It has been awhile now since I put out the challange to myself and my readers to allow this project to unfold in public. I haven't been timely with my posts, but I have been mulling and working on the idea...which has taken some interesting turns. The project that I described it in the last post began to be cumbersome inside me...too many characters...too many modalities of creativity involved. It's often like this. In the first burst of energy, I try to incorporate the whole world in the project. I've slowly come to feel the need to narrow my focus to something real--a person or persons, an area of history or this city. When I shared my inner frustration with my critique group, a member offered a possible avenue for my focus...the Three Corners Area of San Antonio. This is an area of the city that was settled early in our history and has been a continuous neighborhood since. We took a day out to visit the area, talk to some folks, look at the architecture, trying the project on, so to speak. I was fascinated and excited, but after a great lunch and a auto/foot tour, I knew that this idea was not speaking to me.
So, I had the structure and a visual of how I wanted to work, but no subject. I've been in that stuck place all these months. Lately, though, a new subject has begun to come into focus....my grandma. My grandmother has been a primary person in my life and somehow appears in much of my work. (She is the source of "Mildred" in Murphy, the Rainbow Dragon, and the woman in Painting #5 of my large scale works, and perhaps, even Hildegard herself in Hildegard of Bingen.) But, I have never done anything directly related to the person, Annie Belto.
We have two valuable pieces of primary source material that has exciting implications for a visual project: her scrapbook of delightfully narrative images taken with her own brownie camera and her life story in her own words. The lens in my mind is beginning to focus on large scrapbook pages, with her words on accompaning sheets of paper...the pillars are becoming locations of her living spaces....the words are becoming sound installations...I am seeing "scrapbooks" from my paper substrates mounted on wooden display panels on the wall.
I am now in the process of doing experimenting in the studio to create a form for each of the images and exploring several ways that I might reproduce and enlarge her photos. I've cast a scrapbook size "cover" and like the feel of the book, but I am only at the beginning of this new stage of development. But for me, the hard part of the "main idea" of the project is now behind me. The energy and the work is different at this stage. It is more about solving problems...hundreds of technical and visual problems. That has its own kind of satisfaction. Some of this work I do in the early hours of the morning...in that half-waking stage of sleep. I plant a problem in my head before I go to sleep and let my unconscious work out the solution. It often happens that I will have solved a very difficult secion of the work by the time I wake up. The rest of the work I do by contacting experts in areas where I am not skilled or reading books on a technique I would like to use and by creating mock ups, doing drawings and creating examples upon which I experiment. When this phase of the work is completed, I will be able to put the project together in good, clear language to apply for grants or other funding.
