Head in the Clouds; Hands in the Earth
A space-cadet artist comes in for a landing.
I’ve always been a bit of an oddball. I’ve created art in one form or another since I was a kid: directing my little sisters in plays I wrote (and starred in, of course); singing at the top of my lungs, perched in the highest branches of a sprawling ficus tree; and brutal, larger-than-life teenage dramas that could qualify as performance art.
I was always illustrating my imaginary worlds through art. How else could I begin to explain whatever cloud my head was in?
My strange, contradictory nature confounds even me: I am excitable and easily distracted, yet capable of unnatural feats of concentration and focus — as a child it often took a great deal of shouting to rouse me from my dream world and force me to participate in “Real Life,” whatever that is.
A gifted student with an aptitude for almost anything, I bounced from one passion to another with a fickle intensity, declaring each new interest What I’m Going To Be, before moving blithely on to the next: preacher, teacher, missionary, doctor, biologist, psychiatrist, writer, actress, artist….
I never wanted to be a ballerina — my clumsiness is legendary. I was oblivious to anything as ordinary as the spatial relationship between hard, stationary objects and easily bruised shins, knees, elbows, toes…..
It wasn’t until 1999, as I was graduating from Western Carolina University with an English degree, that I stumbled (quite literally) on to what has become my life’s overriding passion. I found inspiration right under my feet, on a mountainside bisected with veins of colorful earth.
I began collecting the various earthen hues, determined to figure out a way to paint with them. This part of western North Carolina is dotted with gem mines — ruby, sapphire, amethyst, garnet, olivine, and glittery mica that pervades everything and makes dirty floors sparkle.
The local abundance and variety of gems and minerals is world-renowned, so from the beginning I was able to collect a basic palette of local colors that would be hard to find anywhere else in the world: Crimson-red clay, red and yellow ocher, a bluish gray, green, chalky off-white, and a powdery mica that glitters like gold dust.
Seventeen years later, I’ve assembled a full palette of mineral colors, dozens of techniques and tricks, and an assortment of crazy improvised tools, made mostly from a random collection of odd metal bits, plastic and cardboard packaging scraps, and re-purposed household items I call The Weirdo Toolbox.
I am still so in love, totally enthralled by this challenging medium that builds my understanding with each new painting. It’s the closest I’ll ever come to being grounded — there’s something about the physicality of crushing rocks that somehow bridges the divide between my imagination and this awkward alien world where I crash into things and have to pretend I understand what’s going on.
It has deepened my awareness of and appreciation for the beauty of the natural world, and the labor-intensive process of grinding rocks is very cathartic. It has become for me a kind of artistic meditation that stills my mind, calming my turbulent emotional nature so I can make art in relative tranquility. It is the calm eye of my storm, the peace after I have endured it.
Click the link below to see Galleries of my work on The Weirdo Toolbox.
https://theweirdotoolbox.blogspot.com/p/galleries-works-of-laura-z.html
Originally published at theweirdotoolbox.blogspot.com on May 12, 2016.
