PODCAST. Season 1 Episode1 "PRAIRIE GIRL"

Cleaning my brushes is a thing for me, wasting paint is not. So this is what happened…

Life is definitely lived in the details. Check out this sky feature in the “Prairie Girl”.

You never know what little piece of magic will turn up in the foreground.

Welcome to WISDOM at the CROSSROADS, The PODCAST! I can hardly believe I am typing that. This project has been a while in the works. The desire to do things a little differently began when I moved out of Winnipeg’s Historic Exchange District after 20 years in the same studio building.

At the time of moving into smaller space closer to home I didn’t really know what that would look like. Add in a pandemic and the loss of two long ago friends well before their time and I kind of felt ,a little bit of “If not now when?” and “Why not me?” So here we are and I am ready to launch myself right out of my comfort zone and into the deep end that is this new podcasting venture.

Thanks for joining me on this podcasting journey. I am looking forward to inviting you into my studio space to share in the backstories of inspiration and process that have resulted in my work in art.

After more than 20 years of studio practice I have created a lot of art. Most pieces find their forever home but over the years I have amassed a collection of artwork that spans my career to date and it is these works that we live with that I would like to begin the storytelling. 

There is a wide variety, there are pieces on paper, on canvas and on panel, and art quilts that have travelled further on exhibition than I have … which is saying something, considering I am an expat Australian and the commute to my original home starts at 12000kms. 

The pieces I have kept are all different yet they do share one common denominator and that is the fact that they have taught me a lesson or modelled something in particular that, I feel, is worth remembering.

Living with them reminds me of a time in my personal or family history and mostly they are pieces I have forbidden my husband from selling off the dining room wall. It was a thing there for a while in the early days.

When we have something in our personal interior landscape for a long time, those pieces can make us feel at home and grounded. It’s only when things change, when we rearrange them, move, or as we are, in recent years during this pandemic, spending more and more time at home that we tend to notice our environment more 

Our personal effects can be a comfort but at the same time the familiarity they offer means they can easily blend into the background to be unremarkable. 

The places and spaces we inhabit and are inspired by can be like that collection of paintings on the walls at home. The more familiar they are the less we see them.

Cathy Heller likes to say, “energy flows where attention goes”. Through our interactions I want to help you to see and experience the familiar, to explore and find inspiration in your personal circumstances wherever that might be to come back home to yourself 

I want our interactions to be about finding and seeking presence and I’ll use the process I am most familiar with to do that

I might be painting on larger surfaces with more confidence in the present but colour remains the focus of my choices in paint. “Blue Gums” in progress.

Creativity has always been my road to presence so that’s where I would like to start. For those not familiar with my work it is generally colourful, semi abstracted and though it might be inspired by a particular place, I have no desire to replicate the real world. I prefer inference and reference and an emotional connection to an experience. 

The act of painting takes me to the zone, that place where time stands still and the worries of my world fall away. It is a place where I am fully present in the moment and a place I would like to introduce you to , to share in the stories my paintings tell. 

The painting I want to chat about in this episode  started out inspired by a collection of photographs I took one day on the trip home from the girls’ gym class when the sun was shining on the incidental green space along the side of the road. It was wild and woolly and fully in bloom. This painting has taught me several lessons including a new reminder I am in need of learning and that is ..to keep better records of my work 

I am embarrassed to tell you that I don’t have a professional photograph of this piece, nor a name written on the back of the stretcher, which has been my habit for many years now. 

I am going to rename her “Prairie girl” after the once small prairie girls whose daily activities inspired her beginnings. At home she hangs in what we affectionately have come to refer to as the Starbucks corner. 

I don’t know about you but at our house during covid we have found different uses for the different areas in our house. The dining room has become a multipurpose design studio, a zoom room, an office and a bistro for when the take out boxes are traded for a tablecloth and dimmable lighting. 

The living room is my daughters’ office, preferred by the cat in the afternoon and also the yoga barre. But since I am inviting you into my space and suggesting you get yourself a cup of tea or coffee, something stronger if you prefer,… there is no judgement here.  Let’s imagine we are settling into the Starbucks corner in the lovely morning sun

“PRAIRIE GIRL”, with her eagle taking flight in the background and her fairy magic occupying the foreground.

The painting, newly renamed “Prairie Girl”, is a semi abstracted landscape, 30” square, painted in acrylic on canvas in 2001! That was in the very early days of having a studio when I shared space and barely had time to get there during the course of any week. 

Those were the days when the needs of our then very young children were my focus and my creative practice slotted in anywhere I could squeeze it in. The rhythm of the weekly schedule showed me snippets of inspiration but I did not have the luxury to take a day or an afternoon to seek and be inspired so I took any opportunity as it arose. These moments had to be found as they could so easily have blended into the background of familiarity.

