June 25, 2006
Content
This is Monk's shadow aspect. Monk is having a difficult time. He is feeling our angst about selling the house and especially does not like when foriegn people enter the house. We have him on a Return to Joy Program. But I am asking that everyone prey for Monk and Arrow, ask your companimals to give some positive thoughts to both of my good cat friends. This is a stressful time for all of us.
So, as usually I am breaking with tradition and talking about The View before Tuesday:
I took myself for a date and read your latest, while eating dinner tonight. I am reading chapter 3 and thinking about content. I have had the good fortune to go to two years of Textile Surface Design School at F.I.T in Manhattan. I say this for two reasons, it is more of a technical/vocational program than an art program and for me, artistically at least, two years is all I needed.
I sometimes think it would have been awesome to get into a fine arts program, daydreaming that I would have learned to paint in oils, might have been given the chance to expand my knowledge of artists through out the ages and their affects on us as modern artist, I could just go on about my ideas and ideals...
But the truth is, I got a speedy course though painting in water reversible media, repeats, colorways and everything related to textiles. When I got out of school, I found a job as a vintage poster restoration artist which exposed me to drawing and painting styles, gave me the opportunity to decipher political and cultural significance in the pieces I restored and gave me everything and more of what I might have been afforded had I gotten into a fine arts program. I worked on originals, Warhol Strike-offs and fell in love with stone litho, Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha.
But, so... I was reading about "content" and I must say I wonder at the implications of your use of this word. Perhaps this word and your use of it is a bit of ignorance I need to shed light upon. Do you mean to say emotional, cultural, personal content? Placing a broader sense of the world or my experience of it into my work? Is content the spark that takes the work past the person who made it? Pops the bubble of technique and form?
When asked, 'What is my own content?' I think I would answer this as, the female form, nature, birds.
But I guess I get stuck on that word. Content.
I feel that I draw upon my experiences and insights when I get imagery out onto the cloth. That the images I create are specific to me, Melanie Testa. I do not feel as though I am giving voice or channeling the various teachers I have admired and taken workshops from. Though I can see that the techniques I have learned have coalesced into something that feels quite grounded to me.