Patricia van Asperen

Dreams vs. realities

Gingko FLow in process

I’ve been thinking hard about whether grabbing a space downtown would be good for me as an artist.  It would make my life easier is some way-always having a place to show my work- but then I realize that there is so much that I need to do just to set up this space-even if it is already an existing gallery space- It would take so much more of my precious studio time to get things up and running right now- timing isn’t good since I have to get ready for another show… How can I possibly do it?

I tried to gather a few people together last summer to look into starting an artist co-op but everyone had more concerns about its success than motivation to move toward its possibilities.  I think that most people hope someone else who is more business oriented rather than studio oriented might like to take the running of a show space and allow them room to be involved but also have the ability to invest only as much as they need to to keep things afloat.

If I chose to take on the task it would likely be very much my concern and that would inevitably mean most of my time would go into the business rather than into the art.

Addressing the business aspects of art are very time consuming and though I know how important they are its hard to keep your eye on the long term benefits every day.   It makes me feel a bit sad that I don’t seem to get energized from running a business (whether its successful or not, is another matter).  I’ve spent two years reading and acting on my reading and getting my name out there but I realize now that even if I have the money on hand to start up an art based business, I have to honestly confess that I know I would not always willing to try to organize the time to keep up the momentum toward this consuming process of start up. Even just maintaining a small retail business that moves me beyond the front door of my home seems daunting as I know I could come to resent the  time and energy being used in “unproductive ways.”  Its really funny to note how opposite my views on what productive might mean to most people.

I’ve realized that there is part of the equation that escapes me.  The finishing touch, the showmanship, the need to have others see what I have done and perhaps want to share in the results of my thought process and work.

I am in love with the process.  Simply that.  I get so much out of the learning the new skills, the research new projects require, the making, the problem solving- that suddenly the end product becomes somewhat less meaningful.  I also wonder if I have some fear or other mental block that I don’t recognize or refuse to see because it is too difficult to confront.  I am starting to read a book called Art and fear  by David Bayles and Ted Orland (observations on the Perils and Rewards of Art making.  I really like thier honesty about what its like to be an artist and putting on that artist front.

I read somewhere that what defines a work of Art for many people is the ability to share emotion.  I think the only thing I have to offer is the sense of peace I find in the making.  Is  being peaceful enough? or is it just the absence of stressors or the absence of intrusions or intense emotions -that quiet internal place we seek for rest.

Balancing and realizing that you have limitations, and yet recognizing that we might have some obstacles in our psyche to decide to work around is something we all have to be aware of and make effort to explore. As much as you need to guard and find ways to make your dreams come to fruition, I think we need to really define what success will look like for you as an individual.

Being recognized for the work that you have done is a bonus but not one that comes easily to all of us.  I believe I should have the confidence to put my work out there.  It is not lacking, I am finding often that I am lacking in my desire to put myself out there – not my work.  I am getting in my own way.  I don’t have a major supply of confidence in presenting myself – not my work.  I am the barrier.

Looking at art from a business prospective asks that we make ourselves known in very limited ways.  I think some people might call it a form of branding.  A very commercialized way of looking at the art of an artist.  Why? Because the business experts say it takes less work to  get recognition for your work, because it is packaged nicely for a the viewer.  Perhaps that is more of the craftsman mentality that the last two years has exposed me to coming into play here.

It seems so important that I make forays regularly into working with new materials, and experiment with new things.  I get a bit frustated when I feel like I’m doing myself a disservice (as a business person) and wandering too far from what I should be limiting myself to.    But this is just what I need as a artist.  How can these two ways of thinking really work together to a better end?  A work in Progress as always, or in my case about a dozen works or so…

Website remodelling

Work is in Progress

Sorry about the website glitches for the next week.  I am in the middle of updating the site and so there seem to be alot of broken or misdirecting links.  Check back in a week or so…and thanks so much again Michael for the beautiful pictures I get to post every time I find something to say on this blog and for all your work on the website!

Start of my Great Lakes Persona : Great Lakes Installation-wall Piece

Just beginning to work on my large wall piece for the Great Lakes Installation.

This is the torso section that  will be placed just above eye level and over looks the viewer.

