artist’s statement~mythos

     

       an irreverent devotion, drawing is what is left to me of religion.  essentially self-taught, i have been influenced by everything and everyone at hand.  i learned to draw by curiosity, patience, and constant practice.  i draw in order to search for and understand through other ways of seeing.

       slowly and freehand, i learn and am drawn by the intricate layers of meaning and unintention of drawing, itself.  i don’t erase but draw for connection and inclusion; too much has already been lost.  i draw in a fluid state of mind, to suspend time and deepen the commitment to what i know from experience.  Carl Jung said, “Often the hands know how to solve a riddle with which the intellect wrestles in vain”, and i have come to trust in this. 

        i learned printmaking because i love to draw the intricate dark tones of line etching and stone lithography as implied colour.  as a way to observe the evolution of what i am learning, i often work in a series.  the art of drawing the matrix and the craft of editioning serve me well in slowing the addled adult humyn whirled to a tolerable pace.  line etching seems to me a particularly sinister medium that lends itself eloquently to my necessarily sardonic whirled-view, acquired in the anaerobic underside of one particular of the indoor religions’ myriad guises.  my somewhat byzantine view of the predatory and cravenly cannibalistic adult humyn realms reflects their formative effects upon me.

       until the age of ten, i lived in an anaerobic religious sect in the jungle islands of rural Paraguay, which was based in the fourteenth century European Anabaptist tradition, and in older secret societies.  i now live and work where i grew up thereafter, in what’s left of the rural mountains of western North Carolina.  here, bruce greene and i made the hellbendre presse~leathrewinggeditionnes print shop which sustains my peculiar practice and fierce devotion.

       relying upon the self discipline inherent in graphite drawing, drawing-printmaking, and letterpress printing, i continue to hone my learning edge and engagement with the modern-day whirled in which i did not grow up.  a constant practice with traditional skills, tools, and materials allows for a contemplative grrrl’s-eye view of the fierce other kind of drawer i care to be.  this vantage point calibrates my capacities to behold, give witness, and respond to the brutal yet unremarkable cultures i knew as a grrrl and live among as a womyn.  along with writing poetry, letterpress typesetting, and singing as part of my everyday life, these old-world skills have always provided diverse voices, applicable in defiance of the adult humyn will to act upon any sense of entitlement to power and freedom without accountability to inclusive reality.

       with these tools and skills in hand,  i can put broader information and deeper comprehension into the hands of the random many rather than the chosen few.  the ordeal and its challenges is balanced by its gifts.  with irreverent devotion, i can offer, to self and other, the needful and willing companionship of the other-wise hidden.  traditional methods of drawing, printmaking, printing, writing, and singing seem to me most generous and capable in engaging all the common senses, and i find that slowing and toning down the voracious humyns in this way, including myself, is always worth the effort.  these methods make a practice of contemplating before leaping; why not, versus just because one can doesn't mean one should.

       the daily practice of these synesthetic languages provides openings through which one can defy, by satirizing and demythologizing, otherwise seemingly overwhelming humyn forces and infestations.  in honing these humble essential skills, i intend to help modify and equalize the immodest and immoderate  humyn tendencies and temptations.  by way of such mirrors, we may yet come to see ourselves eye to eye within the beyond-humyn domains.  by such practices we may come face to face with the often denied and hidden capacities of grievous indecency and violence in each of us.  i did not make this whirled.  drawing is a way to live in and learn from the world, only requiring one to keep showing up, no matter what.

       by observation, it is clear that our species has long since lost the common senses of our own elemental belonging among the mosses, efts, and tree-roots.  as we still live and breathe, what are we doing and being here, other-wise?  wondering this calls and drives me to apply my dark humour and sense of sympathetic recognition to indict the shameless iniquities and oblique obscenities of power causing fear and isolation which bind each of us in myriad ways.  from my vantage point, the reflective reawakening of self and other is a good part of the labour, integrity, and gift to which every breathing artist~craftsperson is called and accountable.

