Living Designs

see: http://www.wlbz2.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=94110 An artist's trajectory: from a bachelor's in literature, to a 1/2 year in a Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, back to her undergraduate university (UCSC) to study art on her own for a year, living and working out of the ground floor of a rain-flooded barn, to getting accepted to a second BA program in art, but also, at the same time, getting accepted into the 5th year (post-grad) program in studio art at UCSC; returning to homeland Maine where she was granted one of the two slots for Maine painters into the coveted Maine fellows program at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, moving on to an MFA program in fine arts at Boston University, graduating only to find herself trying to make a living designing, copyediting, editing and producing books ... and then 15 years of null-hood in either painting or writing (premedical studies and a MSW and LCSW) ... not worki...

I've been hired to paint a huge mural in Portland, Maine, through the company I work with, Peerless Painting. The size is material: the wall I'm painting is 110 feet wide and approximately 60 feet high, and the image covers about 100 feet x 50 feet. Where: the Ocean Gateway Parking garage at the corner of India and Fore Streets in Portland, Maine. The City of Portland required the owner of the building to put an image up. The owners chose a section of a panaramic image taken by a photographer in 1910 of the Portland harbor (Casco Bay) from the Eastern Promenade on a day when half of all the six-masted schooners ever built were in the harbor, and this section shows those schooners. It also shows Fort Gorges, some of Peaks Island, Little Diamond, and Cushing Island, and of course other boats in the harbor at the time. While this has been a company "team" undertaking, I have done all the historical research for the image, and most of the drawing and painting, nevermind m...

In 1992, two artists comrades and myself drove to New York City to see a few shows and visit some galleries. I parked my Volvo station-wagon on Prince Street, or thereabouts, as I recall, between SoHo and Chinatown. When we returned, my camera, my Ricoh manual, entirely manual, had been stolen out of the car. The two parts of the event that I remember are the car I was driving and the type of camera I had. The Volvo stationwagon drove like a insect, maneuvering turns on a mere wing-beat, had the weight of a small tank and so could plow over snowbanks and sidewalk curbs without disturbing the driver much, and sounded like wind over sand--quiet. I also knew it had a steel interior frame with resilience of the body of a 20 year old. It also had enough space between the front seat and rear window to carry six-foot paintings that were five feet wide. I also knew my Ricoh camera could operate as well as any high fancy $1000 camera, so long as I knew how to use it. I was the operating instruc...

It is both the arrangement of images/things in our day-to-day lives and in our dreams that leads us to what is compelling us either toward death or toward life. It isn't the things or the images, but how we arrange them--that say something about how we live. Archeology, the prototype for psychoanalysis, really is about studying how things were arranged, so that someone later made an hypothesis about what a culture or civilization valued and how they lived. How we order what we order, or arrange, speaks of our values and desires. These images are not simply images, but arrangements, orderings, and implications.