“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.
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“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.
The basement studio is almost finished. Everything in it is white. Floor, walls, table, brick wall. I am even spray-painting random “junk” items to reside there. Still keeping my studio downtown, which remains my sanctuary.
Everything is crystal-clear in my studio downtown: focus, attention to detail, ideas. It’s a wonderful space, located in an historical building on the National Historical Building Register. Heat is negligible. And in the summer it’s very hot. Peeling lead wall paint and asbestos flooring (which I covered with particle board.) An earthly place. I can totally relax.
There, the floor and walls are white too, as color is important to me. Do you know that surrounding white extracts a small amount of color out of every color? When I paint there, I make the colors brighter. When work is in a gallery, the effect is the same. Hence my desire for white. I wanted to be working on things as they will be seen.
Recently I hung a painting of mine, not too large, maybe 36″ x 48″ in a patron’s (Is that too pretentious?) office. The man has taupe walls and some blue on an adjacent wall. The blue “matched” and the taupe “matched.” It sold the painting. I have to admit, the colors were exactly were the same. My purist preference would have been, to have him appreciate the artwork on its own, which he truly did. But the matching, well you know….. To sell a painting is so wonderful, but to sell one appreciated on its own terms is even better.
Again, white is everywhere. To keep me on the right path.
“Afloat” Image. Ceres Gallery. New York. Solo Show
I am transitioning out of my present blog format for a very good reason: Showing the 100 collages in my current blog format is coming to a close. (We are on “Sixty-Eight”) To make the transition easier, (soon) , I am planning to blog about other art-related things interspersed with continuing to post the “Afloat” collages until I reach the 100. I will ease out of the front and center visual and few paragraphs of copy into something else.
I have a fear of boring my present followers. I am taking a risk. First, I have tried to keep my blog short. And primarily visual. People do not have time now to do anything but scan.
I am scheduled for another solo show in 2015. A solo show requires me to spend at least an entire year to bring it to its conclusion.
In addition to planning what I will do for the blog, I must first plan what I will do for the show.
And part of the blog material will come from experiences with my new studio and my old studio. Successes and challenges with technique and subject matter, (I’ll keep problems with people to a minimum), materials, time, commuting back and forth for supplies and to work.
I won’t show any finished work, I don’t think. Since the exhibition is for that. I will focus on experience and process. Even in my “Afloat” blog, where I showed finished pieces, I described process and sometimes I drifted into memories. This too will happen. I doubt it will be a “How to Put Together a Solo Show” type of thing. I’ll just see how it goes.
I am not ready to break away from these little collages yet, however.
“Afloat” Image. Ceres Gallery. New York. Solo Show.
There is an expression: “walking on air.” It generally means a person is so happy, his or her feet don’t touch the ground. Or that is the way the person feels.
I had this feeling once. It lasted a few months. I could not shake it. I tried, but I continuously felt, literally, that my feet were not connected to the ground.
It was after I had been accepted into a juried exhibition in New York, where Anne Umland, Curator, Painting and Sculpture Department for the Museum of Modern Art had selected one of my pieces for New York exhibition.
I had just started painting seriously, after I had left my full time job in Advertising. I had been in the studio constantly for a few years, working. I saw the ad for this show, applied and got in.
A lot of artists work hard. I am just one of them. Even a former professor of mine said, when I complained of this euphoria, (because, believe me, it became annoying not being connected to the ground!) “Enjoy it now! It won’t last!” Thinking how harsh he was, I kept painting and working.
Nothing on that great a scale has happened since. Similar career achievements and experiences have approached it, but never again did I get that feeling.
“Afloat” Image. Ceres Gallery. New York. Solo Show.
Here I am again, indulging my fascination with tidal waves. And for those of you who have not been following me and my love of depicting natural disasters, here is a picture of a tidal wave about to wipe out a swimmer.
What I like most about this one is the apparent determination of the swimmer in spite of the tidal wave. She is not letting the fact that a tidal wave is coming deter her from her goal.
This reminds me of all those tasks we dread doing and therefore, we avoid them. If only we did not put them off, we would realize how fast the jobs can be accomplished. It is in procrastinating that we do these tasks more than once. Conceptually doing them over and over, rather than merely marching toward them, like the swimmer.
In our minds, we will be destroyed by the task. There is no outcome collage. No way of knowing what happens to the swimmer. So maybe it is best to procrastinate.
“Afloat” Image. Ceres Gallery. New York. Solo Show.
Happy Halloween! Today is the day all of us have the freedom to “be” someone different. To wear a costume and play another role. To either be on the receiving end of candy handouts or the giving end.
Looking at this collage now, I feel incredibly free! The energy with which this dancer is making her leap, arms up, indicating complete abandon! But she is not free, really. Text messages are coming in. They are finding her out in the middle of this American West wilderness.
Be mindful, if you can, this Halloween, to put your phone on vibrate, your computer on hold. To dress up and wear your crown! To leap across the room and be someone else today. It’s Halloween!
“Afloat” Image. Ceres Gallery. New York. Solo Show.
This volcano looks happy! Lots of brightly colored dots coming out of its center! Certainly not harmful, destructive gases, lava and fire! But jelly bellies and grapes and bubbles!
These exclamation points above, both in the collage and in my opening paragraph, are not just because I am an exuberant person.
The printed sentence has no inflection. No tone of voice to soften a neutral comment that could be misinterpreted to mean something harsh. No tone of voice to explain something in a compassionate way. We have two options when we text or email someone. We can end the sentence with an exclamation point or a period.
At the risk of sounding a little nutty, I would rather end a sentence in an exclamation point than have someone take my sentence to mean that I am angry, sad, or dismissive. (It has been researched that an incredibly high percentage of friendships end by friends using the internet or phone to quickly jot down something that is misunderstood.)
In this busy time where the days are sucked from our lives, I think it’s better to sound a little cheesy than grim!
Hollis Hildebrand-Mills 