2020 was a strange year for all of us. I feel that I benefited more than most be the imposed isolation that COVID presented. I spent the summer making mosaics of all the Planets (including Pluto) and day and Night – in the garden behind the house at the Willy St Art Center. Outdoor mosaics do not hold up in Wisconsin, as well as say, in Mexico, due to the freeze/thaw cycle. I am trying to embrace the (minimal?) deterioration that is resulting – and learn from it.
When Laurel Redmon of Red Sage Health asked me to paint a Harvest Moon mural on her barn in Baraboo, WI I could hardly say no. What Wisconsin muralist wouldn’t want to paint a mural on a barn? After having painted a mini-sky mural at her & John’s Willy St location, I was thrilled to make the trip to Baraboo, ride the ferry across Lake Wisconsin and work in such a lovely healing setting. Laurel, by the way, is a most gifted healer – and I hear that John is, too.
On St Patrick’s Day, 2016, a fire started in the basement of the Williamson St Art Center. As luck would have it, I was out for dinner. I had to live elsewhere for 8 months. When I was able to move back in, as part of the healing process, I began to do mosaics inside the place. The first one I did was in the kitchen – a sun with it’s rays.
In 2014 Sharon and her daughter Shadayra Kilfoy-Flores worked with students, staff members and community members at Drexel Bi-Lingual Elementary School in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico to create a huge mosaic on the exterior wall of the school. Neighbors now refer to Drexel as “the beautiful school.”
In 2020, I began experimenting with “Disintegrations” – paintings built from fabric quilts that contain clothing & related items, along with a top layer of paint / graffiti / destruction. My goal was to build a “vocabulary” with the paint – to see how much paint the work wanted – to see how much the underlying fabric wanted to be obliterated – to see where the work demanded I take it. I made 20 – 30 relatively small works before I learned what the work needed and what made me happy. Many of these early works are in permanent collections – in Madison, Michigan & France.
