Fibermania

A Colorful Life

My old laptop was repaired and returned and it has ALL my pictures on it, so I was visiting last May's flower shots. I also found shots of my sister Brooke visiting us right before she and her family left for Singapore last fall.
This reminded me of an email from Brooke that asked questions about our family history. She is the youngest of four kids, and is 18 years younger than me. I was married at 19 and moved away, so you can understand that while we are related, we had very different childhoods. And because my parents divorced when she was about three, she knows very little about what went on before she was around.

Coincidentally Dave and I were discussing how little he knows about his father and grandparents and decided to ask his dad the important questions before it was too late.

So I have been thinking about history and what makes it important to our lives, and how it affects the person we have become...and with a little stretch of the subject matter about how our history affects the art we make. Big subjects.

This blog is usually lighthearted and funsy, but it could also have an introspective approach occasionally, as Dave's does.

Writing about our family will not pretty. And I have avoided it because I am not sure I can do it without evoking sympathy. I have no use for sympathy about the past. It is all healed in my heart and mind, but it was the stuff that made us all the way we are, isn't it? I mean the choices we made in dealing with the struggles and whether we let them overtake us or we chose instead to fight for ourselves and triumph in the end.

However writing about the past means writing about our mother, who is still alive and doesn't have access to the computer and won't be able to defend herself, so this doesn't seem fair for me to have my say without any recourse for her, not that she would read if it she could. So I have decided that I must make a separate private blog just for our siblings.

But what about art history? I believe that the artists that are written about are those that left information about their art and that information falls into the hands of those that need a thesis project or a magazine article or a book idea. We who were forced to study those dry texts in grad school wish the artist could have written INTERESTING descriptions about their art and life, and not left it to the imaginations of the historians. I would hate to have someone else explain my art after I have passed on. Eeeoouuuw!

Of half my output I would have this to say: I made this as a class sample. It was for the express use of teaching my students how to do xxxx. Pay no attention to this as art. It is merely an expedient to the end result.

But then the rest of it does need some explanation of purpose. I'll try and tackle some of this in the coming weeks. But not in a way that one would find in a college textbook. Not a chance!