Making it up as I go along
February 24, 2021
Life is what happens to us while we're busy making other plans. That saying is widely attributed to John Lennon who used it in his song Beautiful Boy. However, American writer and cartoonist Allan Saunders used it a generation before him in the Readers' Digest. I was still young when I began to think it was an apt description of the way my life was unfolding. I still think so.
Backyard Menagerie, acrylic over paper collage, 2017
I have never been good at engineering my life and none of the grand designs of my youth ever panned out. You know--the handsome husband,the stellar kids, the brilliant career, the house, the social life. None of it came true the way I wanted it to so I learned to cultivate what I had.
Eventually I found myself situated in a untidy garden of scattered beauties that was lovely in spite of my many ineptitudes. Not what I had dreamed of, but nevertheless pretty good.
It wasn't engineered. It wasn't architecture. It was an unruly backyard populated with all kinds of living things that had blown in on the wind and taken root. Some of the things that turned up I tended because I liked them, others thrived on neglect sending roots deep into the substance of my life practically before I noticed they were there.
I think my development as a painter and my present style reflect this way of living. There usually is some semblance of initial intention and, from there, it's all about cultivating whatever turns up that's good, ignoring what’s not. The picture above is a good example.
This painting was done for a class about 3 years ago. I don't remember the assignment but it most certainly was not to populate a landscape with silly creatures. But they turned up so I embraced them gave them presence and a space to play. It reminds me of John Fogarty and Creedence Clearwater Revival's song from 1970, Lookin' Out My Backdoor:
...There's a giant doin' cartwheels, statue wearin'
high heels
Look at all the happy creatures dancin' on the lawn...
Below is another painting spawned in the same way, only not so happy. I don't like this one at all but I think it reflects the mind-numbing news of the day. My intention was to put figures in a landscape, but not those figures in that landscape. I tried to get rid of them but they kept showing up. The appalling news of the day was the state-sponsored kidnapping of immigrant children at the border. We later learned that, for many, not so much as a piece of paper existed to reconnect these children with their parents. I don't like this painting. Not my figures, not my colors, not my style. And it doesn't sing back to me. I keep it only as a memorial to the victims of a bone-chilling episode that made the hard life of thousands of families into a crushing nightmare.
How's that for real life intruding on your plans?
Where are the Children?, acrylic on paper, 2018