Keirartworks's Blog

Wasn’t expecting a day of psychological paralysis after I moved in to the apartment-for-January. All I could see was a massive knot of project-and-task-ropes too tight to unravel – there behind a thick glass wall. I was not feeling intrepid, in any way. More like a five-year-old left behind in a huge unfamiliar city with some gummy bears and a pat on the head, have fun kiddo and don’t let the Mafia get you! Mafia?

It’s been my habit to take all my willpower and run full tilt at that glass wall over and over again until I reach emotional collapse. A saner strategy yesterday was to maintain a steady awareness of the conundrums behind the wall while I read, wrote, ate well, organized the books left behind by Mac students and recovering alcoholics, moved furniture around until the space matched my rhythm, and puttered away at my christmas present (Dec 24 text: Hey mom, Raccoon or Horse?).

By midnight the knot had begun to unravel of its own accord; I found peace.

New place.

Morning teaches me where east is; I can hear the complex conversation of starlings in the back yard. It’s comforting to know they are themselves here, too.

The man downstairs is a smoker; I woke remembering what that was like, ten years ago – my first waking thought of nicotine with my coffee. Amazing, how the smell permeates.

My street is near the hospital, where nurses are charged for parking when they go to work. They avoid this by parking here all day and all night and so the street is packed with cars.

It’s going to be quite a dance when I come home from the studio, but that’s just fine. I am moved in at both places now, and happy to walk. In fact I’d prefer to walk after the car miles I put on in November-December.

There are eight weeks left now, for nine paintings, blog and book, for building good, enduring connections in Hamilton – this is the residency idea-rope, the one that glows with curiosity and promise. It’s right in front of me now, sleeping and still like a beautifully patterned snake, no longer tangled with the others.

The other conundrums: Patreon launch for funding (I’m half-way to my winter financial goal); where to live next month and after; redesign of my Masters research to include Hamilton Musicians; Artists talk about art and validity/function (and others about community); where to move my orphaned piano, desks and dining room table while I set up my life here – those are still slightly knotted, but now accessible and in a different room. They too will unravel themselves as I move ahead, I know.

The reason the glowing curiosity project-rope was tangled is because we’re now down to the brass tacks,* i.e., this is no longer just a great idea, the Hamilton Portrait Project. I’m done my December gig work (that has funded January), and the project now requires steady, concentrated, sustained action. My painter self gathers for the leap:

Define dimensions with portrait-ees, then purchase, build and stretch canvases, or find boards to work on if I decide to work on paper (I’d love to do them all on paper, but framing is much more expensive).

Define symbolic content and focal point subjects in collaboration with Portrait-ees. This will be mostly online, but also with scheduled in-person meetings with collaborators who will come to Hamilton, bless them. Since we’re down to the wire now I will use Proust’s questionnaire as a template for all portrait-ees, then devise more specific questions (myth, curiosities, symbols) for the second interview.

 

It has occurred to me that since these nine pieces will be in a show together, they need to be connected somehow, visually. I like this part of the ‘puzzle a lot. As I work through the preparations (above), I will ‘play’ with the pieces I worked on in December, and experiment on paper. That will happen today, after I’ve got these things in motion. I can’t wait to get at it.

I’m grateful for and fascinated by the wall adornment in my bedroom – that it’s here, and that the most challenging of the pieces are those I will wake up to every morning.

These pieces were perhaps started and finished within an hour, then sold at market. The authors were incredibly prolific painters who had figured out the cost vs labour equation, and how to make painting a viable source of income. You need to see the work up close to appreciate the skill level – just enough finesse to get the idea across, then on to the next piece. You need great imagination and confidence to do this kind of work.

These painters had made themselves familiar with the effects of light on water, and also what tourists want – a narrative of place, time, and moment. Fantastical illustrations, grounded in observation of places where shore meets land, but most likely made up in their heads.

I do not paint this way, and I do my utter best to avoid nostalgia. But I do admire the efficiency of these pieces. Glad they’re not the puzzle I’m working on.

