down, while we sang the familiar repertoire of family songs. This freedom of movement along with the heady smells of summer were experienced as pure joy as far back as I can remember.

When I walked those residential streets of Santa Monica, the yellow-crowned floral heads with their limb-like, green stalks walked with me to where my destination always ended — at the beach. There, the gulls screamed with mixed cries of greeting and outrage, depending on whether they felt my presence to be benign or aggressive. The early evening stars twinkled their replies to the lights on the distant pier. When I walked along the water’s edge, the sounds of birds and water melded with ocean spray, salty air and sand — creating a roaring primal music which swept me along with the tides. I was cleansed, uncluttered, and detached from earthly concerns. I was a swirling speck of grit in a timeless universe. Dreaming.

I was in paradise.

25: OsageOracle

Maybe some of you are familiar with the Osage Orange tree. I was not, before coming to Tennessee. Of all the trees I draw in the arboretum, this is the strangest. Its bark is gnarly and deeply furrowed, resembling the skin of an ancient biblical prophet. There are two that I see on every walk, but this one is my favorite— a female tree that yields warty, greenish-yellow fruit. These orbs are the size of small grapefruit which will fall to the ground soon.

Scientists have theorised that this fruit probably fed gigantic herbivores which roamed the mid-southern land of North America more than 10,000 years ago — like the American mastodon and the giant sloth. So why didn’t the osage orange trees vanish from the earth along with their imbibers?

I was mesmerised by this creature even before I read anything about it — and I continue to be. I often feel it has secrets to tell me about luck and survival.

I am listening very hard.

24: SouthernMagnolias

SouthernMagnolias ©2020 LSAuth. — *SouthernMagnolias* **©2020 LSAuth.**

“… In the pale evening gloom, when the soft fragrance of magnolias hung in the air, my heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and lurch with a stab of pain. I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and wait for it to pass. And it would pass –but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache behind.” Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami

✍️

In the yard of my childhood home were all kinds of flowering trees and shrubs—dogwoods, lilacs, azaleas, forsythia, roses, and Japanese magnolias. Honeysuckle vines cascaded over and concealed the ugly chainlink fence, and my siblings and I would often lick the nectar out of the flowers. We would thread violets and lilacs to make miniature Mayqueen crowns, hoping they wouldn’t be too brown by the time we placed them on the heads of the Blessed Mother icons at school.

Besides flowers, there were wild fruit trees. There was an alley behind our house which ran the length of two or three blocks, and we kids knew every backyard that had a mulberry tree for us to climb — we competed with the birds for those berries and I would routinely stuff myself until the time I actually looked at the inside of a beautifully plump one. There seemed to be hundreds of the tiniest white “worms” fully alive and cruising through the remaining half. I think that ended my thievery of the neighbourhood edibles, and the birds were quite happy about it, I am sure.

Spring was a magnificent time to witness so much natural beauty in Virginia. It had a way of being a curtain which hid ugliness and even sadness. In a way, a freshly fallen snow in Chicago or Connecticut did the same thing—until the snow started to melt revealing the mud, the filth, and the trash.

And here I am, back in the land of a real springtime again. I had never really experienced Southern Magnolias before coming to Tennessee.

They are huge and evergreen and the flowers are as large as porcelain cups and saucers. At night, on our walks in the arboretum, some of these trees stand in groups of three or so. The foliage is as dark as a cave, but impenetrable — and the flowers are luminous, especially in the moonlight, and look like alien celestial bodies.

I am often not sure if the magnolias are welcoming or foreboding. But they are beautiful, and I love them. For me, they are constant reminders that such magnificent and other-worldly beauty also possesses at least a hint of malevolence.

19: Building Trees

I was fortunate that I had begun the 3-dimensional figures at the end of my time in Chicago. It was the body of work that was the most creatively stable, that could weather this big disruption of being uprooted. I was excited about developing them further.

Neptune ©1984 LSAuth — ***Neptune*** *©1984 LSAuth*

In Princeton, these figures became my largest body of work. Drawing and painting, although always important, were not my main focus in those 3 years. I am not sure why this was so, because my canvases were so vital in Chicago. But now, in such a different nature-filled landscape, I found it more difficult to paint inventively, and the mixed-media assemblages seemed to come more easily. Creative blocks are inevitable, but always so difficult & frustrating to go through. When they occur, I have always been able to rescue myself with another medium. My canvases had to wait until I was ready to reconcile them again. Works in various stages of completion were set aside for what seemed like an interminably long time.

PrincetonSketchbook: In the Corn ©1984 LSAuth. — ***PrincetonSketchbook: In the Corn*** *©1984 LSAuth.*

Into the Woods ©1984-5 LSAuth. — ***Into the Woods*** *©1984-5 LSAuth.*

Tree branches filled every view from every window dormer in our attic apartment. There was a very large window in our bathroom that dropped down to a roof overhang that looked out to the treetops. In the afterglow of twilight, Michael and I would step out onto this landing and lie back to watch the little brown bats, not that high above us, in a beautiful display of flight & feeding. It was like being caught up in this arabesque of movement between bats & insects against a backdrop of intertwining branches and leaves. To experience this frenzied dance was pure joy. Such moments were my most profound source of creative inspiration.

NightWindow ©1985 LSAuth. — ***NightWindow*** *©1985 LSAuth.*

I decided to create my figures in the spirit of all the folklore that I loved and remembered from my youth, from mythology to fairy tales. As I mentioned earlier, our apartment was like a treehouse, and the the woods were part of my daily walk.

It therefore seemed totally natural to build more trees.

Here are some of the first ones from left to right: WellWisher, Giver, and CrownBearer.

4: Going to Byzantium....from Chicago

3: Chicago...

The immense and vibrant city of Chicago and the close-knit, secluded life of art school were the two poles of my world for the next 7 years. Each had an immeasurable influence on my work. My map drawings, like those shown in the previous post, developed from colored pencil & conte materials into oil paintings. I thought of these as internal travel logs and I developed a personal vocabulary of mark making which became a legend for all the landscape maps I was to create for the next body of work. The natural landscape that I left behind on the East coast combined with the architectural footprints of my new city life.