Some meandering thoughts and artmaking on my mind this week.
I am in between projects. A little stymied. Taking it slowly.
I am trying to teach myself about painting an abstract background, layering it with text, and using overpaint to push the text back into the surface. All new to me.
But the content is familiar territory.
Here it is on my easel before I began work on the abstract background. I will fill up the surface around the girl with words that will resonate with people (particularly girls and young women) who grew up in the generation(s) in which adults never really told us anything. We were left on our own to figure things out.
I created a work several years ago that depicted this emotional state in a young girl: being between stages, between worlds, “Neither Here Nor There.”
Neither Here Nor There Art Quilt 2017
Neither Here Nor There as I painted it on my worktable.
In my family, my parents avoided important topics.
But I remember the one issue I grabbed onto strongly, decided by myself, a conviction that did not waver. In the sixties, when millions of young people like me were protesting and proclaiming that the Vietnam War was wrong, I knew that the protestors were right.
In my family this topic barely came up. My parents secretly loved Richard Nixon. (secretly they were also worried about how black people were all of a sudden getting stirred up and loud.) I tried a few rebellious words with them, but they did not take me too seriously.
But I knew. That war was wrong.
Now, here I am sixty years later, and the United States Government is again pursuing a war. And I know firmly in my soul that I believe it is wrong.
So, while I am struggling with artmaking and words, I discovered these words this week from general-then-president Dwight Eisenhower. I will end by sharing what he said:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone.
“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”
“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he said. “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
(President Dwight Eisenhower, April 1953, in a speech to newspaper editors.)
. . . . . . . . . .
For all of us: focus each day on the good
that needs to be done in the world.
Be part of doing it.
Thank you for reading. I always enjoy questions and comments.
--Bobbi