Christmas in Kansas

After two days of airport adventure (which were thankfully not as disruptive as they sound), I arrived in Kansas to celebrate Christmas with my in-laws. While I never thought that traveling on Christmas would be a positive experience in any sense of the word, once I finally got off the ground in Burlington, it turned out to be quiet uneventful.

I arrived in Kansas to a white Christmas, the very white Christmas that I was afraid would make it impossible for me to land at all. After braving the traffic of poor sad Kansans without snow tires who were, it would seem, scared to pick through the drifts, we arrived home to a household of hungry in-laws who good-naturedly ribbed me about holding up the Christmas present unwrapping by more than 24 hours.

On this fair occasion, I was blessed with a Snuggie, a telescoping meat fork, and a digital picture frame (preloaded with our wedding pix, which was very thoughtful), as well as a BluRay edition of Big Trouble in Little China, perhaps one of my favorite childhood movies of all time. My brother-in-law, on quite an art kick, apparently, got me a really nice book with lots of pictures called "Graffiti Women." He told us, "I bought this when I saw the print you'd been working on of the mixer. I thought you needed to get out of the kitchen."

"And onto the streets?" I asked.

"Right."

Said with usual Proulx dry humor, I am 97% sure he does not think of me as a 1950's housewife. But this did get me to thinking about the way people interpret ones art, and what it makes them think and believe about the artist themselves. I was looking through the book of Graffiti Women, which has some really amazing art in it, but I have some really mixed feelings about illegal art -- which forces me to think about how I feel about the artists tagging trains and public spaces (especially the ones who work without permission -- although some of them DO obtain it). As I looked at the work in the book, my thoughts went something like this: "That's awesome. I love those colors! I can't read that writing. Oh, look, that one is painted inside a house! That makes me feel better. Oh, that's on a train. Likely not legal. Why would someone do that?" Which then makes me wonder...what do people think about me when they see my work? Not that I do a ton, or am very prolific...but even so.

It's interesting when you're trying to create something. I find it difficult to just whip out a print when I was to -- I have to expend a good deal of mental energy finding a subject (and I use the word loosely) that is interesting enough for me to want to work with. And there's that additional hurdle of seeing the image you want in your head and being simply unable to make it work on paper. The art I create in my head (especially during church when I actually allow my brain to turn off my constant to-do list) is incredibly inspired.. What comes out on paper is this sad sad reflection of what I hoped it could be.

I think, too, about what a body of work says about a person. I use the word person instead of artist, because calling someone an artist seems so pretentious to me...and because I don't think of myself as such. When my brother-in-law was looking through some of the art books he got for Christmas, I borrowed the book on Magritte to flip through it. When I look at a large collection of an person's work, I wonder what it means. How does it fit into the framework of the lives they have developed for themselves? Does their art actually reflect who they are on a day to day basis? Can you guess anything about the way they walk, talk, or interact with others by looking at the visual imagery they create?

Is it important to view art in the context of the artist, or does it exist independently? Can one have meaning without the other?