island shaman figure

Now, I do like the marketplace. Selling artwork is enormously gratifying. But I haven’t yet figured out the balance between pure art (making things that one feels driven to make, regardless of whether they interest anyone else), and commercial art (making things in response to marketplace demand.)

This is a boringly typical dilemma, faced by anyone who likes to make art. I’ve bounced back and forth in my variegated art career, producing some purely commercial work (custom-designed business cards, signs, drawings of people’s houses) and some purely personal (oil paintings, abstract raku clay vessels, porcelain mosaics). I have a little bit of skill in WAY too many media, and the result is confusion. The curse of the dilettante.

There are definitely artists who succeed splendidly in both arenas: by pursuing their own strong vision, they create unique works of art which have natural charisma in the marketplace. I hope to be one of those artists after this studio-building, sorting-out phase.

My Forest Folk arose from a lifelong sense of kinship with trees, and also from ancient myths of green man, wood wife, and horned god. There was never anything cute about these archetypes. They are wild and fierce and undomesticated, even dangerous. Yet, the Forest Folk figures I created had become disturbingly quaint and my customers were using words like “adorable” and “charming”.

So, I stopped making them. I have to figure out how to bring forth the original raw archetype which moved me in the first place before I can begin again.

Horned Green Man

The day is so still. Grey skies, the maple branches a bare lacework against the clouds. I’m making Cedar Spirits, building inventory for the Christmas fairs. Bob is out looking after our neighbor for a few hours, and I’m here alone with the sleeping cats.

I’ve been working in pure silence, not even turning the radio on. Hunched up crosslegged in the loft where I keep the overflowing baskets of shells and feathers and sticks and stones. Hearing my breath in and out, aware of being alive.
 

 Six of my Cedar Spirits will be at

Art and Soul Gallery in Bothell, 817 238th St SE
Bothell, WA 98021
(425) 487-3777

I’m so pleased.  Susan, the gallery owner, saw my  Cedar Spirits on Etsy, and contacted me.

I had made Cedar Spirits a few years ago, and they had sold well — but starting up with them again this summer, it seemed as if maybe the social mood — the zeitgeist — had veered away from products that seemed like what hippies would make with sticks and feathers.