So, as social media quoted to me this morning, get curious, look around you, and work with what you’ve got. I find myself thankful that a) there are no velvet paintings here, b) that only one room has garage sale art,  c) that I have absolutely no desire to smoke cigarettes and d) I have a beautiful studio with clean air where my heart sings joy. I will go there as often as possible, knowing I have bath bed and kitchen here to take breaks in. (Oh, and reliable high-speed internet, which I did not have these past ten days while dog sitting.)

Will brew coffee number two in said kitchen now, and attend to the next task – a detailed list of specific new ways for us all to connect and collaborate.

ONWARD HO!

 

• Down to the Brass Tacks.. The origin of the phrase, dating from the late 1800s, is disputed. Some believe it alludes to the brass tacks used under fine upholstery, others that it is Cockney rhyming slang for “hard facts,” and still others that it alludes to tacks hammered into a sales counter to indicate precise measuring points.

All ten portraits but one large one, spoken for. Incredible, since the Portraits Project arose out of the Hamilton Arts Council’s Cotton Factory Residency offer, announced only eight weeks ago. In the meantime, seven gigs in three different cities, 3,000 km and six different family Christmas gatherings. In the most recent meantime, Westley the Bernese Mountain dog and I become fast holiday friends…

…and the snow falls, then melts, then falls again in Grey County, Ontario, Canada.

As I watch it fall I find myself in wonder at how time can compress and stretch, how it can split as it did this past December into many parallel timelines, each one as full of healing moments as with tasks, events and connections. I’m not the only one whose life went this way – folks every place I’ve been have their own version of crazy and wonder-filled weeks.

What a world to pause in, here. As Westley snores on the floor beside me and Fezick the fighting fish soaks up the music I play (how does that sound from inside a fishbowl?!?), the snow falls like sifted fragments of memory.

I think about the marvel that was Wassail, at Heartwood Hall, three days before Christmas, and one day after a solstice evening of reading & music with Anne Michaels and david sereda in Toronto. Never has there been a better entrance into the holiday season – poetry and song so gracefully offered in a tiny, mid-metropolis church, then the next night a hall packed full of voices raised in full-throated song  – both breathtakingly beautiful and boisterous (some downright badassery by the Wassailors).

Thank you, Anne Michaels, for your language and your strength; I continue to be guided by who and how you are in these complex times. david sereda for your love, your sincere and powerful intention, and your true voice for and of the world. Thank you J Scott Irvine for sponsoring Wassail – it was important and valuable to many, as you are important and valuable – to many. I am honoured to call you friend.

Thank you Kim Dutfield, Tessa Snider, Jim Howitt and Ted Stewart, for showing up to the Wassail workshops and dreaming up impossible, improbable and brilliant versions of songs we all know – and manifesting them beautifully in performance. Thank you Coco Love Alcorn for being exactly right, for knowing just what to do, for your great soul.

Thank you Tyler Wagler for your excellent voice, your beautiful guitar, and your fine, fine sensibilities in music and in life. The sound of your laughter is up there in my top 20 favourite things – it’s always worth hearing what you are finding hilarious in this world.

Thank you Christopher McGruer, for your perfectly toned rendition of Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales; thank you Lauren Best, poet laureate of Owen Sound, for your buckets & sticks, and being game enough to join us on the last possible day.

Thank you Suze Laporte and Mary Flynn for tolerating my annoyingly list-driven parallel selves through the months of November and December. You have been so so generous with your space and time, and I could not have done without your help.

Thank you family, thank you all the full-throated singers, thank you Heartwood Hall, Nathan Wagler and dear Lisa Koop – I’ll talk chicken with you anytime.

I promised to write about my patreon site (now up and running, but no, you’ll have to wait just a bit more for the link) and how to climb on board with the arts projects in my world, but that post will have to wait until after this one.

This post is about good friends, gratitude, springboards.

