Dear Diary

Dear Diary,

I have discovered less than I thought I was going to. I now have more questions than answers. I know my female self. It is very obvious to me who I am. But the masculine side, it really eludes me. I am trying to bridge the gap, crawl under the fence, to the other side where there isn’t a divide. 

The Runner seems to be the guy that I identify with the most. Recently, I have grown to understand he is not only running away from things, but he is also running to something. In the process he gets pretty beat up. 

Poor Runner, he is just one of the characters in my story. In my brain, if I don’t understand something, it orbits through every channel in my mind on repeat, such redundancy. My past relationship lasted nearly thirty years; it’s pretty epic. I feel like I have been released from a time capsule. Dating, the mistakes that I have made. I used to think that I knew a lot, and I would answer a lot of my own questions. In order to defuse that bomb, removing my self from the role of the ultimate answer-er, I started writing dialogues about what I thought the men in my life might say to each other. I also research extensively about masculinity and femininity, dating, love, biology, what a healthy relationship might look like. 

I also have secret letters, so many letters, written but never sent. I copy all of these things and put them in a book. I’m not certainly hiding them, but I don’t share them either. Well, except for sometimes. I really want to find some semblance of truth and the only way to do that is to share. Sometimes with real people, but then there are the characters. They are real and tangible. They make me cry. They also make me laugh. Reality seems very difficult; nothing as it seems. My world of unreality manifests itself through copies of copies. The characters are three dimensional forms that, through chicken wire, burlap, and all of the other stuff that I use, show me sides of themselves that, I otherwise, can not sort out. I am ultimately trying to discover who my masculine form is. I feel like it hides within me, and that I am only just learning of its existence. 

…And "Gas Lighting”.  When a gas light is turned on, it effects the fate of all of the others. They remind me of aspects of self and relationships; two poles, female and male. There are many different factors and characteristics within those aspects. It is literally crazy making. We are effected by the people around us, obviously. Poor Dad, he always hid in that a cigarette suit. He was vulnerable and afraid. He was kind and mean. Smoke and mirrors. 

CAST of CHARACTERS:

SELF: I am the only woman. (I can only communicate with the narrator, however, I am aware of all of the conversations and can comment regarding them. They are not aware of this.)

THE NARRATOR : He knows all and can communicate with all. 

THE ARCHETYPES: These characters symbolize universality. 

MALE CHARACTERS: These include friends, family, relationships (and enemies?).

Maybe there is a woman who has sound advice too. Would the narrator speak for her too? I feel that it is almost time to make that personality. Not yet, though. I still don’t understand enough.

The Runner

Gas Lamps

Gas Lamps
Laura Wilde 

I create art out of fear. A cathartic state purges my demons and provides me with respite. My art does not come from a place of solace, but of loss, remorse and a deep need for sense making. It is  a way to combat loneliness and create internal balance. When I give up on everything else, I still have art. Selfishly, I create to find others like myself.     

I create to recreate memories; the good and the bad. For the most part I begin with every good intention of happy outcomes; however, never does this happen. It is cheery and inviting but once inside it opens windows and doors and all of the dirty laundry gets scattered around the yard. The final work always reflects a charming repugnance. something that makes me love and fear it. My greatest fear in art is being found out. Counter intuitively fear propels me forward in hopes of being discovered in my delusions. My art taps into the dark places that I avoid while secretly breaking the boundaries. 

I create in the name of beauty. Even in entropy, sensuality and pleasure remain. I attempt to unearth the mystery and intrigue. Alternatively, sometimes I have such disdain for life that painting and sculpting are the only things that give me reprieve, an avenue of escape. Oil paint takes me down a path that helps my mind articulate and dismember; to understand what it must be to know the foundation of our automated humanism. 

Creating is also a weapon of defense from the unknown. Where I feel that I cannot get answers from reality, I find answers in the ether. I am angry, frustrated; I care to learn from my mistakes, or know that it was not me but something other. So often I get no answers. I have always wanted a way to know the intimate details of things. Desperately I search in the matter that I can manipulate. Sometimes I find answers. In that space I feel that I have power, feigned or realized. It comes from the matter of loss. The fear of loss and abandonment. Death. That is it.  

Beautiful and tragic, love and loss repeated within the structure. A story you never want to end when you begin, but the fear that it may be fatally destined with the lifespan already in 

place. All things, even relationships, entropic, the clock ticking, through choice or death. This is why I create. 

Love sets by the sun and rises with the moon. I long to discover what love truly is. Is it a chemical cocktail or a spiritual high? What makes it fleeting? What makes it permanent? What makes us care? Tell me why rejection pulls people closer together. Maybe it is not love but truth I seek; not my truth and not your truth, but the truth of truth. 

Meditation is supposed to create space out of time for truth. I am curious to feel what being out of time might feel like. Making art is meditation. It’s a way to meditate without having to force the space and time into submission. It is space and time eliminated, forcing me into the sublime. Going within, finding my soul, shiny things and prisms figure into my work, mirroring, showing me things that I can only see through reflection. I like creating best in uninterrupted solitude, that is unless you want to interrupt. I find that my best work is generally intermingled with solitude and distraction. So my next thought, unrelated to prisms and reflective surfaces, is that I like the unpredictability of chaos until I hate it; along with the excitement of fear, until I hate it too. 

