New Collectors

Such a nice thing happened: a couple at the SPA Bash last Friday loved my work and came back on the weekend to buy two pieces. It's so wonderful when people are in real synch with your aesthetic. The work I make with found objects is not easy for everyone to like, as it uses very funky materials that perhaps some people might think of as Garbage, but for me has a kind of sacredness. I think all my work is essentially about transience and the ephemeral, which is what makes the things scavenged from the Planetary Dumpster and given a rebirth in art so numinous for me.

They bought a piece I call Standing Disarmed (one of the few pieces I made in the Disarmed series that doesn't hang), and even suggested that it "bears a compelling resemblance to Donatello's Magdalene." I have to say that I see and agree, even though I am humbled by the comparison.

Here are images they sent of the pieces in situ in their home.

School Residency

I did an Artist Residency at the Waterford Elementary School the week of March 18. What a great school -- enthusiastic teachers and students, and a wonderful school climate.

Food was the theme I was asked to plan for, so I created a group of experiences that used a diversity of materials and media (here's a look at the display in the hallway that I put up on the last day):

Kindergarteners drew on bananas with toothpicks, writing their names and drawing. Later in the week they made letters using vegetables and then made designs on bread rolls that were consumed at our culminating activity.

First Graders made and painted big paper mache fruit.

Second Graders designed their own seed packets and decorated bread rolls.

Third Graders made veggie creatures and then made scenes and stories with them.

Fourth Graders made collages based on the paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Fifth Graders made Additive Monsters by imagining what some chemical additives might look like.

On Friday we had a culminating activity with Stone Soup (partially made with stock from the remains of the two large sacks of vegetables we used to make Veggie ABC's and Veggie Creatures), cooked by the school's Fabulous Food Services person, Wendy Fearon (who also made and cooked the bread dough we used to form rolls). Each class brought blankets, and we all sat on the floor in the gym and had a picnic.

I met with each class three times during the week (we had a snow day on Tuesday, so that scrunched the schedule a bit; I will go back to the school sometime this year to spend the day showing students what I make in the studio and talking about what it's like to be a studio artist), but I always wish there were time to do things more slowly and spend more thinking and talking time with the projects. Nevertheless, we all enjoyed ourselves thoroughly!

Overview of The Parade Thus Far

I created a Slideshare Presentation about The Parade, to try to sum up where I've been up to this point.

I've been working with Riki Moss, (who is working on her own parade) to create a collaborative installation that will begin with a website exploring the issues we're treating in our artwork and in our thoughts about how we humans interact with the world around us.

The Parade from Janet Van Fleet

Animals!

I've been thinking about animals a great deal of late, which is interesting because I am not an "animal person" -- I don't have pets and am not drawn to nature photography or trying to catch sight of wildlife when I'm out kayaking or walking in the woods. It is that I think other animals, like humans, have their own space, their own lives, their own rights -- one of which should be to be free of human oppression and the assumption that we have a right to their territories, their resources, and their bodies.

So animals are appearing with greater frequency in the Parade. Although other previous pieces in the Parade have been animals, the newer ones are (mostly) four-legged, instead of 2-legged.

 

The Dancing Bear is an exception, but really bears DO stand up on their hind legs on occasion... And I love the Inuit carvings of dancing bears, and this is an homage to them.

This creature was made from a piece of a rotted baseball bat, and came with this intriguing fragment of text.

On another note, I have FINALLY updated my website with a link to this blog and my current Resume, Paintings (with all the Priests I could find images for), Installations, and Exhibitions. It had been over ten years on some pages...

The Popular Kids

In high school, there were always the Popular Kids -- the admired,  the Beautiful People, the ones people wanted to be (or at least be next to). The same thing seems to happen in Art -- there are pieces that everybody likes. In this current body of work, it's the X-Ray piece I posted on January 16. It got 500 pageviews, and almost everybody who wrote back to me after the recent series of posts referenced that one in particular: "I love the X-ray pieces;" "I love the Xray pieces. Probably drawn by all my nursing history;" "The xrays are quite wonderful in a peculiar way, the kind of thing that is both compelling and unsettling;" "The x-ray piece might be my favorite on that whole page"... you see what I mean.

So here's the second piece in this group. Thanks to Chris Jeffrey at SPA for letting me use his glass-cutting tools.

 

And there's also (new) a small herd of animals.

Barbed Wire and Birds

The figures are moving in a new direction. One morning I was out jogging and found a torn piece of a Posting sign, brought it to the studio, and made this piece. I tried to find some old barbed wire, but couldn't, so I created my own. I love this figure, spreading its arms to delineate and guard its private space. The head is a porcelain insulator.

 

Several of the new pieces have elements made with wire wrapped around grasses and sticks.

 

And a new bird, a heron who joins the earlier flock. I liked the more graceful, rounded form of several of the new pieces, and am moving away from the blocky wooden pieces for awhile.

X-Rays

About five years ago I bought three metal cases of glass and paper slides at a yard sale, clearly used by a physican as teaching slides. The glass slides, each about 3x4 inches, are all of x-rays and thin sections of tissue,  and may date to the1940's. I was particularly drawn to the chest x-rays, as images of a human torso, and ones that record damage, disease, and its attendant anxiety.

I am making several figures that incorporate these slides in a small box I've built. I cut the slide down to 3" tall x about 2.5" wide, backed it with mylar, and installed a flickering LED candle, to make the chest appear to pulsate, as with a beating heart.

The arms and headcovering are cloth, with plaster bandage over wire on the legs. 

This video shows the effect of the flickering light: