New work: Eyes To The Sky

Eyes To The Sky
14" x 18" painted paper collage on wc paper

Many of the pieces that I have made have some kind of an internal narrative to them. What I mean is that the "story line" of the piece is personal to me. It's what I am thinking about while I am working. The ideas just come to me because the shapes or colors remind me of something that I have read or seen or heard about. I make some kind of association with something and that takes the work from being purely abstract to something with some personal meaning. 

I mention all of this because I am now going to write some things that are silly but honestly, they are what I was thinking about and what prompted some of the shapes shown above. To start with, I am reading a book by Loren Eiseley called The Star Thrower. Eiseley was an anthropologist and naturalist who lived for the majority of the 20th century. He was a sensitive and introspective person, someone who was a keen observer and who had a real natural curiosity about the "why" of the world. One of the essays in the book touches on the figures at Easter Island. How did the statues come to be? How did the inhabitants of the island come to be there, to live and to die? Eiseley wrote about Darwin also and how he developed his theory of evolution while still retaining a sense of awe for the unknown. I couldn't get those ideas out of my head. But because I am me, I jumped over to an episode of the Flintstones called "Fred's Island." Fred gets the whole family stranded on a fake island, complete with exploding volcanoes, dinosaurs of course, and the token "savage." The whole piece began to feel tropical and prehistoric to me somehow.

The notes from my sketchbook, which I write down as I am working, remind me about what was on my mind at the time I was working. I was definitely considering primitive man and his emotions. We assume early humans were inhuman but that doesn't seem to be the case. I have read of elaborate burial sites indicating that early man must have felt love and loss; he must have had a range of very human emotions. I also had just watched a NOVA special on volcanoes (aren't those things frightening?). And lastly, here and there, I have learned a little bit about Charles Darwin. A fascinating person to be sure.

Many of the shapes that came out remind me of things: mountains, exploding lava, a giant Ronald McDonald foot and a person holding up an Easter Island statue. I stuck in some water there too and had to stop myself from adding sharks! 

I think what pleases me the most, after reading the above, is that the work is a mix of silly and serious. I am not ever going to be the kind of artist who is capturing raw emotion or making grand statements about the condition of our world. My work won't change the course of human events. But I can learn about things and learn about myself in the process and I think that matters just as much. 

 The title of the piece comes from one of the names for Easter Island, Mata ki te rangi, which means Eyes Looking To The Sky. I thought about how humankind has always looked for answers to overwhelming questions. It's usually science that guides us in those explorations but that wasn't always the case. Early man didn't have science, didn't have tools and technology to help him. He looked to the sky for answers. I believe that this is still a viable way of doing things.  There is something beyond science, beyond exploration and technology. Where else can we look but to the heavens to explain the unexplainable?

Thanks for reading and commenting. Now go outside, look up, and be in awe!

Libby