ANIMAL SPIRITS EXHIBITION

Posing with who I consider to be art royalty at the Animal Spirits exhibition opening at Big Crow gallery! Immediately behind me is some of my art which sold in the first week. Hurray!

In the blue polka-dot scarf is Diane Olivier, an extraordinary artist who teaches at City College who I will be accompanying to Morocco for a wonderful art-making opportunity. On the other side of me is Sandy Yagi, another extraordinary artist who I admire. The gallery is run by another extraordinary artist, Anna Conti, whose landscapes of the San Francisco waterfront are incredible. I felt very lucky to be in such company!

Here on the wall is Honeybee from my Dreamers series, a 3-plate yellow, ochre and black etching. 

They put two of my works that I've never exhibited before in unusual, perfect little spots. Above: my little ink-on-wood New Year Misogi Imp in the fireplace. Below: my spider-web cocoon ladies nestled between nests. 

This lovely lady above purchased a black and white version of one of my linocuts. The gallery drew quite a crowd all through the evening, and they were the kind of people that really wanted to dialogue about art. I think it was one of my most favorite receptions and exhibitions; the look of it, the feel of it, the people who came, the sales, all of it.

INTERVIEW ABOUT MY ART IN CAN SERRAT, SPAIN!

Nice interview here about my Channeling Series in Can Serrat, Spain:

http://www.canserratart.com/2013/08/daisy-eneix-can-serrat-artist-in.html

CHANNELING (completed works)

Daisy Eneix, Lightning, 23x16", ink & graphite on paper

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Daisy Eneix, Rain, 23x16", ink & graphite on paper

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Daisy Eneix, Moon, 23x16", ink & graphite on paper

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Daisy Eneix, Float, 23x16", ink & graphite on paper

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Daisy Eneix, Faith, 23x15.5", graphite on paper

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INQUIRIES:

Overall

What states of being do people embody when they feel most present, attuned, aware, charged, connected to nature, an entity or a consciousness in this Universe that is greater than themselves? 

How can I explore this with others? 

How can I express it in drawing?

Process

How do I translate the intuitive experience of mark-making that I get from printmaking to drawing?

How do I combine gestural, atmospheric abstraction with careful representation?

How do I combine graphite and ink without one overwhelming the other?
How do I make room for more open space and less density in my completed work?

How can I enhance precision and remove peripherals, as in a poem?

Content

How do I continue this artistic path of connecting the visceral and ephemeral? 

How has its meaning evolved for me over time, and how can I go deeper into this topic, to previously unexplored territory? 

Collaboration

How do I engage other people in my work while still maintaining the freedom 

to work in solitude and fully listen and respond to where the Muse leads?

*

These works were all completed during my month-long July residency in Can Serrat, Spain. I am grateful to them for the time, space and nutrition (literal and figurative) that allowed me the luxury of experiencing drawing as my sole priority.

Thank you for viewing!

ANKH

I had great fun working on a commission for an Egyptian Ankh combined with four requested elements. After researching the Ankh's meaning I am fascinated: Egyptian symbol of life, unification of male/female, reference to ancient Snake Goddesses, and more. So much material!

I've enjoyed searching a way to weave everything together in a work that unifies all of the requested elements compositionally, symbolically, thematically, metaphorically AND that will look good on the body it is destined for - because ultimately, it's intended as a tattoo! So exciting...

You can see the image much more clearly if you click on it to enlarge it.

Daisy Eneix, ANKH, 23x16", graphite

Drawing the Body Channeling Divine Energy

I'm back in Can Serrat, Spain for a second time, in a month-long artist residency. Drawing and drawing and drawing all day long!! It is such a pleasure and a gift to be able to do this for a significant period of time.

The project I'm working on here explores the body channeling, giving over to, or being in the flow of 'divine energy,' however people may choose to define it, or in whatever context they have felt it. It could be through a particular spiritual, ritualistic or meditative practice, or in an encounter with an elemental force of nature, or by opening themselves up to whatever may be their concept of God, or in some other way altogether. I've asked friends and acquaintances to consider and embody that state of being, which has been the taking-off point for the final works.

