It has occurred to me that I have not yet shown you the new piece I did for the People We’ve Been show (which is still on, by the way!). She’s big and she’s another “Girls Can Be Nasty” piece (I like the combo of these three characters, and the story they instantly create).

In this one it looks to me like they are getting ready to go out to a party, and the one in the middle has not dressed up to the others’ liking, or maybe is not ready to go and is keeping the others waiting. Or maybe they’re at the party already and just picking on this unfortunate bunny girl. But the outer two don’t have their shoes on, so I think they’re still getting ready to go out. I wanted the background to be messy and fun and pink – sort of like a stereotypically “girly” party was vomited onto the backdrop. Hah!

I think people are lovely, and certainly we are capable of stunning selflessness and generosity, as well as committing atrocious monstrosities, but boys and girls tend to be nasty to others of their own gender in fairly distinct ways. The psychological warfare of little girls is nasty indeed and intriguing to me (but not TOO intriguing – I’m not interested in getting caught up in that elementary school drama again!). Some people I guess don’t grow out of it, and seeing these adults acting as nasty children makes me laugh in a way. It’s sad, but it’s silly too, and such a waste. There is so much beauty right in front of us all the time, and that’s what I want to put my energy into, to soak myself in and get lost in. Speaking of which…

It’s like spring out there, can you believe it?! I’m writing this in the sun, next to my passed out jungle cat, who knows all about the simple pleasures of life and takes advantage every opportunity she can. What an inspiration! Two happy cats in the sun, we are, and right now this is all I need.

A smile for Kurt as I say out loud: if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

I only thought to snap a couple pictures after the place was closed and the last of us were running out the door. But here’s some of the art:

And here’s some nut job with more of it.

Notice that she is dressed appropriately awkwardly (that is, the skirt is the Annie Get Your Gun skirt from Awkward Stage).

A big thank you to the brave souls who drove up from the GTA to bring me smiles and hugs. You are awesome, and totally made my day.

THANK YOU to everyone who came out that night! Thanks for the warmth, the feedback, the flowers, and the red dots! All things I like very much.

The show is on until February 19th if you still want to check it out! Bohemia is at 125 Dunlop Street East in Barrie. I recommend the maple latte with soy milk. It’s awesome.

Shine on, you crazy diamonds!

xo.

The funky lady I’m standing next to in front of Bohemia here is my cool new artsy pal Alana, owner and creator of Awkward Stage and curator of Bohemia. I met Alana at the Queen West Art Crawl in the summer where we did an art swap, resulting in the acquisition of some of her amazing reclaimed-vintage creations. She’s the cool cat who hooked me up with this show. Thanks, Alana!

It gets even more fun though (and I love this part too): she and I get to share the limelight on Saturday the 28th with back-to-back openings! Her shop (Awkward Stage) is just out back  of Bohemia, so after my opening at Bohemia from 5 – 7, you can meander down the steps at the back to her opening from 7 – 9 where Awkward Stage Gallery is showcasing the works of artist Robin Luoma (showing from January 25 to February 18).

When I drove up to drop off my art, we had lunch in Bohemia, and let me tell you, this foodie gives her approval. And it’s so pretty! See for yourself:

Those are my dirty dishes on the counter. That mug was full of hot apple cider. Until I drank it all, of course.

And now, here is Awkward Stage:

This is going to be fun! But it’s all ready been fun. Okay, this is going to keep on being fun!

The details be here:

People We’ve Been (Candace’s show)
January 23 – February 19, 2012
Opening Reception Saturday January 28, 5-7pm
Bohemia
125 Dunlop Street East, Barrie

Awkward Stage Gallery opening reception:
Saturday, January 28, 7-9pm
Awkward Stage
Lakeshore Mews (just south of Mulcastor and Dunlop E), Barrie

If you are in or near Barrie, let’s be awkward together in person on the 28th! I am so very ready to offer my left hand to shake when you extend your right, and to step on your feet if and when you should attempt to give me a hug. How can I be so confident of this? Years of practice, friends, years of practice.

Later this month I’m having a solo art show at this lovely cafe in Barrie. Details will be on my website shortly. The show opens on the 23rd, and runs for about a month. Woo hoo hoo!

Stay tuned!

