My Story
Title of Artwork:
“JC Wayne” | 1966, Plainview, New York, USA
CREATIVE STATEMENT
Co-created by two lives who met in a college studio art class taught by Walter Feldman. She loved horses, but ended up with a little sailboat instead. He loved traveling and going fast on any conveyance at hand – bicycles, skateboards, motorcycles, cars. Their co-created work of art manifested out of the combination of their loves as a living being with an innate impulse to live a noble, adventurous life as a creative for good.
My Creative Approach
I started making art, poetry and story experiences as early as I can remember. Moved by the natural world and the kaleidoscopic diversity of cultures, I have always identified as a world citizen seeking to connect the dots and share the outer and inner landscapes that unify all life and the worlds we inhabit. All of my creative activity – art, poetry, creative nature treks, storytelling through books – explores and experiments in revealing the beauty and interconnections of our inner and outer landscapes.
My visual art is one of the most tactile means of making the ‘invisible’ world of our inner landscapes and even our visible outer natural world more known. My art – both my representational ‘Art of the Seen’ and my futuristic ‘Art of the Unseen’ – reveals, bridges and unifies these worlds by depicting the beauty of outer forms and the inner essence within and beyond the forms. Contributing to the well-being of our landscapes is central to my artmaking as a sustainable artist painting with hand-mixed, non-toxic, sustainably-sourced Natural Earth Paint powders.
My illuminations through stories of good and the creative process as an existential artist bring context and a commons for shared culture to the adventure of discovering the world of the unseen we live in and the connections between our physical world and the expansive world of energies all around and within us that shape our experiences.
My ‘cartography of the unseen’ is the lens through which I create and contribute to beautifying living and existential expansion through exploring, revealing and illuminating the wider worlds and meanings we are a part of by interpreting the physical beauty we can see and the so-much-more beauty beyond the form that is not so visible - yet… Creating for me is an existential act of sacred salutation and celebration in perceiving and portraying the essence and elegant patterns of living energies within and beyond the forms of our visible selves, world and experiences.
jc@jcwayne.com
My Trek of Living: MORE OF MY STORY
Some of my earliest memories are going on self-guided adventures with my Newfoundland dog around the magical world of our yard near Long Island’s Great South Bay. Then I discovered school and fell in love with this thing called learning. I did my elementary and middle school studies at the amazing Pelham, New York public schools of the 1970s; high school studies at The Castilleja School in Palo Alto, California and The Wheeler School in Providence, Rhode Island; university studies in international relations, art history and political science at Brown University; and graduate studies in international environmental policy, comparative and developmental politics and the diplomatic history of Southwest Asia, Central Europe and Russia at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Harvard and Tufts Universities as the Berlin Wall was coming down. (In fact, my degree shifted literally overnight from the ‘diplomatic history of the Soviet Union and Central Europe’ to the ‘diplomatic history of Russia and Central Europe’.)
But it was experiences beyond the classroom that profoundly sparked, nurtured and shaped my innate adventurous curiosity, voracious love of books, seeking of truths and sense of interconnectedness: discovering a whole bookcase of explorer biographies for young readers at the school library in the first days of Kindergarten; the incredible school projects my mother’s creativity helped me make, the physics-defying bat and alligator costumes she conceived for me out of paper mâché and the extraordinary field trip-based animal behavior ‘Zoo Course’ she and two of her friends developed and led as an enrichment learning program for Prospect Hill Elementary School with weekly outings to the Bronx Zoo; the detailed, accessible diagrams of eye and ear anatomy that my father made for me to deepen my understanding of how things work, watching him hand-draw and silkscreen holiday cards each year in our basement and learning how to develop film with his stunningly beautiful black-and-white photographs in his DIY bathroom darkroom; the moving and highly original dance experiences choreographed, staged and performed by my sister in unconventional settings; spending hours in the stylish, snug library in my New England grandparents’ house and in the otherworldly humid indoor garden in the magical, light-filled, minimalist Japanese-style house of my Long Island Hungarian grandparents.
And, ultimately, it is the wisdom of my travels through 49 US states (and counting) and 23 countries that amplified and affirmed my awareness that all landscapes, all cultures and all lives of all species are interconnected and here as stories to share, value and voice. As I sat as a 24-year-old in January’s winter solitude in the transcendent gardens at the Alhambra Castle in Granada, Spain writing a poem in the shadow of a plaque indicating the house alongside the garden where Washington Irving wrote the story of Rip Van Winkle, I realized that my purpose in life was to collect, describe and share experiences as memories, which I envisioned as beautiful jewel boxes that I could take out, re-enjoy and share as sustenance throughout the course of my lifetime. It took me a while to figure out how to get there, but ever along the way, I lived Amelia Earhart’s philosophy that ‘adventure is worthwhile in itself’, guided by the value and purpose of memory-making and -sharing as a creative and collective means of uniting lives for good around the universals we all share.
As a deep believer in and emissary of the power of books and stories to share memory, it is only fitting that a passage from the 2014 book, The Memory Garden, by Mary Rickert, which I only discovered in 2022, exactly affirms why I do what I do and have lived as I live:
“Listen to me, Howard… In the end, all the people with ideas of how you should live your life are going to be gone, and you’ll be staring into the mirror, looking at an old man’s face, wondering how he got here. The question you have to ask yourself is: Did that old guy have a happy life?”
Howard nods as Nan speaks… then stops abruptly. “But how do I know? What will make me happy? In the end?”
…What is the power of rain to make Nan feel young again? She doesn’t know… She doesn’t care what the explanation is. “Make memories.”
“What?”
“How to know what will make you happy? In the end? Ask yourself what memory you are making in the present.”
If I make just one person happy with my art, poetry, story books or learning adventures, then I have fulfilled the dream of living a noble, adventurous life as a creative for good. If I seek out, value, absorb and share as many stories from as many diverse lives and experiences as I can, then I believe I have done my part in helping the universe and its habitants know the beauty of its creation.