Battle of the wills.

Side stepping ferns in my garden, I checked on my peonies and lupins in the moonlight. 

The tender leaves have been eaten without mercy. It is a battle of the wills, established roots against the invading insect. 

The spring will proceed, regardless.

 

Sent.

Sometimes a response is delayed longer than is wanted. A sadness grows, because there is room to fill. Until I remembered she was one of the few who saw me, when I did not. 

With Anticipation.

With anticipation. Now reread that as if it's from the Rocky Horror Picture Show- all drawn out, hissing the syllables, and you are 13 again, and with your best friend Molly, and you are reciting what you think you know and you most certainly do not know. 

Here. At age 41 I am revisiting these feelings. Waiting at the Walla Walla airport with a trigger painting that goes to Seattle. Construction for its future home is not complete, so this is just a preliminary conversation that will set the stage for a someday drawing.

Then onto a voyage across the eastern seaboard. The universe is collaborating to support and overwhelm. I'm traveling across the country to walk into another round of the "are you prepared and do you really know what your talking about?" game.

You know how it goes. It always starts with a nod that says, yeah sure, I know what your talking about.

Do I know Terry Oconor, the nineties dancer... Oh yeah, of course I do. 

 Wait, do I? Then racing home to triple check that I'm not crazy...

....Even though the nineties is definitely 20 years ago, you actually never forgot the night you sat there with your fathers childhood bestie. Timothy Smith, he who went from hairy hippy who played the tuba to be the slender, dancer/dance enthusiast book editor. Back when you were 20 living in NYC... it was really actually the entrance to Harlem, upper west side Manhattan - these things do make a difference to an city life's perception you know...We sat at the promising show in question. It was an important moment, this was "the" important young choreographer. Remember this, remember this. Store this. Let's be honest, does an impressionable forget the dance performance where Mikhail Baryshnikov sat validating the moment, and the dancer's promise?

Timmy clarified by a late night Facebook conversation: 

"Tere O'Connor 

Misha sat right behind us, with Rob Besserer who was in Misha's and Mark Morris's White Oak Project with my friend Katherine Graham.... "

Misha's? The ground breaking that was Mark Morris? Good grief that was many moons ago. None the less, I won this round, I did know the answer the nod was in truth. From the days of when I thought dance would be a part of my life and before it was a family joke. Back before now. 

The engines are starting.

Here is the nagging feeling about the winter's preparation for the week's coming game. My work is not all equal. There is promise, and I am building my own place to stand. And yet, looking at the walls last night as I repacked, in my bedroom, in the room that serves as my winter studio, as the room that serves as a giant closet. There was a reason the paintings and photographs have found their way back to my hands. They often fall in two categories. First, when a artist, better then I, saw a simple work, she called me out. "That is an ease for you and as a result, it's not interesting. It leaves me with no questions." Or second, the shrill horror I feel when I realize a piece's immaturity. Looking at a painting that refused to be bought. Those strokes look like middle school, like I was 13.

The plane is lifting. 

Here is what I do like. The process of the trigger drawing or painting, as I am travel with today. The project embodies both the moment of conception and the passage of time between the first install to the second or even third. A trigger piece is an investment in the future. And a relic of the past. My mark, almost always, is getting better. It gives me a chance to rebuild an idea. 

This trigger painting that is sitting in the cargo riding over these snow capped mountains is part II of the Welcome to the Garden Party series, from last fall's show at Studio Two Zero Two in Walla Walla.

After spending the last two winter weeks on Welcome to the Garden Party, part I, installing it in a guest house, I am very familiar with the curves and lines that were started last summer. This coming summer the drawing, that will take place, will be the third and maybe final time I construct my walk under the water birch.  

The lights of Seattle are in view, and I'm still journaling like I did in my teens and twenties on paper for what I thought would be private. In fact those pages became amusing fodder for my sister and mother, as they stored the boxes that held my youth. Tears of hilarity, as they read my scribbles trying to make sense of my love affairs, and my growing mind.

Now I insist in marking my passage, posting my progress and checking my facts for anyone and in particular, my children. Maybe it will help them in their games to come. My week to come, I will be checking facts in bathrooms between conversations, forgetting important people's names, nodding to things that I know nothing about - as often as I absolutely do know everything about.  Hm, I will play the game, and document the voyage into the fog that lays between me and where I am going "with annnnticcccipaaation."

 

Something to build on.

Something to build on.

February 4, 2016

Docks, where I have sat or leapt. They reside in my dreams as a place to go, to dive into the water and swim away. Swift raised walkways climb over the marshes, and wind past wild Rhododendrons, and hover near a cross section of leaves. On the edges of cliffs, the first nations’ fishing piers continue their reach out over the water into my abstract allegory.

