My first public exhibit near the Louvre!
Do it …near the Louvre!
Kapow!…near the Louvre!
Tickle…near the Louvre!
Onlyness…near the Louvre!
Thanks to my dear friend, collector and curator, Nilofer Merchant, for arranging this impromptu pop-up exhibit of my mixed media paintings in Paris! Love it!
Nilofer Merchant and her blog, Yes & Know recently challenged me to think about community and what it means to me in her posting, “Where do great ideas come from?”
It’s really a big core question, and there are lots of ways of looking at it!
Communities of Ideology: all your belief systems, religious, social, political, environmental…
Communities of Geography: all the you’ve places lived.
Communities of Circumstance: gender, race, health, wealth, family…
Communities of Association: friends, networks, affiliations, clubs, schools, family (again)…
I thought it would be interesting to try and map out some of this in a visual way, identifying some of these communities for myself, to see how large I perceived them to be in relationship to each other and to see where there were overlaps or intersections of these communities.
So I began with Communities of Association (the most personal) and I found the results illuminating!
It turns out the communities that have the most overlap (and maybe influence?) for me are artists who I went to school with, who I’m still personal friends and with whom I maintain a social network connection.
Now I tried to be as object as I could about the relative sizes of these spheres, based on numbers of people more than the impact they have on me. It would be fascinating to create another chart where the sphere’s size is based on the amount of influence they have over me.
Another interesting chart comparison would be the Spheres of Ideology compared to my actual engagement with these beliefs. I’d also like to see if this chart would be proportionally represented in my artwork! Am I brave enough to lay that out? Oh the things we can learn just by seeing it all a little differently!
Nilofer Merchant, author, speaker and a Silicon Valley dynamo purchased a little assemblage painting from me last year. Bliss has hung in her office across from her desk as a reminder that happiness is not all rainbows and kittens but has an edge to it too, and maybe in the end it means more if you have to work for it. But she spoke more eloquently about this when she blogged about it in Are You Experiencing Bliss?
I’ve known that she is quite the Wonder Woman for some time so when Good Housekeeping approached her for some photos of her inspirational mug (which ran in the Dec 2012 issue) I was only too happy to help out. It was then that we began sharing our other Wonder Woman bits and bobs. She had a box full of postcards depicting early WW comics and I had a little cropped photo I’d kept taken of a some street art in San Francisco from the late ’90s.
This was the seed of a fun, collaborative process that would lead to the commission of four new works based on the idea of owning one’s onlyness and the acquisition of three earlier works that fit into Nilofer’s vision. The result was a portrait of sorts, one in which individual pieces not only say their piece but come together and spark a conversation. It takes a vision and a curatorial eye, but surely this is an instance when more is more!
One of the first stars to echo the one on Wonder Woman’s tiara was the twinkle I placed in her eye.
Do It was inspired by those vintage Japanese match boxes from the deco period. I loved how the registration line was off either intentionally or by accident, either way, the black shadow line for the lips looks like a Nike symbol – hence “do it”, as if the ruby red lipstick wasn’t enough encouragement to kiss!
I love how the text balloons hover empty while the blacked out speak seems to implore one to break the silence. Pretty appropriate for a speaker!
The canvas edge doesn’t show a lot when these pieces are hung together but it makes for a great space to reinforce the playful graphics of the work. Kapow! was inspired by artist Harry G. Peter who’s original was for issue # 27, 1948. I fixed some metalic rope that was unearthed in a dig from Latvia and some Soviet military stars to reference the cold war sentiment behind much of the Wonder Woman comics – rebelling against the “evil power structure”.
Nilofer interviewed me about my process for this series and my thoughts on onlyness and how it relates to this project to art and to life. You can check out the interview on her blog post Unanswered Questions to Ponder.