Here are some of the drawings in progress:

Daisy Eneix drawing in progress, detail, 23x16". 2013

Daisy Eneix drawing in progress, detail, 23x16", 2013

Daisy Eneix Faith/Flying Backwards (in progress) 23x14", 2013

Daisy Eneix Sky Float, 23x16", graphite and ink on paper

Daisy Eneix Sky Float (detail), 23x16", graphite and ink on paper

Daisy Eneix drawing in progress, detail, 23x14", 2013

The next stage for these drawings will be to add contextual and atmospheric elements that build upon the state of the being of the figure, as I have begun to do in Flying Backwards/Faith and Float.

Once again I seem to be exploring this idea of resonance between the visceral and the ephemeral, a theme that seems to have always been at the core of my art and inquiry. But in this incarnation, I get to collaborate with others and to work in new media, which both feel like exciting new directions for me.

Confluence & God

Odilon Redon

Noticing uncanny coincidence, which I am seeing more as confluence. There has to be something as work - Nature, God, Consciousness, whatever you want to call it. Something more than what we know. Life is just too uncanny. 

Confluence #1:

1. A running theme in my artwork is an exploration of where the visceral, erotic and spiritual meet. Lately it seems that the spiritual side has a new kind of gravity that I'm ready to drop into artistically. I'm not sure what it will look like, but I'm once again returning to artists that drew me initially in that direction: Odilon Redon, Anselm Kiefer, Ana Mendieta, Joseph Beuys and more recently Michelangelo. There are many others, but these are the first that come to mind.

The surprise: There is an exhibition at the museum where I work that is exploring spirituality, and my assignment, as a docent there, is to explore the section Genesis and discuss how I would present it. Amongst the artists are: Kiki Smith, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Conner. Could not be more perfect for the direction I want to go in my own art.

 Confluence #2:

2. I've been wanting to explore new ways of making marks that resemble printmaking, but without the tedious process of making prints. I want to make art in a more direct, spontaneous manner, but mark the page - incise the paper - as if it was a plate. Scrape it, surface it, burnish it, sand it, ink it, as if it were metal. But also, draw on it.

The surprise: Who did I run into with these questions on my mind but a calligrapher, who is using unusual German inking tools. I don't even know what they are called. But I have them. I thought they were merely calipers. I did not know the full extent of their use. But I can dip them in ink. And so - I am coming up with whole new ways to make marks.

Finding Your Line

Recently Christian Tissier, one of the best-known practitioners of aikido, gave a seminar at my dojo. People came from all over the world to participate. I was glad to learn from him, and also of the surprise opportunity to ask him questions. Aikido is as essential to me as art and, for me, they deeply inform one another.

So I asked him this: At this point in my training, how do I best advance internally? Is it about focusing on something in my practice, or attending more seminars? How does he approach it? [Stay with me here, I'm getting to the art part!]

He said: "You must find your line." He talked about aikido as having many lines, lines of ancestry in particular, and that jumping all over and trying to pick up something from everywhere is actually not so useful. That sooner or later I'm going to have to choose my line, and follow it.

As simple as this may sound, it had never really occurred to me before. I guess I've always believed that I should listen, look, and try to learn from everyone who has something to share. That it is important to remain entirely open. Not to select, if it means leaving out.

Sometimes people just say something at the right time and it goes 'thunk.' Yes, aiming involves going towards. But there is another part, which is about letting fall away the parts that are not the target. That at a certain point in one's practice, being continually open to all new influences may be just as stymying as being totally closed to them. That if I want precision, if I want to get to the core, I also have to hone.

So the obvious next question I had for myself was, what does 'finding my line' look like, both in aikido, and in art? Here is how I applied it to the art:

FINDING MY LINE
1. Literally: What are my unique mark-making techniques?
2. Methodologically: What do I choose to make, and also not to make?
3. Heritage: Who are my artistic ancestors?
4. Innovation: To what new places am I taking this trajectory?

It's not as if I haven't considered these things before in this context; they just haven't been at the forefront.  So I am looking forward to embarking on using these guidelines as a lens, and seeing where it takes me.

SFMOMA last chance dance

SFMOMA had some interesting offerings to experience before closing for renovation today. Most people were on line to see The Clock. For four hours. I didn't have the patience for that. But I did spend some time with a fantastical architect whose whose imagination and line quality had me struck dumb. I thought I was looking at lithographs or some such, but these were free hand drawings!

