“Afloat” Image. Ceres Gallery. New York. Solo Show.
Asparagus. Used here like trees over the California Coast. How can an artist improve on the California Coast? I think I just did.
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“Afloat” Image. Ceres Gallery. New York. Solo Show.
My daughter gets all dressed up for homecomings and parties. Everything is agonized over. Makeup for professional photographs done by a so-called professional makeup artist, only to be redone in the car mirror. Dresses tried on and captured by an Iphone from every angle to be reviewed and texted to her friends before considering. Hundreds of dresses to be hung up in the dressing rooms of many many stores. All nice, hip and trendy, smart, elegant, perfect, in fact. All fitting perfectly, but something not quite right each time.
Until the unanimous report comes in that alas! This dress is perfect (My daughter says, you have to be careful shopping with other girls because they will tell you a dress looks good on you just so they can look better than you at the dance. Her grandmother, who is ninety-two, agrees with her.)
I get tired of all her shopping and primping. Put raspberries in your hair, my daughter. You are only this young for a minute.
“Afloat” Image. Ceres Gallery. New York. Solo Show.
Google captures some of my earlier stuff (Google captures everyone’s earlier stuff) where I went a little crazy with natural disasters. I even had a solo show in Atlanta where, although I did not mention natural disasters in the title of the exhibition, the entire body of work consisted of volcanoes and floods.
I exhibited in a solo show in New York with this kind of work also, but I did own up to the subject matter this time by using the title, “Tectonics”. In both of these shows and in all the work I do with this theme, I approach it from an aesthetic point of view. I love explosions, tidal waves, fire and brimstone. I like the chaos, color, motion and excitement. The nature of natural disasters encapsulates these things.
The above work is one of the collages from the “Afloat: An Installation” series, using this theme. Flames and explosions amid a lovely valley near a snow-covered mountain. I searched extensively to find magazines with fire, explosions and smoke on the printed page. (I do not use photoshop or internet images ever. All of my collage work is cut paper from magazines and other printed material) I like cut printed material for this type of art because even magazines are now on the internet. I am combining what-is-becoming old fashioned materials with an old fashioned medium.
What is not hard to find, however, in magazines, are flowers. And I love how I put the foreground flames side-by-side with over-sized flowers. As if to say, hey, all is okay.
“Afloat” Image. Ceres Gallery. New York. Solo Show.
Ah Barbados! When our daughter was very young and could ride on our laps, my husband and I used to go to Barbados. It is very far east and is, in fact, in a different time zone. It is also very far south, near the equator. So the water goes counter clockwise down the drain and not clockwise as it does here.
Exotic differences. Real African food because of its proximity to Africa. Sugar fields with waving tall grasses and birds that sing beautifully at night. Our daughter and I had little watercolor sketchbooks where we painted in the landscape of Barbados. We used up all the blue in our paintboxes.
I look at these little paintings now and think of what a sweet time it was.
The almonds I am not too sure about. The kind of tree, not too sure. But in the collage above, are embedded memories of this magical place and time visited long ago.
“Afloat” Image. Ceres Gallery. New York. Solo Show.
Pink. Looks like an advertisement for a cosmetic company. I cut out pictures of cotton balls on the plastic of cotton ball bags. Bubbles, baubles and a pretty face. Fun. A flower in the middle.
How I love its superficiality and innocence! And, as an art form, I love the integration of colors and shapes.
“Afloat” Image. Ceres Gallery. New York. Solo Show.
This collage was the signature piece for my “Afloat” show. I used it on all eblasts, the brochure and the invitations.
“Afloat” Image. Ceres Gallery. New York. Solo Show.
Some people seem to be surrounded by rainbows and moonlight. They seem to have the freedom to fly away at whim. Not me. I get called for jury duty. I have served on about twenty juries, criminal and civil. This is the opposite of moonlight, rainbows and being free.
When I am stuck in the courtroom, waiting to be called for my interview in front of everyone, (of course, having to stand while being interviewed for selection) a slow anxiety permeates the room. It’s always a red room, which, to me makes it worse.
