About the artist
Beth’s art is something that crouches in the quiet spaces that fall between the cracks of life.
Her inspirations come in half-dreams as she drifts into sleep, or wakes, usually in the late afternoon, and appears with colors, shapes, even fully-formed, as visual, 3-D, jewelry pieces – sometimes as adaptations or syntheses of work she has recently seen, or found objects on a walk.
They engage her in bringing what she sees in her mind’s eye, into a form that can be shared.
She creates with mixed media, loving the feel and the experience of handling glass and clay and paper and ink and pencils and building sculptural things with cardboard and experiencing how they interact, what shadows they cast across a canvas, what designs and surprises unfold from within them.
She loves the surprise of colors, the joy of them - bright, vibrant splashes of vermilion, dotted with orange, or the blue-gray of a stormy sea with tide pools in copper rocks, harboring tiny shells, reflecting dots of pearl in the sunlight; and
the sensation of layers and textures and things juxtaposed, assembled, merged or wed that normally wouldn’t be.
She vibrates to bold, primitive, sculptural, colorful design. Symbols which find a way to express in a single emblem, character, pictograph or glyph, a multitude of words or ideas, generations of beliefs and practices, fascinate her.
Her greatest love is animals. While she doesn’t often talk about them, they appear in her prayers and thoughts and visual creations. She feels them the way one feels a string vibrating in a concert hall.
She is self-taught, often wide-eyed with a child’s fascination, and more outlier, raw, and magical than sophisticated.
She love synthesizing and creating something out of whatever tools or toys, or found objects present themselves to her.
It is a conversation between Beth and those elements and her eyes and the tips of her fingers and the ripples under her skin and the light in the room that forms into each creation.
She seldom follows rules or guidelines and no plan she devises remains static for more than a few minutes.
She works around her apartment at different work stations, as she has outgrown the space in her studio with all my pliers and hammers and drills and tweezers.
She is at heart an experimenter. What if she puts this cardboard cut-out next to that wood scrap? Or this red next to this blue and then views it through a high-powered prism?
Lots of experiments fail and with a few tools and supplies and a creative attitude, turn into something new and exciting.
Recycling old mixed dye onto watercolor paper looks like nothing much until she places some petroglyph footprints on top of it to dry.
She decorates walls and tables and people.
A recycler at heart, she sees new uses for pretty much everything and holds a special place in her heart for those that have been discarded.
- a door hinge is a butterfly wing on which to hang charms on a necklace
- nylon bottle brushes for laboratories can turn into Pampas grass
- an old jewelry box is a treasure chest, home for a kit filled with paper constructions-and-a-book that fits together to build colored shapes
- the intersection of tree branches is a sculpture in itself
- cup separators from egg cartons can become the scales of a dragon
For the most part, she wants to reach out and touch her viewers/wearers with the “ping” of a Tinkerbell in Peter Pan – the sounding of a tuning fork