I just read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (good read!) and at one point he talks about personality and nature versus nurture, and it made me think of Billions Pass Through this Landscape.  He talks about the Fundamental Attribution Error, in which we overestimate the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimate the importance of the situation and context. He says that we erroneously think of character as “something unified and all-encompassing” and relates it to an information-processing blind spot.

He quotes the psychologist Walter Mischel, who argues that “the human mind has a kind of ‘reducing valve’ that ‘creates and maintains the perception of continuity even in the face of perpetual observed changes in actual behavior.’”

Here’s a blurb from Mischel:

“When we observe a woman who seems hostile and fiercely independent some of the time but passive, dependent and feminine on other occasions, our reducing valve usually makes us choose between the two syndromes. We decide that one pattern is in the service of the other, or that both are in the service of a third motive. She must be a really castrating lady with a façade of passivity – or perhaps she is a warm, passive-dependent woman with a surface defense of aggressiveness. But perhaps nature is bigger than our concepts and it is possible for the lady to be a hostile, fiercely independent, passive, dependent, feminine, aggressive, warm, castrating person all-in-one. Of course which of these she is at any particular moment would not be random or capricious – it would depend on who she is with, when, how, and much, much more. But each of these aspects of her self may be a quite genuine and real aspect of her total being.”

And the follow up blurb from Gladwell:

“Character, then, isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment.”

…or as I end up saying over and over to people at art shows when they ask for the schpeal about my art: we all play different roles to different people at different times. We don’t seem to have one solidified identity, rather, it’s as though we have a whole cast of characters under our skin, passing under the guise of a single person, and we pull out a character according to what the situation calls for. It’s not that we are acting; they can be genuine to who we are, although certainly sometimes we do act and wears masks as well; however perhaps that tendency to don the mask or put on a show speaks to another genuine personality trait as well.

And that’s why I use the animals in my art: their stereotypes are easily read as different personality types. We constantly change. Which version of you is reading this, and which version of you last went to work, met up with a friend a couple days ago, sat with strangers on the train? Who are you right now?

Hello, world. Which Me am I today?

New Year’s eve and day took place in Ottawa this year. I hear it happened in other places too, but that is where I found it this time around. Last year it was in Hamilton, and the year before that, in Oakville. Each new year makes its debut in a different place – lucky I’ve always managed to be in the right place at the right time to catch it! What would happen otherwise? Would I be in limbo? Maybe I’d become unstuck in time like Billy Pilgrim, and would wake up one morning beside the ocean under the grey sky in my striped hand-me-down sweater as a four-year-old again. And then I’d blink my eyes and suddenly be running down a hill in a forest at night, and I’d wonder where I am and why I’m running, so I’d turn around to see what I’m running from, and there would be a huge moose right behind me, and I’d realize that I’m back in Algonquin Park and would stumble down the hill in surprise. When I’d collect myself and stand up again, I’d find myself on a strange planet in a giant glass bubble with some frightened movie star, surrounded by weird lookin’ dudes with their eyes on their hands, and I’d be inhabiting version of my body that I’m not familiar with yet. Surely that’s how it would go. And I’d go on jumping back and forth like that, having a really confusing but fun time. And when I find myself back in 2012 along the way, maybe things will be different for me than they are now, because I would have known to invest in Google back in 2004, and I’d be able to afford my own chicken farm with a huge art studio and a pet pig named Newton.

Man, if I really could go back, if just for a moment, to some earlier point in time to tell myself something, what would it be?  Invest in Google? Invent some thing called Facebook before that Zuckerberg kid does and make millions? …Naw. I think I’d tell myself not to worry so much; to not worry about what goes on in the outside so much and just make art – let whatever’s in my head out.  To not censor myself, to let my freak flag fly a little higher. Hey there little Candace, you’re better than you think you are.  Oh yeah, and seeing as we’ve got another minute here together, invest in Google.

What would you tell the eight-year-old version of yourself now if you could? I think we all still carry that version of ourselves around inside us – it’s the part of us that knows things a little more instinctively, and that takes things to heart when we’re criticized. We can probably still tell ourselves that very Something that needs to be said.

May 2012 be the year you hear your own wisdom and give your inner eight-year-old a hug.

Ain’t the internet a wonderful, funny thing.

