Sing Like a Canary

I had an art opening last night at Canary Gallery, and this is the talk I gave. It’s partly about my paintings, but mostly about my Without a Net inspirations. 

I’ve been painting since I was a teenager, and my process hasn’t changed much since then. I like that I work with and teach an ancient craft that can but doesn’t have to be much more complicated than putting paint on canvas in layers. 

My husband gets a lot of thanks for making my frames. They came about because framing was my least favorite part of the process. I was jealous of sculptors because they had this pristine white pedestal as a standard to display their work and didn’t have to think about other options. (A lot of them can’t stand the white pedestal. We all want what we don’t have.)

With Scott’s help I designed these frames to be my version of a “wall pedestal.” They are wide and deep enough that they make the painting come off as part of an object. For you geeks out there, there are no seams at the corners. It makes them as non-distracting as possible. 

The titles come from Shakespeare’s sonnets. It’s a lot fun to pick them out once the piece is finished. 

That’s about as much technical talk as I need to go into. These paintings are much more about a process of personal psychological discovery for me. We’ll be talking more about mind states than about painting.

I started this series in 2011. In order to be honest with myself and get more familiar with my thoughts, feelings, habits, beliefs, and perspectives I painted characters that represented these mind states as they came up in my life. 

I chose animals because their characteristics and behaviors remind us of ourselves. They have and do things that are human-like, and the animal in us recognizes this kinship of fellow Earth creatures. 

I found pretty quickly that painting them had a transformative effect on how I related to my mind states. 

The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850 by Nathanial Hawthorn. In it a woman in Puritan Boston named Hester Prynne is publicly shamed for adultery, and is forced to wear a scarlet letter "A" on the front of her dress as a symbol of her sin. 

She wears it over the course of seven years, and then goes about her life being an upright citizen and working tirelessly to help the sick and the poor. Her quiet dignity and charity cause the townspeople to reconsider the meaning of the A. Instead of seeing her as a disgraced adulteress, they change to see her as compassionate and strong, and they privately start interpreting the "A" as meaning "Able" or even Angel.” 

The letter transforms into a symbol of Hester's power. She took ownership of her punishment and she embroidered her "A" beautifully, with great care. She turned a tool of judgment into a badge of her own strength. No matter what the meaning of the A changed to, it became ambiguous, showing us how impossible it is to identify a person by a single symbol or label, and that our weaknesses can be hard to separate from our strengths.

This story is almost exactly like what I’m doing here, but I didn’t put it together until a lot later.

I’ll start with the Hyena to give an example: 

Book my Errors Down

I was walking around at the Botanical Gardens and caught myself being judgmental of all these women I saw walking around in wobbly high heel shoes. on gravel paths. I had a list of reasons for how stupid I thought this was, until I caught myself and realized I was suffering more from being critical than these women were from wearing their shoes. I was embarrassed about being so disapproving about something that was none of my business, so, as I do for my paintings, I asked myself how could I represent this blindspot of mine on canvas? 

I thought, what animal in the world is disliked and looked down upon the most? Soon after I saw a video with David Attenborough narrating a show about Africa, and he said, “Hyenas. The most vilified animal on the planet.” So I had my subject. 

While I painted, I thought about these poor ladies at the Botanical Gardens and about me suffering with my meanness, and about poor hyenas being hated by everyone. I wanted to paint her to look as lovable as I could. It wasn’t easy to make a hyena look sweet. She’s backlist with a soft light, and the butterflies are like nice wishes surrounding her. 

While I paint these states I keep my blindspot in my mind, lightly, and it feels like I’m giving them a lot of low-key, non-verbal attention. It’s different from analysis or trying to understand it. It’s just giving it nice attention with a paint brush for a couple weeks at least. I don’t rush these because they’re not painted to get a painting done. They’re painted to be more clear with myself. 

The transformative part comes for me as I watch how this work makes me respond differently in life.

I start catching myself in the blindspot. With this one, when I got judgmental and would immediately think of the poor little hyena. This character has become an emblem, a simple symbol to represent the overall jumble of ideas that happens when I get judgmental. 

If you dissected it psychologically you literally could go on all day about the implications of being critical. They stem from past situations and cultural factors. But with this visual mblem, I just notice myself faultfinding and go, Hyena. 

It doesn’t mean my blindspot changes overnight. It means it’s no longer unconscious, and it means there’s no beating up on myself or overanalyzing myself. It’s kept simple and as honest as I can be. 

I’ve watched for these 14 years that I either drop the old behavior or it turns into something much more tolerable, even a strength. Or it doesn’t change much, and I just learn to put up with myself. 

I’ll go over a few more paintings and tell you their story. 

I used to only paint one animal at once. They were meant to depict one mind state. After I finished 55 of them, I made them into a card deck (which I’ll come back to) but from then on I painted animals in groups. I went from painting aspects of a personality to painting about relationships. 

In Favor With Their Stars

This painting was done during the pandemic. I wanted to capture visually a sense of freaking out. I chose animals that had a look of splaying out in some form, like people yelling, “Ahhh!” Of course the animals are just doing their instinctual thing. 

I put a stormy sky in the background, and even though the idea is chaotic, they are neatly stacked. There’s usually a dichotomy between dark and light in my paintings. If I try to paint something dark (and I have intended to paint things as nasty and badass as I possibly could) they always turn out kind of jolly. I gave up on trying to be provocative because something in me will temper it with something playful. 

This painting helped me weather the scary time when we had to shut down our business with no knowledge of when we’d reopen and what would happen. It was therapeutic, if nothing else.

The Argument All Bare

I started this painting wanting it to be like an old fashioned storybook illustration. It started kind of sweet except if you know much about mockingbirds you know that this is probably not a pleasant interaction. They are territorial and harass other birds and animals. So there’s an ambiguous interaction going on with the bird and bunny, but there’s also this goofy little mouse facing us. This hard-to-interpret triangle is meant to bring up questions about relationships. It’s left open-ended. 

As my paintings have evolved I’ve let go of being so specific and intentional about the subject. They’re  are more intuitive and spontaneous, but I have a vague sense of what’s being portrayed. I like the lack of definition, and I noticed that it points to broader, more universal themes that are harder to put words on. 

Card Deck

Which brings me to my cards. This is the WAN Card Deck. After I’d made the first 55 paintings I was 55 and I had the paintings made into this card deck. I found that the original intention of the paintings wasn’t so important. Everyone was interpreting them differently, imposing their own meaning on them, which was perfect. It’s like the Scarlet A. We don’t need to know the old meaning, but it’s interesting. 

I use these in my Without a Net Program, which started with this painting series and grew into a treasury of practices that are playful and creative and help bring about more consciousness in all areas of life. I love teaching painting, and it is so good for people, and this expands on that.