the earth laughs in flowers

so sayeth the poet
e.e. cummings.

It has been a strange journey from plastic trash to numinous flowers. As I have shifted my focus from what is wrong with the planet to what is right, my creativity has exploded.

I am still horrified by the plastics. But I cannot create from horror. Some artists can. I am not one of them. Perhaps I can find a way to meld love and horror.

Check back later.

Seven days and counting ...

Seven days before Indianapolis descends upon the Stutz for our annual studio tour. Time to pick up clean up hang up light up and chill the wine.

Friday, April 24 5:30pm - 10:30 pm and NEW Saturday hours: 2pm-7pm

Advanced tickets available for $10 at participating Old National Banking Centers and at the Stutz Business Office.

Please join us!

The gathering storm swamped me …

To be honest, I returned from Cozumel overwhelmed by the knowledge that my beloved ocean is being clogged and polluted by plastics. This swamped me emotionally and I couldn’t create the installation that I originally envisioned.

Wondering if my frozen state was typical of the paralysis that keeps most of us from facing the enormity of our environmental problems, it dawned on me that bonking my patrons over the head with visuals had the potential of freezing everyone else just as surely as it was freezing me.

So I changed tacks. On the surface it appears that the new work that I will be showing at the Open Studio Tour on April 24-25, 2009 isn’t related to my original intention. But it is. Let me explain.

I have been reading and re-reading The Reenchantment of Art by Suzi Gablik for the past 6 months. The thesis of this wonderful book is that modernism has failed us, co-opted by the same corporate culture of consumerism that modernism originally opposed.

For contemporary artists who are disillusioned with the current state of affairs in our consumer culture, the author proposes that there are 2 distinctly separate options. Confusingly, BOTH are called post-modern yet they are distinctly different. Gablik suggests that this is a dialectic that cries out for synthesis.

On the one hand, many post-modernist artists deconstruct consumer culture to show what’s wrong. Or cynically co-opt it by intentionally creating sofa art. Both approaches attempt to stand apart from consumer culture to illuminate or deconstruct what’s wrong. That’s where I was going with my plastic trash art.

On the other hand, there is potential to love people into changing their behavior by creating an “enlarged ecological perspective, and greater access to the mythic and archetypal underpinnings of spiritual renewal”. This resonated with me as I immediately recognized that this is what I do when I get into a funk: I pull myself out by reconnecting with the archetypes of the natural world.

In my experience, being deeply rooted and connected to creation via the natural world changes the way I see myself as a co-creator of the future. Which changes my behavior.

So perhaps I can help others see what I see and move consumer consciousness forward by “reenchanting” my own art.

This has turned into a delicious adventure.

A gathering storm

I captured this photo late Friday afternoon as I was returning from a photo shoot on the beach. It perfectly sums up how I feel about the problem of plastics in the ocean: Can we outrun this gathering storm?

Eyes Wide Open

This week in Cozumel I have gone from overwhelming grief about the problem of plastics in the ocean, to raging fury, numbness and finally a steady resolve to do what I can to highlight this problem.

This is not a problem unique to Cozumel. It’s a global problem that will require each and every one of us to change our thinking and our behavior about how we use and recycle plastics. This problem is as serious as any environmental problem we face because plastics never break down into anything smaller than the tiny bits of polymer that are rapidly poisoning our food chain.

My awakening occurred over the Christmas holidays when I realized that I was trying to avoid a large pile of plastic rope while framing an amazing photograph of the surf on the wild side of Cozumel. As I got closer to the pile of shredded and tangled rope, I realized that it was actually quite beautiful. It looked like a masterpiece of contemporary fiber art: aqua, turquoise, yellow, brilliant blue and black. However, it clearly did not belong where it was.

The pile has grown since I first encountered it a month ago. That cannot be an accident. I watched the beaches near this heap being cleaned for tourists. Yet this pile grows. I was tempted to lug it to the trashcan on the road. Then I stopped to consider that encountering this pile opened my eyes to the problem. Perhaps its presence can quietly do the same for others?

So, after passing through the manic phase when I tried to pick up every bit of plastic that I encountered, I resolved to create a purposeful heap whenever I discovered a large tangle of rope snagged on jagged coral. Today I created three and added to several more. If the weather cooperates, I hope to create a few more before I leave on Sunday.












It’s not much, but it’s a start.