Dear J. C.,

Erin Gentry from Arthouse asked me to give a presentation to their summer kids’ camp about sculptural space. So I asked the kids to think about the space between each of us and the space our bodies take up. As a group we can contract, expand, overlap and connect. We drew and measured the space around our bodies.

Vitruvian kids!

Eye contact, a conversation. Names exchanged, a few pleasantries. Enough specific details to remember.

A little thread goes out, a string, a heart string. A connection created by one person being open to another.
Connection is a way in to someone’s story, to his or her experience, from one’s authentic self.
This is where attachment begins, if impermanent. A string between one and another, a line between two points.
But how long the string? Like a thread off the spool. It may unfurl a few inches, maybe feet, maybe long enough to be a great long tangle. Maybe with enough repetition and shared experiences to create a pattern.

Then if we acknowledge the connection between the points, the loop is closed. And then we keep connecting the points and the thread weaves between them. And we busy our hands and cross the points from the original thread, and before we know it, we have a fabric, or as Ledia Carroll’s friend says, the interesting tapestry of life.

We create the fabric of our lives from the connections we make, share and tighten. We create safety nets and community. We can allow ourselves to be vulnerable from the trust that comes from a history of these connections.

My thoughts after a big, good week. Meeting new people, asking for help.  Watched these TED videos:

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

And I loved both of these talks. And though that right brain hemisphere experience is beautiful, we sure need the left brain hemisphere to act. It takes both to weave our human experience together.

Attachement without expectation? It is sometimes a shock when the end of the thread releases, but I’m usually glad for the experience. And I’m learning better to let go and trust.

Another thanks to –David Solomon– for curating my work for the show Hell, Heaven in Santa Fe. You can see images of all the works in both shows on his website for –BangGallery–.

Now to get the pieces back to Austin in time for E.A.S.T.! Hope that’s less of an adventure than getting them to Santa Fe.

Here are some room views of the show at Santa Fe Community College of Hell, from August 25 through September 9, 2011.

Mine is the piece hanging from the ceiling.

Here is an image of the “Negative” piece hanging in the gallery at Santa Fe Community College. The ever-amazing curator David Solomon is in the back of the picture hanging the art in the show. I’ll post a portfolio quality image on the site when I get some images back from the show. Sad I will miss the opening Thursday, August 25, but I had to get back to Austin to enjoy my kids’ return to school. I got to meet several of the artists in the show during my trip to Santa Fe, and they are all interesting.

I hope my New Mexico friends can stop in and see at least one of the installations of Hell & Heaven while its up.

This was my scenic setup in Santa Fe for painting. So nice to be somewhere cooler where working outside was delightful.

I painted Hell first, monochromatically, with pale off-whites and white with charcoal drawn into the surface, and annoyed the gallerist by delivering the work with wet paint. I wasn’t happy about it either, but it took a few days to get the welds repaired. Alas, making art on a schedule is not nearly as fun as studio practice.

The Hell piece, “Negative”, was composed of the drops of the Heaven, “Positive” piece. Its composition is more of a Rorschach symmetry, it is flipped three-dimensionally, but it is not symmetrical on a single axis. Its gangly and pokey.

“Positive” is a hexagonal dome with single-point axial symmetry. The painting on “Positive” is layered glazes of rich color, pretty and painterly, easy to do while looking at the New Mexico landscape.

In being rather overscheduled and busy, I made some poor assumptions about the availability of Uhaul trailers during UT back to school and Burning Man exodus. No two wheel trailers to rent to pull the pieces on their crate to Santa Fe. And the trucks that I have access to wouldn’t make it out of state for a road trip in August during a heat wave. So I used packing blankets and band straps and drove the pieces on top of my car, and the crate disassembled in the back, to Santa Fe, to paint them there. The paint would have been scratched in transit, and besides, it was 106 in Austin and 78 in Santa Fe. Who wouldn’t rather paint there?

But sadly, a few welds broke in transit, but otherwise, surprisingly no disasters. And to the German “Reliability Engineer” who predicted poor consequences in the Lowe’s parking lot while I added more band straps, it did actually work out fine. Ha.

In Santa Fe, David Solomon introduced me to the fabulous Dan Kadven who rewelded my broken spots so I could begin painting. Yay for sculpture dudes. They are the most versatile guys around.

The amazing Andrea Grimm busted out most of the grinding, and then we made what is basically the crate and armature of the piece out of scrap wood, and laid out the hexagonal parts of heaven, and now you can see what one of the two pieces is starting to look like.

The sheet of aluminum was entirely cut down to parts that went into two piles, Hell, and Heaven, to have all the edges ground down and wire brushed.