Unbound Art

Inspiration is always around. This year has been the year of spiders and webs.  This friend is outside our front door. Graphite Drawing by Kim Schrag Caught in Their Own Web Details  

During the month of June, I made these quick sketches with pastels. I'm experimenting with adding color to the narrative images. The drawings are 11x15". As usual, the theme of my work is - What It Means To Be Human. I hope you see a reflection from your own experience. Mutual Admiration or No Comparison Building A Wall and  A Monument to Himself Stuck in the Mud The Nest Egg A Whirlwind Slippery Slope Who Picked Up the Rope?  

I made these drawings a few months ago when talk of going to Mars was in the news.  It seems that the rich feel that abandoning the Earth for Mars is the way to save themselves. (The title, The Leaving, started here.) My drawings are ambiguous and although actual circumstances of the day may fit their interpretation, I also see them addressing fundamental issues (such as birth and death) for all human beings.  And now that I think of it, in a short amount of time 4 people that I knew died and none of them because of Covid, but since we were in the middle of social distancing, wearing masks, and watching the numbers of deaths rise, it felt like many people were leaving the planet. So as it is in our everyday life, the circumstances and metaphors mix together.  In the second drawing, called The Arrival, I was imagining where those that left were going.  And it seems that above the clouds that the departed escaped through, there is another land. Isn't that what we alway...

 The Cosmic Heart - It’s Not Personal  Graphite, 22x30”, March 2021

 

I have been invited to participate in a show with 7 other artists at the State of the Art Gallery in Ithaca, in April. These four drawings will be in the exhibit Family Tree Thought Rising Water Burning Bridges

I quit teaching at Tompkins Cortland at the end of the semester, but I wanted to post work that was inspired by a project that we did in Design II. I have been playing with cubes and was commissioned by a friend to take the idea a step in his direction as a gem cutter. I designed 9 cubes that work together to create new relationships through different arrangements. The base was painted first and the rest of the pieces came from this composition.