I enjoy exhibiting this sculptural painting. Watching people interact with it reminds me why I paint this way. Confronted with a dense piece of text some viewers are arrested, some are dismissive, some are angry. The piece is asking for a big investment in time and energy. It is asking for a palpable mental effort. Actually, all artworks are asking for that same thing. This one is just more strident.
Something For Everyone, Mixed Media, 22 1/2″ x 18 3/4″
The packages of words we constantly hand back and forth are the cogs in an engine that shapes every aspect of our lives– waking and sleeping. We need to consciously recognize our language, acknowledge its power and celebrate its resiliency. I put it up on the wall in a physical form to make that happen.
Yet here I am, making it easy for you. This is the text, wrestled back into a form we are more comfortable with– the page. Looking at it on an endlessly changeable digital screen, it is tempting to edit. But words bitten into a finite sheet of clay are uneditable and compressed. They cannot be taken back. This is the unabridged version of my words written in stone.
SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE
Can anyone really promise or even attempt to offer something for everyone? Even super heroes don’t talk that talk. How easy is it to pick out one movie for four people to share? Hard work. Thankless task. Neverending story.
Making happiness… and here we are back to a job for a super hero. No wonder we love them. Would that they were quotidian. Would that the happiness was as well.
In my home, the father was the super hero. Distance & mystery. Beauty & the Beast, in one elusive package. If you would be the object of passionate love, be elusive. Be aloof. Be rarefied. Be anything but obtainable.
Don’t attempt to provide dependable doses of happiness or content. That way lies motherhood, the opposite of super hero. The daily round, the daily grind. Cinderella swept clean of romance.
Who is she anyway? Who could she have been? An action hero. A woodland sorceress. Left to her own devices, given her predilection for clothes and shoes, she might have done time as a femme fatale, graduating in time to super hero & bypassing motherhood– always supposing she is free of the tragic flaws, traveling in tandem and known as a warm heart and a compliant disposition.
Yes, we do; we want these– in our lives but not always in our own breasts, not always out of our own pocket. Perhaps if left to itself, happiness will create itself and self-styled gatekeepers can lay down arms.
andrea trace 