All I could think of in giving this new painting I just completed after 20 years of storage a title is “Grandma.” Because she means so much to me. I say that in the present tense because I don’t believe we really die. We slough off the body, but our selves continue on, lifetime after lifetime.
My grandmother was a Flapper when she was growing up, so she took on the Women’s Liberation movement in her day as part of her identity. Women officially gained the right to vote in the United States in 1919 when Congress passed the 19th Amendment. This was a huge stride in the women’s liberation movement back then. This was at the same time the Flappers trend started. They had a distinct style, which included skirts as short as the knee (a risqué style for that era), bobbed haircuts, listening to jazz, and smoking cigarettes. Thankfully, my grandmother never adopted smoking.
When I was a kid, I only visited my grandmother and my grandfather in the Summers out on my grandparents’ farm in Nebraska, six miles South of Cedar Bluffs. I remember my grandmother more however because my grandfather passed away in 1988 when I was thirteen. I moved to the farm in Nebraska when I was twenty-five in the year 2000, just a year before 9/11. I moved there to go back to school, as I had stayed behind in Riverside, California, where I lived at the time from a move my dad made in 1997. I decided that taking an opportunity my dad and grandmother offered to me to help take care of my grandmother in her house on the farm while I went back to school was an offer I could not refuse because it would allow me to spend a lot of time working on my art and producing a nice amount of work. I hadn’t planned it, but I renewed my education in the graphic and animated arts during the dot-com bubble by going to Metropolitan Community College in Elkhorn which had an awesome electronic imaging and graphics program with an entire lab of current Macintosh computers.
During the six years I lived on my grandmother’s farm, I did indeed produce a lot of work. My grandmother was so generous to allow me to use the basement as a studio in which to work. I could build frames for new pieces of stretched canvas with an old Craftsman table saw my grandfather left behind that was used at one time to build the house it was in. I could work with found objects and nail them to wood panels, as well as splatter paint on some of the works I produced. This piece here was the last piece I started and never finished before we moved and sold off the farm. I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in November 2006. I wanted to move here because I felt the art scene was much bigger here than it was in Nebraska, as I had patronized Omaha a lot.
My grandmother was a wild flower expert in that small community of farmers in Eastern Nebraska, and she was recognized for it. When I was a kid, she would sometimes have people from all around come and visit the farm just to see her large gardens and wildflowers, get an education about them, and gather some seeds she generously gave them for their own gardens.
In the last two or three years I lived on the farm, I started gathering organic matter from her gardens and from the surrounding fields because I felt inspired to explore and experiment with this idea I got, derived from the idea of working with found objects and integrating them into works of art. In this piece, I used old bath towels and cutouts of materials with patterns on them, that were no longer being used, and I used the stalks of sunflowers at the end of their season and integrated them into the picture plane with the help of lots of adhering media.
This painting is dedicated to my grandmother and how thankful I am to have had her in my life. She is one of the extremely few women in my life who were actually benevolent. For me, she made women’s liberation a cause to believe in. I believe women should have the right to all of what they achieved in the United States. I tend to agree with Camille Paglia, however, that this generation of women’s liberation is a lot more politically motivated than it is for the benefit of all. I believe, like Martin Armstrong, the US government is so corrupt and hopeless at this end stage of our republic that the self interests of politicians in both political parties, foreignly incorporated, only insure its demise.
I also wanted to write about a dream I had about three years ago involving my sisters, but the dream revealed more of a symbolic expression of women in our times, and the attitudes they’ve shaped, or that have been shaped for them, in the 21st century. The dream showed them to me as young women with attitudes, little or no make up, and baggy clothing for style. It’s a kind of careless style. I’m not against baggy clothing because I was a teen and tween in the 1990s. I just note it in this dream because this dream was right before the baggy clothing style came back currently. I think clothing styles say a lot of what we want to communicate to the world, consciously or unconsciously.
The dream seemed to summarize a rebellious attitude among Western women because of a sense of lack or inadequacy projected on to the world for not giving them what they want, or what they thought the world promised them. It’s like a “screw you” attitude. It’s a reversal of the idea of women sitting pretty, nice, and quiet during the 20th century as an ideal housewife. I still feel like women’s beauty can’t be covered up by all of what they cover it up with nowadays in rebellion.
My painting is rough, crude, and texturally palpable by the eyes, almost to the point that it could be sharp to the touch. But the flowers, themselves, and the thick paint I applied to them, still exhibit their inherent beauty. It makes me think of this framed print of a painting my grandmother had on her wall in her bedroom of a pioneer woman out in the wild prairie fields with a rifle. I imagine her hunting for flowers however to help soften the harshness of today.
