The Body of Art
Is it the Body of Art, or the Art of the Body? I tossed these wordles around my mind continuously the past few weeks while I felt my Jungian archetypes draw their swords. These ardent minions felt their fates being tempted, their shadows being washed. I heard them fight over who was right and who was wrong. I was beguiled by the conflicting need of The Good Writer to articulate, and The Good Artist to assimilate. I ached within this wave, because although the landscape of the body has provided me with such a strength of being, a reason to keep moving forward, it has also concurrently failed me, pushed me off balance, lectured to me to become a cult of it, to worship it. This is my body, her body, his body, our body, the earth body. It is about the constant madness-in-a-minute gesture we move within, and the flesh-and-bones bag we pressure the skin to reside therein. It is about how we tempt it, curse it, kiss it, make love with it. Still, the question remains: What shall I make of it?
If you ask me why I have chosen to focus my creative practice on examining and excavating the expressions of the human body, even amidst the contemporary art climate ranting a Nietzsche-like tirade explaining how The Figure is Dead, I will be left in a whirled mess of explanations. It all rises above much of what I can handle, and it is a loaded gun I dare not to hold. But, what I can offer to you is I am no fool when I see the obvious. The Universe has invited me to its dinner table too many times to ignore it graciousness. Every life-place I have inhabited, beginning with the art student practicum of the late 1980s, to my current adult-quest for artistic expression, figure drawing has made itself known to me. Like stepping stones upon a student sea of wishes, it invites me into its journey. I have sometimes felt like a divergent Gretel getting off the beaten path, finding her own way of complication, far enough beyond the breadcrumbs Hansel is reminding her to pay attention to.
Life is body and body is life. It is the one thing we all have in common, yet we all find ourselves constantly judging each other for its surfaced worth. This inside-out display, the scratches and brushes and rattles of combinations upon these walls of this show, have provided me with great sustenance. I ride this stallion of self efficacy, and I know now, as a woman of certain age, that I can make something of it. I will combine shapes, color, line, wash any way I choose to do it. I have learned that life, art, is to create meaning; not mere subservient platitudes of pretties. Let the body be my witch’s brew of improvisation, set of cranky intention, display of irreverent abstraction. Let it be my one unforgettable dream of revision.
