Bridges 41 and 43

Bridge #43, acrylic, 7x11, 2005

Bridge #41, acrylic, 7x11, 2005

I am in a funk lately.

On a positive note, I finally checked a book out of the library that I was interested in.  "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" by Wassily Kandinsky.  I was following the discussion about it on Katharine Cartwright's blog.  I hope the discussion is still going.  That is what I will check next.

Bridge 38

Bridge #38, watercolor and ink, 7x11, 2004

I was trying to get to the bare essentials of the bridge.  I like the contrast of the black on the watery swirls of color.  I'm not sure why I made the lightposts marching across the bridge, but there they are.  The curved form under the bridge looks like 80's hair to me.  HaHa.  80's hair.  marching.  makes sense.  For those of you who don't know, I was in marching band in the 80's.  Earlier bridge pictures were about my high school years, some were about my young adult years, this one seems to be about college.

Salt.

Saltwater crackers, acrylic and pastel, 14x22, 2004

Saltwater #3, oil pastel, 14x22, 2004

I'll get back to the bridges.  At church yesterday it was all about salt.  Too sleepy now to get into describing the whole idea.  Ye are the salt of the earth.  You've probably heard that before.  It reminded me of these pictures from back in 04.

Bridges 34 and 36

Bridge #36, pastel, 11x14, 2003

Bridge #34, pastel and acrylic, 7x11, 2003

I think when I created these I was close to figuring out why I needed to keep drawing these bridges.  In #34, I was thinking about the teacher's question from the year before: "What's under the bridge?"  I never did know the answer to that question during the class.  In these two pictures I am exploring what it might be.

#36 has never been shown before.  It rings very true to me, and yet it also seems cheesey.  I did not explore that idea further in drawings.  Perhaps it is a good place to start as I pick up my artistic journey again.

Bridges 32 and 33

Bridge #33, pastel, 11x14, 2003

Bridge #32, pastel, 11x14, 2003

The house I lived in in St. Paul showed up uninvited.  It pushed its way in and sat there.  It forced me to deal with it.

This is my Thursday morning post.  Next post scheduled for Saturday morning before I go deliver girl scout cookies with my daughter.

Bridges 29 and 31

Bridge #31, pastel, 11x14, 2003

Bridge #29, colored pencil, 9x12, 2002

At this point in the series, the class is over and I am back home in my busy life and even though I kept at it for awhile, shortly after #29 I stopped creating new bridges until the next year.  Looking around my new house in the suburbs, I saw the garden and that wishing well.  The bridge became background, but it is still there.

That might mean that #31 is actually the beginning of a new series.  It is hard to tell.  Isn't all of life a series.

The next ones are quite obviously bridges, so no use fussing over the name.

This is where it gets a little weird. Bridges 22, 23, 26

Bridge #26, photocopies of drawings, 11x14, 2002

Bridge #23, pastel, 9x24, 2002

Bridge #22, pastel, 11x14, 2002

This was 9 years ago, but I remember thinking that what I really liked about the bridge visually was the big sweeping curve with the straight lines of the support beams just on the one side.  I also liked how the backgrounds were all gradual changes of warm to cool colors.  But the composition of #22 was too simple so I started to play around with using the big curve as a building block to create other images.  The teacher encouraged me to explore this, and to use the photocopy machine so that I could figure out how I wanted to combine the pieces before starting another drawing.  I kept photos of these as a record of how I got from where I was to where I was going, but these are not show pieces.  I picked a sampling from this phase.  There are many that are a variation of #26.  I cropped off the notes I wrote on them to remind me of what I was thinking about for each one.  At that time in my life, I was about to move from the city to the suburbs and I was not sure how I felt about that.  Now I have lived 12 years in a rural setting, 11 years in the city, and 8 years in the suburbs.  I wonder if anyone else out there has had a similar experience and can speak to how that messes with your sense of identity.  Oh, and if you are trying to figure out my age, I left out the years before rural when my family moved around a lot, and the college years, when I moved around a lot.