John Clark's Valerie Fowler: Nature and Other Stories

My friend John Clark made this film. It's a short profile of me, my art, my husband, Brian Beattie and some of his art. He did a wonderful job distilling my rambling words into cohesive significance and his camera faithfully honors my vision. Please take a minute to see what it's all about.

How to Conquer a Nightmare

When I was very little, say 5 or 6, at the oldest, I had a recurring nightmare. In the dream, a sculpture which hung in my home, came to life as a monster, and tortured me. The sculpture, called "Falling Lady", by Don Snell, early sixties, was a life size human mass assembled in old painted rags, spooky mummy style, which looked to my eyes like a really horrific paper mâché piñata. The woman's body was grotesquely twisted and the spattered paint, though multicolored, looked like so much spattered blood. I had to constantly divert my eyes, and as a result, I don't even remember what the face looked like. It hung over a two story expanse in my parents office/studio space. If I visited my Mom in there I would cover my eyes except to look at her. Never would I enter that room at night and if the door was open and I had to walk past, I looked the other way and ran.

Just your average paper lantern, or is it?

My dream took several forms, usually some otherwise benign household fixture would suddenly turn into the horrible creature, often it was the huge paper globes which covered hanging light fixtures in our entry hall, my parents had several hanging throughout our house, big white cheap, paper lanterns which looked clean and contemporary but which I could only run past as a child for fear they would turn into the creature of my nightmare. So I avoided these lampshades also.

When the dream would begin I would feel the scratchy claw-like hand of the sculpture woman on my shoulder. Made of rags stiffened with paint and probably copious amounts of glue, the sculpture's surface was scratchy and creepy to touch. I had only touched it once, in waking hours, and I don't know how I dared. During my dream the monster's touch would send me into screams and fits of terror. My mom would run to my room and try to wake me but I could only feel the monster's touch--my own mother's touch mistaken for the monster's. It would take her some time to wake me and make me feel safe again. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I would spend the rest of the night in my parents bed because as soon as my bedroom light was turned out I would again feel the monster's touch and begin to scream.

It is hard to say how long this went on, weeks or months but it was during this period that my parents moved my sister and I into another bedroom, long planned to be our big girl room, vacating the room which would become our baby brother's room, but with just one hitch: the new bedroom was the room next door to my parents' studio. Now if a lampshade could turn into my monster, the wall which separated me from that monster could not be trusted to keep that monster at bay. The nightmares continued. But gradually, they developed and changed. In my very last monster dream I found myself walking two houses down to my best friend Rosie's house to play, only to discover that the garage door entry was all closed up, indicating that her family was away. I sat at the curb of her driveway, missing her, and there appeared the monster. I remember not screaming, not running, but gazing down at the marbled motor oil rainbow in the water of the gutter and saying, without looking up, that we should try to be friends. And it seems it was as simple as that. My nightmares ended. I'd like to think that I ended them with my own will. I suppose my parents thought I just grew out of them.
Fear, while you experience it, is a hard thing to get around, and simple, in hindsight, to dismiss.

My husband, Brian, had a recurring childhood dream also. In his, he is at a carnival or fair and after exiting a ride realizes that night has fallen and the carnival is deserted. He is alone and terrified.

How do these dreams stop? Is it simply that the child dreamer matures past the fear? Does the dreamer decide to banish the monster or just look at the monster in a new light? I'd like to think that the dreamer plays an active role. In my dream I think missing my friend helped me to see the monster as somebody less threatening. Who knows? But Brian's dream became a seed idea for a musical he wrote, Ivy and the Wicker Suitcase. 
And here is a song from the musical in which Ivy, our hero, puts a nightmare to bed.
Oh do listen in, and enjoy... 
Below is an illustrations I did to accompany it.

Ivy's Dream, from Ivy and the Wicker Suitcase

Living in a Painting

Month # 5, Work, Work, Work

How to know when good is good enough, when improvement is complete? How to step away?

This painting has been my constant companion--I've been working on it almost daily for the past 5 months. It is a self manufactured problem needing to be solved--but solved in a way which compels others to be swept along into my peculiar reality. How to entice and excite interest: this, for me, really is a fun puzzle. Maintain a certain mystery,  include plenty of candy indulgences (centers of eye pleasing pleasure) but it has to feel genuine. Balance the colors so that they almost, but not quite, shock the viewer. Activate all the potential dead areas with stimulation or is a calm transition more helpful? Several times this past month I was convinced I was finished. Some days I would stare and stare hoping to be convinced that it could not get any better but always I was wrong. So I tweaked and refined, painting elements in, painting them out. Stare and stare, until I got to the point that I believed that even if it could get better, it shouldn't. And so it is finished. And the next painting will be better for the experience of this painting because my life and work is one great long line of learning. 

Many thanks to Brian, my husband, who visits my studio and takes great pictures.

Earth Has a Long Memory, Dedicated to the Lost Pines of Bastrop County, oil on canvas, 44x54", 2013

Recovery

Ready for the Art Tour

 Sometimes stimulus is overwhelming. This past weekend I spent 3 days with my studio doors open, participating in WEST, an Austin, west of I-35 studio tour. The weather was truly a gift, usually by this time in May we have shut our doors and windows and cranked up the a/c--at least during the afternoon hours. But it was cool and breezy enough to keep everything open. The garden looked blissfully blessed by the unusually ample rain we've had, so much still in bloom, so much still spring green. And the people who came through the doors were just as sweet as the day was delightful--many friends--old and new.

And I am still in a sort of happy/sad daze. It was lovely. I am exhausted physically, but mostly emotionally. I had a lot of expectations I think.

 My recovery started this morning, as it usually does, with my family. My kids (teenagers) are in their last 6 days of school for this school year so I think they are in a similar exhausted and over stimulated state of mind as well. But breakfast with all four of us was silly and fun as usual and as my husband, Brian, directed our focus onto two over-sized strawberries, he said, "this is what you need to know today" as he held up two apple sized specimens. As if to say, anything is possible and nothing isn't a little bit ridiculous.

 And shortly later, while driving my daughter to school, one and one half hours before the tardy bell would ring (because she has so much homework to do, and probably a little socializing to complete as well) two things made my life even happier. One: When I got into the van and started it up there was a CD in the player, left there by Brian the night before: Scott Marcus' Rock Star. I hadn't heard it in a while. Scott is an old friend of ours and former band-mate of Brian's. The whole record is deeply personal yet completely chock-full of humor and love for the art form. Ramona and I let the music play. Loud. I usually put NPR news on, but today, with our hazy morning brains, coffee's drug not yet buzzing through our veins, Rock Star was IT. We rode without saying a word. I don't know what thoughts Ramona was entertaining but I was marveling a what a talent Scott is, what a wonderful record he and Brian made together, and at the most probable fact that they'll never make any money from it. But during that short drive I was having my faith in art restored, again.

Rock Star by Scott Marcus, OK I did the cover art, here's a teaser, a snippet of one of Scott's songs

The other thing that happened was this:

After I dropped Ramona off at school I was driving home, coffee starting to click in, taking my usual route back. The sunlight was sharply angled into my eyes, as it usually is, early in the morning, but as I crested a small hill at a four way stop intersection I saw steam already rising from the pavement, a sign that today would be hotter than yesterday and that summer was, in fact, on the horizon, and I experienced a rush of bliss looking at the school crossing guard in her usual place, the beer delivery guy rolling a dolly full of beer from his truck to the convenience store, the pedestrians crossing, the library looking stoic on my left and a bicycle breezing by.