Oil paint gets everywhere. It's just something you have to make peace with as an artist. No one ever tells you that once you incorporate painting into your life that you should expect and anticipate dried paint to turn up everywhere, especially in the most unexpected places.
I've walked around for days with a smudge of cadmium orange accenting the highlights in my braids, at the back of my head where I couldn't see. Just the other day someone pointed out that I had a touch of Rembrant noire d'ivoire on the tip of my nose. I imagine it's how new mothers must feel after dealing with poopy diapers, after a while they may just give in to the notion that their definition of cleanliness and perfection has changed -no, expanded to include a genre unimagined in their former life. At least that's how most professional artists feel. In the numerous years that I have been painting I have tried just about every product known to man to remove dried oil paint from clothing, and the like (carpets, upholstered furniture, you get my drift!). And the best product, the only product, in fact, which left no trace or stain from paint, or residue is Kiss Off.
The key to all stain removal is to never (and I mean never) put the article of clothing in the dryer. That is universal. If you find the stain while folding clothes after doing laundry the stain can't be undone because it's been "cooked" into the fibers. The new alternative is to make that shirt/skirt/pants your new painting wardrobe or my personal favorite, cut it up and use it for rags versus some random rag one purchased. Some of my rag mementos include tees from past vacations, boxer shorts that my older sister wore to cheerleading practice back in the 90s, and favorite shirts that have been ruined by oil paint in their previous lives. Get creative. And use every step in life, even a mishap, and make it a part of your process. SECRET TO CLEAN BRUSHES: The best tool to remove paint from brushes is Lefranc Bourgeois' Brush Cleaning Fluid / Luquide a Nettoyer Les Brosses. Unfortunately, I do not believe this product is sold in the United States but it surpasses every product ever created, in my opinion. This product would totally be worth the day of detention in customs if one were to opt to smuggle it into the states -but you didn't hear that from me.
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The Word of the Day for March 2 is:
didactic \dye-DAK-tik\ adjective 1 a : designed or intended to teach *b : intended to convey instruction and information as well as pleasure and entertainment 2 : making moral observations
"The universe would just be an empty space without art." -Keariene
For the past eight months I have been wearing a cuff I designed out of cardboard. My cuff is black and bears a sequence written in white oil paint beneath a high gloss polish. A-7713. The number assigned to Elie Wiesel during his imprisonment in Auschwitz..
Art, in my opinion, should provoke dialogue and empower one to ask questions, of themselves and all that exists within their surroundings. This is how I measure the meaning of my work. If the answer is "yes," when the question asked is "Did they take a second look?" Only when others measure their experiences and opinions against the message I convey has the end result of my labor been productive.
Many politely inquire about my cuff. "What is A-7713?" Other times I have had to explain who Elie Wiesel is, which is never a bother. With my upcoming collection, I hope to blend powerful imagery and aesthetics with instructions that the past must be retained in the future, as well as, the present.
And, yes. Before it is asked, oil is still my first love and only medium.
In 2007, I was determined to create the collection which is now Secondary Sources: Stone Narratives of the Holocaust. It was a concept, an idea that flourished inside me. I have so many concepts in my head for art collections that I could literally paint each second for the rest of my life and never exhaust the list.
I made a special trip to Paris from 2008 - 2009 to prepare this collection. My business partner was in the south of France and the next thing I knew I was on a plane. It was the very first time that I had ever left Paris on a visit to France. The city just sucks me in.
The snow was something terrible, but I'll take a terrible day in Paris over a good day in Bermuda any day of the week. My approach was not systematic. I had to take off my gloves in order to sketch. Then, I had to warm my freezing fingertips for a quick minute inside the safety of the gloves before returning to sketching.
I like to be in Paris during the winter because there are few tourists and I can roam about freely and have full access to the statues. Art creation is a very private and intimate process for me. I will close all doors, pull curtains, and draw blinds down in order to separate myself from everything outside my head, shutting off from everything in existence beyond me. So there I was in the Cimetiere Pere Lachaise with freezing fingertips and sketch pad in hand. I do not listen to music while walking about because I am trying to "feel" the stones and discern whether a particular tombstone or statue bears a message for me to deliver to the world.
