And the winner is.... My First Professional Art Show and First Win
I was very fortunate, not only did I get to experience my first professional gallery art show at the Glenn Eure Ghost Fleet Gallery, but I was awarded the “Excellence” ribbon. This was the 27th Annual Artist Self-Portrait show. So not only do I have a professional line to add to my CV for experience, I now also have an award I can list. So very grateful. I’m hoping by the end of summer I will have something else to share as a professional development, but I’m going to sit tight and see how things progress. I’m taking lessons for the first time in my life to address the skills I wish to improve or hon. The art teacher is also an accomplished artist and teacher at a local college with her own studio. I’m largely self taught, having public school classes and then an elective painting class in college. So this is a rare gift to be regionally in touch to someone who is accessible.
For my entry, I was to title it “I Am …” fill in the rest. So I titled my piece “I am She.” In part the title comes for the Elvis Costello song about loving a complicated person who is both ups and down and a hundred different things within the measure of a day.
But what I wrote in the description was this:
Although intended as my first painted self portrait from a photo of me in front of my first large
completed painting after 10 years, it was transformed by the influences I felt around me: favorite
artists and artwork, family life, hikes around the waterways that I love, as well as the intruding
anxieties of raising two children while living life in an unstable, beautiful, dangerous world.
So a lot was left out specifically and there is a lot going on in this 4’ x 3’ acrylic on stretched canvas. So in an effort to get better and more comfortable talking about art and specifically my art, I’m going more in detail here.
First it is a painting of me in front of a painting, but instead of standing in my studio, I’m standing in the marshy brackish sound. In the top left corner is my son running in the SUN with our new rescue puppy,. Even a pair of male dolphins, a juvenile and his wing man, are in the waters off our neighborhood’s little beach, a beach we visit almost daily. Over my shoulder behind me is my daughter exploring the shallows on the sound with a staff of driftwood she had found. That day we were behind Jockey's ridge walking along the Roanoke Sound. In the distance the clouds are pretty but are tinged rusty by a wild fire or slow burn. As you look down, the marsh grass if full of life. And I could have depicted more than I have done here. Egrets. Herons. Pelicans. Terns. But I chose a red winged black bird with a nest in the tall straight branches of some wild brush. A memory from childhood when I use to sleep with the window down hearing trains and birds and wind in the pines. Below the red winged black bird are other birds but also a snake winding it’s way through. The snake is both prey and predator when young like the birds, as young snakes are easy meals for the talon armed raptors. People are so wary of snakes, it was an easy and obvious pick to insert some danger. But more danger, more subtle, is the vine like trash snagged around my ankle. Sometimes walking you can trip in vines, but also ropes, wires, plastic mesh, errant crab pots and more trash that gets caught around the edges of the great filters, our marsh. My rescue cat, named for where she was found, Salvo, NC, is standing behind me warily stalking dragonflies, butterflies, and birds in the wild flowers. And in the water is the moon reflecting. I, as an artist a mother a woman, I am over the moon, but also wary and pensive and poised where ever I find my feet or my mind. My dog is still a puppy asleep in my studio, but also like a sleepy sand dune protecting some marsh from the crashing waves at my feet. Behind him is the old inherited chair I use as an easel. It reminded me of pilings under the houses and piers on our beaches. It is however a bottomless chair from times in my family gone unrecorded, and my completed painting of the waves crashing into retaining wall rocks has sprouted an osprey nest. The osprey nest has two fledgling osprey. They are spreading their wings and opening their beaks, and I'm looking over them almost as if I am their mother. I myself have two fledgling older children. Their excited movement has dislodged some sticks from the nest, falling to the marshy beach below. And while the waves in the painting are really contained on a canvas, the waves feel threatening to them. So this is my anxiety of uncontrollable danger I feel near my fledglings. .
There are touches of bronze and gold, and another favorite song, Fields of Gold, by Sting, is written in the grass.
Colors found in nature are intended as impressions of real nature. Colors not found in nature are emotional: anxiousness, excitement, admiration, passion, and fear.
Ok, I have indulged myself as much as I can bare. Although driven to create art with a sincere desire to share with the world, I am also uncomfortable as I was raised to be small and quiet and serve others. So even time in my studio, while driven to establish and spend time there, feels like a guilty pleasure or an act of selfishness. Probably why I’ve created and then tossed so many previous creations and attempts. But we shall stay the course now.
Thank you for any time you take with this. Much love to you and yours.
Dawn
