Snakestress (Birth), 18”X 24”, Mixed media on paper, 2020, photo credit: Andrea Calo
This week, I had some drawings photographed - work I've been developing over the last 4 months of quarantine.
Seeing photos of new work for the first time is kind of an out-of-body experience. It's like looking at someone else's image. You see it and say "Huh, did I make that thing? Weird."
When you're making art, it's difficult to articulate why the work you're making is coming out of you the way that it is. In my opinion, we have a lot less control over this than we think. The way I make images - the color I use, the humor that surfaces - is all a part of the artist I am at my core. I can't really change this artist per se, but I can embrace her.
The more you wrestle with the artist you naturally are, the less free and exciting your work feels to you. And as a result, to other people.
Back in March, I had a meandering conversation about my work with Visual Art Exchange in Raleigh. We talked about my references to Renaissance art, my obsession with ruin, and my carnival-like color palette. When I look back at that conversation, I can see why my work has transformed. Here's a little piece from that interview:
"When I deal with uncertainty ... with this pandemic especially, the thing I always try to come back to is the truth that I know. I think [about this] when I reference the body and what it can do and what it can't do, and specifically the female body and how it's been represented as an instrument of other people. For example, Caravaggio's Medusa, and the legacy of Medusa and how her head was cut off and used as a weapon to destroy things ... I think in drawing all these images, I could claim that body back and I could make it have a sense of agency in its own destruction and its own pleasure and its own power."
