Art, or artifact?
What I’ve believed about what and whom art is for has changed. Children – toddlers and preschoolers, kinders and middle years kids have taught me more about my studio job than any school could have (or has) done. Last fall I worked with a hundred kids, one hour every week with each age group. This spring I will work with two hundred or more, for ten weeks. I bring in a wide swath of materials and some approaches I’ve discovered in my studio over the decades and we explore together, in a Reggio Emilia/ Waldorf rooted approach. 50 minutes of intense collaboration with curious minds and passionate hearts. Every session is a brilliant, living arc of discovery.
Their energies come with me into the studio and now this ink I’ve made smells like butterflies, like sunlight. That yellow turns the blue to aqua like Mexico. The moon isn’t always round and colour s sleep in the dark, just like us. When I come back to my explorations of water, of hands, trees and story-making, they ring now with curious minds and a living arc of discovery. There is just no such thing as solo; we humans are ingenious together.
The series explores portraits of the crimean lindens that line English Bay in Vancouver. I visited there a month after my mother died which was also two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine..
I spent $900 on new snow tires this November and I’ve been grateful for them many times since. The exchange of money for those tires seems far less significant than the conversations I had with the service lady who dropped me off at home then picked me up again when the tires were on the car, my brakes serviced and new windshield wipers installed. Now when I’m tracking well through road ice I remember the life philosophy she and I shared in those shuttles to and back. “Well I think we all get a pass for being assholes once or twice in our lives, otherwise how’d you ever learn anything? But that guy. He’s something else. I can see idiots like him coming from miles away now & no thanks. Life’s just too short for that crap.”
Buying and owning art is like that too. A window into a thought you had or the look on someone’s face. A reflector for memory, for a moment of wonder. What you paid for it is a measure of your love for human nature, for our collective insistence upon creativity, no matter what.
I want living people to buy work made by living artists because there is no moment like this, and together we tell the story of Now. Find pieces that resonate with you, find a wall in your house that could use some life and colour. The piece you buy will become a mirror for your curiosities, a repository for your interests and your thoughts. Purchase it, connect with the artist who made it, add the story of its making to your story. In so doing you choose the story you wish to live, and the world you wish to live in.
I find myself in the Royal Ontario Museum, looking at artifacts – tables, pots, chairs and cutlery used by humans from the Middle Ages to the present. Beautiful things in a tiny pretend room. A small table with impossibly intricate veneer designs on it, lovingly made, with simple stoneware cups and a jug arranged on top. Two plastic apples were there also, which had dried and cracked so the white foam balls could be seen beneath (the table is missing one piece of veneer too, but it is still a table). A dresser behind, also hand carved, and a long wooden bed over to the left with caning and no mattress. It looks like a lounging lawn chair, but from the year …900 CE?
Each of these pieces has a number and a description. They are human-made things, once at the centre of human bustle over breakfast and dinner, work, arguments, love, worry and some form of ceremony. That table was made for love or money by a fine craftsperson. The dresser once stored someone’s socks and clothing. Now they’re behind glass and categorized by date. There is no story, no “Liam made this for his young wife as a wedding gift.” No life present save my friend and I, gazing.
You can permit yourself to wonder about what kind of art brings a smile to your face, what peaks your curiosity and your interest. What kind of art would resonate with what you have in your home, and in your heart. What space in those places could use some life and some colour? Then look at art made by living artists, learn their stories, and the stories folded into their work. Find the piece that connects, and purchase it.
My work is available for purchase on this website, but do reach out in an email if you would like to know more about the story of its making. I answer every respectful note sent to keira@keiramcarthur.ca.