Permit me to wander in thought awhile...

I think that my attraction to painting has at least something to do with nostalgia, although it may not be immediately apparent.

Not the nostalgia of late-night tv shows and 50's memorabilia, and not the nostalgic yearnings for former days of rural life prior to technological wizardry - more a nostalgia derived from an acute case of empathy that I've been managing since childhood.

Photography, in particular, seems imbued with a taint of melancholy.  I have been brought to tears by discarded photos in Antique stores, the work of Christian Boltanski and Robert Frank, snapshots of lost friends, etc.  I do not think that this is unique to me, but I am very, very aware of what images do to me - and that conciousness leaks into the things I choose to paint.

I have amassed a substantial collection of family photographs.  Perhaps the best-documented childhood on record, I enjoy looking through these albums yet also feel weakened by the passing of moments and a yearning to experience again the full breadth of the history that has been experienced.

I do not think it sufficient to live once, in one body.

I love yearbooks, particularly those I am not a part of.  I enjoy looking through the faces one after another.  They are catalogues of people who came together for a short time and drifted away.  Some are dead, some living, some kind, some cruel, some beautiful, some homely, some intelligent, some less so.  They go forward and face life in their own manners, until their ends.  The yearbook stays behind as a semi-public record that they were here.  I explored my affection for yearbooks in a lighter-hearted series called "Big Hair".  I would enjoy exploring yearbooks further at some point with a different trajectory.

The "Big Hair" series really began in my adolescence, growing up in semi-urban Colorado in the 80's.  I was fascinated by the prevalence and extremity of some of the manners that people, men and women both, expressed themselves through their hair.  "Big Hair" was quite common at that time, and I was often simultaneously attracted and repulsed by the towering stacks of stiff hair that added inches to the heights of people.  It seemed a marvelous blend of pride and insecurity, offense and defense.  A few years back I was going through a couple of Nebraska High School yearbooks belonging to a friend of mine, also an artist.  I borrowed his yearbooks for a couple of years and during this period worked on some paintings responding to the clear frequency of young women with massive, massive hair.  I thought the yearbooks were wonderful.

To accentuate the aesthetic nature of the hair I chose to frame their portraits differently than expected, and I think the effect worked well.  I imagine them as great birds, sheer cliffs, or powerful waves.  The series is more visually humorous than many of my series, but I still came at it seriously, with best intent.

I'll be sending another entry soon.  This weekend I will be participating in a benefit auction for SOIL Artist Cooperative Gallery, a non-profit alternative space of which I was a participating member from 1997-2001 and from 2002-2003.  The gallery just published a book about its 10-year history of exhibitions, some of which I had the pleasure of curating.  I am looking forward to seeing it.   The auction is always fun, and I rarely leave without more art to hang in our home, which is looking more and more like a museum.

The following Thursday my wife is having an opening at a local gallery. 

I promise to send pictures!

Wesite http://demiart.com if you are so inclined...

Image 1: Big Hair #5 ©Demi Raven 2002, 16" x 16" x 2.75", Oil/Acrylic on Board
Image 2: Big Hair #2 ©Demi Raven 2002, 16" x 16" x 2.75", Oil/Acrylic on Board