2018 Highlights

Lisa Rawlinson

2018 Year-In-Review

Plein Air painting in Hawaii

DecEmber 30, 2018

I think a little end-of-year introspection is always a useful thing, looking at themes and assessing what worked well and what worked less well, what feels unfinished or unexplored, or what is clearly ready to be left behind. Back in 2016 when I started scribbling sunflowers onto paper I had no real intention of making art again. But then it exploded, becoming a compulsion, a feeling I honestly hadn't experienced since I was a teenager (I'm 46 now). By the time 2017 began I knew it was going to be a thing, but it felt like a nebulous, shapeless thing at that point. After Universe, Emergence, and the East Austin Studio Tour, that thing started gelling. As 2018 rolled around I had some very definite ideas about what I wanted to do and less clarity about how to go about doing them, but enough direction that I dove in. There was a lot of just throwing seeds into the fields to see what would germinate, and some of that process has been slower than I'd like. But, when I set aside the impatience that's driven by eagerness to just be doing the things I'd like to be doing and I look at the broader picture, I'm pretty satisfied at least that things are moving and that there is meaningful progression and growth in a way that sets the stage for more to come.

Leveling Up

I've been approaching the style of my work almost as an art director would, carrying over that approach from my career in publishing. Each series or body of work has its own style that reinforces the concept or sentiment behind the work. This was something I had in mind early on, but without a lot of work under my belt I don't think this was evident to anyone except myself. I think 2018 started to tell that story more clearly. As I moved into the Mars Revisted series, I intentionally shifted the style to be more pared down and ethereal, and I was happy with the results which both met my expectations and took me to places I hadn't anticipated. I'd begun my bird paintings in 2016, but hadn't thought of them as a series. When I started seeing the connections between them, refining the ideas, and officially declaring them part of the Ornithomancy series with the painting "We are just now at the beginning of our journey.," I evolved that style as well. It became a synthesis of stylistic devices I'd used elsewhere, just as the ideas behind that series are a synthesis of other ideas. On a technical level, I finally tried my hand at stretching watercolor paper on stretcher bars as if it were canvas, a method my old UNT watercolor professor Rob Erdle used. It allows me to work across bigger surfaces with no buckling (important since I do a lot of super-saturated wet-on-wet watercolor painting), and I can more easily control the presentation by avoiding framing.

Long-Time Coming

My painting "The Answer to the Question 'What Changed?'" (which you can see on my Art page under Ornithomancy) was one of the first paintings I conceived of back in 2016, but considering I was just kind of dabbling at that point, I wasn't ready to commit. And more importantly, that one carries a lot of personal meaning for me and I just wasn't emotionally ready to paint it. I needed to be in the position of the phoenix in that painting, not the cardinal, and I wasn't quite there. And then all of a sudden I was, and it was a long time coming. A very long time. But it took some thinking on how exactly I wanted it to play out. That painting probably had more journaling and scribbling and pre-work than any other I've done so far, surpassing What Are You?, which I had to teach myself about the structure and behavior of atoms before I could begin. So to get this one out, and in the new style I'd established for the Ornithomancy series, felt like overcoming a monumental block. And now I'm free. In more than one way.

New Body of Work

In July I took a trip to the Big Island of Hawaii with an urgent need to see the Kilauea eruption. I'd gone there in 2016 with a photography group and had determined to go back when I could be in charge of my own schedule and activities, and at that point I became close to obsessed with lava after seeing it in person. I was lucky enough to connect with a local this time, a friend of a former co-worker, and through him was able to experience the eruption in a very up-close-and-personal way. Not only was I given access to locations that most people did not have, but I was exposed to the event via the perspective of a Hawaiian rather than as a tourist. Hearing the stories told by him and his friends and family gave me a much richer insight into the eruption, expanding beyond the geology and the sheer emotional impact of seeing such a force of nature into its human impact and insights into cultural views and beliefs. Since returning home to Austin I've been processing all of that by playing around with small paintings and watching as a new body of work begins to take shape (a sneak peek is on my Instagram account), and there's a lot more to come that I'm excited to get out.

Magical Plein Air Painting

Plein air painting and drawing was really my first foray back into making art, even before my little kid-style sunflowers. It's a way of being more present in an environment and has been something I do while traveling (and sometimes locally). My plein air experiences in Hawaii felt absolutely magical, enough so that I began working winged unicorns and the caterpillar from Alice and Wonderland into some of them. But the vivid sensory recall that creating those paintings provided me with was a gift to myself I couldn't have fully anticipated. This was a technique I'd already discovered for enhancing memory, but to be able to mentally transport myself into a literal paradise where I was also undergoing significant personal transformation is going to be something that sticks with me for a long, long while. I also began keeping a dedicated art journal and creating hand-painted postcards on the trip that I think will become a consistent element in my overall body of work. (You can see the journal pages here, here, and here, and some of the postcards here.)

