When I make art, I am the complete person I am meant to be. My artistic self even goes by different names, and so some people know me as Sunny, SunnyMarlene, even Sunny Lovemore.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have some kind of art on the go. I started out by doing every project in the Worldbook Encyclopedia Craft Annual 1975 at least once (ok, I didn’t build the submarine one). That was my first apprenticeship. I am now mostly a painter, but I have done a lot of small sculpture over the years — mostly found objects, paper, people’s cast offs. I still like gluing stuff together, and I think that even when I am painting I am approaching it like that. It is all collage for me at some level. Art, innocence and childlike discovery, are tied together for me.
I prefer to work by instinct and don’t have a particular theory of art that steers me along. In many ways it would be much easier for me if I did. The art world pressures artists to express what it is they do in words. Not all of us are comfortable with that, but we try our best. As long as language is useful as a tool to help people enjoy and understand art, I’m fine with it. But I don’t need it to actually make art.
On the other hand, there are times when art is not taken seriously enough at all, and I wish I had more words to defend it. When I was a kid, adults let me know that making art was not really that important. It was just playing. This message is still fairly commonly given to kids. Fortunately I didn’t listen to this message, and stuck with it long enough to learn the grown-up truth about art. Art is vitally important. It is not just important culturally, as something to put in a gallery, to decorate the best houses. Art is life and death.
Art can keep youth at risk from hurting someone else or hurting themselves, give them a pathway around destruction. As a form of therapy, art can unlock people’s deepest memories and feelings. It can tie whole countries together in friendship (think of the Statue of Liberty). A canvas or piece of paper is a little window that shows the mystery of the universe.
Lately I have been thinking that the personality or ego of an artist is not that important really. I saw a gorgeous show of red-and-white quilts not too long ago, and it took my breath away. There was no ego — most of the artists names were lost. Each piece harmonized with itself, with the other pieces, with a long tradition. No tension or conflict in sight. You see that fundamental happiness in traditional art all over the world. Yet it was beautiful, unforgettable.
That’s all the words I have for now. Back to the studio I go.
