Gourd, Vase and Gray Metal, Judie Myers Still Life, Oil on Canvas |
Six months ago my mother, my sister
and I stood in the small studio of our old house. A full-sized
dumpster sat outside, already over half full.
When you must move accumulated
belongings, forty years of the life of a family and nearly
twenty-five of that in the same house, it is not true there is no
room for sentiment. There is almost no room for anything else.
To standard household goods and
beloved mementos you must take with you, you add the studio work of
three artists. You resolve you will keep only the best pieces. You
have already decided which are the best – long ago. Nothing else
is going to accompany you.
Gourd, Vase and Gray Metal, Detail Judie Myers |
Woman with Vase, S. Myers Salvaged Piece |
But art has a little life separate
from its creator, and an artist is often not the one deciding the
fate of their works. In two cases here they were not...
Out from back of a stack of
unfinished canvases – many of them torn or injured in various ways
– I drug a painting; it was red and yellow and gray, vibrant even
after the dust and stress of an unheated, uncooled studio. I set it
up against the wall.