When I was in gymnastics as a kid we called it a vault – or maybe that was the action, I don’t remember. You run full tilt, then leap and land hard on the wider end. It compresses then releases, lifting you in a kind of explosion, up and through the known laws of gravity.

The sensation is like being propelled, higher than you could ever get on your own steam, by euphoria. During those long impossible moments in the air you can sumersault, twist in a pike, flip like a dolphin, and vault yourself onto and off the ‘horse’.  The landing can be tricky, but there’s always a padded cushion, a spotter, and a good sense of humour waiting there to soften it.

With good friends, and gratitude, you can defy the laws of gravity, and find ways to land well, with laughter. Thank you, and all my love to everyone for 2019. Lets do this one together.

Why so complicated?

The only movement is a slow floating down and slightly to the right, here in the woods. The only sound the crunch of snow underfoot, and the dog’s open-mouthed breathing. He finds deer tracks from earlier today, I find the mother tree – five feet wide at the trunk, strong, healthy arms raised to the sky – a living monument to time and resilience, to peace.

Do we find our need in these times maybe. Does it sometimes speak in the voice of old sorrow, maybe.

Underneath the desire for things and events that pass for fulfilment, that partly satisfy  -lies the deeper understanding that seeks acknowledgement:

Ah. I do feel an ache, here. And yes, only I can name it. Only I can tend to it. 

Also:  I can ask for help with this. I am not alone.

May we tend to our deeper needs with compassion and love, for ourselves and for each other.

A new year begins, from a place of deep deep love.  Truly, all of my very best to you all.

Keira – xoxo

 

Third day is a charm. The first two have been about moving in, setting up, getting my bearings – where does the paint go, need a bookshelf, is there room for the sewing machine, where the heck is the gel bucket and why on earth did I bring a guitar …

This circus of a December has me back and forth from my gig work in Owen Sound and the residency in Hamilton – often requiring pre-dawn drives up or down the highway, trips into the cabin, re-arranging storage compartment to gather stuff I need, which has entirely made up for the Y workouts I’ve missed.

Sleep schedule is well distorted, so I often pass out somewhere early in the evening then wake at 2am & get to work – writing bios, planning workshops, curating music (for Wassail Dec 22 in Owen Sound). I’m blessed and grateful to have friends who are cool with texts like this one:  ok, I’m just walking around in aimless circles, need to crash for a bit. Is it okay with you if I come over & crawl into your spare bed now? 

Thank you, Mary, Suze, Christoph, and everyone else who has offered to be part of this process with me by offering a spare bed and bathroom, joining me in workshops, rehearsals and email threads, interviews and painting collaborations. In this way, with shovels full of miracle and wonder, the December mountains are actually moving where they need to go.

Turns out there IS room for the 1956 Singer, yay. It’s a part of my process, the non-expert sewing of quilts – when I need distraction from the pieces in front of me I can zone into this production work and clear my head for the next go. The finished ones will help me with the draft here beside my chair this winter, too…

Portrait work has begun – I have met with three of seven collaborators, and begun the process of determining format, content, research and development of their pieces.

It’s still possible to jump in with the Hamilton Portrait work: two $500-800 collaborations are available, there’s room for $100-$1000 collaborators who would like to contribute funds and curated input towards the final two large portraits of artists of my choice, and I’m now seeking writing and funding collaborators for the printed book.

I’m in the process of setting up a Patreon site to make it easier for folks to jump in – I will add the link here on this post, and write another that’s devoted, in full gratitude, to a personal exchange between me and you, around art, process, music and collaboration.

I’m warming up my practise here in the meantime – playing with paintings from the Bells series, now that I have a wall I can get back from to see. I like the darkness, and the hope in this one & look forward to hearing it ‘ring’ when it’s done. Maybe today….?

While I stare at that one I’m messing around with these small pieces on raw silk. They’ve been hanging around for a while waiting for me to play some more. Acrylic wash over stretched silk, then gel, now dry media – china marker, pencil crayon, chalk pastel. It’s on the wall now with a second layer of gel on it – drying. I’m liking the texture of gel and silk with the dry media. Not sure if there will be a recognizable image on these – if so it will have to wait, since I can’t find my vine charcoal …

I’m loving this.

