Small But Mighty Print Exhibition
Riverside Art Museum,
Riverside, California
Website
Exhibition dates: February 2 – April 28, 2013
Opening night:  Thursday, February 7 during Art Walk

press

Press Enterprise Artist Spotlight

previous exhibitions

2012
PAAR Exhibition, Brandstater Gallery, La Sierra University, Riverside, California
Members’ Exhibition, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, California
Journey into Intimacy Solo Exhibition, Sun City Library, Sun City, California
Journey into Intimacy Solo Exhibition, San Marcos Library, San Marcos, California
Art and Earth: My Art, My World, Murrieta Public Library, Murrieta, California
The Art of the Avocado, Brandon Gallery, Fallbrook, California
Verse to Image, Riverside Community Arts Association Gallery, Riverside, California
Your Face Here: The Modern Self Portrait, San Jacinto College Art Gallery, San Jacinto, California
Local Author Exhibit, San Diego Public Library, San Diego, California
Riverside Arts Council Exhibit, Riverside, California
PNET Members’ Print II Show, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, California

2011
Off The Wall, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, California
PNET Members’ Print Show, Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, California
Artscape, Riverside County Administrative Center, Riverside, California

Kathryn V. Crabbe, Make a Run for it (POOF), 2012, mixed media on paper, 5 x 8”.

I am trying to decide whether to take a hiatus from blogging or to really devote myself to it on a more regular basis. Comments appreciated, plus let me know what you like, don’t like, want more of, etc. You can also email me.

The drawing above is from my newest series, the Aliens.

Kathryn V. Crabbe, Cosmic Raven, 2012, acrylic, charcoal and pastel on canvas, 48 x 48”.

Last night I fell asleep under the stars in my backyard and I understood for a second how much we’ve lost by losing ourselves online. Why not try it sometime and see what you’re missing. The painting above (which is large by the way at 4 x 4 foot) was begun out of anger so it’s messy and wild and untamed, feelings we NEED to fight for and express if we are to re-claim our wildness, wild spaces and wild creatures.

Suggested comments and titles from facebook friends:

Eye of the hurricane
A big mouth about to devour a cosmic ice cream cone
Very pointed, very sharp
Pierced
Curiosity
Cosmic raven

Notes from “Becoming Animal” by David Abram

Magic doesn’t sweep you away: it gathers you up into the body of the present moment so thoroughly that all your explanations fall away: the ordinary, in all its plain and simple outrageousness, begins to shine — to become luminously, impossibly so. Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it. (p. 224)

Kathryn V. Crabbe, Rocks, 2012, graphite on paper, 8.5 x 11”.

When oral culture degrades, the mediated mind loses its bearing, forgetting its ongoing debt to the body and the breathing earth…Similarly, the computerized mind, when left to its own devices, all too easily overlooks the solid things of the earth. Skilled in the rapid manipulation of symbols, it neglects the stones and the grasses that symbolize nothing other than themselves. Dazzled by its own virtual creations, the digital self forgets its dependence upon a world that it did not create, overlooking its carnal emplacement in the very world that created it. (p. 287)

Our animal senses are neither deceptive nor untrustworthy; they are our access to the cosmos. Bodily perception provides our most intimate entry into a primary order of reality that can be disparaged or dismissed only at our peril. (p. 307)

There are those, however, who are not frightened of grief; dropping deep into the sorrow, they find therein a necessary elixir to the numbness. When they encounter one another, when they press their foreheads against the bark of a centuries-old tree, or their palms into the the hand of yet another child who has tasted prematurely of wrenching loss, their eyes well with tears that fall easily to the ground The soil needs this water. Grief is but a gate, and our tears a kind of key opening a place of wonder that’s been locked away. Suddenly we notice the sustaining resonance between the drumming heart within our chest and the pulse rising from under the ground. (p. 309)

From Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by David Abram

The confrontation with the unconscious usually begins in the realm of the personal unconscious…and from there leads to archetypal symbols which represent the collective unconscious.

Carl Jung, as quoted in Surrealist Art: The Lindy & Edwin Bergman Collection

Kathryn V. Crabbe, bone, 2012, mixed media on paper, 5 x 8”.

PAAR Exhibit (Plein Air Artists of Riverside)
Brandstater Gallery
La Sierra University
4500 Riverwalk Parkway
Riverside, California
Directions
Exhibition dates: July 9-August 22
Reception: August 22, 6:30-8:30

Kathryn V. Crabbe, including this condition (SPECIAL), 2012, mixed media on paper, 5 x 8”.