       in trying, myself, to be a fully accountable humyn being, drawing keeps me from believing everything i can think up.  it is an expression of my joyous equological devotion and irreverent furious love for the diverse unhumyn worlds and the tender tumultuous humyn whirleds of my time, on behalf of worldwide wilderness, childhood, and children.  care-fully wielded, and with applied belligerence, curiosity, and dedicated observation, these practices and skills can be part of the tried and trued sustainable resourcery; the unvirtual mediums that help make the covert visible; voices of super~sheroic depth and breadth for the inherent and inalienable rights of the lost, marginalized, and under-represented: the invaded, infested, and appropriated children, childhood, and beleaguered natural world.

       applied belligerence is the means by which i hold myself accountable to the ways of equology.  with applied belligerence, i can remain engaged in an often incomprehensible adult humyn world.  equology and resourcery are words i made because i need them.  by equology i mean: equal rights, regard, and consideration for all the beyond-humyn living world and all her literal and figurative children and descendants: mineral, vegetable, and animal.  resourcery, combining resource and sorcery, implies the mysteries reliably inherent in all that is wild, and the applied conjuring of imaginative powers by which anyone can live, learn, and change.

      some of my drawing sheroes are: Kathe Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Curtis Bartone, Heinrich Kley, Walt Kelly, Susan Sawyer, Albin Bronovsky, Patricia Hunsinger, Winsor McCay, Gwen Diehn, Remedios Varo, Joe Loccisano, Honore Daumier, Horst Janssen, Peter Gourfain, Hieronymous Bosch, Federico Castellon, and the drawing printmakers of Eastern Europe.

       usually, i draw in graphite, silverpoint, line etching, stone lithography, egg tempera, fresco, and with words in poetry, prose, and letterpress.  i do most everything slowly and by hand.  what comes of this, given my life experiences thus far, tends toward a fierce, peculiar, sorrowful, irreverent, and furiously faithful point of view.  the practice of modest skills, along the borderlands of the vast and superficial shallows of the immoderate humyn whirled, allows me to engage where i can without too much harming nor hindering myself and others. 

       when not in the printshop, i am often drawing and singing elsewhere, in deep green study, or observing the wild and humyn creatures in our habitats as they observe me.  my humyn familiars, sinisters, and peculiars are---as beatitudes and as tried and trued reflections of my own multifarious self---the curious children, fierce womyn, and honourable menschen who faithfully continue to show up in my life, whom i am blessed to learn from and with.  in the abiding presence of such companions, my own run-amok species may yet develop the sustainable capacity, imaginative intelligence, and the resourceful challenge and courage to modify and make less of our invasive selves.  where there’s life, there is said to be hope.  thereby, the bodhisattva’s equological apotheosis is as likely as anything else, every minute.

       drawing is my resourcery.  it is a skill worth practicing, in faith with the sustaining mysteries within and beyond us, and with the wild resourceries of imagine-nations’ implicit realities.  the nation-of-imagine provides a worthy ambi~valent duality, as tried and trued as anything, in refutation of the destructive consentual realities of the invasive and unsustainable urbanization of the wild worlds i care to live among and leave in my wake.

       the tenacity of my faith in drawing is reflected and abides in the intricate imagination and autonomous mystery of the essential wild worlds inside, around, and beyond us, as in childhood itself.  my fierce trust resides in all that my species is still blessedly---if manifestly and blatantly---not yet equipped to comprehend.

       i hold these truths to be self evident: diversity, inclusiveness, spontaneity, and wilderness save and remake us at any and every apocalyptical moment.  when the sins of the fathers are at long last visited upon the fathers, rather than upon the children, womyn, and nature, then the right to life, common sense resourcery, and equological justice for all will be seen and heard in the land.  the seven deadly sins are not sins but crimes.  the only nation is in the equology of all nature and our own common sense resourcery within her.  the essential religion is resourceful compassion.  the only homeland is the earth.  everything is practice.

 

                                                                                                       ~  koreloy wildrekinde~mcthistlewhistle