The Geo Physicist

This is the radio program that enlarged my thinking about fault lines...

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/fragility/

Please send me your faults

I want your list of faults! What do you hide, what do you consider weak, what embarrasses or shames you, what do you wish would go away, or wish that you could change about yourself?

Some of mine: My perceived lack of success, always feeling broke, that I don't earn more money doing what I love (making art and teaching), my skin's dryness, slackness and bumpiness, the bunion on my right foot...and I'm just getting warmed up!

I was inspired by listening to a Speaking of Faith podcast of Xavier Le Pichon: "one of the world's leading geophysicists, as well as a compelling spiritual thinker. [He discussed] the meaning of what we call "humanity" through his discoveries in plate tectonics," describing the earth's fault lines as a fundamental aspect of the earth as a living, changing organism. Likewise, in humans, it is through our weaknesses that we connect with each other, and create community.

The faults you send me will be gathered and arranged by my friend and collaborator, Robert Metrick into a sung performance for my upcoming installation A Porous Space, at College of DuPage Gahlberg Gallery in June, 2010.

Winter on the Lake

I take morning walks on the lake with my dogs all year, but the winter is when the lake is completely transformed with snow and ice. This year I have been drawing every day and feeling very humbled by the task of finding lines that somehow respond to all that moves and changes around me. It is invigorating, and I find myself looking forward to the task, and what colors the light and water will present to me.

Bonfire in Wisconsin

The Post Farm the day after Thanksgiving.

Starting New Things

Recently I cleaned out my studio. I unstretched canvases and rolled them up and wrapped a great many in bubble wrap. Bit by bit, I cleared out stuff, and washed and painted the floor a new color, a sort of putty yellow that lifted my spirits considerably.

I find it so hard to start work again after a show, even if I think I know what I plan to do for the next show, I am overwhelmed by a sense of not knowing, a state where my anxiety and self criticism run amok.

The activity that really helps is writing and drawing in my sketchbook, a free place where nothing need be good, or finished. Slowly, slowing a picture of what I am to do next, begins to appear.

I really don't like not knowing. Something like cleaning or sweeping or cooking dinner is very clear…I know when the floor is cleaner or when the dinner is done and when to stop. In the studio there is no clear criteria other than what I invent.

I also started a singing group recently, very amateurish, which meets Sunday afternoons. It feels so good to I sing, especially when I can harmonize with other voices. There is a magic that happens when the voices melt into one another and verses are traversed like so many swelling waves. I have set a goal to make up songs and try them out with the group. God, it's fun.

Teaching Practice

I see my teaching as directly connected to my studio practice. I hope I am willing and able to do whatever I ask of my students. I teach through my motivation to understand better what I perceive as a basic human need to fulfill ones potential as a creative and ethical being who is both a whole and distinct individual and who is a thriving and contributing member in community. With students I explore ideas about art practice through researching the relationship of ethics to aesthetics. These themes inform all I do in the studio and all of my work with students. Discovering and calling attention to existing sets of relationships through one's art practice embraces a sense of connectedness and thereby increases the possibility of wholeness and health.

I began teaching at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1986. As a twenty eight year old second year graduate student, I was asked to lead an evening painting class. I was not provided with instructions, guidance or any support whatsoever. I knew immediately that somehow I instinctively could to talk to my first students, some of whom were older, working professionals. I have continuously worked to develop this intuitive capacity that enables me to help students, through reading, researching and consulting with other teaching artists.

Immediately following graduate school, I was hired to teach painting and drawing at the University of Iowa, where from 1988 to 1994 I taught full time at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. In addition to my regular teaching responsibilities, I created and ran the Art Department's All Media Forum for two years, which I developed in response to a need for increased interdisciplinary discourse. I also helped develop undergraduate curriculum and began teaching an undergraduate seminar, which continues to be my passion.

In 1997, I was hired to teach a graduate interdisciplinary seminar on the Role of the Artist at the SAIC. Because of my own interdisciplinary history as a painter and time and performance artist, I especially relished the opportunity to begin my teaching experience at SAIC with this particular class of diverse and intermedia students.

Unique to my teaching approach is my emphasis on the social function of painting since Manet and the advent of modernism. I help my students to be knowledgeable about the past and well versed in current developments, to know why they choose to paint, to be discerning about their painting materials and to see their choices as part of a historical continuum. I want them to understand that the decision to practice painting has social implications, that it cannot be a neutral set of actions, and to see that their choices have impact and meaning, both on their own terms and, they intend it or not, against the backdrop of history and contemporary practice.

With my seminar students, I read and discuss perspectives that enable us to see the historical relationship of the arts to power as manifested in the realm of art practice. My goal is that each student becomes conscious of his or her attitudes and assumptions about being an artist and what art does, thus bringing them greater clarity in the studio, or however they may choose to shape their art practice. In exploring these issues with my students, I offer various artistic models to help them clarify their own process and to enable them to validate the social place of their painting.

I believe that I must continue to evolve, both as an artist and as a teacher. I embrace the traditions, techniques and disciplines of painting proper and conceptual painting approaches. In my painting and drawing classes, I emphasize the history and materiality of painting. We spend a good deal of time taking as much advantage as possible of seeing actual work in the Art Institute and other institutions and galleries in Chicago, as well as looking at painting from books and digital reproductions during class.

In studio classes, I provide structure and projects that help train students' capacities for rigor, productivity and discernment. I am an enthusiastic, demanding instructor. As much as I am able, I endeavor to see students' work from their perspective, and to help them to find the language and resources that will allow each grow through their work. I openly acknowledge that I have subjective preferences, share them, open to them to challenge, and invite differing and opposing perspectives to flourish in the classroom studio.