I circle back to fear. This is why I create, I am pretty sure, for the need of tangibility. I don't want to forget that moment when my stomach turns inside out and my heart stops beating for a moment. I don't want to forget? I think that is so weird. Just like I don't want to forget the pleasurable moments in sex, I don't want to forget pain. It seems that pleasure occurs less often than the fear of pain, which remains a constant. It penetrates my pores and I am always running away trying to escape, while trying not to forget. A little sailing ship of Fear traverses my neural networks. The waves slap against the side of the ship, and the wake is left behind. All the while the ship is dropping little demons over the edge. My brain is littered with them. My artwork, especially the puppets and marionettes are representative of my demon collective. What is it that I am trying to get at, to harness, with the marionettes? I am trying to find truth, maybe a truth that doesn't exist. It makes me feel better anyway. Exploring all of the deep fissures, fashioning eyes with glitter and plastic, so that the narrator of my story, the Pigman, can look into my soul and give me sound advice. 

Those deep waters explored, me all exposed, is it the symbolism that makes my work interesting? The marionettes are fucking creepy. Making people into dolls and puppets. It’s very easy to keep the fear alive in a manipulated form. Marionettes are suspended like a hanged man. At first I thought they were fun, but then, I felt like I was making some type of dark magic in them. Does the energy within the doll affect the energy of the living? Sometimes, on an evil day, I hope so; on most days I hope not. 

Now painting is not external, but internal; especially oil paint. Pigments and oil all mixed together with toxic turpentine. It’s the self portraits that really get me. They are so revealing. I stare out of the canvas at myself with contempt; longing, sadness, loneliness. I appear to be searching for a better time, somewhere in the past, somewhere in the future. Others see sadness, but I know what floats under the surface, creating myself objectively where only subjectivity lives. This is when I move back to the three dimensional. I can only take so much introspection. Sculpture moves my demons outside of self. “Painting”, of its own free will, sails around in the little boat in my mind, picking the demons up and putting them back in the ship. 

To be honest, the reason I make art is to find my people, which feels like trickery, coercion, or just outright self-indulgence. Relatable, seeking, inquiry, these things help me find peace. I make puppets so that I can finally get into the psyche of individuals that I want to know better or understand more, or more often because they are utterly perplexing. Empathy, the way to understand others; that is what’s important. Maybe I create so that I can prove to myself that I can feel what others feel. It validates who I am. I think the best part of that type of creating is the materials that find me. I will know what I am supposed to make but I often don't know how it will come about. Watercolor over plaster. Why? Pigman has pistachios at the center of his core; they are his heart, surrounded by green bubble wrap. His eyes are very reflective in the two fold meaning of the word. When I was adding the sharp upholstery tacks to his chest his beak quivered horrifyingly. It chattered together as if he was alive. Which brings me to another point. Initially I wasn't sure if I was animating him or killing him. In the end, though, I strung him together and hung him up. Maybe a month later, he came to me in a dream while I was working on a new victim. He said that he was alive. I said no. I grasped his bronzed, metallic death, clawed hand and brought it to my lips. I kissed it and told him that now he is alive. He speaks for 

every part of the emotional and physical aspects of my “why” for this or that, be it emotional or the physicality of matter, being realigned and designed into something that makes more sense than it did before it became its new identity. His dialogue is the most useful of all. 

Journaling and dialogues, the narrative, my hand puts pen to paper. From there I am my character only, telling stories and asking question from my angle. The narrater seems to know things I do not. He asks questions from a variety of different perspectives. I find myself arguing with him quite often and suddenly feeling very angry at the ideas he proposes. He suggests that some of the things that occur are somewhat out of the puppets’ control. They are not as self reflective as some, maybe they are operating on conditioning, just doing the best they can. Sometimes the narrator has intrinsically beautiful ideas and I have to write them down with one hand and guide my car through traffic at the same time with the other. 

As with the narrator, all of the puppets have life in them, although not all come and ask for it in a dream. In creating the personality within the puppet, I have found that taking time away and then returning to the creating process is very painful, surprisingly so. As with all emotions of the tragic kind there is a lot that I don't understand. There is a certain naivety in my relational skill set, which makes me fearful and hopeful at the same time. Sometimes I look at the face of the marionette and see the person in it. Serendipitously, or eerily so, that implants a seed that begins to germinate. I will find parts of his body in the most unlikely places, or pieces that don't seem to make sense until I get back to the studio. Oh the eyes of the goat sitting in a box located on a high shelf. I had to fish around for them in on my tip toes. I pulled those golden brown orbs out of the plastic; so beautiful, so longing, so fitting for a man who had no
heart. Another, my favorite most beloved, the crocodile tears of frustration, the raccoon. He wanted to know if he was going to be one of the puppets. I assured him that he would not. I guess I was wrong. That sneaky snake, I didn't want to do it. He’ll be cute and fluffy with red beady eyes. 

I have spent a great deal of time making and dissecting tarot cards. Truly an amazing tool for figuring out what strengths and weaknesses I have. It’s the only way I could think of to dig into my mind and find the dirty mucky parts, some real good ones too, but that is not what I was looking for. I don't need to fix those. I want the ugly truth. That’s what I originally wanted 

anyway, but then I wanted to find out the truth of some significant others. Here is the birth of the dialogues and the volumes of writing that gives me insight, good and bad, about these hanging balls of psycho mumbo jumbo nut jobs, and of course, myself. 

There is so much more to interject about the marionettes, the sailing ship full of little demons in the ocean that is my mind, and of the pond where all of my ideas come from. “To Be Continued” is all I’ve got.