Notes from the Seth Materials

Creativity connects waking and dreaming reality, and is in itself a threshold in which the waking and dreaming selves merge to form constructs that belong equally to each reality. You cannot begin to understand how you form the physical events of your lives unless you understand the connections between creativity, dreams, play, and those events that form your waking hours. In one respect dreams are a kind of structured unconscious play. Your mind dreams in joyful pleasure at using itself, freed from the concerns of practical living. Dreams are the mind’s free play. The spontaneous activity, however, is at the same time training in the art of forming practical events. (p. 141)

The inner core of dreams provides a constant new influx of material, feedback, and insight from the psyche, so that the personality is not at the mercy of its exterior experience only – not confined to environmental feedback only, but ever provided with fresh intuitive data and direction. Even if such dreams are not recalled, they circulate through the psychological system, so to speak. They are responsible for the inventiveness and creativity of the species, even bringing new comprehensions that can be used to bear upon the life of the physical world. (p. 187)

Small amounts of ordinary stimulators, such as coffee or tea, taken before bed when you are already sleepy, have a beneficial effect in stimulating dream activity and aiding dream recall…a very small amount of alcohol can also serve. Anything that suppresses activity will also suppress your dreams. As is known, anyone deprived of sufficient dreaming will most likely begin to hallucinate while in the waking state, for too much experience has built up that needs processing. There are many secondary hormonal activities that take place in the dream state and at no other time. Even cellular growth and revitalization are accelerated while the body sleeps. (p. 190)

Jane Roberts, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, (Seth Material)

Kathryn V. Crabbe, pulled forth (JABBER), 2012, mixed media on paper, 5 x 8”.

The Seth Material as channeled by Jane Roberts (some of my favorite bits)

But while disasters, imagined or encountered second-handedly, may in fact later occur, they are far different from physically encountered ones. You only add to their unfortunate nature by negatively brooding upon what might happen in the future, and you destroy your own stance. Your stance in time is highly important, for it is your practical base of operations.

To some people wars, poverty, murder, treachery, corruption, are primary experience, and must be dealt with – as requiring immediate action. The body must react. Such persons are beaten up, or robbed. Those are immediate sense data, and in one way or another they do react. However feebly, their point of power corresponds immediately with the point of danger.

You cannot react physically in the same way to projected or imagined dangers. There seems to be no possible reaction. You are frustrated. You are meant to deal with your immediate, primary experience, and in so doing you take care of your responsibility. You are able to take action in your own experience, and therefore affect others. You do not have to be ignorant of wars in other corners of the world, or close your eyes. But if you allow those experiences to overcloud your present, valid intersection with reality, then you speak and act from a position not your own, and deny the world whatever benefits your own present version of reality might allow you to give. (p. 213)

Jane Roberts, The Nature of The Psyche: Its Human Expression

Kathryn V. Crabbe, PZ7.J15317, 2012, mixed media on paper, 5 x 8”.

I’ve been drawing aliens all week. There is a little snippet of found text in each drawing plus a tiny, hidden word written in pencil – can you spot it?

Notes from the Seth Material as channeled by Jane Roberts

If you magnify your limitations you create your own prisons. If you enjoy those freedoms that ARE yours now, you automatically increase them…You get what you concentrate upon. There is no other main rule. (p. 61)

If you do not trust your nature, then any illness or indisposition will be interpreted as an onslaught against health. Your body faithfully reflects your inner psychological reality. The nature of your emotions means that in the course of a lifetime you will experience the full range of feelings. Your subjective state has variety. Sometimes sad or depressing thoughts provide a refreshing change of pace, leading you to periods of quiet reflection, and to a quieting of the body so that it rests. (p. 105)

Examine the literature that you read, the television programs that you watch, and tell yourself to ignore those indications given of the body’s weaknesses. Tell yourself to ignore literature or programs that speak authoritatively about the species’ “killer instincts.” Make an effort to free your intellect of such hampering beliefs. Take a chance on your own abilities clearly, neither exaggerating them or underaccessing them. (p. 284)

Your impulses are your closest communication with your inner self, because in the waking state they are the spontaneous urgings toward action, rising from that deep inner knowledge of yourself that you have in dreams. (p. 284)

To change the world for the better, you MUST begin by changing your own life. There is no other way. (p. 286)

Jane Roberts, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events

Each day as I draw from life, outside surrounded by nature, birds, wild things and hot skies, and then later on when I paint abstractly, at home with ambiguity and passion’s many flavours, I struggle to find a way to be in a world quite un-accepting of the artist’s way. So it’s writers like Abram who guide and encourage me with their ponderings.

The computerized mind when left to its own devices, all too easily overlooks the solid things of the earth. Skilled in the rapid manipulation of symbols, it neglects the stones and the grasses that symbolize nothing other than themselves. Dazzled by its own virtual creations, the digital self forgets its dependence upon a world that it did not create, overlooking its carnal emplacement in the very world that created it.

Bodily perception provides our most intimate entry into a primary order of reality that can be disparaged or dismissed only at our peril.

An addled and anesthetized numbness is spreading rapidly throughout our species.

There are those, however, who are not frightened of grief; dropping deep into the sorrow, they find therein a necessary elixir to the numbness. When they encounter one another, when they press their foreheads against the bark of a centuries-old tree, or their palms into the hand of yet another child who has tasted prematurely of wrenching loss, their eyes well with tears that fall easily to the ground. The soil needs this water. Grief is but a gate, and our tears a kind of key opening a place of wonder that’s been locked away. Suddenly we notice the sustaining resonance between the drumming heart within our chest and the pulse rising from under the ground.

David Abram, Becoming Animal

Kathryn V. Crabbe, Drawings, 2012, pencil, watercolor and collage on paper, approx. 8.5 x 11”.