Final Entry.

Dear Red,

The past year has been a thrilling, brilliantly challenging year of growth and finding a creative voice and personal identity in my heritage.  I would have never imagined that the color red would open so many possibilities in which to approach.  I allowed my intuition to guide me through the journey supported by the art and vision of the next step.  In my original proposal I stated that I wanted to " create a parallel of the color red to the Ojibwe heritage".  I didn't realize then, that I needed to be connected to the Ojibwe heritage first, to have any personal reflection of the color.  It took almost 7 months for me to realize that, but once I did, it all made sense, it all had a purpose, everything I had done up to that point was creating my parallel and now I feel like I can rightfully tell the story of red in parallel to my Ojibwe heritage.  At the end of my proposal I have Red.  Cultural context.  Personal Identity.  These three things have intertwined themselves wonderfully together, as at first I was trying to keep them separate.  I have traveled and created pigments from Greece and Berlin and absorbed the red culture.  I became confident in a drawing style that is rooted in the basic, graphics in which I have always had, but tried to convey another way.  My knowledge of the pigment red has almost become  a personal narrative.  I exhibited my mini paintings from my travels, shared my stories and relocated to the Denver in a matter or weeks.  Being in Denver in a studio space has been exactly what I needed, some consistency.  Having Red Rocks in my back yard, has been crucial in my further development of raw pigments and the reaction with raw artificial pigment.  The results have been astonishing and moving at the same time.  I am installing these paintings at Red Rocks at the end of May and will be printing the photos on a large scale.  These will be prepared for Loose Affairs in Berlin at the summer residency.   For me that is my final set of paintings for the Dear Red project. The installing in the place of origin is exactly how I want this series of work to been seen.

In the future....
I've been finding myself continually drawn to red ochre and red ochre paintings of the Ojbwe I have turned my attention on curating a palette of red ochre to study and use in a series of large graphic images (modern day pictographs) in these pigments in urban landscapes (cliffs).  This project will start in Berlin 2015.

Overall, I am grateful for the inspiring words of my advisors and fellow Transartists, I never imagined that I would grow so much as an artist through this program, and it's only the first year!

Best,
Lindey