Fear and exhilaration are so close to these places. Wound together with what is on hand, the posts touch the earth for stability in response to the terrain. Additions to the landscape are designed by emotion. The ground is populated without our footsteps, only our shadow. Water is not particular, it overtakes regardless. Skirting the elements, the platforms give chance to pluck out subsistence.  Collecting as I go. To give as I go.

New Works: Something to Build on.

Press Release: New Works: Something to build on. 

Thursday, Feb 4, 2016 5-7 pm

Closes Saturday, March 26, 2016 7:00pm

Group Show with Penny Michel and Squire Broel.

Studio Two Zero Two 202 Main Street Walla Walla Washington 99362

 

After last falls Welcome to the Garden Party, Studio Two Zero Two has asked Augusta Sparks Farnum to continue her residency for another season. With a new installation and works on paper, Augusta Sparks Farnum establishes her current theme.  Come see what Tex Cox is talking about in his latest community email. “I am sure Augusta will surprise us again with something totally, outstandingly original.”  As the Studio Two Zero Two guest artist, the work will be up through March 26. 

 

To see more work and Augusta Sparks Farnum’s writing consider her website. www.augustasparks.com

When she was my age.

She not only looks like me, but she is with her friends, and they are all my age. 

Mary, my 90 year old grandmother who just moved herself into a retirement community, is looking at my grandfather through the 16 mm film showing herself, without pretension. The eye brows and lips belong to a woman who has yet to leave the home front. She sits in her bathing suit, in the sun. It must be the early 1960s, the Sail Fish Club at its peak. This century’s sexual revolution is coming, civil rights are starting. Women have short hair, short shorts, and maintain the family structure. Independence is not without permission.

Late night, I am waiting. I wait by watching the 16 mm films made by my grandfather, sent to me by my father, on my phone. In the film, the men, the women, and the children play. My grandfather Bill, sees the synchronicity and it is beautiful. My grandmother Mary, my genetic doppelgänger is mesmerizing. Her future husband is there, with his wife Rusty. She, like my grandfather, will die of cancer. In this film, Rusty is still the avid sailor. Everyone is glistening. I am reminded, we are all living the same lives, only improved….? By what? By invention?

Sheer joy of participating is the goal of the films. The stars of the film, people I knew when they were grey haired, and dying, are racing around in shorts with wind blown hair. There is the same pensive look fleeting through their faces, amid swigs of water, or gin and tonics, and laugher. There is the same management of food, and fun, and function. 

They are gathered, moving in and out of tiny sail boats, jumping off docks, sitting on rock ledges. Conversations are continued, are stalled, are shared at the water’s edge.

At the edge, the families submit to the winds, and the community. Everyone is submitting to the day. Submitting to the water. Except for those that are waiting. The time has yet to come. To go. To be. To leap. To shake it all off. Watching and waiting. And watching, for a turn.

When I look at Mary, looking at me sideways, through my grandfathers films. Her face says “there is so much more than this.” In my repetition of life, equality, and inventions speed up life’s functions. ok. ok. And yet, I have longer to live. By extension, my daughter will have even more time.

My grandmother, in my grandfather’s white oxford, outrageously beautiful, and ready for her own terms. She was my age when she built something to stand on.

 

 

Last fall's biography, bare witness, as I am changing.

Augusta Sparks Farnum (b.1974) grew up in New England, home of the transcendentalists. With artist parents, she lived amongst abstract painted narratives on the walls and floors. In houses that were built, and pulled down, by hand. Independence came early to Augusta as she moved freely, walks in multi-storied forests, swimming in natural bodies of water, and immersed in visual conversations. She was guided to consider where she looked, early. Graduating from Bard College in 1998, with a degree in Photography, the world was full of stories to be told in a single large format photograph.

Constructing an adult life, Augusta's art circled inwards.  With a young family, visions recalibrate to the mess of the kitchen sink, and utter chaos. She renewed her botanical studies, inspired by cultivating a garden, and as a florist. Drawn to the simple line, versus the complications of a darkroom with small children, attention was directed to what was accessible and close at hand, most often this meant a pencil and a scrap of paper.

Since 2008, during the re-modeling of her tiny house, art work began to crawl into the plaster and wood paneling. The bathroom tiles grew a mural, an ode to an ending florist career, and pulling in the gardens that adorn the house. The use of common building materials, sheets of plywood and plaster, became the ground work for Augusta's art practice, for the years to come.

