mcauleyhouseartists: Creating Personal Shrines

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Creating Personal Shrines

David Fair, artist

Artists create shrines to express many different things. Shrines can be political, humorous, sacred, satirical. Shrines may express strong emotions, or contain a message on everyday life. The act of creating shrines can also be quite therapeutic and healing as it enables us to express ourselves in a visual language reflective of one's most private thoughts.

By using the shrine format, and enshrining objects of significance- be it a piece of paper, a puzzle part, a beautiful picture, the artists creates a window looking at what is personally important, showing that there is something here of greater meaning than just a pleasing composition.

I think our artists created a remarkable collection of shrines- all very expressive.

The shrines created had many meanings. The shrine on the left

was created to honor our military men and women serving in the Armed Forces.

When creating shrines it's wonderful to have an assortment of materials to choose from.

Shells, art history pictures, buttons, mirrors- all come together in the shrine below to transport the viewer to
an underworld fantasy.

Debbie's box of Inspiration

Megan created a puzzle shrine to honor her grandmother.

To see more photos of the exciting artwork we're creating at McAuley house be sure to click on the flickr link on the right hand side of the main page.

About the Art Program

5 Ways to Grow as an Artist

So how would a Cassatt or a Henri or Picasso approach painting differently than we do today? How might this heartfelt fear of others controlling our painting process impact our self-understanding as artists? Here are five possible answers:

1. Making a successful picture is not the goal. Think of periods, such as childhood, when we grew, our self-understanding changed and we became more of who we are. There was an endless stream of events where we expressed ourselves and slowly began to discover the things that pleased us. As with the sense of freedom characterized above, the entire payoff was growth. The events of life when we grow are the things that happen along the way. Making art should be exactly the same. Paintings are just the series of events or steps we take. Let them go. Keep moving. Or as Henri implored, “Keep living.”

2. The painting process is always a beginning. As soon as the freshness evaporates (we are bored or lost or acquire interest in something else), stop. Do not think in terms of finishing. Picasso lectures eloquently on this. Finish is the death of our work because it means we are painting an expectation or “to be like” and that puts the brakes on painting to see and feel more deeply. Every beginning is a new prompt, a new point of departure. Begin everything. Finish nothing.

3. Ignore non-artist authorities. Juries, the grantors, the gallery, the direction from above are just so many fingers in our pie. All external measures are dangerous because they not only push us to performing, as opposed to creating, but their sense of worth takes over our own. This is precisely what Parisian artists fought against.

4. Get into a prolonged creative process. Have dozens of paintings in your studio that have been abandoned for one reason or another, left in various stages, unfinished but always complete as expressions of who you were at that moment. Work on several paintings simultaneously. You are not making shoes.

5. Furnish the world with your beauty, let the world see, touch and feel who you are. Scary I know. It is so much easier to hide within safe fortresses, the sources of praise and dignity that we can count on by pleasing our audience. This is the dreaded condition called style. We cannot be free to be who we are if we are not always risking being who we are in front of others.