LISA BICK
And now I find myself living in Northern New Mexico . I left Indiana six months ago after 35 years planted in peony springs and cornfield summers . It came about due to a powerful need for a new life that does not exorcise old demons but builds on the past - a past which I tend to view slightly too romantically . I ’ ve learned from grief because I have been to the dark side of the moon of solitude , anxiety and isolation . And I ’ ve learned from love and life that there is always fire in the snow . I decided that for me , an artist and a writer , to change something as fundamental as the raw landscape outside my window that perhaps inspirations and fresh perspectives and ideas would flow . Not quite so simple .
I grew up in Washington , D . C . where my first love was the National Gallery . My mother would drop me off for long afternoons there when I was young . The Textile Museum , the Renwick , the Corcoran and the Phillips Collection feature prominently in my mind ’ s catalog of impressions . It was inconceivable to me , even as a child , that my world would not include art and creating with my hands . I didn ’ t realize then that my heart and personal maps were just as important in the making of that art .
I was also deeply impacted by the unrest that simmered throughout DC at the time . I was swept into the protests against the Vietnam War , the indignities of racial riots , and the changing tides of culture in the late 60s and early 70s . And then , when I was 18 , my oldest brother took his life and I learned about personal wounds . All of my youth and all of my coming of age during this time is carved into my psyche and all find ways to infiltrate my paintings and writing .
Printed and Dyed Textiles were my Fine Arts concentration in college guided by the tutorage of Joan Sterrenburg who also was the founder of the Handmade Paper Facility at Indiana University . Her unwavering connection with nature and her own personal handmade life sent me on a path to weaving and photo silkscreening and textile dyes and stitched fabrics as well as the incorporation of natural objects into my fledgling artistic efforts . She taught me the means to heal grief and to express it all at once . It would , however , be years before my hands were plunged into buckets of beeswax .