Hosmer, Colette
The work of artist Colette Hosmer lifts the thin veil between art, science and spirituality. An artist of infinite patience, Colette, combines her own castings, so delicately painted they look real, with dried minnows, spiders, skeletons and even small birds whose souls have passed. The result stops your heart. How dare she turn death into art? In a moment of cognitive dissonance you fall off your mundane tracks. Rigid dualism is shattered, connections you have been socialized to forget surface, and you tumble will-nilly to your own shamanic center.
The art of Colette Hosmer holds you in the shimmering and scary moment where something new is born. In the lineage of Marcel Duchamp who put the wheel on the stool and the mustache on Mona Lisa, Colette challenges traditional assumptions to communicate the over-arching idea that science and art are not distinct realms and to reveal thse sacredness of the creative process itself. "The deeper my concentration the more I'm connected to the heart of life. My work arises from this place of profound connection where I simply know that separation is an illusion."
Is it possible that the elaborately cross-referenced system, which allows us to see only what we are prepared to see, has a faulty foundation? John Russell points out in Art and Geometry, that perspective orders chaos in both life and art. "To lose all sense of perspective", says Russell, "is to this day a synonym for mental collapse." But what if our perspective is just wrong? "We get arrogant about the way we see things," Colette explains, "but there are a billion ways to see the world. There's always more than meets the eye. The brain is the great master of illusion creating self-serving stories that hide the web of life underneath." What's underneath is Colette's true concern.
Colette has come to believe that each of us possesses an internal blueprint. She points out that this inner map is often recognized only in retrospect. Once we see the pattern, however, we either commit to it or lose it. She uses her own story to make her point. When she first went off to college she had no particular course of study in mind. As a result she came home after a year. Wanting to "go to the big city" she and her older sister, Nancy, moved to Colorado Springs. Driven by economic necessity and "blind hormones" she found both work and a husband in the Safeway supermarket. Ten years and two children later she had grown up. Leaving a failed marriage, she moved to Albany Oregon where her other sister, Janet, lived. Janet offered a suggestion, "Get your feet under you before you go back to work. Take some time for yourself." Colette enrolled in art courses at the local Community College. Beginning as a meticulous realist Colette learned all the rules she would one day shatter. "My childhood love of making things turned into exploring materials and technique. My life exploded."
During this period Colette met her first mentors, experienced the energizing force of artistic camaraderie, and perhaps, most indicative of what was to unfold, she joined with several teachers and students in building a rudimentary bronze foundry. She began the love affair with mold making that would become central to her work. "We'd have pours in the evening on our own time and I experimented with everything. If you have the patience and a little technical knowledge, you can cast a duplicate of anything."
She modeled in clay and cast in bronze. She experimented with flexible rubbers, silicones, and hard plaster shells. She began with those all too familiar images of mothers with children, old cowboys, the proverbial crouching figure. Interested in shape and form and primal force, she scoured the college library's art and anthropology books sculpting whatever attracted her. "Eventually I realized I was beginning to distort, add a slope to the back, exaggerate a stomach," she explains. Her interest in the connection between human beings and nature was already present in early watercolors like The Sheepherder, a naturalist painting set high in the mountains. Colette's later exploration of separate but identical units combining to make something new was foreshadowed in Sea of Cattle, a watercolor inspired by an aerial photograph. Only close inspection revealed that this seemingly abstract work was actually a field of individual cattle.
Colette Hosmer is the youngest of three sisters born in North Dakota, just south of the Canadian border, in a town of eight hundred. Her psyche was shaped in that lush glacier-formed land nestled between the Turtle Mountains and the prairie where Mother Nature expressed her bounty in lakes, ponds, poplar trees, birds, fish, and every kind of wildlife imaginable. Her father, like his father before him, ran the local grocery store. You might say that Colette's art originated in the simple economies of rural life. She and her two older sisters owned few store bought toys. Instead her mother encouraged the art of collage - in those days simply called 'making things'. Colette cut, pasted and reassembled used boxes from the grocery store, drew and painted on the backs of old flyers advertising specials, and modeled clay. Whenever her school needed an art project or stage set Colette was recruited.