Structure of great lakes wall piece

The idea mainly being to “watch the guardian”.  As though the spirit of the lakes are making sure we are doing our job caretaking its physical entity.  I’ve been leaning toward a more spiritual understanding of our water rather than a resource based look at the reasons for maintaining  the health of our water system… the feeling of the water as an integrated element, like that of the circulatory system,  to our nation rather than something separate and useful that can bring us wealth if we maintain and protect it.

I was reading about aboriginal concepts of water and celtic traditional understanding of the water and simply wonder if as a western type thinker, would I be able to access that kind of understanding of the world.

The need for the formation of a different perspective is not new for many, but it is new to to my understanding that I might now have the right kind of relationship that will make for a healthy world for my children.  It seems even with all our claims that we respect the workings of this world our old perspective, and understanding of what really respecting nature might look like, is not working effectively.

This search for a new method of understanding  seems to be rising as the necessity for change for our own survival, and those decisions which still come from our resource value based thinking continue to fail.

In the Western ways of thinking water is still seen as a separate element that we must help balance, maintain, correct when we have overused it or used it in detrimental ways.  Its value is in only how it is related to us and our needs- not as a intrinsic part of natural world, and its value can stand can outside of our survival or as a system that feeds and maintains the balance of our world.

Beginnings of the :Mystery of Making”

Here’s the first disk of a project that I’ve been mulling over in my head for sometime.  I keep reading and reading about other artists and the creation of art and how it must look to those who aren’t submersed in the art world.  I’m always thrilled to see what others are doing and started thinking a lot about how many mental steps we take to get to our final piece.

All our world culture seems more interested in the “Product”, (what the final work looks like), not looking for- not much interest in the process and what that might look like.  I read somewhere that if another person takes more than 30 seconds looking at a piece, it is unusual.  As a creative beings, and so many of us are in so many ways in our lives, software designer, to homemaker, to artist and craftspeople, it just makes me sad that there is so much that we have to miss out on and rush through to get to the end result,  to keep surviving and thriving.

Beginnings of "The Mystery of Making " Machine

I started to imagine what it might look like if we could boil down all our important art elements Line, shape, colour, concept, subject and plugged those all into a machine (I’m sure there are programs that do this by now in the  2D art world) but what might that look like in the 3D world we live in? And so I started thinking that this piece needs to be constantly changing or the end result must be constantly changing visually.  Just like our mental processes and how we take a vestige of an idea and it starts moving, picking up speed in our minds and changing and then usually at some point when the idea looks its best (as a product) , (or just after we catch a glimpse of a new idea hanging on the horizon of our consciousness, or we have grown bored with the overworked idea) most of us stop, show it to others (which is kind of a celebration of the work we put into it), and the creative process ends.

What if it didn’t end- for a 3D object, what might that look like?  What never stops- our minds, and machines and time?  So I started trying to boil down these facets of my own process, and how might I integrate these things into my visual language.  I only have very rudimentary understanding of machines that must have stopped after the discovery of the gear (the glorified wheel)  and so I guess my thoughts about making a machine are limited by my interest in caring how things work (I’m much more interested in how they are made and what they can do for me (product oriented!)

So came the idea of working with decorative versions of gears that represent each of the main elements of art making- (which apparently takes up an inordinate amount of bandwidth in my brain).  How might that look and how could I represent it in my limited human capacity and within the limitations of my skill set?  The gear that I’ve shown here is the gear that builds the forms and shapes that would populate a final peice of sculpture.  I am still working on how to integrate all the elements but its a beginning!

New completed pieces

I just finished two pieces! Thank goodness for submission deadlines!

One that is part of the Great Lakes Installation Piece and one I did because I still love my exotic florals, which are an extension of the work I used to do in my paintings from 2007. This one is called Wreckage Uplifted and is inspired by old wrecks that we have been watching in our scuba training class. It also has the spiritual element representing the loss of life and death has become represented by the ship masts- symbols of an afterlife.

This floral piece is self referential in a way in that it is about the evolution of itself as a creative work. The piece is constructed in three sections, the first one- the conceiving of an idea and consists of a brief sketch of the initial idea as it forms.

