NOTES ON MY PROCESS AND WORK
My work often starts by locating images that spark something deep within and which I wish to explore.
Usually I have a difficult time getting started, and a lot of self doubt. I just keep starting over and over until something appears.
I hope to reflect my feelings of what it is like to be feminine and most of all what it is like to be a reflective person.
Figures seem to come to me and populate my world. I see them appear, as if ghosts from the past and stories come with them, things I muse about as I work. I have a large collection of vintage and antique photographs and before starting something I spend a lot of time looking at the faces of these people from my collection, faces of people who inhabit another realm, unidentified and yet I feel I do know them and that somehow they live through me. There are certain images I am drawn to. As I work, the images change to something coming from within me and create a feeling for me that says something.
The photo or other image which I use as the basis of a composition often changes quite a bit.
I prefer using the old photos to models, real people or still lifes as they are more like doors to another reality, rather like Alice stepping through the mirror.
The seeds of a composition take shape, often totally unrelated to the image. Sometimes I will try to paint something "realistic" such as a set up still life, but I am never satisfied with this, perhaps because I have never been able to work with a model as I would wish, which would be clothed or in a costume. I have done a lot of life drawing, and it is to me a dead end as to "art". I want to dig deeper and somehow I feel that something covered reveals more than something uncovered.
Often my piece is painted over and over again as it is simplified and abstracted, and then it is put aside as a failure, sometimes scraped down and abandoned. Then I save the scrapings and perhaps glue them to another work. I also tend to get depressed at what I have not managed to start. It seems like a big struggle within myself which is only resolved when a sort of road opens and what needs to come begins to emerge.
I strongly believe that there is something which needs to emerge for my own well being ----and if successful it speaks to others as well. All those failures which haven't found their way yet are stacked around the studio, and finally I will pick one up and think of it as a new canvas already primed, I try to forget what is already on it. Or should I say, quit trying to "fix" it. I just move on. Hardest of all is starting something absolutely new. I can't understand those painters who know what they are going to do and put it all down with confidence. I am just the opposite. I am able to draw a figure or do something "realistic". But somehow that's not the thing. That is not it at all!
That method also seems my way of living life. My experiences good and bad are all there and I keep adding onto what has occurred, the good and the bad.
With this board (it's usually a board I work on) filled with failure and experience, I now have the nerve to start to experiment and play --using my intellect as well as my sponaneous intuition. I often work as if in a meditation. It begins to appear to me that there is an underlying structure. And it is now that something begins to emerge, something I had not planned but which seems not only obvious but somehow important to me. It is then that things come to me, that the right touch occurs as if from another place. It seems that the more layers I add, the closer I get to what was really underneath. I am drawn to the mosaics over paintings as it creates a sort of icon, finally.
Recently I have found a modicum of confidence in my work.
It is a balance between intellect and the spirit. Sometimes I wish to throw everything away, and at other times am filled with a sort of ecstasy that something has worked and has a life of its own.
A POEM ABOUT THIS
In my view, a tree is not a tree.
the image of a tree can be a tree and many things
A tree can be a dream of the self,
its trunk alone holds
all there is to hold,
its branches reach out full of possibility.
It stands part of the air and space around it
its leaves and branches waving in the breeze
or is it waving the breeze, who knows.
In such a way my thoughts put the tree into some form
but certainly no matter what I do
that form is no tree
but something deeper
a mystery.
Christine Zachary 2008
CAVE OF THE SYBIL
47 x 40 inches
oil on board with glass, metallic paper, metal turnings.
The start of this piece? I can't even remember what it started with. After I started the above original painting it seemed uninteresting to me, so I began to abstract it, work on the colors, and add layers.