First off, in murder trials, there is the alleged murderer looking at me. Pointing at me, indicating to his lawyer he wants ME to be on the jury. There is this suffocating feeling of never being able to leave.
In civil trials, there is haggling in the jury room over the amount of money the plaintiff wants in the case. We always agonize over this one. Trying so hard to be fair. One jury I was a part of, we figured out the woman was due two million dollars! Because we took so long, the poor woman panicked, and told her lawyer she would settle for three hundred thousand. All those hours going over facts for nothing!
It is always in the fall of the year. The notice comes. And that get-away plane looks pretty good. I usually am feeling like I am coming down with something. One year I was in a health food store and I told the person behind the check out about my always being called. She said “It’s your energy field.” And handed me the card of some healer and energy mover.
I told my friend in San Francisco. And how, I said, will I know if my energy field has changed? She said, you won’t be called for jury duty anymore.
“Afloat” Image. Ceres Gallery. New York. Solo Show.
This is a tuna steak. Raw. In front of a building in China. I did it only for aesthetic reasons. Don’t you get that? Loving the colors.The photographer who painstakingly took these pictures for my records knew it was a tuna steak. I don’t think I would know that.
He is a gourmet cook and therefore probably has it cooked on the grill or some other luxurious way. And doesn’t think of tuna the way I do. In a can or presented in the form of an ice cream scooped mold on a lettuce leaf.
I am highly impressed with people who cook. I used to cook. I made desserts from Northern Italy and I stuffed curried mashed potatoes into eggplant skins. I used to make my own spaghetti sauce and not ever used sauce in a bottle. (I think pasta companies put that stuff in see-through jars so we can see the finished product is not corrosive.)
Cooking used to be an elegant expression of myself. Since our daughter came into our lives, and the pediatrician told me, a shocked vegetarian, to feed her Gerber’s veal and lamb in a jar, we eat things I never would have begun to eat. Meatloaf and spaghettios. Granola bars and Nutella. Nuggets. Corn dogs. Even sloppy joes. On white bread buns.
Now that I am gluten free and our daughter is going off to college, I think I am easing back to more culinary ways.
“Afloat” Image. Ceres Gallery. New York. Solo Show.
Pansies. I love pansies. Here they thrive in the winter. Rows and clusters of them are being planted in huge quantities now at all gas stations, median strips, apartment complexes. People are buying them to put in their flower beds. I am too busy with this blog, I don’t know how I am going to get any artwork done.
But when I see pansies. With their sweet, upturned faces, sometimes shivering in the cold, I turn all Southern and say, “They hung the moon.”
“Afloat” Image. Ceres Gallery. New York. Solo Show.
When I first moved to Atlanta, there were hot air balloons in Piedmont Park. I think they were races. Up close a person would run very fast, then jump into the basket. Off in the distance, drifting through the sky. Little polka dots. I always wondered if people in separate balloons would yell back and forth to one another.
Also, at that time, there was rafting down the Chattahoochee River. Leaving one car at the end point and driving back with another car to the departure point. Then jump into the raft. By water this time, lazily down the river.
We used to take lunch with us on those raft rides. There were thick trees on the banks of the river. In the middle of the city. Anytime anyone would visit me from out of town, I would take them on this excursion. Once, I took a now well-known Ad Agency copywriter (he named the HandyCam) with visiting friends from Maine and we went on one of these trips.
This well-known copywriter was neurotic. As we drifted under the freeway, way up above us, cars whizzing overhead, he said, “What if that truck driver up there has a panic attack, turns slightly and winds up in the river?”
It disturbed the moment. The most primal form of creativity is fear and this guy was certainly creative.
I don’t have first-hand experience with riding in a hot air balloon. I like to think of it as quiet. I hope it would be like snorkeling, where I enter a peaceful world. And not once during my air experience is there some trucker having a panic attack, tearing into my thoughts.
Hollis Hildebrand-Mills 