Writing an artist statement, especially for a specific exhibit, can be daunting. How to distill, to crystallize the swirl of mental and emotional processes that materialize themselves into a work of art? Here is what I submitted for an upcoming exhibit in Rochester, NY. Two series traveled from South Carolina to New York, both on cradled wood but one series is 36x24 inches while the other is 22x10 inches. My goal is to keep it short and accessible.

"A native of Syracuse, NY, I resided in Rochester from 2004-2012, often working out of the Anderson Alley Artist Studios. Enamored of the Edo period of Japan, an Asian aesthetic is visible in much of my work, whether cradled wood collages or site-specific installations. 'Edo Influence' and 'Remnants' share their verticality, and their search for a sense of balance. A balance of space and activity, composition and detail, quietude and energy.
'Edo Influence' suspends colorful collage within neutral geometric planes and layers textural elements to create a Zen-like sense of balance. It is vertical; as a human, I am a vertical being. Each piece mirrors my personal search for balance: for private space amidst the noisy energies of daily life. 

'Remnants' embodies awe and grief, two emotions I feel upon discovering a lone butterfly wing. Awe for their strength and fragility, grief for an individual death as well as the disappearance of a number of their species. Exploring the butterfly as a recurring motif is now into its fourth decade for me. Here, angularity meets curvature; human invention intersects with organic nature."

In the midst of creating the "Remnants" series, images of migrants fleeing their native lands at great peril are filling the airwaves. The poignancy, the compassion I experience while working on the butterfly wings are emotions akin to what I feel for those trodding for miles on new lands. It helps to voice these thoughts with trusted friends, one of whom shares what she sees, what she "hears" - having seen only one "Remnants" image via email.

"If you look at how you have put together disparate elements to create something beautiful...I can see it as a metaphor where you could think about migration." She is referring to the stages of the butterfly and connecting it to the human migration currently in the news." She continues by posing this question: "While we are each in our own cocoons, are we open to a metamorphosis that incorporates an inclusion of disparateness? Where each element retains its individuality, but together contributes to the creation of something beautiful?"

What an eye-opening, socially and spiritually conscious connection my friend makes for me. Yes, there is an awe for the migrants' strength and fragility, and grief for the death of a drowned migrant child. There is also a sense of hope in the beauty of a butterfly wing.

When Steve Wong, Marketing Director for The Chapman Cultural Center, asks me a question that I've been asked dozens of time, I find myself giving a new answer. "Have you ever visited Japan?" It is a logical question as my artwork reflects a self-described Asian aesthetic. My answer: "No, it's too crowded."

I experience claustrophobia in crowded-no-visible-escape scenarios, and even photos of urban Japan elicit this sensation. Whereas photos of rural Japan elicit a fear of being too disconnected from urban life. Go figure.

A week later, artist Stephen Merritt - who learned his clay-vessel crafting in Japan - suggests that I really must travel to Japan. Again, "No, it's too crowded." He reminds me that Japan is a land of opposites: tumultuously overcrowded streets balanced by serenely tranquil temples. I am not convinced that I could survive the tumult for the sake of the serenity. Honestly.

The image above is "Edo Influence 5" - one of a collaged and sewn series created on 3x4 foot cradled wood - currently on view in the Artists' Guild Gallery, Chapman Cultural Center, Spartanburg, SC. It is the image the Spartanburg Herald Journal selected to accompany Steve Wong's column in the Arts section of the Father's Day edition.

Perhaps it is obvious in this piece, and in the series, that in my art as well as life, I am piecing together a balance of activity and non; of full and empty. It is in the emptiness that my creativity resides; it is in the activity of creating that it manifests.

Perhaps the direct influence of Japanese aesthetics is now so ingrained in my creative psyche that there is no need to visit the literal cities and country of Japan. Perhaps as I continue to bring my artistic sensibility to the ever-evolving work, it will one day say "Laurel" even more than "zen like" or "Asian."

