Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Resuscitation

"As one gets older one sees many paths that could be taken.  Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion."  - Jasper Johns


I've been going through my years of archived photos today. It will be 10 years this Fall that Kafuffle Designs was born out of a need to find my creative voice again so that I could survive my failing 16 year marriage.  After my first daughter was born, I had decided not to go back to the 16 hour days of movie advertising.  I continued to do freelance from home, generating all of the artwork for KROQ calendars and events,  hand tinting photography for advertisements and greeting cards, creating logos, and even illustrating a book.  When computers deemed my skills archaic, I stepped away from advertising....a bit sore from being replaced by a machine pretty much overnight, but also a bit relieved because I HATED what I was doing.   I didn't hate all of it...KROQ was great, and they paid quite well, but everything that I created was about reading other people's minds...trying to extract what was in their heads and getting it down on the page.  Ever since I could hold a crayon, my creativity had been my voice, as I was terribly shy, quiet, anxious kid.  I preferred to say things with artwork than with words...and as an adult, that is one thing that hadn't changed.  As my marriage was ending I immersed myself in paint and paper and found objects...I became obsessed with resurrecting broken things and breathing life back into them, and they in return filled my lungs with the fresh air that I needed to find my voice again.  When I look back at my archived photos I am reminded of all of the different stages of growth I have gone through.  It's difficult to describe " what I do", because it kind of looks like a shotgun blast of unfocused creative output.  I find it easier to say what I need to say if I combine a lot of different mediums....I don't like rules very much, which is funny coming from a person who keeps her anxiety under control, not with drugs, but with a ridiculous amount of structure and planning.  Art is my release valve...it is the one place where anything and everything is possible and I let my hair down.







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