The second piece is of the work that begins to flesh out the idea into the final peice in its finished state. As you move from left to right the piece looks more and more complete. Seen from only one angle (right side) the peice looks fully finished, from all other view points the piece shows its workings through the process.

With sculptural works I need to send in pictures of various angles and sometimes a detail of the larger piece especially if it is of a large size. But I feel at a wee bit of a disadvantage to the 2D artists who send in one image, and atleast the photograph shows the peice in some version of what it will appear like in the show. 2d media presented in a 2D recording.

However I noticed, if the peice introduces elements that are pushing into 3D, with impasto brush strokes or other objects that are added, it can really start throwing the recording of the piece way off. Sculpture so affected by light and the environment around it, the colours it is placed upon -the light reflection in the room, these all getting caught in the shadows of the form. Every photo taken from a different angle makes it look so different. Each shot I take can sometimes feel so disparate from the others, almost unreadable as a single three dimensional thing. It must be hard for juries to get a real sense of a sculptural submission. I hope one day to learn to do all my pieces justice when I have to record them with photography.

I almost wish I could present them in a stereographic way. Michael and I picked up an old stereoscope on our trip to the states this summer and he has been playing around with the double photos creating the 3d effect. Hmmmm…wonder what I could do with that?

Portraits

I’ve never felt myself to be a portrait artist but that is what I have been doing these last two months.  Here is one I did of my daughter, almost complete except for some darkening of the background and decisions to be made about how to trim the edges.

I joined a small group at Kingston school of art called Everyone needs a Challenge and I can prove it.  The portraits are a result of that group.  Our first challenge was to gather a number of items and incorporate them into a piece, with all the considerations of scale, lighting  needed to integrate all the elements.

The second challenge was to do a self portrait, as someone other than yourself.  This one was difficult because the last self portrait I did was so unflattering of myself that I think I had to throw it out.  I was afraid to go down that path again.  This time was easier though as I tried on a different costume and had fun coming up with an idea of who I wanted to be if I were born 200 years ago.  I would likely have been in United Kingdom, and I just got my harp and have started to learn some celtic tunes on it so I had to place that in there some where.  I thought of my age, nearing 50, and how I would have back then been considered old, (maybe even wise!).  So I thought it would be interesting to see myself as all those things and how would I spend a quiet moment in my life.  I had fun choosing the additional things to put in the painting.  The results so far have helped me get over the trauma of my first attempt at self portrait, probably because I could not exactly be me.

Some of my latest pieces for the Great Lakes Installation

My studio wall as it looked at the end of March.

I’m still a long way from completion and as usual I’d hoped I’d have had much more time to devote to my studio work and therefore have much more done.  But life as a Mom calls often these days especially with sometimes  up to8 kids asking for help navigate through life.   I’ve also had to help my parents move into a retirement home so that took up the rest of March and April, with gettign their old house cleared and cleaned to put up for sale etc.  I’m going to put a more concentrated effort into studio work in the month of May.

Here are some elements that have begun to come to life over the first three and a half months of this year.

Beginnings of driftwood: mesh armature (over bottle for support)

First phase of Driftwood

Driftwood after branches added

DRIFTWOOD:  I decided to add a peice of driftwood into the installation because it seems as much apart of my Lake shore experience as any.  Infact one of the first sculptural pieces I made was a disk, that I cut, carved and varnished from an  piece of driftwood when I was in my teens.  It had a beautiful unusual texture and colour and I still have it on my mantle at home.    This piece came together quite quickly and I really liked the texture I ended up with.  It still carries the water, waves, ripples effect I’m hoping to carry through out the piece.

Driftwood: finished carving

The next piece I’m working on  is the Swimmer piece.  I’m not yet finished it but have had to step away from it for a bit to get more perspective about what I want to do with it.  None of the wave effects that are visible in the other pieces are yet present, and I’m waiting to see what direction I should take to the introduction of the human figure into the landscape of the installation.

Detail of arm and Neck

Detail of upper torso

Mold to support clay

I’m going to have to build this piece in sections and then put them together.  The size of the torso section here is about 26 inches and I plan to add a head and arm and perhaps the bottom of the leg.  I wanted to show the movement -twisting of the body as it moves through the water doing the front stroke.

