Searching for my art/craft "voice…"

Drawing was a favorite pastime when I was a child. Somehow this (left, and below w/ detail) is the only childhood sketch that has survived. As an older kid I did more with crayons, and when it was decided I could not draw, graduated to  paint-by-numbers. In my teens and college years I switched to fiber, trying needlepoint, crochet and crewel.  My college roommate, fine-artist Lissa Ainley used to say  that while she was “artsy,”  I was more “craftsy.”   What little  artistic aspirations I had as a child soon died out  for lack of nourishment and only more recently has it begun its rebirth after many false starts dabbling in various crafts in my late 20’s and 30’s including stained glass, stone carving, and painting.  I enjoyed the stained glass but it was expensive and messy (shards/splinters of glass all over the apartment), never got accustomed  to breathing lead fumes, was constantly cutting myself and I never became very skilled technically, although I did produce a few nice, although rough pieces, and it kept me off the streets, as they say. Below is my first stained glass piece.

Stone carving for me was a fiasco—the activity was slow, demanded more  patience than I could muster at the time, I found it impossible to visualize  (if you want to carve a bear, just cut away everything that doesn’t look like a bear), and I found it physically difficult to use the heavy tools. The number of blows I dealt with hammer and chisel can be counted on my fingers and toes—I did not take to this and have nothing to show for it. As for the painting—well duh—I can’t draw! My one and only completed acrylic on masonite was a nightmare—a sort of forest green and sea foam thunder storm (you had to have been there, I trashed it years ago). The stone carving and painting attempts were inspired by artist Vijali Hamilton who has a different way of seeing than most of us. This  large carving/painting in a sandstone cliff in the Malibu Mountains was created in the late 1970’s by Vijali.   

Spirit Within Matter  by Vijali

It is exciting for me to see how it turned out as I only saw it in it’s earliest stages back then—under Vijali’s guidance, some of the tentative first “whacks” with hammer and chisel were done by me. As I recall, the piece is very large—maybe about 4 to 4.5 feet across and 3.5 feet high.  Vijali  has created an amazing series of similarly themed works in all sizes, from small hand-sized stones to enormous carvings in outcroppings of rock overlooking oceans, deserts and jungle landscapes all over the world, many painted, as is the Malibu work, with gradations of blue creating a giant eye or window illusion through the solid “matter” of the stone to reveal the “spirit”  it contains. (My apologies to Vigili for this half-assed description of her incredible art. Go to her website if you want to understand more about her work    www.worldwheel.org