The images brought a number of science fiction films to mind - Brazil and Alien in particular. But set in the lighting of Metropolis and in something of the surrealist engraving feeling of Max Ernst.

I was also intrigued by a program called The Workshop, offering DIY classes, that had samples set up in the lobby. I haven't really caught on to the 'DIY' craze, but I thought this was a really ingenious use of a gallon plastic bottle. Something about the way it held the light was pretty compelling.

ART, AWAKENING & LOSS

Daisy Eneix, PERSEPHONE IN HADES, 2012 graphite drawing, 22x30

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Daisy Eneix, SONGBIRD, 2012 graphite drawing, 22x30

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Daisy Eneix, FELINE, 2012, graphite drawing, 22x30
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It has been five months since I sent a package to myself from Can Serrat, Spain, which contained preparatory drawings created over a period of six months, and the final drawings I created at a residency while there, a time when my hand was fully coordinated with my eye and the muse, and I had the luxury of drawing six hours a day and took full advantage of it.

I experienced pure joy in the making of these drawings. That I could address this multilayered material, be both isolated and surrounded and influenced by other artists who were also wresting with their muses, and not feel as if I wanted for anything except to be doing what I was doing was a kind of celestial experience. I was channeling a precise and clear energy, purposeful, sometimes huge, but remarkable in its focus and total absence of fear. In martial arts, the peak experience for me is similar. There was a deep awareness and contentment, a stillness inside of motion. It was a kind of awakening. I was realizing a vision, I was open to being guided, and I was in contact with pure creation.

The package of these drawings never arrived. I am lucky that I have any record at all, but I do really wish I had the originals, as well as all of the other sketches and beginnings of new works that were with them. Maybe their loss is the catalyst intended to force me to turn a corner, or release the subject matter altogether, or it's just part of the larger letting go of many things this year. Maybe they will show up one day. It's hard to say. I don't know entirely what to make of it. But I'm trying to listen.

I am grateful that my dear friend and traveling companion Susan Schen took photographs of the drawings with a real camera. They were taken in a combination of sunlight and indoor light, as they were never intended as a final record. Unfortunately, large, gray pencil drawings on gray paper --particularly when so detailed and full of purposely faint lines alongside dark, coarse ones -- don't photograph well without professional lighting, if at all. But since I do have these 'ghosts' of them, I wanted to share them (above).

It is so much harder, while operating in the world of practicality, human relationships and the social and professional practices that are just as essential to me as art, to remember how important this relationship is, the one waiting there, with the Muse. I can only access it when I am truly solitary, and only when I give it my full, undivided attention. Since I am not the kind of person that naturally leans toward solitude, this is always a challenge. But the memory of this and the posting of these drawings may help me to keep striving towards it amongst the other, competing strivings.

I am so grateful to Can Serrat for creating the kind of holding space that they do for the artists who come. It is not only the delight and aesthetic wonder of the place but also its hosts, who imbue it with the kind of spaciousness and quiet, love, tending and merriment, eclecticness, chaos and edge, that allows artists to feel both at home in solitude and in the company of their peers. And also dinners to die for. This seems to be especially helpful for artists.

Overall, I'm just grateful that I got to have this experience, and how vivid it remains in me.

More about Can Serrat:
http://www.canserrat.org/

Additional details of the artwork above are posted on the Can Serrat blog at: 

http://www.canserratart.com/2012/07/meet-artist-daisy-eneix.html

ON MAURICE SENDAK:

Believer: How did you find your artistic style?

Maurice Sendak: It's spontaneous combustion. I don't know what's going to work until I start to draw. It is so out of your hands it is amazing. It just started to happen. Bumble-Ardy was a little boy many years ago and now he's a pig. I don't know why. There's so much I don't know about the procedure.

From:
p78
"I REFUSE TO CATER TO THE BULLSHIT OF INNOCENCE"
Maurice Sendak interviewed by Emma Brockes
The Believer
The 2012 Issue

http://www.believermag.com/

SYMBIOSIS

Painting completed. Commission delivered. Yes!

Daisy Eneix

SYMBIOSIS

ink on wood panel

36x18"

Symbiosis ©2012 Daisy Eneix

Symbiosis (detail) ©2012 Daisy Eneix

Symbiosis (detail) ©2012 Daisy Eneix

Symbiosis, detail ©2012 Daisy Eneix

Symbiosis, detail ©2012 Daisy Eneix

All artwork photographed by Susan Schen.