After what started as a side project in 2007, Augusta founded the Carnegie Picture Lab, a volunteer art history and art education nonprofit in the Walla Walla Valley for Elementary schools.  Carnegie Picture Lab continues to play an important role in her family's life. In particular, helping to establish a healthy development program.  The now established nonprofit has 70 volunteers, serves 9 schools, with 4000 students, a two person paid staff, including a program director, and a 10 person board in housed on Main street.

Augusta now directs the majority of her attention towards her own art. Integrating art into life as a layer versus as an object has been a theme. The body of work continues to explore multiple mediums, raw and precious lines, color light study, and spacial mapping.

The work has become more abstracted, and the color atmospheres more emotive. Though derived from relationship studies, like the bowing of one tree to another, it is only yet another form of abstract narrative conveyance. 

The social aspect of the art practice, specifically the installation's influence, is the indication of a good host.

Fall 2015

Studio Two ZeroTwo

Walla Walla. Washington

www.augustasparks.com

Something to Stand on.

This newest body of work found me after a long hiatus. There is a collective in my life that has been working on, what one might call, the work. With that said. These platforms are the structures that we all make, when we need something to stand on, climb through, run past. They are made out of necessity. And, for now, they are enough. 

The work is making its debut at Studio Two Zero Two. 

The rules of my work according to this day, April 18, 2015.

Roving ideas, and statements of process keep repeating themselves with insistence like a bad pop song. To clear my head, I sit to write.  Today Janice James’s class comes to see the studio.  They have come to see the best part. My Judy Pfaff process shot. The brain spread out, someone once said. And yet, my years as a house wife insisted on tiding it up just enough. I sit to write. I need to know where I am going before I rant and ramble in my public persona way, and say things I wont remember, to these unknowing and willing. To make sense. To explain the need for the moments that I decided to preserve. The William Clift way, with his dowsing for photographs. It is my job as an artist to choose an image, is that not always, an act of divining? The vision sought and found is my empirical truth, for the moment.

 

Today is about my process. Is that not why people come to see a studio? I think of the many rules I follow, ones made while I was young to bring me into the stern human that I wanted to be. Rules both found in my social and art practice.  Discipline. Discipline. Discipline. This was hung on my wall, after I learned to not ask permission. The king asked his court artisan to paint him a rooster. A year went by and no roster was produced, the king was frustrated and called for his court artisan. “Where is my rooster?” The artisan reached into his robes and pulled out a scroll, a brush, and a vessel of Sumi ink. He laid them on the table and with few short strokes, produced the most beautiful roster ever seen. “I do not understand” spoke to the king, “I've waited a year and that took only a moment. Why make me wait?” I can only imagine what the court artisan said, “Dear Sir, I have spent every day, all day making roosters….” Practice. Practice. Practice. Follow the line all the way through. Be truthful, lies will always be known. Amy Bruner asks, it that the truth? Own the choice to be raw, it is the response and record of movement. Move with the body and not the fingers. Know where you are, and where your body is. Stand whenever possible. Line has power, as much as the eyebrow whisker. Know the importance of leaving the line alone and what it means to take it out. Keep your marking habits throughout the image. Color can be the gushing water from the spout, turn on and off. Practice the use of color. Make it a  decision, not just an emotive discourse. Balance the work. Ground the work. Arthur Gibbons says, know how it is to be presented, know it before you make it. Everyone says, You will always be responding to what has been done- done by the self, done by the others, and this neither matters and absolutely does. If I keep on working, it will resolve itself. The dimensions of the work must be something I can handle by myself. Picking up the art, carrying the art, moving the art, it must be do-able, alone. This is an absolute. Otherwise the work will wait and wait and wait for help, and stop. Reinvention is a place of creativity, repetition is a place that refines the idea. Give yourself to those who know more. Respond. Look. See. Walk. My father, Bill Anderson says walk. He is correct. And walk when I need to think. Think it through before acting. There is often another answer. It is the 89th try out of 100 that the answer comes, says that  designer, in that Rolling stone, in that bathroom, in that house, in that town. Trust. Know when to stop thinking. Stop thinking. When help is offered, allow for that help to be self directed, other people’s opinion is a collaboration. Respond. Know what is not part of the job. Know that a multitude of life experiences can simultaneously build a stronger path. It is here where I get hung up on that children's book, Frederick the Mouse, the poet who watched without getting his paws dirty. William Cliff taught it was equally important to practice physical labor, visual labor, and mental labor. Without work, and history there is no empathy towards relationship. Look. Consider shapes, colors, botanicals, humans relating to each other, move, reflect light. Elliot Porter's thrown rocks will always be far more beautiful then placed rocks. Establish structure to give balance. Respond. Keep it simple. Too many elements make a mess. Sonia Schmitt suggests starting with 3 elements. Look at the edges. Question the focal point. Consider the struggle: object versus the periphery. Periphery is the dream. Object is the narrowed concentration. 

