Tag: memory
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When walk out in the yard after lunch these days we can’t help but feel Molly’s absence. The paths she would take through the garden and the spots along the way that she always revisited to check for “messages” from other animals passing through. Part of the joy of living with Molly was getting to experience her maps and pathways. She would sometimes stubbornly insist on going a different direction than where we were headed. She found her own plants for healing and enjoyment to munch on and had such a curiosity for everything happening in this shared natural space.…
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I haven’t made any artwork for about a month. We have been caring for our sweet dog Molly as mast cell cancer affected her little body. We lost her last week. Losing her has torn and shifted us in so many ways. She was with us for almost 14 years and, with her loss, the dimensions of her presence in our lives have shown themselves to be so many times her physical size. She filled every room and beyond. I have experienced grief before. Family has passed and friends have gone from illness and accident. Those loses rippled out over…
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With a prompt in a recent creative Zoom call to share a magazine from our youth that we still thought about today, I shared a memory of my friends Vince, Mark, and I typing in code for the Commodore VIC-20 from an issue of Computes! Gazette from February 1984. I was 15 at the time and the program was Multicolor Character Generator. We spent ages reading out the many many lines of machine code while Vince typed it in to the VIC-20. We got it wrong at least once. Sorry Vince! The program, written by some guy named Bill Gates,…
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At least this is how I made one. You should make one too! I’m not usually someone that feels like the way I make things is of much direct value to other people. I feel the same about other artists’ work. I am interested in why artists make what they make and how they connect to a process for making but not as much in the techniques they might use. I know that I primarily learn and discover from direct experience and less so from following someone else’s patterns. In making my art book Imaginary Landscapes recently, I did realize…
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During most weekdays I spend some portion of my day in video calls. I work remotely for my job and those calls are the way I attend meetings and have one-on-one check ins with the people I work with. I mention this mostly because, over the recent holidays, I spent a couple of days reorganizing my workroom here at home and one of the goals I had was finding better ways to find myself in a room that I spend a lot of paid time in but that beyond that is my room in our home. In the video calls…
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I think of my six year-old self and my friend Steve. It is the first day of first grade. Summer’s tint is still glowing from our skins. We wear the defiance of hot days roaming between shadows and light. Peanut butter and jelly and soft brown bread remnants on our faces. We are walking, unhurried, along the sidewalk. We are stuck in the adventure, the freedom, of summer. Lost in the memory of wild ranging and wandering in what felt like a vast unmapped wilderness but was really just a few looping residential blocks. We strip summer clothes off, down…
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In the previous post, I showed a series of abstract drawings I made on my phone. Digital finger painting. Making those miniature images of line and colour in motion were a therapy for me at various times. A way to pull emotion out of me expressed as visual motion. As I described, working on my phone was a space between other spaces. A way to duck into a creative space when the circumstances of a time or place didn’t allow for other modes of expression. What began as pure abstraction and motion studies in those phone drawings lead somewhat unexpectedly…
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Is this the first place I can find myself? Am I here watching unknowing as my grandfather sets up a tripod to take these photos tightly framing the screen of their Phillips TV? It’s July 1969 and I was born five months ago. People are walking on the moon. Is my round baby face in the room to see Walter Kronkite’s relief at those first deeply grainy but impossibly live images of those first steps on the lunar surface? No one is reflected back in these screens so attentively captured by my Grandfather’s camera. But I breathe, somewhere there in…