So I’m still getting used to this blogging business. I’m not sure what half these buttons do, behind the scenes here. And all this time I have been both categorizing and tagging each post identically, treating these two options as the same thing – just couldn’t remember what the difference was. Then yesterday I thought, okay, the categories are clearly the things listed on the side of the page, so the tags must be ways for people to find my posts in all the wide web. So I decided to add more tags. Yesterday’s post was the first time I used this tool differently if not properly, and because of the picture I posted, I tagged it a bunch of extra things: painting, drippy paint, feet. (Apparently my reasoning was incorrect because now I have the word “feet” in my categories on the side of the page. Hmm..)

Well wouldn’t you know it, someone must have googled “feet” and found my image that way, because within an hour I had an email from someone with a blog all about feet and toes, asking if they could post my image on their page.

Excuse me? Did that just happen? Um, yes please!

Good old internet, uniting people together in the quirkiest of ways. You can find anything here! The last medium of free speech: ah, it is worthy of love and protection. Wiggle on, toes, wiggle on!

See the “toemail” blog here!

2011′s already gone! I’m starting this year with a sleepy grin. Here’s a partial shot of the last piece I did,  finished a couple days before we ushered in a new number, largely with drunken cheers, or in my case this year with swanky cigars and ill-matching, not-so-swanky patched-up-and-yet-still-holey jeans. Why a partial shot? Because I have to sort my photos and in the meantime this is what I’ve got, that’s why. Bon année! Or bon fête or whatever! BON WHATEVER, EVERYONE! HAPPY EVERYTHING!

Good art happens to me when I don’t get so hung up on a vision of the end result. If I become precious about what I’m creating, I’m constantly afraid of “ruining it” and that thought cuts off creativity at its root: experimentation. But all art is an experiment! If it’s not an experiment, it’s arguable that it’s not art anymore.

My sculpture teacher taught me a good lesson about this in my second year of art school. He said that the worst thing an artist could do was get too precious about their creation – because then you stop taking risks. You worry about ruining it instead of pushing, pushing, pushing an idea as far as you can: you stop being creative, and stop allowing yourself to discover new things.

Whatever we (the students) were working on, he would tell us: don’t fall in love with it!

We had an assigned project to sculpt a larger-than-life realistic portrait bust over the course of several months – we spent HOURS AND HOURS AND HOURS with the model, struggling to capture her likeness in wet clay. I sculpted mine with a long, pretty neck, and this amazing professor liked the grace of it. He would come over to check on my progress often, and critiqued me frequently, which I took as a big compliment, because he liked what I was doing enough to want to push me: to help.

I was almost done. Almost done this huge project that I had spent weeks on. And this professor comes up to me with this smirk, and he says in his fabulous British accent, “you wanna fuck wit’ it?”

He told me to hold the base of the sculpture stand. I was terrified. He kept saying, let’s just see, this could be nice, you wanna try? Let’s try it! So he put one hand on each side of her head, over her ears, and in one swift motion he yanked her whole head back and slightly up to the side.

It could have broken right off, BUT IT DIDN’T, and it made the sculpture so much better – so much more interesting and unique, more graceful, dignified looking…

I wouldn’t have had the guts to do that on my own.

The way he approaches art strikes me as wonderful and important: with simultaneous delicacy, fearlessness, and playfulness.

The moral of the story: don’t be precious.

A brave penguin girl has travelled a long way without faltering, hounded by those who would love to see her fall. She has not given up on her dreams of flight, despite having been equipped with flippers and not the feathery wing-span necessary to capture and cradle the wind, to hoist the torso up onto the thin substance of air and carve arcs through the seeming nothingness of the sky.

How does this seem to you? Is this hopeful? It is foolish?

This is the final piece from the Be Part of the Art contest. Participants were asked to submit a short personal story on Meaning-full’s facebook page, in which they compared themselves to an animal within a specific context; i.e. one role you play in a given situation, in contrast to someone else, also assigned an animal stereotype.

The winner was our new friend Nancy from Mexico. Here is her winning submission:

I’m a penguin: a penguin that walks miles and miles to get to what [is] passionate [to] her, surrounded by predatory birds waiting for her to make a mistake; a penguin that moves her wings over and over again because her dream is to fly.

This piece was created to illustrate her story, and is being shipped to Mexico this week as her prize. A runner-upper prize is also being sent this week to the person with the second-most votes.

Thank you again to all who participated! It has been fun, and I plan on doing the contest again in the summer. Maybe you will consider submitting next time..?