Playing in the Sandbox

Even though 2018 was technically only my second full year of making art after a 20-year break, painting is something I have been doing my whole life. The form that my painting took was an area for exploration, but it wasn't something that felt foreign to me (I do have a degree in painting). I've always been a big proponent of that whole getting out of your comfort zone thing. It can be powerful in unexpected ways, so in 2018 I chose pottery as my route into new territory. I took one semester of ceramics in college and came out of it with very little I was happy with and a lot of frustration, so it felt like a good test of my mettle. And there seems to be a flourishing of ceramic work going on right now, both sculptural and functional. I'd been seeing cool stuff out there and was ready to try my hand at it, so I enrolled in classes at East Side Pot Shop under the awesome tutelage of Scott Proctor. I still came out of it with only a handful of things I was really happy with (but some that I was very happy with), but I can say with confidence that I felt real progress happening. As a painter and someone who works primarily on flat surfaces, thinking 3-dimensionally caused entirely new neural pathways to form that fed back into everything else I was doing. And ideas for ceramic work were blooming left and right, unfortunately surpassing my technical skills in that area so far. As time and money allow, it's a creative channel I'll continue to build on.

Well, that was unexpected

After I painted my Emergence series, I understood that creating art was in a sense a way to work though a personal lesson, a task that had been set forth intuitively and from a source beyond my conscious awareness. I was a little coy in writing about that part of it in my blog post, still figuring out my own feelings about it, but it was at that point that I understood the potential for using art as a means of enhancing a connection to something I struggle to define but that I have finally come to terms with as real, even after a lifetime of ignoring or dismissing it. I've written about this more extensively on my blog, so I won't rehash all of that sentiment. I had no idea it would become so ingrained when I decided to create what I call Visual Meditations for 100 days in a row as an experiment to see if I could use the act of painting to strengthen that communication. I started at the beginning of April, and I've only missed a handful of days since, well past the initial 100. This was a surprise to me, and at first I considered the Visual Meditations to be separate from my art. But I realized that was silly. Of course they are a part of it. They work to deliver information, but completed, they stand alone as paintings.

Symmetry

By the time I wrapped up my degree in Painting and Drawing, I'd already made the choice not to pursue a career in art and to instead do other very worthwhile things that I do not regret doing at all (the reasons behind that choice are varied and a topic for another day). Putting a cap on that world, I was interviewed about Good/Bad Art Collective in Denton, Texas by Christina Rees, now Editor-in-Chief of Glasstire, then a writer for the Dallas Observer. I'd been one of the founding members, one of two people who came up with the idea for Good/Bad, and leaving it was a hard decision for me. It was the thing I was most proud of from my college years. I kept at it for a while even after graduating, not making art, and beginning a career in publishing. And then I finally moved on. Doing the interview felt like a way to gain some closure. It went a little haywire. The article was edited after being written in a way that emphasized interpersonal conflict within the group (a bunch of artists in their early 20s planning 200+ events together without interpersonal conflict would be an absolute miracle though, really), rather than the art or the group's ample achievements. I ended up working at the Observer later for a short time and realized that a touch of drama was the M.O. of the editorial staff, at least at that time, so it made more sense. For a while though, the article made some of that interpersonal conflict that much sharper, which reinforced the choice I'd made as for the best. Fast forward 20 years, and I entered one of my Mars paintings in the Fifth Annual Juried Exhibition at Artspace 111 in Fort Worth, juried by none-other than Christina Rees who has gone on to have a great career writing about art in insightful ways. I entered because it was an opportunity, and because I'm now at that point where I'm ready to start getting stuff out there, but the symmetry of that connection had some meaning to me. I like a tidy bookend. And in some ways it felt like the closure I'd been seeking two decades earlier, which means it's time to open a new door.

Making Time

One of the biggest changes for me in 2018 was yet another decision I made: to more consciously transition from the work I've been doing for my entire adult life into making art. At the outset, I thought I'd be able to do both, to sustain my art-making through my freelance publishing work, and I did for a while. But that business model requires a level of energy and time that can too become all-encompassing, leaving little room for personal creativity (much less being a single mom). It was a juggling act. I had already started taking gaps between projects to work on art, then a gap coincided with a dry spell in the freelance world, and then all of a sudden everything was uncertain and unstable and different, which has been a source of anxiety and guilt and excitement and joy. But it also means I'm in it now. I have managed teams of designers on multiple projects at once with art budgets of over $100K and delivered on all of it, so I'm feeling okay with my ability to figure this out. It's an open door to a new way of operating in the world, and the first step in that is making time. So, I'm winging it, but I'm doing it.

It's not just about me

Despite this extensive navel-gazing exercise, part of my reimmersion into art is reimmersion into a community of artists. I fought back my hermity tendency and talked to people I don't know with enough success this year that I'm good with it, and I began to write about other artists on my blog (see posts on Scott Winterrowd and the Angry Cloud). There's a lot of room to expand on that and build on connections made over the past year. But I've met some cool people, and it's a start.

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