You write as well as make art. (Eleven books!) How does your creativity interact with different mediums and forms of expression? In other words, how does your writing inspire, influence, or engage with your art and vice versa?
I am a self-taught artist, so my path is not typical. I started writing when I was nine years old and have written almost daily my entire life, for almost sixty years now. I started painting when I was sixteen. The first ten years were practice: learning how to use brushes, how to mix paint, how to apply paint to different surfaces.
The first “interaction” between writing and visual art happened in my late twenties. I used the compositions in my photographs and paintings to bolster the descriptions in my writing. For example, I used a human figure in a photograph to describe posture, attitude, appearance. The connections continued; a big one was when I started using my visual art as a lure to draw people’s attention to my writing.
Your bio mentions a “mature vision” that has arrived with age. Share a bit about how your creativity, creative process, and/or work have evolved over the years.
Well, now that I am sixty-eight, I have a lot more time to spend on my creativity, so that allows my various skillsets to develop. I think I am doing my best writing and visual artwork now. For me, at sixty-eight years old, I am no longer as worried about reception, so that means my work can be more honest and filled with personal integrity. I am doing what I want to do and how I want to do it.
Some details: An interesting thing happens when I read my old poems outloud—I notice that I now have to pause within lines to breathe, so the process of aging has altered the length of lines in my writing. One thing that has not changed, and this comes from being self-taught, is that I still have visions of what a piece of art should look or read like, and before starting out, I ask myself, “Why not?” For example, “Why not make landscapes out of broken pieces of wood?”
Talk about the process for bringing your fence board project to life. How does such a collection come together? How much is known and unknown before you begin?
My fence boards began their genesis in my late twenties. A guy I knew purchased the “one-by” redwood siding from a dock structure on Humboldt Bay. I helped him move the wood. He could not pay a salary, and he got in some trouble, and spent some time in prison, so he paid me by giving me the wood. I sold some of it for interior siding and bookcase material, but most of it got sold as campground firewood. The wood had nails in it, so I saved my chainsaw chains and broke the wood with my feet, instead, into campfire lengths. The resulting edges reminded me of different landscape skylines. The idea stayed inside me for thirty years, before I composed my first fence board landscape. (See “Landscape.” It was my first one, and I wasn’t sure I would make more, thus the uninspired title.)
I do not really think about collections when I do art; I am thinking about individual pieces. Most of my fence boards are hybrids between actual landscapes and generic landscapes, so I know, basically, what I am trying to represent before I start. The hybridization usually results in simplification of the actual landscape into a more iconic representation. It is all about composing (reverting to the original Latin meaning: putting pieces together).
A few of your fence board pieces seem to be named for the area where you live. How has the striking landscapes and environments of a place like New Mexico affected your work?
The mesas in New Mexico, especially at sunrise/sunset and moonrise/moonset, provide me with a basic shape. While my first one, “Landscape,” was totally imagined, most of my work now is inspired by and are representations of actual landscapes that I drive by all the time.
The materials used to create the fence board artwork are tactilely rough, but assembled, they evoke an unexpected vulnerability. How do you approach creating mood or tone in your work?
Once I started recreating the landscapes in New Mexico, I started to incorporate other found objects (a lot of it being “trash”). I like the idea of basic composition, putting pieces together, and how the “construct” reveals how many human idea(l)s are quite fragile in the face of reality. And, actually, what I have noticed in many folks’ reaction to the work is it makes them feel vulnerable somehow. The fact that some of the pieces reach out past their frames makes people nervous. I have not figured out, yet, how to use this when I start a piece.
“Mood” and “tone” are created by texture, or how light greets the work, and that is a consideration as I put pieces together. It is also a big consideration when I photo the pieces for publication.
What’s next for you?
I am working on an extended prose piece about embarrassment and faith; “Bewilderment” will fit in the title somewhere. My “old man” poems happen every day or so, and a new collection is I see stuff all the time that I want to represent in art, in some medium. I will finish a watercolor (painted only with a knife) today of the Rio Grande Gorge. I am thinking about expanding the size of some of my work, especially the fence boards, to become public installations—maybe 8 feet horizontal by 6 feet tall. When I ask myself, “why not?,” I know it will be time to start on those.
