Still More Old Art

This one's REALLY old. It's the very first one I did in this style or format or whatever you'd call it. Everything else I've done since then, I consider to be an evolved form of this.

When I started grad school as a painting major, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I pretty much wasted most of the first year, trying this and that different way of painting but sticking with nothing, in the search for my 'true style'. It was a dismal and panic-filled time.

I was near the end of my rope when, very fortunately, I found a studio space to share -- with one of my professors.

As we only used the back door of the building, in order to get to her workroom my professor had to go through my space, and in so doing she would see all the little odds and ends that kept appearing on my work table -- small found objects and bits of debris that I found interesting and brought in, or simply never bothered to throw out. Some I would absently modify in some way, literally doodling in 3-D.

And finally, she made a suggestion one day that changed my life as an artist. She remarked, perhaps half in jest, that she actually found those trivial objects more interesting than my 'serious' work -- and obviously I found them more congenial -- perhaps I could use them in my paintings somehow?

I took to it like a duck to water. It feels so natural to me now that it's rather surprising that I had to be prompted by someone else; I think what I lacked was the validation that an explicit suggestion from an authoritative source represented. In fact, in hindsight it's clear that I had already taken some tentative steps in this direction, needing mainly to be freed from: #1. the grip of certain fundamental, almost unconscious presumptions about what constituted 'serious' art; and #2. the idea that I was a painter and a painter I would stay, that painting was painting and sculpture was sculpture, and never the twain shall meet. Thank you, Anne-Marie -- for finding a way for me to cross that mental gulf in a surreptitious, non-traumatic way.

Anyway, this is the very first piece I did, explicitly following her suggestion. It incorporates a vertebra (actually two vertebrae, but one fell off -- you can see clearly where it used to be, at the top), as well as plant parts painted in 'faux-trompe-l'oeil', and uses a much looser, freer visual language than before. And at the same time, I stopped thinking of myself as a painter.