Creative Process 6

This is the final piece" Clusters of Spirits Searching for Signals " as it was photographed after the installation at The National Academy Museum, Justin Gallery on April 16, 2015.
It consists of 4 pieces, 3 are hanging on the right and the fourth piece is  standing in conversation with the other. The softness, movement and monochromatic tint, contributed to its zen like, spiritual look. The lighting was doubled.  Natural light from the balcony hit the right part of the piece  and museum lights from the ceiling gave it a reddish glow on the top.

Here is the photograph.

Creative Process 5

 Combining the spirits sculptures with photographs of trees or a house became a very exciting project involving photography and photoshop techniques.
 I found a group of photographs taken by Enrique Rodriguez Boulan in Maine. Some of them take place at the Olsen's House near Rockport, Maine. This house belonged to a family that Andrew Wyeth was close to when he was painting in that area. Both the exterior and interior of the house inspired him to paint very beautiful watercolors.
The house is now open to the public and a visit to it shows the corners, rooms and light that Andrew Wyeth found visually and probably emotionally mesmerizing.
To me these photographs are great as background for the assembly with the spirits sculptures because they portrayed the house as an old, empty and mysterious place. It couldn't be a better place to be occupied by spirits.
Here are two pictures assembled from interior photographs of the house.

                                                                                  

Creative process 4

Creative Process 4

The Spirits sculpture was photographed from different angles and at different stages of assembly.
However one idea stuck in my mind.  In my  initial daydream/fantasy that I had about the spirits floating around,  the spirits were hiding in the woods. It occurred to me that I could use a photograph of trees or countryside where I could superimpose the pictures of the Spirits sculptures and create a series of photographs depicting landscapes with the uncanny element of a floating sculpture around it.
Here is the first photograph. I titled it The Spirits's visit.

                                                The Spirits'svisit       Photo  assemblage

These fabric sculptures, that I called spirits, are meant as transitional objects. They represent important objects, people no longer present in someone's life. They would be the equivalent of the security blanket for a toddler , usually a piece of fabric or material made to substitute for the child's parents and be soothing when they are away. Similarly the idea of spirits implies a partial presence of a meaningful
person. I like the fact that they are made of fabric. Ghosts are also covered by fabric when they are represented in drawings or paintings. Fabric gives the sculptures a soft, floating appearance that can be moved and change with simple touches.

The creative process III

The Creative Process II

The Creative Process II

Even though I was painting circular shapes in abstract paintings and I consciously chose them for the sculpture piece, I did not expect that when I assembled them together they would look like flowers and eventually like a plant or vine. This was a surprise that brought me back to an object: flower, that was very present in many of the choices I made in life. So the shapes that we create in art are multi determined like the visual images in dreams. They originate in our unconscious and make it into  consciousness for special reasons and connections.
When I decided to replace the metallic mesh for fabric as a building material for the next sculpture, after a few trial and errors, I realized that sewing each piece like a stocking and placing armature wire inside it was the way to do the work. After a few moments, sitting at a sewing machine in the studio, it was amazing to be flooded by memories from my childhood when I enjoyed looking at my mother sewing and wished I could do it myself. So my new piece has fabric and sewing, two things that connect me closely to my mother. At no point did I think that I would work at a piece in this way. It was a process of discovery that once again brought me to my childhood and pleasant scenes in it. Playing with fabrics, sewing with thread and needle, were childhood activities free of conflict. Art work is more productive when is autonomous from psychic conflict.
Here is how the fabric sculpture looks  at this point.

Fabric Sculpture

The Creative Process

The creative process

I would like to write about the creative process from two different points of view. The first one is from the point of view of an emerging artist that is working on abstract oil paintings and is also making wire sculptures with mesh and fabric. As an artist I am curious about the process that takes place while I am developing work. I want to document the process in pictures, describe it and show how it develops. The second point of view is related to my profession as a psychoanalyst and the contribution of psychoanalysis to the understanding of creativity. Here I can share my impressions, psychological analysis of my art work and intrapsychic observations.

VINE                   wire and mesh sculpture                           2014

This is how this work started. I was taking a class on Sculpture with ordinary materials, I decided to work with wire and mesh. The wire could be shaped and the mesh was helpful to cover it. Here are some pictures of the beginning.

After several units were tied together to an axis, I continue to work adding more pieces  at a vertical position. Soon people started to comment that it looked like flowers or butterflies. Although I did not intent to create these images, I did accept that it looked like a plant and eventually like a vine. Plants and flowers have been in my mind since childhood.

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