Transparent White, are you the answer?

So I think Winsor Newton Transparent White may have changed my life…or at least my oil paintings. According to www.winsornewton.com it provides the “palest white glaze”. I have four days to find out if it can also provide the color and light that comes so easily with watercolors but escapes me in oil painting. This painting and three others will be finished, cropped, stretched, and perhaps even framed in time for Fort Point Open Studios this weekend. Come see! Friday 4-7 pm and Saturday and Sunday 11 am – 6 pm at 12 Farnsworth (next to Flour Bakery).

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life is art

One of the greatest things about spending a weekend in NYC looking at art – high and low, in the gallery and on the street – is returning with the vision to see everything as art. Even this rainy Monday.

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A 3D painting for the pioneers of 3D rendering

Tonight, my Fort Point neighbors at Neoscape are celebrating 15 years of creating breathtaking renderings, animations, interactive and design for the real estate and architecture fields. Neoscape President Rob MacLeod, and one of the pioneers in Experiential Design and Visualization, asked me to hang a few works for their celebration. He chose, “Undone”, my first experiment in cutting canvas to create a three dimensional object, for its obvious connection to Neoscape’s 3D work.

While Neoscape’s work is just plain cool and slick and mine is purposefully messy, there’s a similarity in the works…both are storytelling and an invitation to the viewer to imagine things that aren’t yet there.

Happy birthday Neoscape! 

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a city plaza, life's canvas

This is city life…this is art: Me on a bench in business clothes working on a laptop in a city plaza. Two young men in front of me juggling a soccer ball, beginning a 12-hour marathon fundraiser. A pile of blankets on the bench to my right with a dirty sock poking out. Adjacent to us, a slumbering, sunburned sailor with Patagonia clothes and the trappings of a past ‘good life’. The park employee cleaning the barrels hands a resourceful homeless man an extra trash bag for his possessions. Meanwhile, thousands of commuters stream by us, never picking up their heads. How can we not see each other on this great canvas of a plaza?   

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It looks like a turkey

People have said more degrading things about my artwork but “It looks like a turkey” was the first poultry reference I’ve ever heard…about my artwork, not me. (Full disclosure: I’ve been accused of talking in circles like a hen; My sister says the adorable messages I leave her in French sound as if a turkey hijacked my phone; and I have refined an excellent pigeon impression.)

The turkey comment came from a Boston police officer as my fellow artist/arts-activist/patron/friend and I walked through Chinatown last night with Soft Spore White in a clear plastic bag. I’d finally delivered it to her –  a work from an installation she helped make possible in January 2009 – and suddenly, I wanted it back! It is the best conversation piece. Ever.

Imagine if you will, a 16” irregular sphere of iridescent white with 3” conical spikes all over it, which have been folded and smooshed up against the side of a bag. Its shape is not perfect and it sags into the corners like a lifeless fair prize goldfish at the bottom of a bag of water. 

What is it? 

A spore! And we’ll release it on you if you don’t stop staring!

One woman said it looked like a dumpling. I call it art. The whole thing…the piece and the interactions with people while walking through Chinatown, and later sitting by the Chinatown Park waterfall.

I have visions of creating one enormous spore and suspending it in plastic over the plaza…what would people say then?

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participatory nose making

I added a nose to a community totem making project led by artist Judy Motzkin at the Cambridge River Festival. (the other side had a lovely face but the artist forgot it was a 3D object. )I love participatory projects...and I love saying that word, participatory.

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Soft Spore White

Call it a pillow if you must. This sculpture, Soft Spore White, from an installation in '09 is heading to a client in Boston where it'll have a new life as a decorative bed pillow. Filled with microbeads, it's a fun, squishy companion while still being l'object d'art. Contact me if you're interested in your own customized sneezy, squeezy sweet dreams! (silk, thread, batting and microbeads)

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bring on your best "hmmm" and chin scratch

You like free stuff, meeting new and interesting people, and you think my art is "interesting". So you will be at the opening of Deciphering the Divine this Thursday from 5-8 pm?

Deciphering the Divine – a solo show of paintings and drawings
Gallery at Fort Point Framers
300 Summer Street, Suite M4 (lower level)
Boston, MA 02110
March 3 - 31

opening reception: Thursday, March 4; 5 - 8 pm

Bring on the questions and chin scratching! (Ascots and berets optional. Extra points if you use some language from the last post.)

