words

influence/inspiration/ideas

I'd like to evoke a feeling of place where the elements of the world we know meet bizarre, reverent spaces that make dream sense.

My working process involves building layers with acrylic paint, spray paint, gold or silver leaf and collage elements. Sanding and then adding more layers. It’s a continual process of adding, subtracting and reacting led by a combination of intuition, accident and deliberation.

My mama told me never venture into space but

I did

-Space Girl, Seeger and MacColl

If I was where I would be

Then I’d be where I am not

Here I am where I must be

Where I would be, I can not

-Katie Cruel

Magellan Street, 1974

This is the year you fall in
love with the Bengali poet,
and the Armenian bakery stays open
Saturday nights until eleven
across the street from your sunny
apartment with steep fo'c'sle stairs
up to an attic bedroom.
Three-decker tenement flank you.
Cyclone fences enclose
flamingos on diaper-size lawns.

This is the year, in a kitchen
you brighten with pots of basil
and untidy mint, I see how
your life will open, will burst from
the maze in its walled-in garden
and streak towards the horizon.
Your pastel maps lie open
on the counter as we stand here
not quite up to exchanging
our lists of sorrows, our day books,
our night thoughts, and burn the first batch
of chocolate walnut cookies.

Of course you move on,
my circumnavigator.
Tonight as I cruise past your corner,
a light goes on in the window.
Two shapes sit at the table.

-Maxine Kumin

power: deadly, revolutionary, horrific, possibilities

“If enough uranium atoms were gathered in the correct configuration—forming a critical mass—this process could begin sustaining itself, with one atom’s neutrons splitting the nucleus of another, sending more neutrons into a collision course with further nuclei. As it went critical, the resulting chain reaction of splitting atoms—nuclear fission—would liberate unimaginable quantities of energy.

…just one kilogram of the uranium underwent fission, and only seven hundred milligrams of mass—the weight of a butterfly—was converted into energy.”

Midnight in Chernobyl, Adam Higginbotham

"...the achievement of a million unremarkable days."

The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides

stardust ideas:

The first painting in this series was "I'm not lonely. I'm just curious." I wanted to depict a space scene with millions of stars but in a theatrical way, like a stage or a set. At the same time I was working on this painting I heard Jill Tarter from the SETI Institute talk on the radio and she filled in all the blanks for me. So my unformed or not quite verbalized ideas about space, space travel, and the future were informed by her ideas. Most of the titles in stardust are words, direct quotes, ideas, or composites of ideas from her interview.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_tarter_s_call_to_join_the_seti_search.html

power plant:

power plant has a negative connotation, something poison, evil, wasteful. The "power plant" image developed as a monumental structure, like the great pyramids, something unexplainable and awesome. When it was finished the image seemed powerful like something alive, simmering, massive and generating energy. It made me think of a gigantic generator. A "good" power plant, not a destructive one.