Hey all, I only started painting in the spring of 1999, but already consider it a nurturing source of freshness for both the model and the artist.
From my own persepctive as an artist, the painting feeds the writing, feeds my life, feeds the chaos, creates something I can give back to life and somewhere in the middle of all of it my kids dive in, feeding into and exploring thier own creativity.
From the model's perspective, I take the art of painting people as seriously as raising children, giving birth, or making love. My former experience with midwifery, is an ever intertwining theme I can't shake, but wouldn't want to. It anchors me with an understanding of the responsibility that comes with painting people. I feel like I'm reinventing for myself as an artist another way around the traditional life drawing classes, the same way that midwives started helping modern women give birth naturally, in spite of the conventional wisdom of the medical profession.
I finished my BA in creative writing with a strong psychology emphasis while attending the MFA writing program at Goddard College in Vermont, a progressive school that requires creation of one’s own curriculum. Yet I've used my entire life as a classroom to achieve my undergraduate degree which ONLY took 20 years amid scattered colleges living in 60 different locations across the states.
My husband of 25 years, Ron Heacock, our three children, and I have lived an alternative homeschooling life because we believe "the life of the individual is dependent upon freedom in a safe space" and that direct experience is life's best teacher. With that thought, I never thought I'd be proud of a piece of paper, and I never thought I'd be going back to Goddard to get my MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, but I tend to live a volatile passionate life that leads me.While I'm in school, I will miss facilitating writing workshops on character development, science fiction, and especially, my favorite topic, "How to Write Love letters" which encourages men and women to put their love down on paper...
but then just wait until the book comes out, filled with long overdue art, essays, poems, and short stories... sometimes we have to draw back in order to give again. I'm thinking completion date of the book to be somewhere around my birthday May 2003.You can still occasionally find my freelance essays and poetry in alternative and women’s newspapers, writer’s newsletters, journals and anthologies, but its all been on the back burner since I started school this January 2001.
If you want honesty which reaches deep into the soft grace of a sometimes dark, but always human heart, I think you'll like my work. Until the book comes out I invite you into my website home, my wolf's den of things to come. But I warn you, I don't pull punches and I don't edit during the process stage of writing and creating. This has been known to offend some, but I mean no harm, and I hope that if you follow the threads far enough you will be able to find the love, even when I use strong language.
I do invite you, however, to send me your thoughts of the nature of being painted or on my work itself. And by all means, if you find typos let me know, eventually I will have to edit this stuff, and those who know me well, know my typing sucks:-)
Thanks- Karen
So much for the spin and onto the good stuff....
I beleive that when a person is painted it touches them deeply, for some this may even tap into a prevebal stage of mirroring at the mother's breast. How we are percived and how we feel about being looked at is tied into so many vulnerable things we don't necessarily understand with the "thinking" part of ourselves. It may even be a trigger that gives us insights from other times and places. On the other hand, when I paint someone I, too, am working from a non-thinking vulnerable part of my creative self, and its scary (but there are worse fears.)People used to tell me I was brave to have my babies at home. I used to tell them I was chicken shit. But the truth is, being pregnant would call upon a wildness in me that contained a sensitivity that could smell illness… like a dog knows when a stranger has the wrong intentions. Hospitals were no place for my babies to be born. I could feel that. I had no choice. I could not go there without my hair standing on end.
Slowly I came to realize that painting is like that for me too. It’s intimate, wild, wide open and scary. The impersonal life drawing classes didn't feel right either. The models seemed to shut off a part of themselves in such a public setting. How can I paint ALL of someone if they are closed down because of the nature of the space or relationship? How does this reflect our art in society? Could the nature of how we paint people add to the objectification of human beings through the art we present to society?
It led me on a search to understand more of what I was doing. I think it’s a bit like giving love to someone, letting the energy flow back and forth, even a bit like massaging a woman's back during labor contractions. I decided to go back to graduate school to focus on the responsibilities, joys, and respect that would naturally evolve from exploring this experience of painting people from an interdiciplinary perspective.
When I paint, I am constantly asking myself, "How do I paint you best?" Even if it is a self-portrait. I once came back from an dance class sore from doing push-ups. A few days later, I did a self portrait that focused on those sore muscles across my chest. I felt better about giving myself some attention there. The painting (Blue-eyed woman ) sold at an auction to benefit a local AIDS charity.If I paint you I want to paint you in my private studio and serve you a cup of tea, and perhaps we will do some dancing first to loosen up. If I paint you, I want to play your favorite music even though I might chatter over it while I paint. (I like to tell people what I am painting when I am in the process.) To be painted is as much a part of the process, as is the finished painting. I don't feel I was as successful with the process of some my early works. Yet, I still like them and I know I was still developing my understanding of how it could be done.
I would love to paint almost anyone, yet I don’t want to paint anyone unless IT calls us both, like the earth and the whispering wind and we have no choice but to eventually heed the call.
If you love, then all things will come to you. At some point love will begin to direct all your actions and thoughts. Then you can accept life. Excerpted from The Book of ECK Parables, Volume 3 by Harold Klemp