Deciphering the Divine

The following is my artist statement for the upcoming show, Deciphering the Devine, at Fort Point Framers (Boston), March 3 - 31. Psst...secret here, and spoiler alert...I never know what the show is going to be about until the work is all together and ready to be framed.

::

My work is a visual account of my everyday experiences – a narration of the mundane and sublime in each day and how these seemingly varied experiences exhibit nature's transformative, restorative and live-giving forces.

The work in this show draws from two recent bodies of work, both using the human mind as a centerpiece and references neuroscience, meditation and the remapping of brain circuitry. While the subject of this show draws directly from my cognitive life, the abstract imagery references fragments of indecipherable characters and letters, as well as the natural world of aquatic organisms.

As I work, I try to tap into a state of flow and decipher something not immediately known. A secret alphabet may appear from the swoosh of a gesture line, or the shape of a human heart might be suggested by a crevice in a sea sponge.

All of the mediums exhibited in this show (watery inks pooled on paper or film, thinned oils, and human hair on paper) are difficult to control. This allows the mediums to come to life and exhibit their own natural properties, diminishing my power over the outcome. Working in this manner is like redefining how one interprets the world through cognitive remapping practices, such as meditation. The immediacy of finding a solution, or controlling the situation, seems to fade away and the richness of the details takes hold of the mind.

Kate Gilbert Miller
February 23, 2010

A life of letters

As a teenager I fantasized about living a life of letters. I didn’t know what it meant but it sounded cool. I interpreted it as a life of scholarship and solitude; part organic spiritually, part rigorous intellectualism. Ultimately, I realized I wasn’t the scholarly type (thank you Doc. P. for pointing that out) and as much as I liked alone time, I craved socialization too much to be a Virginia Woolf type. (Plus it turned out I wasn’t mad, just a little bit sensitive.)

But I’ve hung on to the letters part.

I write every morning. I love communicating through letters and cards. I read everything in front of my eyes; license plates, graffiti tag, signs (always rereading the ones I see daily and adding commas or removing letters) and look for the hidden or alternative meanings.

So it’s no surprise that I choose the words around my studio carefully and use them sparingly. Up right now:

• Painting is not about what you see, it is about what you don’t see - Bernd Haussman
  
  
• To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now – Samuel Beckett
  
  
• Originality is the art of concealing your sources – Benjamin Franklin

As I work, I try to tap into a state of flow and decipher or form something new out of the drips and accidents on the page…I try to find form in the mess. Describing this process and condensing it into a catching one-liner for my show title is proving difficult. It’s flow. It’s deciphering. It’s a struggle, but it’s also a joy for me.

I have a few hours to come up with something clever before the postcard ships to the printer. Maybe I’ll drive around and look at signs…

Any suggestions?

image above: messing around with colored ink and this "y" appeared

Moving forward

Just now as I got off the station bench to board my train to the studio, the homeless man next to me -- who had not previously said a word -- grinned a toothless smile and professed, "You're a strong woman. You're moving forward, not backward". With his warm smile of insanity came a thumbs up...and precisely the encouragement I need as I enter a two week stretch to pull together the next show.

Recent Works (drawings and paintings)
@ Fort Point Framers
300 Summer Street
Boston

March 3-31

Opening reception: Thursday March 4, 5-8 pm
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

“Your work is sick!”

“It’s like a dream. Like there’s all this thought crammed into it. I could stare at it for hours.” That was my favorite comment about my work last Friday at the opening of Dénouement/Indéterminé. It came from a young woman from California who swayed every part of her body while she talked (head and hips one way, shoulders the other, while her feet made their own pattern on the floor) in the most adorable and free way. The lithe Valley Girl was one of several dozen Kimball Union Academy students who came to the gallery for some free snacks and stayed to share their uninhibited thoughts on my work.

Each student I talked with was earnest and brimming with energy. Yes, some were shy and didn't really look me in the eye but they were all honest -- not yet capable of being disingenuous or saying nice things for the sake of saying nice things. So refreshing!

Admittedly, it was one of the oddest openings I’ve ever been to but I walked away feeling great. I’d shared my work with the next generation and in return they’d given me some honest and pleasant feedback. I also had a new found appreciation for all who teach. (Julie, your work is so important!) That’s all there is after all – inspiration and conversation – or the indéterminé of life, love and art.

Me and Mom in front of her favorite painting, Maggy, which was also a big hit with the students. Apparently it looks like a popular album cover but I don’t know which one. Do you?