Reflections on Showing at the BMA

Since 2014 I’ve been posting the holiday bookmarks I make for family and friends. My idea was the gargoyle was there to watch over your book, so the image was just the gargoyle. For the last six years I’ve been putting my gargoyle in a location of significance that year. It started with when I was in NYC to be part of a panel at Columbia University. The Empire State Building was centered in the view from my window, and it was clear that year’s character belonged on the ledge outside. This year’s holiday bookmark celebrates a landmark in my life for the widest audience I’ve yet had for my work. In the time since four collage paintings and six drawings of mine have been hanging in the Baltimore Museum of Art, my appreciation of this privilege has been growing. From the initial joy and wonder to increased satisfaction, to amazement and gratitude, my attention lately has been on the number of people that are seeing it. And hopefully thinking about it. This has always been the focus of the series that the four paintings represent. (All of that group, a series spanning decades are posted at visualcommentary.blogspot.com) Protest comes in many forms, and I’ve always known that images are powerful, combining emotion with idea to provoke the minds of others. The opportunity to affect people’s point-of-view with my own feeling and research about injustice and the destruction of the planet is deeply moving. My craftsmanship builds my authority and makes my commitment to these issues visible. To have it available on such an esteemed platform is a joy beyond description. The best summary of those feelings is the drawing before this post, “Crest”. What has always mattered to me is what I want the work to communicate. At the opening I saw that it was. And better than that, each person I spoke with had a view enriched by their own experience that took their reading of the work in individual directions. Everyone takes their own meanings from what the work shows. Those ripples are what counts. The drawings included in the show can be seen at various places on this blog and are a bridge between the protest series and the personal emotional weather that dominate this blog. The duralar over the sky represents the detached mind more preoccupied with its own ideas than the surroundings and underlying emotional state. This show, up until mid-March, is without a doubt the most exciting thing to happen in my career. Naturally this year the gargoyle had to be at the museum to express the daily joy it represents for me. Print it and cut it out, then for protection sandwich it between two pieces of clear contact paper. Use it to mark your place in what you’re reading, or if you read on-line, it can watch over an important book you keep.