SHADOWS AND MIRRORS REFLECTION ON TURNING 80
Shadows and Mirrors is a 38x26 mixed media work. Three dimensional, six-inch papier mache letters and a silk peony are mounted on an acrylic mirror. The colors are alive. Vivid. The letters are painted with acrylics and glazed.
The Latin is a line from a lyric poem collection called The Odes." Pulvis et Umbra Sumus" is Latin for "We are dust and shadows." The next line, not used in the my work, is "Fruges consumere nati" or "Born to consume the fruits of the Earth."
The words were written by the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, better known as Horace. The odes are about love, life, and, often, death. They are a none too subtle reminder that we're going to die. Like all living things, we will one day perish. Period. When examined closely, life, it seems, is an unsustainable illusion. Damn!
Doris Lessing wrote that the great secret all old people share is that we really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. "Our body changes, but we don't change at all." Lessing wrote, " And that, of course, causes great confusion."
And greatly confused am I. Being 80 is very different from being 18. And I am talking about attitude and behavior and all the unseen stuff. Not physical things. In many ways I am still 18. I am arrested development personified. I don't think of myself as elderly. I am, in fact, waiting to grow up. I do see clearly the smoke and mirrors of my tenuous existence. I have noticed the shadows. UMBRA. I feel the shade. UMBRA. I have already been asked where I want to have my dust thrown. What a dumb question to ask an immature kid in an old person's body.
Too often I have viewed my life in a rearview mirror. That is dangerous. If you don't keep your eyes on the road ahead you are apt to crash. I have often viewed my life and world reflected in a funhouse mirror. Some days are/were more distorted than others. Warped. Twisted.
The mirror in this new work distorts when you peer into it because it is plastic. And because it was cheap. There are slight, wavy distortions. Look carefully and you will see the truth.
G.B. Shaw said a mirror is used to see our face, but art is used to see our souls. My cynical view of the world is very much reflected in my "art." There is an obsession with past lives lived. The hundreds of pieces in my Lost Souls series used the anonymous dead. My Self-portraits as Told to the Artist used 48 individual living souls as sitters. Alive or not they all are visual documentation of passages from here to there. Life stories spoken or implied. In each there is the clear if unacknowledged understanding that every life has the same ending.
"I just want you to know," Rose in Moonstruck says to her husband Cosmo who is chasing his youth, "no matter what you do, you're gonna die, just like everybody else."
"You've never seen death?" Jean Cocteau asked. "Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive."
Pulvis et umbra sumus, fruges consumere nati: we are but dust and shadows, born to consume the fruits of the Earth and then die. And that's it. Make the best of it while you can. Particularly if the Fruit of the Earth is in ice cream. And cake.
The Latin is a line from a lyric poem collection called The Odes." Pulvis et Umbra Sumus" is Latin for "We are dust and shadows." The next line, not used in the my work, is "Fruges consumere nati" or "Born to consume the fruits of the Earth."
The words were written by the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, better known as Horace. The odes are about love, life, and, often, death. They are a none too subtle reminder that we're going to die. Like all living things, we will one day perish. Period. When examined closely, life, it seems, is an unsustainable illusion. Damn!
Doris Lessing wrote that the great secret all old people share is that we really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. "Our body changes, but we don't change at all." Lessing wrote, " And that, of course, causes great confusion."
And greatly confused am I. Being 80 is very different from being 18. And I am talking about attitude and behavior and all the unseen stuff. Not physical things. In many ways I am still 18. I am arrested development personified. I don't think of myself as elderly. I am, in fact, waiting to grow up. I do see clearly the smoke and mirrors of my tenuous existence. I have noticed the shadows. UMBRA. I feel the shade. UMBRA. I have already been asked where I want to have my dust thrown. What a dumb question to ask an immature kid in an old person's body.
Too often I have viewed my life in a rearview mirror. That is dangerous. If you don't keep your eyes on the road ahead you are apt to crash. I have often viewed my life and world reflected in a funhouse mirror. Some days are/were more distorted than others. Warped. Twisted.
The mirror in this new work distorts when you peer into it because it is plastic. And because it was cheap. There are slight, wavy distortions. Look carefully and you will see the truth.
G.B. Shaw said a mirror is used to see our face, but art is used to see our souls. My cynical view of the world is very much reflected in my "art." There is an obsession with past lives lived. The hundreds of pieces in my Lost Souls series used the anonymous dead. My Self-portraits as Told to the Artist used 48 individual living souls as sitters. Alive or not they all are visual documentation of passages from here to there. Life stories spoken or implied. In each there is the clear if unacknowledged understanding that every life has the same ending.
"I just want you to know," Rose in Moonstruck says to her husband Cosmo who is chasing his youth, "no matter what you do, you're gonna die, just like everybody else."
"You've never seen death?" Jean Cocteau asked. "Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive."
Pulvis et umbra sumus, fruges consumere nati: we are but dust and shadows, born to consume the fruits of the Earth and then die. And that's it. Make the best of it while you can. Particularly if the Fruit of the Earth is in ice cream. And cake.