 

Everything changes, within this spring I have made three ideas of work to present as one and yet my drawings today are the same as my photographs 20 years ago. Stephen Shore says we only have one or two ideas, if we are brilliant we have three ideas. Paul McCarthy says we have millions. Lynda Benglis says keep working, and it is time for my work to get crazy. My mother, Katharine Bell, says gold makes it automatically decorative. Paul Mogensen says decorative does not have to be a bad word. Amy Baumann says to practice and my drawing does looks better. Others, so many others, just look. 

 

I stack all of these up and my husband stands guard against them. I am the person I was at five, drawing on the wall, in my closet, in my room. Following the example of my forebears, record what you see, know, smell. My hair is the same mishmash, now I wear a big bow made of plastic to pull my bangs up, to see clearly. No distractions. 

 

Except, yesterday. I find my self exhausted and pushing against the wall. I moved through what I was working on, multiple times already this spring, I've moved through. I’m ready to cycle back through, and I only have seven days left. I have a whole new chapter to work on this week. No time.  No time to look. No time to be truthful. I sit here working, I can no longer stand. I see Klimt in one corner and Jim dine in the other. I am only doing the same thing again, and yet I think it's different, it is a mess, it is okay, it is decidedly mine.

The Shop.

Seems it is time to step up to the plate and claim my heritage as a shop owner. Or rather take a step towards the idea, with my new switch plates- which are totally cool. It is not a new idea, just one I’ve had for too long, and just didn’t know how to map forward without pain and confusion. Little steps, that is all these are, and wicked awesome million dollar ideas. We have all had them. These are little ones that I have acted on. In little ways to bring just a little bit more art into yours and everyone else’s life. Enjoy.

The flood's intention.

So. In the area of progress, the winter has brought distraction, and opportunities to reconfigure.

Work that resides inside me was shown in parallel, when driving with a winter full moon.  By myself, I remembered: music still allows me to separate from the internal environment. 

How could I have forgotten, from yesterday, when I danced in the kitchen?

Here, the work is done for me. Floods in. Fills. Moves past.

Floods hardly stay in one place. Never for a cup of for tea, rather at its own pace and desire. Oh, convince me to live otherwise, for I am not so easy to sway. If only for 3 and a half minutes or so.    

This is the what.

Maira Kalman for Art Club

 

Why pick an artist? In my volunteer work with Picture Lab, I think a lot about choosing artists to enlighten a large community. Artists have messages to tell, or maybe I have a message to tell through an artist. You'll never know.  I have the honor of attracting people's attention to those particular topics. 

Given the construct of the women artist, by Art Club, I had a variety of ideas that were rising to the top, until I had a conversation pertaining to my own work. This past summer I had my first show in years at AMO in Waitsburg.  Art has risen to the top of my priority list like sweet cream. The last few years as I settle into my back seat chair at Art Club, I have been experiencing, and exploring this reengagement. After what seems like a great hibernation, and a Quantum leap. I am artist again.

So, when it was asked whom I looked to for inspiration, three artists came up. Kiki Smith, (maybe a future talk). David Shrigley, a dark witty illustrations, and Maira Kalman, a designer first, or is it writer first? or is it painter first....?  An avid producer of the illustrated "snapshot." She has flipped the viewers experience, through "narrative drawing and expressive illustrations." I had only been a viewer, and I needed to delve into what she considers, and the world behind the claim that she, Maira is a life-ist.


Carnegie Picture Lab

in

Six years ago while working in my garden, I made the radical decision to give the next several years of my life to bring art to the schools. Taking privilege out of art, every child every class, making it accessible to all.  All meaning children and their volunteers, in elementary schools, in Walla Walla.  

Hardly a day goes by when the effort was not considered. How to make the program better, have the volunteers happier or how to best blow the minds of the young and unexposed. Oh and the possibilities are endless, what with partnerships and field trips and books? And then there is the structural work, how to invent a board, a non-profit or a working studio. With parents, many heavily educated adults who had given their attention solely to children, we pulled them out of their comfort zones. Reintroducing the idea of working for all the children, dishes and laundry can wait, we must volunteer for art.  

All of these things have a life of their own now. My bullish ways have been replaced with people who talk politely, interact correctly, expect accordingly, and present outstandingly, all in the honor of art. 

And now although my responsibilities continue, my lioness ways are directed at that which I would beseech others to do. 

Can you believe this phoenix?

http://carnegiepicturelab.com