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canvas, 12 x 9.75 inches, 2000 |
COURTING THE UNEXPECTEDBY TERI THOMSON RANDAL
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"Because I am working from an intuitive process, things around me, things in my mind, all get filtered into the painting," Maki said during a recent telephone interview. "It becomes a way of marking a certain time in my life." An example of this intuitive process is Maki's fascinating work Wordsearch (the wise strive to no goal). While working on this painting, Maki became so frustrated and unhappy with it that she put it in a closet and considered it a loss. "But it kept beckoning me," Maki said. "So then I told myself I could work on it, but only in my free time because I had already wasted so much time on it." Much to Maki's surprise, having given up the thought of ever finishing the painting, she completed it in two weeks. During this same period, while reading a collection of Zen poetry, the artist came across the phrase, "The wise strive to no goal." "The idea perturbed me, unsettled me, because our whole culture is so geared toward goals," Maki said. Then she realized that the poem mirrored what had happened with the wayward painting. "It only came around when I totally let it go," she said. To honor the lesson the painting taught her, Maki decided to spell of the work's subtitle in raised circular cutouts dotted across the canvas. She relished the irony of a viewer embarking on a goal-oriented word search and then arriving at the Zen phrase for the solution.For Maki the phrase also refers to the process of looking at a painting. "When you look at a painting, it is important to be there in the present moment, fully open to it without your own wishes or desires. Likewise, when I keep that attitude in my own work, I am the the most productive." Indeed, it was while Maki was completing Wordsearch (or not completing it, in a Zen sort of way) that she first experimented with her looped and dribbled lines. Until then, the artist had meticulously painted her lines with a brush -- for example Coming to Meet and Somethin' Else -- but she disliked the tedious process. For Wordsearch, a painting she felt she could experiment with, she mixed the oil paint with resin, but it in a squirt bottle, stood over the painting and squirted a tangled line onto the canvas."I did it out of curiosity," Maki said. "But I liked the result because it seemed less contrived and more immediate. Like automatic drawing." Maki went on to use the squirt-bottle technique in Revolving Possibilities, Interlock and Orbit. Each time, the line came out differently. I've never been able to duplicate the same results," Maki said, seeming delighted. In the catalog essay, commentator Kathleen Shields writes, "Maki's work suggests that the value of any journey lies not in our destination but in our awareness that we are always arriving, always here in an ever-evolving present." Maki's own journey as an artist also suggests this theme. As an undergraduate art student at the University of Wisconsin, Maki was determined to become a printmaker. But her professors and the graduate students in her department didn't see her that way. In the young Maki, they saw a painter. "I didn't understand what they meant, but I also didn't dismiss it." Maki said. It wasn't until midway through her graduate studies at the University of New Mexico that she stepped onto the path foreseen by her Wisconsin mentors. She earned a master of arts in printmaking in 1980 and then a master of fine arts in painting in 1982. Maki naturally gravitated to abstraction and the intuitive approach. The trouble with that she said, was that she never knew what her next painting would be. "It was scary because I didn't have a nice, one-sentence phrase that summed up what I was doing. At that time it produced a lot of anxiety." Later in the 1990s Maki briefly switched to semi-figurative painting and based her subject matter on the external world. The only happy result from this period, Maki said, was that her parents finally understood and liked her work. The downside was that it simply didn't work for her. In 1999 Maki returned completely to abstract painting and allowed once again her intuitive senses to guide her. The paintings in this show, she said, come full circle to the place she began nearly 20 years ago. Maki's paintings often combine two- and three- dimensional elements. In Orbit, a wire attachment, protruding from the painting completes the circular path of a painted line. In others, knobs and spheres serve as place markers along the paths of lines or punctuate focal points of spirals and loops. The physical shape of the artwork is critical to Maki. Few of her finished pieces are rectangular. Additional rectangles or scroll-like shapes often jut off the sides, adding to each piece's playful, unique character.During the 1980s many artists experimented with oddly shaped canvases, but few are manipulating the boundaries of the canvas today. Maki said for a long time she resisted altering the shape of her canvases because it is not a trend in contemporary art, but she finally gave in to her instincts.."I came to a realization that if I really wanted to do something that was honest, those shapes had to be on there. Without them, the painting just doesn't breathe. It lacks presence." It all ties back to the art of surrender, of letting things happen, Maki said, "I can't choose the kind of painter I want to be." April 12-18, 2002 |