Color Craziness

I do a lot of color testing and settle on a palette before painting. 

The evidence sometimes looks pretty chaotically cool, so I thought I'd share. 

This one was tricky to work out but I think I have my almost final palette now :)

It was so nice to settle into work this evening. Hoping to do the same tomorrow.

A Revelatory Manifesto ~ Patti Smith, Just Kids & Why I Make Art

mJUST KIDS by Patti Smith - a set of artist revelations

This book really touched me. Some incredible ruminations on being an artist, creating, love, collaboration and innocence:

'The creed we developed as artist and model was simple. I trust in you, I trust in myself.'

'Robert trusted in the law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus influence the outer world. He did not feel redeemed by the work he did. He did not seek redemption. He sought to see what others did not, the projection of his imagination.'

What is the soul? What color is it? I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return. I did my best not  to fall asleep, to keep it inside of me where it belonged.'

'I didn't feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.'

'I wondered if I had really been called as an artist. I didn't mind the misery of a vocation but I dreaded not being called.'

'In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.'

'In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?'

'Robert had little patience with these introspective bouts of mine. He never seemed to question his artistic drives, and by his example, I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-charged.'

THE BOOK: http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.aspx?isbn13=9780060936228

Drawing away until the wee hours always feels good. So does combining two animals into one. In this case, a wood bison and a bull. With its own special rider.

I'm working on the third version of the preparatory drawing, and it's really coming along.

I find that the first drawing I do captures something of the feeling in my head, the dreamy part, but it usually needs more substance. The second drawing usually has more things in the right place, but often looks either a little too technical, cartoon-y, or has lost a bit of the energy of the first. Then the third somehow pulls it all together, combining the dream and the real into something new.

2012 - MY DREAM ARTIST RESIDENCY, CAN SERRAT, BARCELONA, SPAIN:

Artworks and more at this link:
http://www.canserratart.com/2012/07/meet-artist-daisy-eneix.html

Hairier, Scarier & Waterfalled

Daisy Eneix Misogi New Year Imp, 2012, in progress, detail

Daisy Eneix Misogi New Year Imp, 2012, in progress, detail

Daisy Eneix Misogi New Year Imp, 2012, in progress, detail

Daisy Eneix Misogi New Year Imp, 2012, in progress, detail

Well I've made a lot of progress on my little Imp. She's got some fur now and her own waterfall and a mossy, green environment (still in progress). So, a number of folks called her a Demon. I wish to explain how and why she is not a Demon. She is most definitely an Imp.

What is an Imp?
Historically, Imps are mischievous, unpredictable magical characters that may assist Demons, Witches, or Wizards. Whereas a Demon is usually a colossal, independent force, an Imp is smaller, lesser, more ambiguous creature. It also likes to have company.

My Imp also has a bit of inspiration from:
Kitsune, which are the enchanted, shape-shifting female fox spirits of Japan,
The goblins in the story-poem The Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti,
the monkey god Hanuman from the Ramayana Epic.
And other unspoken ones.

An Imp is an enchanted creature that is definitely going to add chaos to your day.
Whether or not you regret that chaos is never entirely clear. Perhaps it will show you a pleasure you never thought existed, make you laugh at yourself very deeply, or bring you a little secret knowledge or a treasure. It may just as likely bite, claw, steal, kidnap and cause mischief of all kinds.

An Imp will undoubtedly sharpen your awareness of yourself (and your possessions - it is best not to take your eyes off of them when it is around). It always comes with darkness and light, though not necessarily both on the same day. Imps are very devoted and loyal in their own code of what morality is but it is not a human code and therefore makes sense only to the Imp. You can learn a lot from an Imp but it is also best not to spend too much time in its company, lest you lose your way back into reality.

For me, the Imp is the perfect metaphor for the artist's dilemma.  Sunlight living is glorious and joyful and feeds the soul and body at the root; however, it is night, darkness and mystery that feed the art and the heart. Both together are essential, but I have yet to find what my own line of balance is. I have definitely experimented with going too far in either direction. However, this particular little Imp seems very much at home in the daylight environment of a lush waterfall. I think that's a good sign.