In September, 2020, the Bobcat Fire roared through our community of Juniper Hills incinerating 100-year-old native vegetation, thousands of acres of animal habitat, and not least, eighty-seven of our neighbors’ homes.
Why I (Still) Make Art
With a loss of this magnitude, it is hard to see the way forward. No, I didn't lose my home and I grieve for my neighbors who did. What I did lose was thirty plus years embedded in one hundred artworks lost forever to the god of fire, and I mourn for the specific warm and cool colors resonating, the result of explorations and discoveries, the aha moments when the physical and the metaphysical made themselves known as one thing.
Paint for me is a sculptural medium and I apply it thick and juicy with squeeze bottles and pastry tubes, watching the fat forms take shape and create their own fields of energy, or three-dimensional landscapes, or draped suggestions of the robes of mythical personalities. I am a restless artist, and my explorations take me in many different directions but always with the juicy fat paint forms, and most recently, backed by auras of faux fur, seemingly alive against the wall.
When I archived my work on 8-foot metal shelves in a 20-foot metal storage container, I was careful to wrap and label each stacked painting, and each box of smaller works displayed photos of the contents, and each rolled up flexible paint object was lovingly wrapped and wearing a photo on the outside documenting the heart within. My careful organization satisfied my desire to acknowledge the years of work by giving the work and myself their due.
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My husband and I drove to the top of the loop, and we observed the fire roaring over Pleasant View Ridge in great 40-ft high tongues of flame, unstoppable, hungry, and we evacuated taking our dog and cat and ourselves out of harm's way. When we returned two days later, we could see that our house was untouched, but as we drove up the road, saddened by the black skeletons of formerly lush junipers, I could see that the 20-ft metal storage container looked wounded, tilted to one side, with evidence of smoke having curled around the vents.
Getting out of the car and walking down the hill from the house I approached the container. Then I opened the doors. Grey ghosts of ash in the form of paintings leaned on one another, great heaps of ash where boxes of artworks once stood, the large 5-foot paintings sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall were blackened and melted into one another, and the carefully rolled and wrapped paint objects had become molten and their once juicy forms black and fused to the metal shelves. That vision is seared into my brain, like when you put a steak on a hot cast iron skillet, and it is transformed from flesh into something crusty and hardened. I haven't really recovered and probably never will. Time heals all wounds? Not really.
Instead, time has become a tool I must use to regenerate the urge to see the physical and metaphysical dancing together once again. I am a realist after all, realizing I exist between worlds both scorched and released. I am in a different place, and I need to embrace my re-birthed self.
What impels me to go forward, to make art again, is the search for something true, something ridiculous, something powerful, something quiet, anything that cracks open my resistance to joy. Recently I made a landscape with thick juicy paint, an eccentric shape borne by the form of the paint itself, embellished with sequins, and faux fur. I titled it "Two Junipers, Loss and Rebirth." It lives between the worlds, just like me.
Stevie Love