Draping clay over the Kelan Klay support

Unfinished before carving and sanding

I’ve made a number of wave forms and am introducing other elements that I associate with water and the Great Lake experiences.   I’ll take pictures and add them to the blog as they reach some level of completion.  I realize that there is so much more to this installation and the ideas change and grow as the process continues.

Sculptural Putterings About…

Read the rest of this entry »

Concepts: Up and coming Works -The idea process

I have three projects I am researching, building, working on, creating right now. All are in the process of being conceptualized.   I like the research part of projects as much as doing the work and depending on the subject that can take quite a bit of time. Its an ongoing process that I try not to let over shadow the work itself.  I try to match a learning with a concept of how to present the idea in a visual way (perhaps the graphic design element to my thinking process).  I find myself taking steps to do  research, experiment and work on producing the sculpture all at the same time.  I am trying to let these things ebb and flow as I have learned to let myself do when I am working on any piece of artwork.   Each has something to add to the discussion.

Side view of Great Lakes Maquette

One project is what I still call my “CAS Project”.  It  is one that I believe will take the longest to wrap my mind around because it is a very complex problem.  I have so much to say about this system.   I was in the early part of my life a foster child in the very early 70′s and have those experiences to say something about.  During the thirty years I had little to do with the system, I was left with the impression that it was a system suffering and I think I have some sense of what outsiders may see.  I have a strong desire to build a piece that breaks down that negative view of the CAS’s work in our society, while still acknowledging that there will always to be room for improvement. I am a Foster parent now and have been involved with that for nine years now.  What I see of the system from the inside makes me much more empathetic to what is happening  to both the child and the social workers difficult task and administration of the care of those children.  I have a strong desire to continue to process my thoughts and understanding around this and I believe it will be an installation piece because of the sheer complexity of this subject.

My second idea for a show is what I’m tentatively calling my  “Autopsy of a Bad Relationship” piece may be the one farthest along on its way to completion conceptually.  But strangely it hasn’t found its way outside my head to expression in my work yet.  I see this as a much smaller scaled piece but still having the nature of an installation.  When I lose momentum, or need a break from ” the Great Lakes Project”  I might fill it with this.  My interest in what makes things tick and what doesn’t in interpersonal relationships, married to my perhaps misplaced belief, that   I have a strong sensibility to the inner workings of others,  makes me sit up and wonder about why I have failed so many times in this journey to forge strong bonds with a life partner of my own, until very recently.  And I guess, in believing now, that I have had some success – what might make this so different now and allow it to work. This piece will also include the use of text (words and phrases) which I have never liked to use because I don’t usually process my emotions in a verbally descriptive way. Strangely it is the words of a dying relationship that stick with me- the harshness of the sharp contrast of communication between two people who once uttered soft edged loving words now using them as knives to nick each other to the death of the relationship?  But also leaving so much unspoken, and the abscence of the words that might change everything.

Surface Mask of Great Lake

My last piece I have already mentioned in a previous posting, is “The Great Lakes Project” which has traveled some distance conceptually since, but still refuses to be pinned down, yet it has become the most manifest.  I have started the vocabulary to describe some of the concepts I’ve learned and pieces keep flowing out of me.  So far 13 are in progress since October and I have keen hopes on having an installation ready in the next 2 years with both music and photography as integral parts( in the final version atleast.)

Arm of Lake

I hope now that I’ve overcome the limitations in my knowledge of uploading etc with the new Lightroom program and database, and so I hope to keep up the postings on this blog.

New Great Lake Project

I returned from a tour along the Canadian half of  Lake Superior for the second time in two years even more fired up to take on the importance of  these bodies of water in my life.  This may be overlooked to many of us who grew up along the shoreline and have never left.  But to me it was an adventure into the heart of my identity as a person and an artist. I was raised along the shores of the Great Lake Basin, the St. Lawrence River and now I live along side Lake Ontario.

Strangely,  I have had very little perspective of how important these lakes are to our understanding of our place in the world.  As a child I’d heard of the pollution and our struggle to save the lakes and found out where I was on maps of Canada and saw how close I was to the big blue areas of the lakes.

