January 13, 2024
More Here Than Meets the Eye
My friend Stuart once sent me a small flat piece of driftwood through the mail. Not wrapped or packaged in any way, the wood had postage and address on one side; these words inscribed on the other:
For how many weeks did waves, wind, and tides toss this piece of wood against sand and rocks until it was smooth enough to be stamped and sent to you?
All art carries with it its own weeks, waves, and wind, its backstories. I love discovering and imagining backstories for art I see, and revisiting in my memory the backstories behind my own art.
Here’s the history of just one bit of mini-Matisse #7:
Underneath the cutouts lies a piece of Dixie All Purpose Food Wrap, paper purchased in 2017 following the creation of a painting done in Canada, a painting with its own backstory—which of course is part of the even-further-back backstory of the little bit of food wrap below.
Pause here to follow this link <https://dottyseiter.blogspot.com/2017/06/all-this.html>.
All that is carried energetically in the little 2 x 2″ snippet of food wrap you see here along with its white ink transcriptions of my thoughts and inner state in the moments I set out to create, not to mention the people who fabricated the paper, those who packaged it, its journey to a warehouse perhaps, its transport and delivery to my home.
And that is just the backstory for one—one!—piece of paper in this tiny collage!
~2 x 2″; paper cut-outs and ink on art journal page
collage
2024
=====
9 responses to “More Here Than Meets the Eye”
Yes! It’s so beautiful to realize this backstory.
I was once introduced to a gratitude-exercise: look around in the room, give thanks to what you see (thank you, chair, for being so comfortable to sit on), but then also to thank the whole string of people/things that are behind that chair – thank you, maker of the chair, transporter of the chair, seller of the chair, thank you wood and wool, and everything that’s behind that.
Okay, back to your painting: I love it! Love your shape-experiments.
xoxo ;o)
No comments:
Post a Comment