Outsider Art Fair in NYC

Impossible to describe well - my time leading up to, participating in, and “recovering” from - the 2025 OUTSIDER ART FAIR at the Metropolitan Pavillion in the heart of New York City. A “trip”, a word referencing altered states of consciousness, is the word I must use. Intensity every moment, from making lists of all the pieces I would bring, packing portfolios and tools along with art and clothes - driving to the city, checking into the hotel….

The next morning Carl and I walked with my work down to the venue, unpacked it, hung out for a while until the other artists in our booth arrived and unpacked. We checked out the other art spaces there, and left Jenna and Daniel to install all our work.

Then FOUR whole days of non stop attendance and focus, meeting people, discussing my work, and having my picture taken with a big celebrity, Jerry Saltz. Did I say “recover?”

Now home I can think back to the whole picture: the VAST array of New Yorkers and visitors who wanted to see work that “is not derived from “art.”” I and my work were in just the right place at the right time in my favorite city. I was comforted by the work all around me in the other gallery booths. It was exactly what I needed to nourish that part of me that creates.

Connections: Lost and Found

CONNECTIONS: Lost and Found, my solo exhibit, opened at Ceres Gallery on April 23. The opening was April 25. It was packed! - I have never seen so many people at an opening at Ceres who came in, not because they were friends or relatives, but to connect with the art. To SEE the art, LOOK at it carefully, and TALK with the artist, in this case, me, about what they saw, thought, wondered about and felt. I was flooded with good feeling and confirmation from our interactions. I could tell “for sure” that my art was affecting people in a good and useful way, that it was “doing its right work.”

Here are a few more images of recent work. There are over 100 of these small drawings at Ceres. I am tapping a heart spot in some of these, and in others, those mysterious parts of my psyche. I learn from what I do.

Going With the Flow

Two exhibits in Wellfleet filled May and June last year, and a quick but refreshing trip to Mill Valley in California ended the summer. I was in my studio once again….. and what now? I had gathered a few more resonant twigs and bits of the natural world, and again had the feeling of something needing to come from them being in my hands. Again I went to encaustic to build out what I felt should happen with the twigs and bits.

Something kept happening, and I followed it. I recalled the feeling I’d had, drawing onto raw canvas, using bits of text and hints of twigs. Connections were being made somewhere in my brain, and when I looked at my work table …… I started to “give voice” to them.

An Art Full Year

2023 began with a bang, as I was notified that my exhibit for the Wellfleet Public Library was accepted. Not only accepted, but eagerly anticipated. I had proposed new and experimental work, all of it extensions of the slowing down I had begun months earlier. By January 2023 I was deeply into the process, putting things together that made sense on an intuitive level..

I wrapped twigs, combined them with bones and cloth, and built small and precarious sculptures. I was reminded of a Jewish legend about the birth of Abraham.

In the story an evil king, Nimrod, decreed that all the newborn Jewish males should be killed. Abe’s mother hid in a cave to give birth. She wrapped him in her garment and left, thinking it better to leave him than subject him to murder. What happened? God sent the angel Gabriel down and the angel taught the baby Abraham to nurse from his own little finger. The child survived….. and the story continued….

Some themes recur. They appear as if from nowhere, and come into and through my hands, through my work. Danger, birth, flesh, spirit. Big ideas, here in intimate scale.

The Wisdom of Slowing Down

It was the end of May in 2022 when our son and family came down to visit. Lowe was not yet 5, and her pace during our walk along Sligo Creek was just right. She communicated with a tiny caterpillar, made a home for it with a leaf, and set the tone I needed. We meandered slowly along a path of wood chips. I began to pick up twigs and small shapes of wood that “called to me.”

I was reminded, as I collected and placed more and more twigs and bits of wood on my studio table, that I often clean and lay out chicken bones in my kitchen. There is something about the rhythm, and the similarity to letters and symbols…. Bit by bit I walked, collected, placed, contemplated, and organized my treasures in different ways. I would choose one, hold it in my hand, and wait for a sense of what it needed. If it needed smoothing I would wrap it with plaster gauze, then smooth more with spackle, then paint with layers of encaustic. Slowing down had opened up a new well.

Interview with Carolivia Herron

Interview on WOWD with Carolivia Herron, December 5, 2023. In three parts, each about 15 minutes.

My statement from the May 2023 Remnants exhibit was read powerfully and beautifully by Carolivia Herron on Epic City.

Support

IN the Yellow Chair Salon. Finally. We met every couple of weeks on zoom. I met artists who were open to my earlier “radical and unpalatable” subject matter and approach, as well as where I was now. I wanted to recover and reclaim what I had decided was “past” and to somehow bring that into the present. I had no good ideas but I had a sense.

My first salon group members suggested I consider softening the edges of my paintings. How? They could see my proclivities to organic forms and tactility. Their focus was on helping me to deepen, clarify, and strengthen my work. Wow. I took a deep breath and dove in. Within a few months I had let go of painting only on rectangular supports. I used my hands more, building and shaping. Bones, teeth, cheesecloth, other materials I had used decades ago began to reappear in the work.

Shifting Gears

Sometime in 2021 my work with lichen slowed. The pandemic had originally spurred it on, as I walked on every street and path in my area. It was everywhere, and I needed to see beauty. It was beauty and I needed to paint it. And then a shift occurred.

I was in that space where “waiting” was all I could do. - When time that seems like a desert, but you suspect something is brewing. It was. Turned out I needed people. People on my wave length in some new way. I joined the Yellow Chair Salon, complete with a mentor and supportive serious artists. Just what I needed!

I had been focussed on nature around me since 2009. I was ready to try something new, preferably “scary” or a stretch for me. I needed to grow. I decided to paint my aging skin. Here are a few of the first bunch. Some cross the boundary - human skin, the skin (bark) of trees, the skin (aerial view) of earth. Almost reminds me of my latex “skins” from the late 80’s, embedded with bone, sand, and yarns, sometimes morphing into landscapes. Amazing.