Hand – Work

Twenty years ago today, 1998, I was on my way to Venezuela to collect shells with a group of collectors more experienced than I. In Caracas airport, I was amazed to see almost everyone walking with a cell phone to their ear. I learned later that the people had embraced this technology sooner than we had because their land-line phone system was so inadequate.

While I had signed up for the trip some months before, I didn’t realize I was in an altered emotional state from the events of the preceding three weeks, until I was in the van going to our hotel when the radio started playing the theme from the movie “Titanic”, “My Heart Will Go On,” and I began crying.

My former husband, Ray, had died suddenly of a heart attack three weeks earlier and my sons selected that song for the funeral.

It seemed not quite right to be going on vacation, but the trip was paid for and my sons told me to go and have a good time. I had not cried until now. The song was popular in Venezuela at that time, and every time I heard it, the tears started.

Fortunately, there were no radios on the beach. There were thousands of Turkey Wing, Arca zebra, shells on the beaches along with hundreds of Hairy Tritons, Cymatium pileare. In fact, so many of them that it was hard to find other smaller shells.

The weather was changeable, so I was either hot and sticky, or cold. Many days there was no hot water at the hotel. The beaches were dirty and trash strewn to the extent that I started asking myself, “What am I doing here?”

Ever the scavenger, I picked up all sort of interesting things: buttons, dominos, colored cord, drift wood, sea weed, net shards, marbles, feathers, and eye glasses.

Fast forward to December 2007, when I attended a weekend workshop in Santa Cruz, California, to learn about using encaustic wax. The next summer, after I had gotten the paints, wax, and equipment, I was looking for a subject to make an encaustic piece that was not just a sample. Every time I rummaged in my shells, I reminded myself I should use what I brought back from Venezuela.

I found the words to the song and printed them out in small blocks, along with a few bars of music. My first layer was blue encaustic paint. I floated the words and music across the sky. Into the hot wax I pressed the domino, small shells, buttons, rusty pieces, seaweed, and netting. I penciled in Venezuela 98 across the sky. The encaustic gives the 8 in. x 10 in. piece an “other-world” look.

I haven’t done encaustic since that summer, partly because I can’t ventilate my studio to use those materials, so I need to work outdoors. And life began to get more complicated the next year.

From what I’ve seen, I think doing encaustic well requires a well planned idea of what you hope to achieve. I used to work that way when I was weaving tapestries, but I don’t have that focus these days.

I stepped into another world last Sunday. My son and his family escorted me to San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA). We took BART from Dublin, California to a stop two blocks from the museum. The last time I remember being in the city was in 2002, when I had to get a visa for my shelling trip to Brazil.

We had lunch at a nice breakfast and lunch place that we found between the train and the MoMA. It was interesting to see sleek, high rise buildings next to older ones with all sorts of architectural decorations on their upper floors.

The museum has seven floors. I suggested that we start by seeing the exhibit I had come to see, the

work of Robert Rauschenberg, titled “Erasing the Rules.”

I had heard about this exhibit last summer when it was at the MoMA in New York, and scheduled to come to SFMoMA in November.  For me this was a must see.

I first saw some of his work in Cincinnati in 1970. I’ve seen pictures of his work from time to time, but I had not seen the actual work. Of course, you never know if going to see a show will be worth the effort until you have made the journey. I was not disappointed Sunday.  It is a fabulous exhibit.

The exhibit has paintings, drawings, assemblages, collages, videos of his collaboration with dancers, diagrams of how he planned what he wanted to make – on and on it went from section to section. There was so much it was overwhelming.

This man worked large. And small. He used everything – cardboard, fabric, metal, wood, stones, rope, zippers, newspaper, transfers, photography, silk screen, oil, enamel, ink, watercolor, crayons, car parts, even mud.

He was mixed-media before anyone knew what that meant. After about twenty minutes, I concluded that I am putting way too many interesting items into our trash or recycling bin. It took us about two and a half hours to work our way through all his work that was shown.

Of course, there is a book of this huge exhibit. I couldn’t pass it by. It measures 9 ¾ in. x 12 in. and is 1 3/8 in. thick, with 412 pages. It details how his career developed and contains items that were not included in the display.

Now, I can read about what I saw and remember how each piece looked. I can study his composition, which I find hard to do while I’m walking through a museum.

I didn’t take photos, but Jeremy did, and you can see them on my Facebook page. If you live near San Francisco you should go see this. But hurry, it closes on March 25.

Riding the train back toward home, I was mentally going through my stash, recalling the materials I have in abundance that other artists are not using in their work. Those are the things I should play with to see what they will do. Forget the rules. Improvise. Ask what if . . .?