In 2001 our daughters were 6 and 4 year olds and gymnastics was a weekly activity. The facility we attended was a bit of a hike from home, along a secondary road yet still within the city limits.

 I don’t want to say I am a distracted driver, but I am very observant, I am curious and I am always very aware of my environment. 

Each week the roadside foliage along the way, some might say weeds, but that’s a judgement and remember, there is no room for  judgement here… with each passing week the foliage scrambled more and more energetically as the weather warmed into summer and the roadside bloomed. 

I love a little incidental landscape, you know, those un curated spaces along the side of the road, in infill lots, along railway lines, in suburbia, or anywhere really where the weeds and grasses are allowed to compete and freely blossom. 

In the image “Prairie girl”, you can see the suggestion of the prairie landscape stepping into the background and the roadside weeds scrambling in the foreground. 

For me this painting will always be a direct reference to that one sunny day after gymnastics class when I pulled off to the gravel shoulder in my bottle green minivan. I handed my girls a snack and juice box to consume in the backseat while I quickly snapped a dozen or so pics on my elf camera before hopping back into the van and heading home.

 I am dating myself but this was before digital cameras and iphones, nothing was instantaneous and printing the film was a delayed and intentional act. My studio at that time was a shared squeeze but was a space that was exclusively mine while I was there in the odd hours I could make it and it was a place to be creative.

 There, I was not worried someone would eat the chalk pastels or hurt themselves with toxic or sharp implements and I could relax and immerse myself in colour, in the process of interpreting the world around me.

I worked on paper initially and quickly developed the habit of painting on multiple projects simultaneously. I can’t even remember what I was working on as the main focus at the time but I do recall I had this 30” x 30” canvas that kind of became the canvas I ended my day with. ( meaning I used it to clean my brushes and use up any excess paint at the end of my time there. 

The foreground evolved into a reference to that overzealous stretch of wildflowers on the roadside. It is quite colourful as marks were dependant on what had survived the day in my paint pallet. It’s a little repetitive and just like the weedy blooms I was recalling, it too found its own rhythm 

This happened without much conscious thought and the piece evolving from a vague premise without any preliminary thoughts or sketches. My primary goal was to use up the paint and not be late for pick up.  I was immersed in the process with zero expectation and I guess effectively I was getting out of my own way. This incidental green space first encountered in those trips to gymnastic class, had bloomed through the struggle and competition for resources untended just as my painting had began. 

This “Prairie Girl” reminds me to be present, to be observant and to be aware but possibly the most important lesson I learned happened in the top part of the composition, in the sky. When I did take a pause to evaluate what was happening in the canvas I didn’t feel the sky was  working so with one of those critical self-statements I remember telling myself emphatically.. “Mand, this looks like absolute crap!” So I proceeded to paint out the sky with white gesso , effectively overpainting with the intention to erase what I had done and start again. 

As luck would have it the paint oozed in great globs across the surface as well as my desk and since it was almost time to leave I gathered a spoon or something to coral the liquid mess back into a container.

 As I brushed and dabbed at it some of the purple paint from below the surface began to blend with the white and as each spoonful of salvaged paint stretched across the painting to reach its salvaged container, long strings of liquid paint drizzled across the surface

Exasperated and literally up to my elbows in wet paint I paused to take in the sky that had bloomed into a pending prairie storm. And if you look closely there is the suggestion of a giant eagle taking flight. “Prairie Girl” lives in the Starbucks corner of our living room. She has a beautiful handcrafted bloodwood frame crafted by my talented friend and picture framer. In it her presence reminds me of my own “Prairie girl” It reminds me to take those detour adventures when i can and to allow events to unfold. Sometimes what happens will follow the course we have planned while at other times a new path will be forged and that path just might take us to somewhere new and unexpected.

Years later while I was doing some experiments with dye sublimating imagery onto fabric I used this same painting as a source image. It meant really enlarging parts of the composition. When I received the prints back, details from the foreground had blossomed into a clear elemental image, a lovely fairy hidden in plain sight. She became yet another reminder to be present, to be aware and observant in our daily travels because we just might find some hidden magic along the way.

Here is the link to go back to the podcast to take in the meditation if you haven’t already. Wisdom at the Crossroads, The Podcast is also available wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thanks for tuning in and joining me as this new journey begins. I will look forward to connecting with you again soon as we journey through the backstories of my artistic practice in the search for presence.

Until then, may you be more, be present and do a little less.

Amanda

Apple URL for the Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/widsom-at-the-crossroads/id1609992256

Apple Trailer - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wisdom-at-the-crossroads-trailer/id1609992256?i=1000551067035

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/5AbmRHQor17IeJJivYaYJf

SPOTIFY:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6vfUjwApDxZ5ScqohexDe3?si=cgi3nlaVT3ywCqdBTOLbbg