The art of Colette Hosmer holds you in the shimmering and scary moment where something new is born. In the lineage of Marcel Duchamp who put the wheel on the stool and the mustache on Mona Lisa, Colette challenges traditional assumptions to communicate the over-arching idea that science and art are not distinct realms and to reveal thse sacredness of the creative process itself. "The deeper my concentration the more I'm connected to the heart of life. My work arises from this place of profound connection where I simply know that separation is an illusion."
Is it possible that the elaborately cross-referenced system, which allows us to see only what we are prepared to see, has a faulty foundation? John Russell points out in Art and Geometry, that perspective orders chaos in both life and art. "To lose all sense of perspective", says Russell, "is to this day a synonym for mental collapse." But what if our perspective is just wrong? "We get arrogant about the way we see things," Colette explains, "but there are a billion ways to see the world. There's always more than meets the eye. The brain is the great master of illusion creating self-serving stories that hide the web of life underneath." What's underneath is Colette's true concern.
Colette has come to believe that each of us possesses an internal blueprint. She points out that this inner map is often recognized only in retrospect. Once we see the pattern, however, we either commit to it or lose it. She uses her own story to make her point. When she first went off to college she had no particular course of study in mind. As a result she came home after a year. Wanting to "go to the big city" she and her older sister, Nancy, moved to Colorado Springs. Driven by economic necessity and "blind hormones" she found both work and a husband in the Safeway supermarket. Ten years and two children later she had grown up. Leaving a failed marriage, she moved to Albany Oregon where her other sister, Janet, lived. Janet offered a suggestion, "Get your feet under you before you go back to work. Take some time for yourself." Colette enrolled in art courses at the local Community College. Beginning as a meticulous realist Colette learned all the rules she would one day shatter. "My childhood love of making things turned into exploring materials and technique. My life exploded."
During this period Colette met her first mentors, experienced the energizing force of artistic camaraderie, and perhaps, most indicative of what was to unfold, she joined with several teachers and students in building a rudimentary bronze foundry. She began the love affair with mold making that would become central to her work. "We'd have pours in the evening on our own time and I experimented with everything. If you have the patience and a little technical knowledge, you can cast a duplicate of anything."
She modeled in clay and cast in bronze. She experimented with flexible rubbers, silicones, and hard plaster shells. She began with those all too familiar images of mothers with children, old cowboys, the proverbial crouching figure. Interested in shape and form and primal force, she scoured the college library's art and anthropology books sculpting whatever attracted her. "Eventually I realized I was beginning to distort, add a slope to the back, exaggerate a stomach," she explains. Her interest in the connection between human beings and nature was already present in early watercolors like The Sheepherder, a naturalist painting set high in the mountains. Colette's later exploration of separate but identical units combining to make something new was foreshadowed in Sea of Cattle, a watercolor inspired by an aerial photograph. Only close inspection revealed that this seemingly abstract work was actually a field of individual cattle.
Colette Hosmer is the youngest of three sisters born in North Dakota, just south of the Canadian border, in a town of eight hundred. Her psyche was shaped in that lush glacier-formed land nestled between the Turtle Mountains and the prairie where Mother Nature expressed her bounty in lakes, ponds, poplar trees, birds, fish, and every kind of wildlife imaginable. Her father, like his father before him, ran the local grocery store. You might say that Colette's art originated in the simple economies of rural life. She and her two older sisters owned few store bought toys. Instead her mother encouraged the art of collage - in those days simply called 'making things'. Colette cut, pasted and reassembled used boxes from the grocery store, drew and painted on the backs of old flyers advertising specials, and modeled clay. Whenever her school needed an art project or stage set Colette was recruited.
