Famous Last Words

In class one time a student asked me how professional artists use oil pastels. I said "they don't" and laughed. A few weeks later I went to Denmark and fell in love with oil pastels.

I'd bought them for my daughter. She and I spent many hours drawing around the island of Møn in Denmark. I loved the speed, the marks, the colors, and especially the limitation of the colors. There was something really appealing about trying to boil everything down to 18 colors.

Here Møns Klint, the chalk cliffs.


The sea along the cliffs.



Piles of seaweed collected along the base of the cliffs.


We sat for a while drawing these cows and their calves until I started to wonder if they might get annoyed with us and push us off the cliff.


And here, piles of firewood against the neighbor's house which we could see from our kitchen window.

Source of the Spiral, Part 4

My first experiments involved using a stone to form a divot in watercolor paper. This is a detail from a drawing I made while staying on the island of Møn in 2004.



It was interesting but still not quite what I was getting at so I put it on the back burner for a few years. The idea stuck in my head but also metamorphosed. It was altered by other forms that I saw around me, in particular a wild rose bush whose blooms were extremely abundant. So in 2008 I tried again. Also with paper. This time I used cut up water bottles to support wet paper into rounded forms.



This was getting closer but it wasn't until I switched to canvas and began to sew that it really took shape. Blue Cups is one of the earliest spiral pieces. It was made in 2008 not that long after the last paper attempt. It was organized like the bumpy cement patterns I saw on the street in Harrisburg.

Source of the Spiral, Part 3

The rock carvings in Tanum were painted red which created a striking connection, in my mind anyway, between the cup symbols in the rocks and the seemingly random dots that decorate the Elmelunde Church on the island of Møn, Denmark. You can see them in the two close-up shots below. Six dots circling a central 7th dot creating what looks like a little flower. But I immediately felt that those dots must have been drawn from the pre-Christian cup marks that, flattened into two dimensions, are dots. And it seemed to me that a simple, but powerful symbol was transported from one way of thinking to another. Brought forward in time even if it lost it's meaning shortly thereafter. This is total speculation on my part. The great thing about being an artist is that I can make a connection like that and run with it. It's not terribly important that I'm right (although I'd love to see someone follow up on that idea) but just that it gives me something to think about. In this case how critical symbols are maintained through major social changes like new religions and political upheaval.

Source of the Spiral, Part 1

I was asked about the source of my spiral works. The answer to that question is multifaceted. One of the main things I look for in choosing forms is a kind of universality. I want to work with forms that are meaningful but that are meaningful to different people in different ways. So I look for forms that are powerful but open. One of my earliest sources of inspiration for what became the spirals was found in Møn, Denmark. The island is populated with ancient burial mounds. These include large boulders and you can actually go inside some of them. I'm not positive if the rock below is part of a burial mound but it is covered in carved out "cup" divots. These divots are fertility symbols.


Climbing up to the rocks.


A view of the fields.


Close-up of the rock and divots.