Thank You, Kathy

Creativity is blood, paper cuts, and an undeniable urge to form something. When the pieces start falling together, when the final image starts forming, my soul knows a boundless joy. A little bit of ADHD and a whole lot of creative love means my projects are many and varied.

Some weeks it's the chemical smell of turpentine and oils. The press of stiff bristles on canvas. Other weeks it is more organic, herbs crushed and combined. Rose petals turned into ink. Last week it was words and reading them aloud. Listen to the way the ink on paper becomes melodious and meaningful when read from the heart. Start thinking interdisciplinary. Sound and word and the canvas you paint it on.

All of it starts like a distant star. I see the little pinprick of light. I admire the way it shines. This little spark grows as if I'm moving closer. I sketch out the ideas, or frame out the words. Right now it's fabric and paint and carving. The creative process is so personal and individual, how do we talk about the way our brains make connections? These stars in the sky that we connect in illusionary lines until a picture forms. That's how I create.

For my rubber carvings it always starts with a sketch. Paper marked, cut, and arranged to press the charcoal impression of itself into the rubber. The scissors glide through printer paper, snip off the unneeded edges and cleanly help me find the right size and shape. The carving tools, varied in size and shape, swoop through leaving thick and thin lines in the rubber. The craft knife trims edges and excess. The roller moves through the paint, spreading and smearing following the intention of the wrist. The wrist is so important, guiding each tool with intent, with the final image in mind.

These simple tools, blades metallic and clean, breathe life into my art. Extensions of my hands, they carve from this plain, dull square of rubber, magic and life. I breathe in the scents of plastic and metal and know that this is joy. A lot of this I learned from an artist named Kathy Ross. A fearless woman with sturdy, aging wrists who grins like she knows something the rest of us don't.

For all her gray hairs and wrinkles, she spoke to the group of creation with boundless, youthful joy. With pliers she bent metal and with a hot glue gun she bedazzled plastic skeletons. She sliced apart cookie tins and built a massive tree. You put a coin in one slot and listen to it tinkle down through the metal chambers, swing past the broken clock face and pop out into a tiny metal dish. What really grabbed me was when she pulled out this rubber. Leagues upon leagues of carved rubber! Like a tapestry across her table it spread covered in images telling stories.

An entire book with all the images carved in rubber.

She signed my book, 'For Neva, freedom to vary. -Kathy Ross and the space pliers'

Vary my tools. Vary my colors. Vary my art in all the different ways I feel inclined. So now with scissors, blade, pen and brush I vary between cloth and canvas, color and monochrome, and know that everything I create is worth doing, no matter how it turns out.

The first time I put ink to carved rubber and pressed onto it a scrap sheet of paper, my hands were aching with the repetitive motions of carving, because why would I stop once I got going? My hands were nicked with little cuts. Black paint dotted my workspace. Tools were scattered across my art desk.

There it was though! Kathy would be proud I think, to know my first print is not something she would think mundane. This wolf headed woman before me, looking back in wet black ink, was my first rubber carved print and it was Kathy and knives, that helped me bring her to life.

Thank you Kathy and knives.