My Pound of Flesh

I've always spoken through my art, or through other's art (quotes from gifted verbalists). It's always been difficult for me to translate my artwork into words. But through this particular flesh series, I've decided that I need to risk more to push further.

It's interesting to look at art history and artists and see the stages and metamorphoses they go through. This blog has been a vehicle for me to see my own changes. Change is not always easy or comfortable, and to share that process is difficult. I'm hoping that by working through my own uneasiness, it will aid in my growth.

This flesh series has gone through many stages. I first started working on it after I attended a viewing at a funeral. Seeing a person's lifeless body is a piercing experience. I had difficulty in finding the right descriptive word--I decided on "piercing". Mariam-Webster defines the word as: 1 causing intense discomfort to one's skin. Seeing a body separate from the part that makes a person who they are, pierces you--or rather through you. For me, it makes the belief in the spirit side of a person very apparent. Other's may call it the mind or consciousness. The fact is, that life here on earth is a unique and even fleeting experience. Everyone enters it the same way, and exits it the same--through birth and death. By using skin as a medium, I hoped to show that connection, through disconnection. Everyone wears a skin--a canvas for the spirit.

My first efforts disturbed many. Which is in a way what I intended. Flesh apart from the spirit is alien, even though it is an intimate part of us. Others viewed it as sexual. Another interesting part of flesh, tied to our earthy existence and survival as a species. Even that part of our flesh, sexuality, disconnected from emotion, in my opinion, have the same disturbing results.

I then got lost in the medium and the process. I strayed from any one point and went wild, playing with ideas--the connection/disconnection we have with the earth/environment, with humanity, with spirituality, focusing too much on our flesh and the decoration, painting of the flesh, painting on the flesh. Line, color and texture were becoming the focus in some pieces more than any real meaning. Which was fun. But confusing.

So, back to the basics. Black and white. A pound of flesh. A topographical map of one's life between birth and death. The choices we make that make us--the sacrifices and the unrepayable debts. I may be getting to a closer focus, I hope, but am still at the beginning of the process.