A Biography

My love of painting, with its qualities of hand made materiality and human scale, and the energy of old churches have inspired my work for over twenty-five years.

I moved from Boston to Chicago in 1987. Hired as Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Iowa in 1988, I spent over 6 years commuting between Chicago and Iowa City. Between 1990 and 1993, the performance aspect of my work dropped away in favor of painting based installations, such as, When Ready, Bear Fruit, at the Hermit Foundation's 1993 Growthrings International Art Symposium, in Plasy, Czech Republic. There I was able to realize my dream of visiting the country that elected the writer dissident Vaclav Havel to be its first president and to make an installation in a church environment. The site-specific installation I created in the Plasy monastery granary was based on a baroque cathedral floor plan and included sculptural objects and my first fresco painting.



In 1994, I was awarded a Regional Artists' Project Grant to create Mutual Borders, which took place at Community United Methodist Church in the Back of the Yards Neighborhood of Southwest Chicago. My first community-based work was motivated by my desire to better understand my relationship as an artist to a particular community. I also wanted to see my work in an actual church, since the influence of my Catholic upbringing in my work in terms of materiality and ritual was becoming more and more apparent to me.

At that time, members of the three distinct ethnic congregations mirroring the ethnic make up of the church community engaged in a heroic but ultimately unsuccessful effort to save their dying church by attempting to merge congregations. They invited me in to work with them, a relationship which lasted two years and culminated in my execution of a traditional fresco painting inside the church.

In order to directly involve the church community, I worked with two teenagers from each congregation over a four-month period. As they developed their artwork for the Mutual Borders artist book, we discussed my taped interviews with the congregation elders and how race and economics impacted their lives.

In 1997, I began teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I continue to teach today. I collaborated with artist Jeff Hilliard at Prairie Avenue Gallery, Chicago, to create the installation Illumination.Ornamentation.Collaboration.Decoration, consisting of wall paintings, oil paintings and artist books responsive to the history and architectural richness of the historic Prairie Avenue Mansion. This project lay the foundation for the next large site-specific project I completed in 1999 at the Chicago Cultural Center, Death, Dreams, & Heraldry.

The Chicago Cultural Center is Chicago's one hundred year old former library and war memorial. Fascinated by the omnipresence of the Civil War Memorial and its ideals of male heroism, I countered with notions of private, intuitive experience.

The architecture of the Cultural Center, its two glass rotundas, luminosity, the principles of illumination through knowledge and through public civic service, all influenced the forms of the project. I used the four shapes of cast glass Heraldic Emblems I-IV as the project's central image. Inspired by Baroque window architecture, I began making emblem shapes in 1993 when I first visited the Czech Republic for my artist residency. My emblems reference heraldic shields and their many permutations of symbolic and ornamental representation. The heraldic shield both protects and identifies. An infinite variety of forms are possible.

Of the many pieces I made for the show, the content of my artist book Picturing Death elicited considerable response from viewers. Picturing Death consisted of eight gouache paintings and accompanying writings, which functioned as a cathartic vehicle for my fears and experiences with death. Moved by the power of the stories people began to share with me, I produced the simple but effective structure of my next piece, the Picturing Death Project. The project traveled to numerous venues in the Midwest, including the Evanston Art Center's 2003 exhibit, Remembrance, in which I created secular/sacred environments that engage the architecture and culture of each location. The Picturing Death Project provides a structure for journal writing with four questions that help participants examine how we will choose to live with the knowledge that death is inevitable.

My work on the Picturing Death Project inspired me to curate an exhibition of artists' work responding to the theme of death and dying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Betty Rymer Gallery. Mortal, which opened shortly after the September 11 attacks, provided a forum at the school to contemplate some of the grief and loss of the time. The exhibition came to the attention of counselors at Horizon Hospice, Chicago, who were planning a conference on the culture of grieving. After including the exhibit as part of the conference, we began a fruitful and ongoing collaboration based on their use of the Picturing Death Project, which, presented at both art venues and community spaces, continues to the present.

In 2007, I produced two major installation projects, The Flux of Matter at the University of Indiana, Kokomo, and Studio Practice at Koscielak Gallery, Chicago. Looking for an equivalent to Romanesque church architecture in the American Midwest, and intuiting that Native Americans would have an analogous tradition of sacred architecture, I learned of the contemporary tribe of the Miami Nation of Indians of Indiana located near the gallery at the University of Indiana, Kokomo. My personal relationship with this community and my research into their history and culture became the focus of my installation and paintings.

Also inspired by eighteenth and nineteenth century French artist self-portraits, I made paintings of my studio workspace and explored my connection to other communities, most particularly with the Miamis, who had several centuries of intermingling with French priests and fur trappers, many of whom assimilated into the Miami tribe. Along with paintings, I made paper and cardboard forms based on eighteenth and nineteenth century paintings of artists' studios, heraldry (clan identification on protective shields) and architectural forms, such as traditional Miami Indian longhouses and French Romanesque churches. These forms engaged organic, decorative ornamental shapes with infinite possibilities of energetic, synergistic and symbolic representation. I activated the relationships of these forms in my animation Eulogy for Lost Worlds which symbolically chronicles the loss of identity and history through the intermingling of French fur trappers and priests with the Miami Indians for several centuries in the territory that is now Indiana.

For my exhibition Studio Practice, I presented a facsimile of my studio space, highlighting particular aspects such as my easel and palette table, shelves of books, both sketchbooks and research material, stacks of paintings both in progress and completed, and works by artist friends who inspire and influence my work.