I did this drawing some time ago, probably in 2023.
I found the frame a few years ago and always knew I wanted to use it. I was lucky enough to have the image that was meant for it: Directions.
I think this piece talks about both time and distance. Arrow up, arrow to the right—either works.
It’s a fun little piece, and I’m ready to part with it.
Directions, c. 2023
Pen and ink
Drawing: 3½ × 2¼ inches
Framed: 4½ × 3¾ inches
$350 framed
I’ve been thinking about behavior.
Maybe it started with something I heard at Meeting this weekend about being slow to anger. The message was partly about animals and how uncomplicatedly they can love us. But my mind went somewhere else.
If you want to be loved, love.
If you want people to be kind to you, be kind.
If you want charity, show charity.
It sounds terribly simple. Maybe too simple. But I keep coming back to the idea that eventually it isn’t what we say about ourselves that matters. It’s how we behave.
Quakers don’t ask each other for résumés before we sit together in worship. We don’t list our accomplishments before standing to speak. At least we shouldn’t have to.
And yet I have a résumé.
I moved myself to New York when I was young and somehow built a life there. I finished my bachelor’s degree and figured out a way to do it for next to nothing. I ran a gallery in Midtown Manhattan and increased its sales. Later, Michael and I had our own business. Michael worked his tail off to help make it succeed.
Then HIV changed our lives.
We closed the business and moved back to Minnesota. Somehow, through that enormous transition, neither of us lost our medical insurance. That may not sound like much today, but at the time it was a feat.
I went back to work.
Eventually I found myself teaching full-time at Minneapolis College. I stayed for more than twenty years. I helped build a department. I earned my graduate degree while working another job to help pay for it.
Woo-hoo.
There. I gave you the résumé.
But none of that is really the point.
A résumé pulls together the pieces of a life. It’s simple Gestalt. You don’t see all the individual pieces anymore. You see the overall shape.
It makes a life look planned.
Mine wasn’t.
There were good decisions and bad ones. Things I worked hard for and things that happened almost by accident. Sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes I screwed up. Sometimes my own behavior probably made things harder than they needed to be.
That’s the life.
And maybe that brings me back to the message I heard at Meeting.
If you want love, love.
If you want kindness, be kind.
If you want charity, show charity.
Who I am isn’t my résumé.
Behavior tells that story.
In the end, which matters more—the résumé or how you live your life?
“I paint because the spirits whisper madly inside my head.” —Attributed to El Greco
When I was asked to do a show in Second Life, I decided to go back to an older body of work. I didn’t want to make a new show just for the sake of making something new. I wanted to look again at work that still had something to say to me.
Words I Cannot Spell started several years ago at Hunt & Gather, a wonderful old junk shop in Minneapolis. I saw a pile of letters stacked on top of one another. I stopped and looked at them.
I thought, that’s how I see words.
I started taking photographs.
But the photographs were too perfect. The camera knew exactly where every letter was supposed to be. I don’t always see them that way.
I began to have fun. I jumbled things up to more or less replicate what a page sometimes looks like to me—with a dash of anxiety and confusion thrown in.
That is what interested me about bringing these pieces back for the Second Life exhibition.
I was very appreciative of the opportunity to show this body of work again. The work is older, but the experience behind it is still very much a part of how I see.
Lately I have been doing a lot more writing—articles, agendas, reflections, and writing about my artwork. Maybe that’s why I found myself thinking about those letters again and about how I see words.
Showing this work again gave me another opportunity to give the viewer a little insight into how I experience the world through dyslexia.
Sometimes older artwork just needs another place and another time to speak.
