It's a New World...

I haven't posted in a while... I got really sick late last year, and anything not crucial to basic function was dropped for a while, including my posts. It took about four months to recover from the illness, and with a lot of help I was able to keep things running.


One of my personal issues is perfection; I like to do everything a certain way. The major problem with that is that nothing actually gets finished. I can't tell you how many abandoned posts I've made because I couldn't think of the perfect thing to say, or the perfect image to add. I hit deadline and I either abandon ship or push out a rushed article that I'm not happy with.

The reality is that nothing is perfect, and I'm certainly nowhere near perfection myself. People don't read my posts because they're looking for an example of perfection, right? No, I think people read what I have to say because they're looking for the method behind the madness. No amount of eloquence can upsell that.

Allen Williams - "The Warded Man", from Dream Covers

We just finished up a spectacular group show called "Dream Covers", curated by book designer Lauren Panepinto. It's a hard show to follow up, the work is so good. Cynthia Sheppard and Sara Winters are opening up this next show called "Rituals", in which both have created very personal oil paintings and graphite drawings. They dropped off their work today, and we lined it up along a wall and stood back and talked over the work. It was fascinating to look at, with all their art there. It reads like a surreal storyboard, something kind of fantastic and sci-fi in nature, very Stanley Kubrick. My eyes kept swatting left-right, left-right, my brain trying to make sense of it all. Its a very different feel from "Dream Covers": each piece in D.C. is perfection, a full statement on its own, but Rituals is like an exquisite corpse between two women, one story morphing into the next, not yet fully formed. The viewer has to figure out where it goes and what it really means.

Sara Winters

Cynthia Sheppard

I think rather than blather on and on about why this is a fabulous show in one perfect little blog post, I'm going to post more regularly, and make smaller, less perfect posts. Messy, thoughtful, possibly silly, but more true to form. I can handle that. I think the artists won't mind, either.

"Rituals" will open up on May 14 and run through June 4th. Sara and Cynthia will be at the opening reception from  6 - 9 pm. 

~ Julie Baroh