Saturday, December 17, 2011

Helen's Dilemma

I've been thinking about Helen's two blogs on her metamorphosis dilemma and all the interesting comments.  I'm  remembering the discussion we had about whether this challenge should be a series and if so, what would the series be about?  At the time I was disappointed we weren't going in that direction, but on reflection, I'm content with our decision to do our own work with individual themes.  I even had the fleeting thought, like Kirsty, that I could somehow work out a series with the five pieces we are doing this year, not even knowing in advance the themes to be chosen. I soon realized the foolishness of that, as I would be making up ways to fit the theme to my work.

I can't let go of series work though, I've been doing it to long, and with the larger size, I feel less like experimenting and more like doing serious work.  I think others of us are leaning in the direction of expanding on each theme into our own personal series, Helen and Françoise have both written about it.

I'm thinking of my work exploring the body through medical imaging, and how I can include metamorphosis in that challange. Since I usually work abstractly I was interested in the replies to Helen's comment on whether "the subject of a work of art be obvious to a viewer or need it only be in the recesses of the artist's mind."  Most of the replies reinforced my belief that the artist should make the art they need to make and the viewer should interpret it the way they need to see it. Obviously, with our discussions on the blog, the reader will receive lots of information about what they are viewing, but I'm hoping to look at the art for a while before reading text.


This is the start of my series, subject to change of course

1 comments:

Renate said...

Karen, you mention that you considered working on a series and then seem to discount this idea. I wonder, given this new size, if you could not incorporate a series albeit smaller into the one large piece that reflects a metamorphosis, eg. I see the five items shown in your picture being incorporated into your piece, smaller to larger ie morphing in size. Okay I'll get off my soap box.