First Full Stop

The Jell-O Show was last Saturday, and while I was washing the dishes today I realized this is the first time I have felt finished with my work for months. Of course my work is never finished, and the round of my work year has just begun, but I have a moment to breathe. Right now.
And of course I want to talk about it. I did something big this year, with my Jell-O Art, and it marked a shift for me. It may have something to do with the associated facts that my son just moved out at age 20, or that I am turning 60 in a month (less...). It may not really be a shift, but just a ripple in the stream that is my life, but I feel like I'm on the landing of a new staircase.

Jell-O Art is a metaphor, I suppose, for my life as an artist. I've written a lot in the past of how I discovered that I was a capital A Artist when I tried to explain my creative process with my Jell-O to a student I was mentoring years ago. Suddenly realizing that I approached all my projects with the same creative process, I was struck with the fact that if I had a creative process, I was indeed an Artist. And showing my Art in a real gallery, regardless of the juxtaposition of the show with April Fools Day, means I am a Real Artist. Looking back at my life from the threshold of sixty, I wonder why I ever had any doubt.

Well, I know why, of course. Because I never formally studied and have no credentials, my lifetime of creating art has been on the margins of the "real" art world. The problem of my legitimacy, however, seemed to be within me, and it was when I was creating my Jell-O in the isolation of each winter that I began to take myself seriously.

Last year I began what I call an artist's book,
which included a sort of tutorial on dried Jell-O and a compendium of all of the t-shirt designs I have created in the 22 years of the Jell-O Art Show. I see it as a museum piece, and a work in progress, and I planned to add to it this year but I got distracted. I took out all of the boxes in which I store my molds and odd pieces of dried Jell-O from previous years (the stuff is a durable plastic) and somewhere from the blue the idea came to render the Radar Angels in Jell-O.

I may write more about the Radar Angels, but in brief, there is a group of mostly women artists who gathered decades ago now for tea and support, and one of the things they birthed was the annual Jell-O Art Show. It became the purest vehicle for my self-expression beginning with the first year, and I continue to take it far more seriously than any other part of my artistic life. In 22 years I have explored many techniques, but every year has been a process of figuring out where I am, what I am doing and thinking, and how I can communicate that through what is surely one of the most uncooperative art mediums there is to work with.

Drying it has freed me from the perishable aspect, and given me the luxury of planning and experimenting at leisure, and has also stretched out the project from a hurried week or two to a long few months. When the Holiday Market ends at Christmas, my work year comes to a close, and after I organize my t-shirt and hat inventory and read a novel or two, I start my Jell-O.

This is becoming a novel, I see. So this is the introduction: I made the Radar Angels in Jell-O. I can explain. Although the show is over, it isn't left behind just yet. I haven't started anything new.
Except this.