What I really want to write: "Deadlines are our enemies," but this is simply not true. Whether self-imposed or the necessary element of a grant proposal, artist residency application, or exhibition prospectus, THE deadline can serve as impetus and also prompt inspiration.

Still, the deadline looms like an Acme anvil in a Roadrunner cartoon (hopefully a reference that even Millennials can grasp). And heaven forbid that we artists have multiple deadlines because even a very organized individual, i.e., myself, can miss that all-important date. All of this to say that the results of deadlines are evident and rewarding right here in my own backyard: Paul Yanko's exhibit at Hampton 3 Gallery, Greenville, SC; and Terry Jarrard Dimond's "Textile Constructions" at Upstairs Artspace, Tryon, NC. Please visit the exhibits or at least the websites.

Then there is my self-imposed once-a-month blog deadline, which I missed in April because of other self-created deadlines. I really wanted to set up a spring trunk show/demo and workshop at the Fine Arts Company in Hagerstown, MD; a solo exhibit in the Artists' Guild Gallery in Spartanburg, SC; and was hoping to be welcomed back to Stephen Merritt's "Art in June" exhibit in Rochester, NY. I was especially dreaming of these venues during the cold, wet and dreary winter months when spring and summer seemed intergalactic spans of time away. Now they have arrived and I am breathing deeply in the now-ness of it all.

At the risk of offending someone, because this resource may seem a bit sophomoric, I find there are valid points in the responses to a deadline-question posed to Creativity Coach Eric Maisel. Valid points: don't procrastinate, build in wiggle room, use a calendar for visual cues, small steps can also get you there, and engage friends and mentors to stay on track. Hmmm, what is working for me?

"Don't procrastinate": I did not, although I was not juiced and became obsessed with theme and concept to the point of incapacitation. My calendar was staring directly at me while I was taking "small steps" by gathering raw materials. Nonetheless, I was in neutral, idling the engine, and waiting for a revelatory moment. The anxiety of the ticking off of days only exacerbated the situation. Which is when I called a trusted artist friend Jeanne Raffer Beck, who basically gave me permission to show both existing and new work. The existing work will have a new audience, and the new work will debut. I literally exhaled tension with her insight and advice.

I look forward to posting images of new work, which I like to do only upon exhibition - debuting in the real world before doing so in the virtual world. And I wish you smooth sailing toward your next deadline.

I am in between studios and yearning for a warm room with a horizontal surface; which brings me full circle to the good old kitchen table, a surface upon which many artists have launched their careers. Just ask them. Including Rochester, NY-based artist Jane Notides Benzing. Jane's work of manipulated-painted-paper wall reliefs originally captured my attention because we both work in paper. The artist has since progressed to plexiglass boxes containing not only paper but illumination and mixed media. Just how does Jane coerce her paper to bend into those voluptuous shapes? She offers to demonstrate...on her kitchen table.

My kitchen table is "distressed" naturally, from decades of moves, disassembly and reassembly, decorative attempts followed by subsequent paint removal, and loans to others. It is an understatement to say that it has character, but it is a workable stand-in horizontal surface.

Ironing wood? I discovered that birch veneer, designed for refurbishing countertop edges, is perfect for finishing cradled wood pieces. As it is thermally bonded, my "craft iron" - the classic heavy steam iron model - allows me to literally iron this edging. Hence, ironing wood.

Stitching paper? Yes, on an inherited 1960s model sewing machine. I love the textural element that sewn thread adds to paper collages, while also creating a more malleable surface. The stitching additionally serves as a visual unifier to the collection of prepared and found papers.

I have recently created a new work surface from a door mounted on sawhorses, but it is nonetheless reassuring that the kitchen table is always here for me.

Note: Jane Notides Benzing - see pages 20-21 of Metropolitan magazine's fall 2011 issue

The customer service person at Home Depot and I pull over a dozen 1x2-inch lengths of 8-foot pine, staring each one down - literally - to find just two that are "true," or are closest to true. Warping in several dimensions is more common than not, making the discovery of the best among the stack a timely task. The same is also the case when selecting a 2x4-foot hardwood-surfaced panel.

