I first encountered Abbeth at Portland, ME's
Cosmic Bridge art/music festival under a bridge, a refreshingly homegrown affair with many artists' stalls among the vendors'. Immediately upon looking at her (vividly colored) drawings I felt weird; really weird, like my mind was changing, consciousness opening. I ended up looking at every last thing, scores of drawings and paintings. I'll share with you a few, more at
abbeth.com,
FB,
IG, etc. It is my hope that you will feel it too.
Abbeth changed everything I think about the figure, about visual art in general: I was so astonished by what I saw that I saw that I needed to rethink everything, that there were dimensions unfound and uninvited to our 3-D morass. I'd wanted to take up, engage w/ the dimensional challenge for some time, but here was a road map, an exemplar for us mortals. Figurative conventions are overridden, and figure/ground, positive/negative space, objective/narrative dualities are superceded as well.
In the paradigms of figuration, there are the Cavepeople, Egyptians, Bellini, Picasso (Bacon?), Clemente, and now Abbeth; and a few million others. Not all men: props to Cavewomen, Kahlo, Spero, Schutz et al. Why's it been so hard for us to redraft the body, and it's relation to its environment? Any change is internalized to injury/death, an 'insult to the body' (see Dix). Or worse, a change in consciousness (quelle horreur). And yet, perhaps we
would like to slowly, gently loosen our identification with so
louche a thing, so perishable a commodity; perhaps we
would like to express the confounding of corporeal identity that consistently plagues us, our worldview/self-assessment being challenged so consistently. Perhaps fun, a wee bit?
I will not share all my favorite stuff because I want to leave a few doors and windows open for you burglars. I gave up on titles pretty quickly because. It gets wilder toward the end, I ourage you to have courage. And now, without further ado, in no particular order...
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| Fishbowl Creature |
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| 3 Legged Walk to City |
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Springtime
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Winter Speaking Summer
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