Unpredictable, beautiful and shaggy!

Amy Sillman     Cliff

A painter whose work I really admire is Amy Sillman – if you Google “Amy Sillman images” you’ll come across a lot of great pictures.    She’s an abstract painter who also incorporates almost identifiable images that tease your mind into a Gestalt whirl!   She writes that she wishes her work to be

"Every day the raw, the goofy,

the inexplicable, the urgent,

the disrupting, the embarrassing,

the awful, the complex, and the 

fearsome barge into my life,

whether I like it or not. I respond

with paintings that are partly cartoon,

partly lament, partly grudge, that I 

hope are unpredictable, beautiful,

but sort of shaggy”.

I’m enjoying spending these first days of the New Year soaking myself in art – it’s so refreshing and enjoyable compared to the dire tv we have these days – the endless yapping heads, the stupidity, the lack of compassion and complete absence of long sightedness.  It seems like everything and everybody is just looking for what will gain the maximum profit.  I’m even being deluged with emails by companies whose products I reviewed with less than 5 stars on Amazon – they want me to give them 5 stars whatever I think about their product “because it will hurt their ratings” – as if that is reason enough!!  It’s like the school kids who feel they should have an A because of their GPA – the quality of the work is irrelevant.  I bought a new mp3 player to replace one on its last legs and discovered that the new ones only work properly with downloaded and paid for music – not with free library books!

And so to turn to art is so refreshing – to find the unpredictable, the beautiful and the shaggy is wonderful.  Turning the annoyances of everyday life into beauty!! Hmm I wonder what sort of a quilt I could make about eye drops, mp3 players, chattering inanities and cliffs?

If you have been, thanks for listening!

Elizabeth