And to what purpose, you ask? I am creating my own cradled wood substrate for a new collage. Of course, in order to do this I invest in a miter box and saw, spring clamps, c-clamps, and wood glue. Let me be honest here: I am not a carpenter. My respect for this skill has just grown another notch as I test my own patience while constructing the frame. But this is the desired size and one I can create, rather than wait for UPS to deliver a prepackaged frame at my door.

While the experience of building the frame is yet another character-builder in a life beginning to brim with character, I am glad for it. It reminds me of the concept of "true": "reflecting the genuine character of something," one of the many definitions in my 2001 Random House dictionary. I would normally edit myself for using the same word three times in two sentences, but it fits here, so I won't.

"Accurately formed" is another definition. I seek accurately formed wood products to serve as ingredients in my homegrown recipe for a cradled wood frame. While the task of discerning the best pieces of wood for the job seem almost unattainable, the next task is even more daunting. It is the blank canvas or more accurately blank wood - staring so objectively at me - waiting for my subjective art to appear on its planar surface, that is my next and ultimate challenge. So, here I go, once again seeking "true."

On Monday, September 30, I gingerly push the door handle of Spartanburg's Chapman Cultural Center; inside the monks of Drepung Loseling Monastery are creating a mandala sand painting. Expecting a rush of silence, I am instead greeted by the grating of metal. Rounding the corner, my focus reaches the center of attraction and I pause. The mandala is mapped out in white on a square table where color is being applied from the center outward. With foreheads almost and sometimes actually touching, three robed monks lean in, pulsing scrapers over the ridged surfaces of metal tubes, dispensing one color of sand at a time. Incredibly intimate is this collaboration; incredibly ritualistic.

This intimacy is unlike any I have witnessed in artistic collaborations. Perhaps it is a cultural comfort zone common in Tibet. Perhaps it is the absence of ego as each serves a larger purpose. A monk pauses to refill his tube - from a separate tabletop brimming with white bowls of brightly hued sand - and glances back at the mandala, as if to remind himself, "What next?". I recognize the question, "What next?", as I too have stood in my studio, tool in hand, caught in the interval between thinking and doing. The sand mandala experience is what I dub as the "sound of color."

On Sunday, November 3, I rest against my studio desk while listening to a petite elderly visitor describe her reaction to one of my artworks, "Golden Rain 6." Collaged onto the surface of a 12x12-inch cradled wood substrate, the piece is subtle. Perhaps too subtle to be noticed. Not so. "Golden Rain" is an unexpected series evolving from my experiments with the required parameters of the All Squared Away exhibition. Sponsored by the Metropolitan Arts Council, the exhibition's 12x12-inch format allows 124 Open Studios artists an opportunity to feature their work in a smorgasbord presentation at Council headquarters in the West End of Greenville, SC. Even if you couldn't take in all of the actual studios during the November 1-3 self-guided tour, All Squared Away lets you "taste" the art.

Back in my studio, I am listening to this stranger craft words of eloquence about "Golden Rain 6" while goosebumps travel my arms. In this series I attempt to strike a balance between imagery - the kimonoed silhouette carrying an umbrella, and abstraction - a vertical curtain of rain. To this end I assemble super thin strips of paper in a value range of greys with only hints of color. Interpretation belongs to each individual viewer. She calls it "the sound of silence."

Thank you, monks. Thank you, stranger. I am speechless.

Process oriented. This is how in 2009 one of my instructors at The College at Brockport SUNY describes my approach to creating work. I also work with concepts: the beauty of impermanence, the textural character of nature, the manifestation of ethereal qualities. But these are just thoughts that float forward as I select collage pieces, cut paper with an x-acto, weave strips, and perform all of the practical steps that move concept into reality. So it is with the latest fan (Black & White Fan #19) to emerge from my studio.