The sketch on the left was created as I sat in the snow, before it began to rain. For me, this statue represented the children that were lost during the Holocaust. The body, in scale, felt innocent and ghostlike, and it was also, vast, and empty, and a gesture that echoed with questions. Upon my return from Paris in 2009, I painted the middle image; a sample for Patricia Guggenheim who will be modeling her hand in the final version. I never signed the painting depicted in the middle image which was an indication that while my mind said the painting was finished something within me said it was incomplete.
Eventually, I had a most delightful and brief life change and something inside me "clicked" and I knew what was to be corrected with this piece.
"It's all wrong." I told a loved one who phoned from Spain New Years' Day.
"What's wrong?" Was the reply.
Balancing the receiver on one shoulder I exclaimed, "Patty's painting."
I usually have a blueprint in my mind of what a work will look like. I store this image in my head and typically know exactly what I want and my job is truly to execute the schemes of my imagination.
"So, you want to know how I spent New Year's Eve? " I continued, "I revised Patricia's painting." My heart sank like a stone drifting to the bottom of a dark ocean floor. "I realized that if there was a war and I was torn from (my partner and) my child. The last thing I would be feeling would be all pastel colors and a silky smooth background!"
And so I conveyed the story of how I spent December 31, 2009, meditating and offering up thankful prayers for the inner and outer peace that is present in my life. I am ruled by a very deliberate passion and so, to the angst of many, I prefer to spend my birthday and my New Year's Eves painting. I am called to create and identify messages for society and therefore it is not work.
Many viewers do not realize that when they look at one of my painting they are simultaneously looking at chunks taken from a calendar, weeks that are given like an offering. It's like I have to give up my life in order to deliver life. And for such love I am a willing slave.
***
This painting was created to Leaving Paris by Craig Armstrong on Piano Works. I usually play music while I paint. (The same song on repeat until the piece is finished.) Something that punctuates the emotion of the work, but there was never a song created that could translate the darkness of the Holocaust to me. The hardest part of this collection is finding that there is no song or sound that can translate such darkness to me.
I thought about all of the millions of baby's hands that were let go of in the concentration camps. I thought about the worried mothers. I stood inside their stripped uniforms and shaved heads, and tried to interpret what it meant to be a Jew on that day. I asked, "How could a yellow star hurt so much?" So I painted the yellow star above the "child" because of what it meant to be Jewish in the 1940s. That is why there are heavy yellow strokes on the statue. It is also the reason my signature is yellow because I know what it means to be a Jew at any time.
I know you are dead and this letter will never reach you. You passed away in the summer of 2006. Your daughter, Talia, my dear friend, was marked by your sudden absence.
I could not help but think of you as I roamed the tombstones of the Pere Lachaise Cemetery that winter. I was preparing my Sacred Stones Collection at the time, marking the end of my process with grief. You see, I began painting because someone stole the only baby photos I had when I was in high school and I had no way to show my unborn children and grandchildren what I looked like throughout my lifetime so I began documenting my emotional history for them. In telling this to Talia around 2003 she said, in her thick Israeli accent, "I know what you mean. My father survived the Auschwitz death camp. We lost everything in the Holocaust. My family has no pictures from before 1946. I know how much it hurts to not be able to see the past."
Talia and I held hands through what was the most tumultuous times of our lives, and now we walk beside one another with the inner peace and self-certainty that has been won in this newfound era of our existence.
I asked her about your tattoo number. I asked if she knew what it was. "He had one, but I don't remember what it was." I became a little obsessed with your tattoo number when I returned from Paris. We called Israel and asked your wife what your tattoo number was and she too could not recall it though she slept beside you faithfully for over forty years. It was like the horror of what the tattoo represented had been blocked from their minds, ignored, and thus erased from the caverns of time and history.
"My father," Talia declared one evening after we left schul, "has always had more integrity than any human being I have ever encountered in my entire life."
The horror and indignities you experienced and witnessed were not enough to overcome your humanity. And that is how YOU became the spark that has become the inspiration behind my newest collection Secondary Sources: Stone Narratives of the Holocaust. I knew that all around the world Survivors were dying, taking with them the extraordinary narratives of history. And such personal accounts, if left unrepeated, means that the Holocaust itself could also bear the threat of being erased from the archives of the future. The weight of this thought made my heart crumple like a bawled up sheet paper.
