My talk at the Estuaries Launch Party

(Estuaries is a magazine published by the College of the Albemarle)

My name is Dawn Van Ness; I am an artist.

I want to say thank you very much for the opportunity to publish my works.

Last year I submitted one piece and it was published. And as this is a confidence building exercise for me, I went ahead and upped the anti… and submitted multiple pieces this time.

I’m happy they were accepted.

Estuaries is a wonderful, open to the community magazine, which for anybody who has submitted work to other outlets, understands the challenge to find welcoming spaces. There is a lot of no’s in the world.

So thank you to the staff and COA for allowing us a welcoming platform for our voices and our visions.

LITTLE BIT ABOUT EACH WORK

As I need to get comfortable talking about my artwork, I’m going to share a little bit about two displayed on the monitor now.

REFLECTIONS

The first one is a photograph. And while many of us love to share our photographs of the sunrises and sunsets and the beautiful waves, and the animals, i find myself documenting litter. And what can be a beautiful reflective surface of water in the marina, giving up a dreamy, impressionistic, wavy, limpid skyscape anchored by a post, is instead punctuated by a surreal cloud. A plastic bag. By contrast, The REFLECTION of the real cloud immerging from the depths appears ghost like, a snarling phantom..

With this work I document and illustrate one of the pieces of litter that stalks our habitat.

It’s the plastic bag that likes to take off with the wind with the least cause or care.

Although bans have been requested and sought, it has only been the action of a handful of retailers that has helped the cause to remove plastic convenience bags from THE consumer STREAM. Its aspiring at best. It’s not enough. Every convenient store grocery store restaurant pours more of these into the consumer STREAM and while it is aspirational again that they would all be recycled,  plastic only has a lifetime reuse of two or three times. Eventually it becomes UNREUSABLE and will be burned like for fuel or sunk into the ground. Unfortunately, plastic never goes away. In the environment, it just breaks down into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces until it becomes micro plastics. And there it is absorbed and ingested by wildlife that we ingest. It starts to appear in drinking water. It starts to appear in our blood. 

A bit of whimsy convenience month after month year after year, settles into our habitats and becomes one with landscape. Then it becomes one with us.  It’s full effects just now being tallied. 

A plastic bag. As natural AND NATIVE as kudzu. Thankfully not able to reproduce itself. But it is invasive. I collect between two and twelve on my afternoon walks with my dog. The ones in the sand are impossible to pull out. The ones in the roots impossible to untangle.

Plastics become litter.

Litter becomes pollution.

Pollution will harm the health of all of us.

LINE

Line  is part of a PERSONAL self portrait challenge. I wanted to get better at painting people. It was also part of an unusual use of under painting challenge. Instead of a white gesso canva with reds and pinks or blues or greys under painting, I used green yellow on a black gesso canvas for the first time. With a quick snapshot of myself to guide me to block in the composition. 

I had no great intention or aspirations, but as it is with art work, some things started to speak to me. There was something in the defiant jaunt of my jaw, the way my eyes look straight ahead at myself. And the line as I scraped the paint down in the background, it took shape not as the organic viney backdrop I envisioned, but as a rusting wound. Like the mark left by a metal stake through a piece of sheet metal on an old ramshackle shed or a cheap utilitarian pen enclosure for livestock from my childhood and my dads survivalist homestead lifestyle.

I didn’t know when I made this portrait that I was starting to address the deep seated pain that shapes me. Like many children of military veterans, I have PTSD from childhood trauma caused by abuse, instability, addiction and neglect.  And I am defiantly fighting its programming with regular therapy appointments and a lot of uncomfortable work, my broken brain fighting me all the way.  in the painting, my skin is unnatural as I feel like an alien and sickly operating in this world of normals, but I have my chin up.  The wound is still open and still bleeding, rusting, but my eyes have light in them even if they are surrounded by shadows

So this self portrait challenge, which I was afraid narcissistic, unworthy, and too difficult, was a way for me to process and understand my trauma and myself, and to get a better hold on myself and life.

It’s also lead me to my second gallery, exhibition installation idea for 2025, one that will deal with childhood trauma and childhood PTSD. A worthy topic that I believe more conversations in our communities need to have.

INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS

This piece was a huge work in progress of diminutive dimensions.  Maybe 8”x11”

 It had many lives. Its first version fell flat and I walked away from it for five years. I challenged myself to do something with it versus throwing it out - to use it as a creative exercise. 

Over months of touch and go, It morphed from a flat scene with very little poetry or texture into something that was crowded with a variety of women in a variety of scenes. Like intrusive thoughts. Distractions. 

The girl on the drums distracts from the death mask. The base drum is the moon. A figure sleeps and is landscape. Is a musical instrument.   The grid work of a calloused city is the sweater of a figure turned away. A drink is toasted. A song is sung. The night is full of confetti and fireworks.

Intrusive thoughts.

All there to distract.

From what is truly upsetting.

Even more upsetting than death.

Intrusive thoughts. Distractions.

All working hard to protect the Artist from the pain of realty. 

CONCLUSION 

So with that, I’d like to say NOT ONLY thank you again for the opportunity to publish my works but ESPECIALLY FOR THE OPPORTUNITY I WAS GIVEN  to take THE WORKS more seriously GIVING ME MORE CLARITY ABOUT THEM. And Thank you for your indulgence as an audience today as I learn to publicly talk about my artwork.