Deborah Santoro

It all started with a 60s era LIQUORS sign in Ayer, Ma. For several years I have been weaving the letters (LIQUORS) in and out of yoga poses and tile patterns in my prints and multimedia pieces. In March I made my first gelatin printed LIQUORS sign, 8 feet tall and 14 inches wide.  And then I made another.  It was interesting that just as I was committing to make prints that I could sell, the first things I actually made were more or less unsaleable prints.

The 7 letters of the LIQUORS sign line up neatly with the 7 chakras, an esoteric system of thinking about the energetic body that emerged in India centuries ago and was imported to the West along with yoga in the 19th century.  The chakras and their associated colors, meanings, and locations continue to evolve in the West.

Chakras are thought to be spinning orbs of energy at various locations in the body.  This concept is useful to yoga practitioners who use them as focal points, a means of concentrating ones mind on the practice.

The LIQUORS sign points to the ubiquity of alcohol in our culture.  Despite the fact that a percentage of the population is always in recovery, our culture values the convenience having alcohol in grocery stores. Imagine for a moment that you are recovering from opioid or alcohol addiction, and yet simply to purchase bread, milk, and eggs, you are obliged to walk past an aisle full of beer and wine.  For most people in recovery, it’s not just one substance, it’s any mind altering substance they can’t have, because one is never enough.

This is the mock up of the sign.  The final version will be fashioned of silkscreen on acetate, laser cut plexiglass, marbled and hand printed papers.  Inside the letters are allusions to places in the body the chakras represent and potential pathways for healing.  There are x-rays, neurons, words, brain imagery, yoga poses, heroin molecules, and more.   The imagery here is evolving as I study the chakras and learn how to heal from grief. A good friend told me that I would have to learn how to incorporate this loss into a new version of myself.  The one thing that’s missing in this sign is my sister- I’m still figuring out how to add her in.

Here it is in my studio, twirling:

I’m participating in an Artist 2 Work incubator program designed by Professor Ellen Wetmore of UMASS Lowell.  So far we’ve had lectures from professors on value proposition, basic marketing concepts tailored specifically for artists and the art market, branding, and targeting the luxury market.  I’ve learned many new things and relearned things I’ve forgotten that I knew.

Our first homework assignment was to write a value proposition.  She asked for 2 sentences and I wrote a paragraph.  Typical.  Separately from the class I read advice on applying for grants that seemed sound- have 3 people review your grant proposal before you submit it, and include at least one person who does not speak the lingo.  The rationale is that not everyone on the board of folks reviewing your grant will be fluent in art speak, and you need to reach them too.  So I had my husband read my value proposition, and at first I though he just didn’t get it, but by the next morning I realized that I just wasn’t being very clear.

Good advice, that.

Deborah Santoro: The Asana Series

My prints and multi-media pieces inhabit the space between yearning and falling, between striving to realize a potential, and the habits/patterns/programs that enmesh us in ways of being that do not serve our higher selves.  The LIQUORS sign becomes a stand-in for addictions of all kinds, and the hopelessness that trails them. The asana, or yoga poses, represent an embodied, intuitive knowing that links human potential with universal themes; dendrites and star charts, our mitochondria like tiny suns inside our bodies.  In the time bound dance between despair and enlightenment, time, pattern and color all have their part to play.

I recently went to Wellesley to see the Kathe Kollwitz/ Krieg Cycle exhibit at the Davis Museum & Cultural Center.  I’d write about that, but Altoon Sultan already did that here. While I was in the vicinity, I went to Altoon’s current exhibit at the David Hall Fine Arts Gallery downtown. I went with children, and so didn’t have quite as much time to really look as I would have liked.  It’s a bit distracting when your middle daughter starts rolling around the gallery on a wheeled chair, even if the owner is exceedingly nice and even encouraging.

Still, I have admired her from afar for some time and it was wonderful to see these exquisite little works in person.

I was also given a large full color catalog with a full length essay about her work, which I will read as soon as I remember where I put it.  It was been that kind of week.  Two weeks, really.  But today I’m back in the studio and it’s been so long since I updated my website/blog, that I’m feeling slightly ashamed.

Not for lack of working, however.  Here is a new piece:

It’s similar to what I’m working on today, only now it’s a diptych, with more orange.  An interesting confluence, to me at least, is that the way Altoon’s hooked wool rectangles hang from pins on the gallery wall causes them to be not perfectly straight.  The gelatin plates I’m using are the same way, and as they age they become more and more irregular. All in the interest of subverting the tyranny of the rectangle.

The diptych idea popped into my head about a month ago, but it requires a bit of a set-up to line everything up, which I finally did today.

One more thing.  I’ve become hooked on listening to the Modern Art Notes Podcasts while I work.  They had a really interesting one on Picasso’s sculpture at the MoMA, and today I listened to an older one on Marylin Minter and David Ireland.   If you like modern and contemporary art, they are a great way to learn while you work.

http://manpodcast.com

A good day in the studio yesterday.  Sometimes it feels like you spend all day to get one interesting thing at the very end.  It took the whole day to get there.  Not that I’ll throw out the others, but suddenly it all crystallized.  That, that indefinable thing that I didn’t know I was looking for until I saw it.

One place where I have not done well as an artist is dealing with rejection.  I sort of suck at that.  Today I received a rejection to a show I was hoping to get into.  What I normally do with rejection is is to stop trying for a while.  This is not a productive or useful response.  Today what I will do is read a chapter from The War of Art, and then decide what to apply to next.

The important thing isn’t that I please others.  The important thing here is that I am absolutely true to my inner vision.

I reject that rejection.