In the midst of working on this fan, I remember the principle of balancing activity on the paper with a "place for the eye to rest." Every viewer that inhales a landscape crowded with trees, hills and meadows also needs an expanse of sky, or at least the still surface of a pond, where they can exhale. Did I give you a place to rest in this fan? Does the balance of texture, scale, black and white values, positive and negative space, and imagery as well as mystery work for you? Before I put the finishing touches on this fan, I ask myself those very questions, even if in a nonverbal intuitive fashion.

Did I stop soon enough? Too soon? Through trial and error over the years, I am finetuning my sense of when to stop. Sooner rather than later is generally better. Keep it fresh instead of belabored. I want you to feel the shadow of my hand having just left the piece.

This breath, the inhalation and exhalation, are on my mind lately because my body wants to involuntarily cough spasmodically. The lingering of a cold, turned bronchitis turned walking pneumonia where, after a month, I barely remember the freedom of breathing without a tightness in my chest and bronchial tubes. Occasionally I attempt the Vipassana-style meditation of watching the breath, particularly the quiet space between inhalation and exhalation. It's a wonderful space, a place to rest.

We breathe 22,000 times each day; a fact I discovered while a nontraditional student at SUNY working on a mixed-media project. I started with a concept: body by the numbers. How to visually and abstractly portray these phenomena? Through the process of playing with materials, breathing 22,000 times daily expresses itself as dual plastic tubes, one filled with teabag paper and the other with a diaphonous white tissue. This series departs from the Asian-aesthetic imbued in the art I make today, but is nonetheless valid in that it provided me figurative breathing space to create anew. I think of the experience as existing in the space between inhalation and exhalation.


Black & White Fan #19 is part of the invitational exhibition "Connecting Concept to Medium: Fiber Art in South Carolina," opening September 7 and continuing through November 14 at the Pickens County Museum of Art and History.

I am recovering from bronchitis and discovering patience in the process. Patience is folding origami cranes between coughing spasms, when my preference is to be scouring thrift stores for raw material. Patience is rocking with the kitten, when my body wants to head out to the art supply store. Patience is waiting for health, waiting for the armature of a fan hanging on my studio wall to reveal its natural evolution.

Which transports me to a decision made 7 years ago when my artist seal became my artist's signature. According to Oriental Art Supply, the soapstone for my chop was gathered from the coastal regions of Fujian and Zhejiang, China. While my work references Japanese art, I do more broadly acknowledge an Asian aesthetic.

Dated August 1, 2006, this email arrived from OAS, following my order for a seal for "Laurel":

"Dear Christina,
     We received your order request for your signature and artist seal. We are writing to make a suggestion regarding the characters that you have included use (sic). The three characters that you provided are not the most poetic and thoughtful translation possible. The first chosen character is translated as "laborious." The second character as "flower bud."  The third character is just a phonetic sound that has not particular meaning.

     We had our translation specialist take a look at the name Laurel and they chose a two character translation. The first character means "spirit of water."  The second character is translated as "softness." This translation we feel is much more elegant. If you like this translation, we can provide it for you at no additional charge as you have already included payment for a signature card which includes the translation services. Please let us know at your earliest convenience how you would like to proceed.

Best Regards,
Ja-Shin Yeh
Oriental Art Supply"

I am still touched by the consideration shown in sending this communication which offers me an alternative. "Laborious flower bud" is actually a concept I can relate to more easily than "Spirit of water softness," but it is definitely not as poetic. I like poetry. The left brain wants to analyze ad nauseum the import of my seal's translation. Spirit of water: mist, waterfall, ice, vapor, cleansing, gushing, streaming, puddling, trickling, drowning, raining, downpour, salty, hard, soft, life-giving, life-threatening, life-destroying. Softness: arcing, arching, spherical, resilient, cloud, tactile.

While my art has been described as beautiful, elegant and engaging, it is not the favored flavor-of-the day: hard edge. My art is not edgy. Most often it is a weaving - literally and figuratively - of subtle imagery, black/white/gray with a nuance of color, textured, and layered. Like life.

So, thank you again, Ja-Shin Yeh, because while laboring as a flower bud, I am embracing a spirit of water, softness. It is an embrace that requires patience as it unfolds, like the petals of a bud.