Thanks for all the support, folks. Big love to you from the Hamilton studio!

From two Artist’s talks given on November 24th in Owen Sound Ontario, about my upcoming collaborative portrait work.

I feel a need to establish some background, to support the foreground of this talk…

I remember staring at the flower in our Dundas garden for a long time before I drew it.

Mom asked me later how I knew how to do that.  I said, “The tulip taught me.”

Fifty years and a few life changes later, I spend a summer alone in a twelve acre forest.

This time it’s the forest that teaches me about my work as an artist as well as a human: about learning to see what’s actually there, rather than what I believe to be there.

Dad and I went away and painted watercolour landscapes together every summer when I was in my early teens.  Bless you, parents, for that experience, which established a fierce joy in me for the act and sensibility of making art from life.

…which led me to art study in Toronto… which led me to wonder, “where are the women artists? There seemed to be only five of note in the last century, at least as of 1982 –

– Georgia O’Keefe, Emily Carr, Mary Pratt, Freida Kahlo…

…and Käthe Kollwitz.  This is also the way I felt, then, in a visual art class full of posturing males who defended their haphazard final pieces (painted while drunk and stoned past the point of clarity the night before critique) with claims that they were examining abusive relationships with their mothers….  The (CIA- funded) gods of abstract expressionism were fully present in those years, in that studio.

I clung to the women artists, and to Ms. Carr in particular.

 

She travelled on her own to Europe and England to study art. She was self-reflective and wrote good books. She had at various times a cabin in the woods, a tiny house on wheels, a good friend who was a monkey, and she told the men in the Group of Seven to Piss Off when they annoyed her.

While the neo expressionists were grandstanding in New York City, Ms. Carr said

“I must go home and go sketching in the woods. They still have something to say to me.” 

thirty five years after painting class, I spend a summer alone in the forest.

Is it ironic that this experience of isolation from humans gave me a new love and appreciation for humanity?

It took me a full five weeks of living alone in my cabin to slow myself down enough to hear the tree frogs, to observe the incremental changes in that place which have been happening steadily for 100 years and more. There was a great deal to see when I learned to slow down and pay attention.

The forest teaches me to open and hold an empathetic connection to my chosen subject,  get the heck out of the way of what I’m looking at, and allow myself to be surprised.

But of course the human world is not slow. There’s a great deal of change and stress in these times, for all of us. What to do? How will we keep ourselves and each other safe and sane, alive and aware, in the mess of these times?

Ms Carr whispers in my ear, points out what is happening to my kindling pile after a only year on the ground.

I’ve been thinking about this for some time, now.

If mycelium and mycorrhizae connect entire forest ecosystems by symbiotically extending the roots of each tree and plant, and in so doing also build healthy soil, what connects and nourishes us in human ecosystems?

Of course, we know that Love connects us.  But what is the action of Love? How does it deliver nourishment and connect us across race, gender, politics, economics, AND ALSO back to natural ecosystems?

If you can forgive my clumsy photoshop illustration… my theory is that Arts connect us, internally and externally:  Music, painting, poetry, story, film.

I think we’re often not aware of the extent, or the strength of these connections we share, through art. Maybe if we were we’d be more discerning with what we ‘consume’, and it’s effect.

My work at the Cotton Factory residency December 1 to Feb 28 will be a mini-experiment in connection through art. Through collaborative ‘portraiture’ I will endeavour to build and grow a mini human ecosystem in which ten to twelve collaborators are connected through the work we do together, and the paintings I produce as the result of my artistic collaboration with them.

I invite you to consider becoming part of this little human ecosystem – who knows what we will discover together!

This post is already long. In the next post I will outline how to become involved, on whatever level you choose.  I salute the six people who have jumped in without hesitation to collaborate with me, and also all those who will jump in soon.

Hooray for art!!