Sustainability, Substance and Ability, Substrain

Keeping on, what I'm made of and what I can do, the turmooil underneath. Inspiration and motivation and embracing the fears. I've been thinking a lot about artist's stories. I know where my own inspiration lies. I wonder about other people. I'll start with me, because I can't ask anyone to do for me what I won't. So here's a bit of the painting I'm working on now:

I have long been in love with a place I've never been. When I was younger, I wanted a tribe. A recognizable group to which I belonged. I think this is commonplace for anyone who feels like an outsider or like the last and only. For me, this was mostly because i am mixed race and I grew up in a very pale town. Not rudely so, most of the time, but still. I gravitated toward any other mixed race person I saw, but found there was a kind of magnetic repellant that happened between many of us. The thing about being the last and only is that when you find another one, you either feel like you should be joined at the hip or you reject them. It's difficult to explain, but I understand it, so I won't explain it.

I wanted a country for my tribe, where we could just be without noticing the thing that made us different from everyone else. For mixed race people, the closest thing to a homeland is New Orleans, Louisiana. The place of the first independent black newspaper, and a thriving Creole community. Shit, I speak some French! I love jazz music! And the heat, the mystery, the ready association between life and death, the dancing, the faiths all intermingling, it didn't have to be much to be paradise. I read a book recently called, "A Twisted Ladder" by Rhodi Hawk (If you haven't read it, you should) and was so deeply pulled in, I couldn't see my feet. Like wandering through a cypress swamp right when the moon peeks over the treeline, like sitting in the backseat while something, someone else drives your body to dance, like the lonely howl of a blues man, like cornbread, sweet tea, kudzu, climbing through the spanish moss on an old growth oak tree barefoot. The magical south, I guess. Honeysuckle, magnolia blossoms, kissing on a sunporch on a night so humid your dress is a second skin. The power and mystery, the history of pain and overcoming of pain, the south is rich, bloody soil. And the water, graceful and giving and murderous and callous, takes everything she wants. The Cold War Kids' song "Saint John" about a young man who kills a man who was attacking his sister and now waits on death row, is pure southern gothic. And recently, Adele's song, "Rolling In The Deep" is to me almost exactly a love affair born and died in black bayou water. Of course, the book and later the film that made Savannah, Georgia a tourist droolfest, "Midnight In The Garden of Good and Evil" cannot be overcelebrated. The wail of Bessie Smith, the velvet of Billie Holiday. Bourbon straight. Rich.

My imaginary south, and I have to call it that because the real thing is both more and less fantastic, is itself the experience of the mixed-race writ large. The tension between races is a war I fight inside myself. The black King and the white Queen both hold court inside me. I've been called beautiful and ugly, too much of this and not enough of that and vice versa. Close family members do not look like me, the possible variations have made us all different, much as NOLA looks nothing like anything on any side of her. Sexy and vivacious, a place to party and do things you'd never tell your parents about. Ugly and broken, a place to be saved from itself, a project. Me and she, she and me. There are ghosts that whisper in my trees, there are a hundred forms of religious reverence practiced in my cemeteries, churches, livingrooms and town squares.

My magical, mysterious, imaginary south is very much my own self portrait. There is, always, a seperateness, a loneness (not aloneness, not loneliness), the allure, the danger, the myth and magic, the story only hinted at, something coiled, something sharp and dark.

I can hope that over the course of my life, the entirety of my work forms and completes the puzzle of my experience. Soft and sharp, sweet and bitter. Yes, it sounds egocentric, even a little self-aggrandizing. But it's not. We all walk our own road, and in order to both expand and shrink the landscape, our duty is to express to anyone who will listen our own road-learned experience. I do want to know about you.

Laurelin