One day she told me your story. That you were a young man in Auschwitz and worked doing labor. That you hurt your knee from always kneeling on the ground and that the wear of your wound became so serious that you could barely walk. You could not work and had a fever. You became so sick and you knew the feeble ones were killed. So death became so real. You spoke to another worker, someone higher up. He had been a doctor before coming to the camp. You and this man were from the same country and had lived in nearby villages. Somehow, the doctor convinced the Nazis to let you rest for two days in the barracks. He said you would be valuable again after resting off the fever. And so you laid in bed knowing death was surely at hand if you did not recover. On the second day, as you tried to break the fever that was inside you, bombs were dropped and everyone that worked in the labor camp you were in was killed in the blast, including the man that saved you and the only reason you survived was because of your wounded knee.
You only told the story once to your children. You did not want to ever look back.
I want to thank you for having the strength to tell your story. And I pledge to remember you and tell your story so that your memory and legacy will live on.
It is not an easy thing to disallow the darkness of humanity from overthrowing one's spirit.
Thank you too, for creating and nurturing a life that has grown to become one of my best friends.
New York has embraced my work. One of the things I cherish about being an artist is seeing and hearing the way others reinterpret my work. This fact even goes out to the journalist who title the articles and retell my story. When I saw the headline given in the issue of NY Arts Magazine, "Standing the Test of Time," I thought to myself that there was no better description for what I achieved with the Sacred Stones Collection.
When I returned from Paris, I lived a house away from an artist. When Derek and I would discuss paintings or techniques I would often say, "I need to execute the colors in a way that they will be visible one hundred years from now with the same vibrancy of today." His reaction often was "Who cares about one hundred years from now!" (I do.) When I paint, I often think of my work in terms of outliving me. For me, the longevity of my art is something I always take into consideration, from the way the canvas was created all the way down to how it has been framed for viewing. The question of endurance never escapes me. This question had to occupy the minds of the masters that traded in days of their lives and hours of creative focus to produce something that unknown people occupying the unformed empires will someday be able to witness. They all had us in mind.
Each masterwork that I produce is the result of collective days spent in complete solitude and the experience of an inner revival. However, when I look at my collections I see the many weeks past, evaporated by the everlasting tic-tok of history's momentum and the moments I can never get back. It's like a visual diary of my emotional life. The title given by NY Arts was so fitting because I have withstood time and overcome the fluctuations of day to day life in order to consistently deliver a message that I know will be observed by a future that my eyes will not know. I am my own constant.
To thrive as an artist requires a unique strength that is only heard by those called to do it. Painting is a compulsion from a source that transcends me. No one will ever be aware of the costs made to so skillfully reconcile the world of my imagination with the outer world I live and breathe through. My life has been sacrificed for the sake of my passion. And my joyful hands are my willing tools.
"NOW DO YOU WANT THE TRUTH OR DO YOU WANT THE TRUF?" -Keariene Muizz
Both of my parents are from Chicago, born and raised. However, my mother, unlike my father, managed to escape life without the native Illinois city accent. As children we couldn't help but snicker when listening to our father pronounce certain words. Especially words ending in th. Whenever my father opened his mouth he always managed to give away his origin through a mangled word or two. The word with became wif. Mouth could easily be converted to mouf depending on the parent we spoke to. When my baby sister was about to be born the explanation was that our mother was, "going to give birf" (not birth!) at the hospital. But the ULTIMATE word that would send all four of us reeling in a laughter so powerful that we'd get tears in our eyes, behind his back of course, was the word earf a Midwestern variation on e-a-r-t-h.
The four of us would be planted on our brown plaid sofa, two to a cushion, watching him pace before us asking, "What's the circumference of the planet earf?" Sometimes, we couldn't contain ourselves and we'd steal glances at the sibling beside us, our eyes widening with the laughter our mouths couldn't reveal. Other times we'd secretly nudge one another with our elbows whenever he said earf, laughing mightily on the inside.
That was so long ago. I have a lot of -isms, Keariene-isms, if you will -things that only I would say or come up with. For the past decade, the people that know me up close and personally, friends and family, mostly, have often heard me say, "Now do you want the truth or do you want the truf?" In response to an inquiry they may have made. At first this question usually prompts them to scratch their head and say, "What's the difference?" And I let them know. "The truth is what you tell someone when they want their feelings spared and then the TRUF is the undiluted reality." This usually makes them laugh.
You see, I always speak the truth, but much like my daddy, I speak the truf on occasiontoo. It is always best to know if someone can handle it beforehand as everything has it's time and place.
Speaking the truf can be freeing. You'd be amazed at how many times someone would prefer to hear the truf over the truth -especially when that dress doesn't make them look bigger than they really are! Just ask them, you might be surprised.