The bank associate responds to my "work" identification as an artist with an oft-heard comment: "That must be fun." Undeniably. But the levity associated with the word "fun" is counterbalanced with a myriad other words associated with gravity. "Fun" smacks of concepts such as hobby or dabbles in the arts, at which point I am inclined to launch into a monologue on the value of the arts - all of the arts - to society. Have you ever seriously imagined a day without music, a day that is absent of literature or poetry, a day where stages upon which to act or dance evaporate, or a day with walls stripped of paintings and photographs and courtyards of sculpture? What a bleak and sterile world.

More than likely the bank associate has a clearly-defined job description, work schedule, path of career ascendancy, and regular paychecks. An artist has to invent all of this, in addition to creating actual art. Ideas, materials, skills, experience, technique, style, studio, tools, business cards, resumé, artist statement, website, blog, social media, marketing, sales, collectors, publicity, promoting, photographing, taxes, exhibits, installing, framing, competitions, grants, deadlines, inventory. Just to name a few of the items that constitute "all in a day's work" (for an artist). Add in travel, agent, staff, factory, contracts, commissions, interviews, and more. Many of the artists I know are also instructors, adjunct faculty, workshop presenters, lecturers, jurors, curators, and art supply store staff. There is the ever-present danger that these commitments - the professional artist's unwritten job description - will squeeze the creative juices from within. Thankfully, history supplies us with muses and mentors, artists both proficient and prolific, and undaunted in this challenge.

The performing arts are applauded; the response to the visual arts is discourse. Although occasionally there is applause - like the day when a classroom full of adult learners erupts in gratitude at the end of a drawing lesson on value scales. This is fun, but what proves to be even more, well, fulfilling is that the students realize the lesson as intended. And the intention is serious...but fun. Time to get back to work.

I feel a bit defensive about this fan. How can it possibly be considered serious art? The other fans I create are in palettes grounded by non-colors black and white. This one is, well, pink.

Neither the fan nor the pink is a statement about femininity or breast cancer awareness. My fan contains within it personal references that unite two divorced people. The collaged Asian calligraphic elements - the black sumi brush characters - are studies that my octogenarian mother produced in an Elderhostel class decades ago. The worn wood handles - which once housed various nibs to hold India ink - anchoring the base of the fan belonged to my late father. Perhaps, subconsciously, the pink is the blending of red and white, of parents. But that, too, is not the intention.

Andy Warhol uses a popping pink background on one of his "Marilyn's." Jeff Koons uses pink in his inflatable sculpture "Tall White, Pink Bunny". Pipilotti Rist bathes her installation "Tender Room" in pink.  Takashi Murakami makes the macabre cute, a white skull contrasts with a bubblegum pink background. In 1983, Christo surrounded 11 islands in Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, with floating woven polypropylene fabric - in pink. And so it goes through the art historical ages, recognized artists using pink: Picasso's red period, Matisse's "Pink Nude." You can even purchase a tube of Fragonard pink oil paint.

Smithsonian ran an article on the gender equation of pink (and blue) but what interests me, more than the social aspect, is the basic argument surrounding the legitimacy of pink as a color. There are blogs about this nonexistent wavelength and there are books.

So why do I feel defensive? Squeamish about showing this particular fan? After all, pink occurs in nature, naturally. Cherry blossoms, roses, insects camouflaging themselves in pink, and pink flamingos. Traveling outside my own culture informs me that, for example, in the Thai color chart pink is associated with Tuesday. The bottom line is the free association and conditioning that I, as an American, have to consistently dismiss in order to encounter this new fan without hesitation. Then again, Thursday is Valentine's Day, spring is "around the corner," and pastel colored eggs will soon be dancing before my eyes. Huge task but not insurmountable. Perhaps the irony in writing this blog, in processing my thoughts and feelings about the color pink, is that I have now influenced your experience of this very fan.

As one viewer expressed, upon seeing the fan multiple times, "It's growing on me." Pink is a color that can symbolize an embrace but which, apparently and inherently in art, is not a color easily embraced.