Interesting, how many views last week’s post has gotten so far. The last time I got this many was in February when I was posting from the UK about our visit to Sunderland where Paul, my fiancé, was born. We also went to London for a few days that trip but I reported on that the following week, and both of those posts had time to accumulate reads while last week’s did it in a matter of days. Yes, yes, I do compete with myself, I believe I mentioned my obsession with my social media following recently, but since last week’s post was about older artwork of mine, I thought I would show you some more, albeit from the early 90’s and very different. Above is an untitled pen and ink piece from a series of drawings based on yods. Yods appear in the Pre-Celtic Breton language as well as the Hebrew alphabet, but my interest came from astrology where it represents an aspect between planets or signs that create a Y shape in one’s chart. They are a rare phenomena called the Finger of God, indicating a karmic mission or fated life purpose, and I have one. I did not know what the pattern meant when I first started doing them, and once I did, I made lots of them. What my karmic mission or fated life purpose is, was, has yet to reveal itself, but I do feel I’ve always been on a path. Or a rollercoaster, frankly, especially when I was younger, but I just try to say Yes when doors open and so far, things work themselves out. So, given that, I’m doing some charcoal drawings these days in preparation for the printmaking I mentioned wanting to do last week. I like them, I’m relearning about working with black and the negative space of the paper surface. I’ll do a few more of them and then switch to pen, or more likely brush, and ink since that’s what the prints I plan to do will involve. Baby steps, it’s all a process, maybe I’ll show you some of these charcoal pieces next week.

I’ve been thinking the last week or two about what to work on next now that the show is over. This is a common reaction by artists after a big push to get ready for the event. In March, I posted about dropping by the Funk and Schuster Printmaking studio and being excited about the prospect of doing some mono-prints. I had just seen a show of small black on white woodcuts in London I found interesting, but the process was too foreign to me. It was only recently that I realized that what I needed to do was some drawing. Drawing was my primary process in college. I did massive ones mounted on canvas and presented them as paintings. There were several professors who indulged and others who dismissed me as a frivolous female. I did take Printmaking as part of my BFA but, really all I wanted to do was draw, which I continued to do throughout my twenties before I finally picked up a brush. Even now while painting the birds, that first drawing stage is often almost too good to cover up, but I do. Saturday, I pulled out an old portfolio from storage. I’ve got more professional pieces from the 80s tucked away in my studio but this was work I hadn’t looked at since I left NYC fifteen years ago. Expecting trash, I was surprised. Most of it is falling apart if not badly faded, but some of it is very strong. The drawing above is part of a panoramic series I did from the roof of the tenement building where I lived in Soho. It led to the brush because I also did sketches of clouds from the roof that became a series which also resembled maps and ribbon agates, and I spent years deep into the theory that agates, maps and clouds, were all the same thing.

My show's up.

Often, when I finish a series of paintings, I do analog collages. I usually don’t show the two together but I did once when the space was big enough to accommodate both at my first show at The Commons. It was an interesting experiment. The general public responded to the Birds, which sold really well, but the artists and thinkers I knew personally would engage me in serious conversation about the collages. Those pieces were done primarily during the CoVid lockdown but I also did an extended series while I still lived in NYC that were about 9/11 and were shown in Europe and Asia as well as the US. You would probably recognize the two collections as having been done by the same person, although the 9/11 ones were mounted on black backgrounds while the CoVid ones incorporated birds in the imagery. They all have a human figure of some sort, and I try to keep it down to three or four elements. For example, Rendezvous, which I did this week, has three elements if you don’t count the painted wood panel it’s mounted on. The crows are from a Japanese woodcut, the greenery is from a photo I took of a friend’s garden, and I assume the woman is from a European painting, probably 19th century but I can’t identify it. I’ve had her in my stash of images for years now, and I may use her again, who knows? Way back, long before the 9/11 series, there was a group I did with Renaissance madonnas and angels juxtaposed with images from a box of antique postcards I found in, of all places, an abandoned house in Arkansas before I moved to NYC in 1975. That’s a whole other story, but those postcards were all sent to one woman by her son and siblings who all travelled extensively although she apparently didn’t. Some were postmarked as far back as the First World War. I’ve since sold the cards to a collector for a tidy sum after photocopying some of them, but I wish I’d copied more. I love old, obscure images and they were perfect. Writing about this, as I prepare to hang my upcoming show next week, reminds me of a review from The Provincetown Independent newspaper for my exhibition at The Commons where I combined the work. They wrote - “McCarron paints birds in all their decorative, evolutionary splendor, using joyous colors and gilded backgrounds. They’re full of pluck and pomp — the artist’s quietly defiant response to the strain of our pandemic era. McCarron also does collages — a startling adjunct that feels a little Victorian and Alice in Wonderland-ish.” They got it. I loved it. Onward.