Art and sentimentality. Can the two co-exist?

Each year as I consider what appeals to someone searching for Valentine's Day gifts, I am caught between my desire to sell 'love art' and my need to retain the working fundamentals of my arts background. I cannot tell you how many times, I've had my knuckles and mental state rapped for including sentimental visual elements in my artwork. This knuckle rapping has come from respected art professors as well as dear and trusted artist friends.

Case in point: While working on pieces of a large installation project, "The Extraction of Relevance" made for a university show, I decided to include two 'very feminine' wired on, metal found objects. I added them to the bottom front leg of my welded together torture/inquision chair. The appearance of this decayed metal, hulking chair is intentionally designed to be unsettling....throne-like tall with two of the three legs stilted on industrial rolling wheels. The third leg tip-toes like a ballerina balancing atop my 'precious' found objects. A metal/leather strapped headpiece (electric chair-esque) dangles above the empty metal seat and on one chair arm, an attached tray of rusty 'truth finding implements' (antique dental tools, broken and brown stained razors, vintage syringes and such) completes the grisly aspect.

The found objects I added were two small beautifully made, classic ball and claw feet, each about 4 inches tall. Most likely originating around the turn of the century...fitting, yet incongruous additions to my chair. I like their delicacy, the visual tension these pieces add and the message they relay.

While I was working on the installation, into the studio walked one of my artist compatriots who has also been an arts mentor to me. How I love the lengthy arts history conversations we've enjoyed. She absolutely lost it when she spied the diminuitive additions to my chair! When she calmed herself, she asked why I had added this sentimental crap to the already completed chair. She commented, "What is so strong about this installation is that one cannot tell if it was conceived of and created by a man or a woman." She then went on to speak of how difficult it is in the male dominated fine art world for women to succeed or even compete. Any show of sentimentality or nostalgia by a woman in her artwork will knock her out of the golden circle, where art is taken seriously. She asked me if I would consider removing this element.

Her request impaled what is at the very heart of my work as an artist. I explained to her, I am a woman and I find it impossible to deny this in my artmaking. What this little sentimental piece of metal fluff signifies are all the uphill challenges I've surmounted to be considered worthy as a serious artist. It is also my stubborn refutal of what is held sacred by the fine art world. These "precious" additions attest to how women are hobbled, constricted, expected to fit a male validated artist mold. Sorry, I can't...won't remove them. I've paid my dues, I've earned the right to speak my artistic mind....these bits of sentimental fluff stay put!

I went on to show my installation. It received critical acclaim and was considered one of the better pieces in the show. The question offered by my installation is "Who actually sits in the executioner's inquisition chair?" The art critic who exists only because there are artists or is it the artists, themselves who inwardly apply the torture implements as they self-examine their work?

Out of this strengthening experience came the commitment to always be true to who I am as an artist. Do I get teary eyed over sappy sentimental music, movies, books? Yes...I do. Do I include female nostalgia symbols in my artwork? Yup...I sure do! Am I capable of building visual metaphors for weighty, swinging man balls or meaty Judy Chicago inspired pieces of female genitalia? Then put these shock value pieces on display to compete in the larger fine arts arena? Yes, I can and occasionally do.

But as a women, it is my heart that I speak from and the heart of the matter that I wish to speak to... Why would I ever want to deny this lovely female part of myself? I have learned you can have the best of both - creating from and showing both your female and male aspects.

So today, I've put together a jewelry collection for my store celebrating the 'art of Valentine's Day love'...with fluffy heart shapes abounding and abundant. Next week. I'll drag out the welder, blast holes with the sandblaster and bend big metal to my will. It all works....every bit of it is about being true to yourself while expressing your heart and the art of love....or is it the love of art?

Deep down inside of DH and myself is this shooting fireworks, razamatazz, bending sweetly into a stroke of midnight kiss...our response to ringing in the New Year. We're celebrators, looking forward to new adventures that lie ahead and happy to have made it intact through another year.

We have a party, although these days we rarely venture from our home environs on New Year's Eve. A too close for comfort encounter with a drunken driver a number of years ago has made us quite content to cuddle up together in front of our home fire. We happily toast the New Year with crystal flutes of bubbly and treat ourselves with, prepared just for the evening, delectable tasties. With the comforting strains of Guy Lombardo's 'Auld Lang Syne' playing in the background, we count down, watching the televised ball drop in Times Square. At the midnight hour amid neighborhood fireworks and other things that make loud noise, we kiss with our renewed New Year commitment to each other. Well...we kiss if we're still awake enough to find those lips.

After a half century of living, it's almost always the quietly shared moments that have the deepest meaning for us - awake or asleep.

Happy New Year to you and yours.....

Wait. What???? Are you talking about the garish riot of neon colored lights stuck onto neighborhood houses up and down our street? The "look at me - look at me" chase of razzle-dazzle Holiday marquee lights? Poor Frosty, the (stop-rip nylon) Snowman hovering in front yards, while chilly air blows (you know where)?

There seems to be a competition afoot in our hood this year for blazing outrageous house decorations. It started with one house a few years ago and has now blown into a cluster of shouting, streaming flood-lit dwellings. Any of which could easily be screen captured by night-time Google Earth. Our homie street is beginning to look a lot like Little Los Wagoes.

Not to miss out on this residential festooning and seasonal fun, DH and I decide to trek out into the winter woods to capture and bring home wild pine and juniper boughs for front porch decoration. Well...actually we unload a friend's garden pile of new evergreen clippings. But the hunt has many similarities...frozen fingers, pine sap drips on new winter coats and shoe mud gobs tracking where we walk.

Once home, we stuff the boughs into an old urn, positioning it just so on the front porch and wiring those limbs to the wall. No full-cheeked arctic wind will blow these babies down the street. Next on the cheer list - our ceremonial choosing of color lights. Off to Wally-world, we go, humming Christmas tunes under our breath, because neither of us can remember the right words. When you reach this memory juncture in life, I think it's called "uh-OH? @xmas"!

Of course, DH is stopped in his tracks by the blinking bright LED lights, all arrestingly displayed at man-eye height. I'm drawn to the softer non-blinker variety of traditional tree lights. Inspection of tree light boxes, ad copy and verbal comparison of pros and cons ensue. It soon becomes apparent that evergreen lighting compromise will be necessary.

Stretching yards of light sprinkled green plastic encased wiring, we begin our decorating. An hour later, after many consultations, re-winds and re-drapes, our Christmas bush is plugged in and ablaze. I can happily report that we've joined the neighborhood light brigade....in this case, the Yuletide Home Guard. His bright blue-ish white (sock you in the eye) LED lights are sweetly twined with my little green sparkler brights. We've offered up our part to the nightly Christmas parade milleu.

All is well, all is bright. No doubt about it, Santa's way will DEFINITELY be splendidly lit on that one very special winter night!

(**NOTE: The above image is not a photo of our house.) Photo Credit: CC-laurie