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Wednesday, November 6, 2019

My Saturna Island Art Studio in Action

Welcome to my art studio on Saturna Island in the Southern Gulf Islands of B.C. Canada. 



That says it all, for now. 

More Creative Life News

You can read and see more about creative life, travels and tips rom this itinerant artist at Creative Life News click  https://www.janetstrayer.com

Regards, Janet 








Monday, February 4, 2019

Retro is Always in Style

I've been thinking about time. It's tricky, as we know--  an elusive, immaterially real concept that entwines us as we live each moment, day, year of our lives. Time marks our memory, our mirrors, and leaves traces on everything in our world. Like the wind, we "see" time only in its effects, its collaterals.

Then there's the fairly uniform way we mark time by clocks and calendars. Civilization must agree on some things at least, though we take our liberties there too, like the idiosyncracies of local yes-or-no "daylight-savings time". And the wildly different personal timescapes of individuals. Some are highly compartmentalized, others not.

Me, for example, especially at this time of my life. I experience time as a rapidly moving conveyor that blends many elements backwards and forwards. Each minute is vast with so much flowing into it. Yet, I'm also acutely aware of the relentless ebb of minutes, the finality that will be reached... who knows when. 

For most of us, looking back through time's traces in photo albums, old magazines, and even historical art work is often a moving experience. Given that time is nonstationary, looking "through time" necessarily moves us from now to then, wherever and whenever those places exist.

Art history has always seemed a treasure-chest to me. How it cycles back and forth between stylistic preferences and different "avant-gardes". How amazing break-throughs seem to occur alongside advancing tradition. How styles change, are assimilated or absorbed into new treatments. How old things come alive again in new contexts.
painting by Janet Strayer, 36"x36", acrylic on canvas

 I'm pleased to have this work, Lady Cranach Likes Early Modern in an exhibit of Federation of Canadian Arists (click for Retro show). It's my take on a bust-portrait by Lucas Cranach that  I've appreciated for its outrageous costume and stylistic slyness --re-envisioned in this painting with a different face, lower body, and setting.

painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder
The  headress and upper clothing, especially the sleeves, identify her as a Northern Renaissance Cranach  -- but the face, setting, and mixed stylistic devices used in my painting play anachronistically with art history. My intent is to convey, more generally, the convergence of many epochs in painting, which typically builds from the past, acts in the present, and thinks of the future. I really enjoy this spiraling  of art-history and different styles.

Time moves on... in many directions. 

More Creative Life News

You can read and see more about creative life, travels, tips and creative adventures by this itinerant artist at Creative Life News at https://www.janetstrayer.com

Regards, Janet 











Monday, January 7, 2019

A New Year and What Have You Got to Show for It?

It's a new year and, as for every beginning, we wish it to be a good one. What's good, of course, is relative and subjective. So, with each of us wishing for a good year, there are bound to be conflicts among all those incompatible goods. Still, I like to think there might be some universal ones, like peace. I know: if wishes were horses, beggars could ride.  It seems worth it to keep thinking beggars might ride. In any case, it seems impossible for some of us not to keep wishing.

New Year's brings out customary but odd habits. Not the staying up until midnight and drinking champagne (if you're lucky). That's dandy so far as I'm concerned. But the typical old year's reckoning and new-year's resolution-ing is not something I want to do. Not personally, and not more generally in terms of  the society in which I live.

But it's unavoidable: the new year coundown of "best" (and of course it also brings to mind "worst". To me, there seems something so culturally sad and diminishing about going through  "the 10 best hits of of the old year" and similar lists. We still like to do it, though my own lists hardly match up. The flip side to our customary backward-looking reckoning is all the forward-looking resolutions we project into the future for bettering ourselves or our world, There's something reassuring about that forward-looking, I suppose. A little optimism about our own decisiveness for future action. So I'm picturing a petty con-artist saying to him/her-self, "Yeah, tomorrow I'm gonna quit all this petty theft and get into some serious crime!" Well, we do what we can.

I was wondering when this habit of new-year-resolutions started. Seems it has ancient and religious origins.  Thought the seasons differed, the ancient Babylonians made promises to their gods at the start of each year (Spring) that they would return borrowed objects and pay their debts. Whereas in the winter, the anciet Romans began each year by making promises to the god Janus (January).

We're hardly  surprised when, yet again, our actions disappoint our resolutions. No one holds us accountable for them anyway.  So what if, instead of momentous resolutions, we just decided, "keep being humane each day"? Does that sound too defeatist, not striving enough? How about just trying to be decent, as a good friend of mine once said?  I'll try that.
Detail of painting in Flow series by Janet Strayer

  So what have I got to show for the new year? Fortunately, since I set myself up for this one, I've got a new art show, with its opening reception next week: FLOW: Nature, Art, and Mind. Some of the paintings from my previous exhibition on the same theme are included,  as well as many additional ones.
Here's the write-up:

FLOW: Nature, Art and Mind is a collection of abstract and expressively representational paintings that seek to capture the dynamic energies of land, sea and sky. Inspired by the natural world on Saturna Island,  Strayer depicts the shifting currents amongst natural forms, which serve as a daily reminder of the delicate balance of geo-organic life. The seemingly solid Earth is alive with telluric energy and tectonic shifts, the Sea with oceanic flows, the Sky with atmospheric currents . . . each interacting to form and transform our world.

The exhibition is at Place des Arts in Vancovuver, a large and friendly setting that will be showing three separate art exhibits simultaneously: mine, those of another painter who uses alcohol inks in lovely abstract compositions,  and a photograhic work that is quite dream-like. You can read more about it all here.   

The exhibitions run until Feb. 6, ... enough time to set  your resolution? Happy New Year.

Your comments are always welcome: click below this post where "no comments/comments" is noted.

More Creative Life News

You can read and see more about creative life, travels, tips and creative adventures by this itinerant artist at Creative Life News at https://www.janetstrayer.com

Regards, Janet