Geographically, these Great Lakes not only live up to the “greatness” of their name in Canadian terms, but also are impressive on an International scale.  For instance, I I only just learned that Lake Superior is the second largest lake in the world, with the other Great lakes falling closely in behind, all remaining in the top 15, in size and volume.

Long before my intellectual understanding of this though, I knew how wrapped up my identity, and the whole landscape of my mind came from my traipsing about these shore throughout my childhood    But I’ve wondered for some time now how could I integrate this into my work as a Canadian sculptor.

My initial wish was to create a body of work that is to look directly at the idealized  image of the Great Lakes, and ask whether that image, carried in the hearts and minds of our people, informed largely by the work of Ontario Landscape painters, depicted as a strong and healthy entity, that has been capable of bearing the weight of the Canadian Identity and our economic future and compare this view with a picture of the state of the underlying ecosystems at present, as seen by researchers and educators, and myself as an artist.

It turned out to be a bit too overwhelming a place to start,  but as with everything, what  I have seen and read along the way is helping me to hone and define the edges of these vague thoughts.  This trip helped me find more images and get in touch again with the vastness of the environment that these lakes have created in my life.   I ended up only hoping to bring to life in my sculpture, over the next years, some of what I have gleaned about the Lakes and their shoreline.   I’m just happy that I am committed to setting aside the time to see these lakes and learn more of them and how this is starting to nibble away and replace some of my old ideas of what I need to say.

One of the things this research on the great lakes forced me to explore is the aspect of size in my work.  I tend to work pretty small in comparison to other sculptors so it really has to be a  factor considered in this work on this project. I had to do a comparision between the lakes to even begin to understand the differences between them.  For instance  Lake Superior has a surface area of 31820 square miles (82413 km2) while the smallest is somewhat debatable between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie as Erie has a depth of 210 ft., volume of 116 miles cubed, but a water area of 9910 miles squared, while Lake Ontario has greater Depth, volume but far less surface area.

Unfortunately I have learned that I have a mind that simply does not process mathematical information well.  So I had to come up with a visual way of understanding their sizes.  I came up with a unit of measurement that I used to add and compare  shape, depth and surface area  and how I could use all of  these aspects together to come up with a visual representation of the lakes.  This is the maquette I came up with and it seems to read accurately visually. This is the first step in the process of comparing sizes of the lakes in an attempt to digest so much information in a way I can understand.

My goal is to visit each of the lakes this year for a week at minimum and travel the shoreline along on the Canadian side, to get some sense of the feel for the landscape that is representative of the area and for those things which might feel out of place with the idealized image too.  I will continue to do more research on other important aspects of the lakes as I go.

When I started the project I was considering doing the search for history and identity as an artist and when I began the journey to Lake Huron I was still at odds with whether I should include Lake Michigan because it is not Canadian and its inclusion would seem to be in conflict with what I am seeking  here.  But it would be foolish to not recognize that my search for identity as a Canadian artist  just  doesn’t fit within the parameters of this project,  just as it would be unreasonable to even consider doing an environmental impact study on just Canada’s side of that imaginary line that runs through the maps of the lakes dividing Canada from the US waters.

Kakebeka Falls

There has been work to address both countries concerns and research sharing on the Great lakes which is so important to maintaining these shared bodies of water.   The last review of the quaility of water of the Great lakes was done jointly by Canada and the United states in 1978 but is now undergoing a review.   Check out some of  the info online at the Great LakesWater Quality Agreement .

My trip with Michael (Photographer) last October has fed my mind with the colours and structures and  images that will I hope read as Lake Superior in the fall.  It was a beautiful landscape draped in autumn colours and changed as we past the half way point in Lake Superior National Park where the leaves turned decidedly yellow against an ever increasing evergreen backdrop.  The birch became predominant and there were even evergreens that had changed a bright matching shade of yellow.  One person thought they were Jack Pine, but I will have to find out to be sure.

The trip helped me continue to solidify a direction for this project and it has become more about the water of the Lakes and the shoreline that surrounds it without regard to nationality.  Water is such an elemental part of who we are, it would make more sense for me to find a way of addressing our connections to each other as people who live along its shoreline it rather than any man- made attempts at creating a division of something so shared.