Adrian Rayment is many things to many people. As a dear friend I have the fortune of knowing Adrian (Aid) beyond his acting career and The Matrix Reloaded. To me, Adrian is the epitome of a renaissance man. His dedication to transcendence is an everlasting romance, a never ending exchange between ideals and emotions. More than most artists I know, Adrian lives to push himself beyond the confines of physicality and all that bodily preoccupation encompasses -a passion I also share but approach from a different direction. And I guess that's why I imagine I'll know him forever, because Adrian is unaware of himself. He is completely unaware of his grandeur. It is in this absence of ego, from the lack of self-consciousness, in which Adrian Rayment is able to deliver the undiluted purity of an emotional event.
Like me, in seeking truth Adrian Rayment takes everything in through the only medium he has ever truly needed, his senses. I have many artists friends and there are experiences that only artists exclusively encounter. I notice that I go to each of them for different things. I usually don't ask people what they do for a living, I'd rather find out what inspires them, and if that includes their occupation -then very well. I've had friends for ten years and never knew what they did for a living. No joke. But what I knew was their love of James Baldwin or how they liked their coffee. I'm a details kinda girl. I can't help it. Well, with Adrian we never discussed work for many years. Then I broke the silence and find that I go to Adrian when I need to feel the company of a collaborative spirit. I love being in the presence of brilliant people. It creates a spark within me.
ADRIAN RAYMENT AS THE IRON MAN: ACTING & ARTISTRY
The metal creations produced by Adrian Rayment are an enlightened deviation from the mundane. The manner in which his tedious calculations not only foreshadow elegance, but calibrate it as part of a divine whole, is an unwavering trait which sustains the glorious ecomiums of critics internationally.
Of all the artist I interact with I notice that I have different types of conversations with each individual. Whenever I discuss art with Adrian Rayment the exchanges usually center on the topic of "the process." I realize I often reveal different parts of myself to different people and that Adrian gets glimpses of the embarrassed and childlike parts of me. Adrian has seen the Keariene that blushes. He has also witnessed the part of me that stands in awe; like the 1,000th time I saw French ultramarine (blue), but the first time I saw it in the tears of an angel in L'Offrande -that was the first time I was in awe of blue, when I grasped that the deceased have prayers and wishes for us too. Therefore, I was naturally curious to explore Adrian's process.
KM: I realize that I have most of my breakthroughs, with regards to business strategy or my work itself almost immediately after I hit a wall. What is your process?
AR: Breakthroughs? I'm convinced my ultimate breakthrough is always just out of reach, it's not a mind set I've nurtured. I intuitively believe in myself as a creative person. How to keep on the creative boil? Immersing myself in being true to myself and subsequently honest to those around me. This attitude is not purely restricted to flesh and blood. I find inspiration, emotive sensation, from man made inanimate objects as well as nature. Natural aspects specifically.
***
When I began the Sacred Stones Collection I noticed that the feeling I immersed myself in while painting would linger throughout the rest of the day, ruminating about death and how it affects us on a macro and micro level is not exactly a productive thing to do when one is roaming through the aisles of the Home Depot. Therefore, I had to learn how to "turn off" and disconnect from the theme in order to create an emotional barrier between my "art world" and my real one. Reggae music was the cue that would help reset my mood. (Think about it! It's impossible to be sad when you listen to reggae music. You show me a sad reggae song and I'll show you a lie!)
***
KM: Have you ever had a character linger long after you're work is done? How do you exit it?
AR: A lot of my creative concepts linger in the recesses of my mind's playful corridors. Some have been running a muck for years. They are my fertile projects of the future, my internal muses maturing towards an eventual birth. I do not rush them. I feed them and play with them in waves free of scrutiny and social filters. I let them pull the strings that make me tick, stir my very essence, we grow together in blissful ignorance.
***
The renaissance men of today are quite different from the days of yore. They have the ability speak in prose one minute and prove themselves as more than capable of holding a riffle and covering your back in a foxhole the next moment. Adrian Rayment is all of these things. He is qualified to pull from any agency which prompts the stimulation of invention, be it martial arts, sculpting, writing or acting. His life is one which fully encompasses all forms of artistry and I am thankful that he is fearless and exacting in all his pursuits that I may continue to stand in awe of his interpretations of existence and all that propels us through it.
