Ten Year Anniversary: Artist Portfolio
Seeds From the Past
All this talk about our word of the year recently has been stirring some deeper reflection for me. I continue to get private messages and emails from readers sharing their selected word and the why behind the motive for choosing it. I feel extremely honored to be the receiver entrusted with your own ruminations over these things. And so grateful to know that anything I’ve written has inspired you to do so.
Yesterday I posted this image to my Facebook account and noted that it was the ten year anniversary of a ten-page article featuring a portfolio of my work in Somerset Studio magazine. When I look back on these things, I see them as if they aren’t that newsworthy, or maybe what I mean to say is they don’t strike me as new news, so why bother sharing it. But the response has been way more enthusiastic than I anticipated.
When I got my physical copy out this morning to reread the article, it struck me how many seeds had been planted from my words quoted throughout the pages. So much has changed since that time, I finally extracted myself from the marriage (and recently changed my legal last name from Neubauer to Marie), I would not classify myself as having a strong religious faith as the author worded it, but I have no doubt that’s how I came across during that time in my life.
Since the article was published there have been five more studios, ten years of change, ten years of growth, and ten years to shed much of the emotional baggage I touched on in the interview. I have a deeper understanding of who I am as a person and an artist.
It has been a good long while since I’ve had the privilege of standing in a booth at an exhibition or spent anytime in a physical classroom talking about the overarching theme of my work, but there were many between then and now. I’m back in that place of longing for what I sense is coming on the horizon. And the seeds. The things that were planted in those conversations ,and in my own hopes and dreams, continue to sprout and grow in surprising ways.
“We have collected a handful of seeds—of starting points and potentialities. We now enter the second stage, the Experimentation phase.”
~Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Seeds. I considered this word for my 2024 focus, but I knew in my heart it was more like a running theme I’ll be exploring for some time to come. I’ve started working on a series of sculptures in my own art making time and growing more excited over where it’s taking me. But that is a conversation for another day.
Thanks for being here friends. I hope you enjoy the article.
Crystal Marie
Artist Portfolio: Crystal Neubauer
BY RICE FREEMAN-ZACHERY
(printed in Somerset Studio Magazine, Jan/Feb 2014 issue)
Each of Crystal Neubauer's collages begins with her choice to make conscious use of the discarded detritus of people's lives: the faded letters and scribbled notes, the fragments of book covers and their stained endpapers, all the things that are usually tossed into the trash and forgotten. Each collage ends with a transformation that is only tangentially about salvaging ephemera; at its core, each is about Crystal's belief in the invincibility of the human spirit and reveals itself as a meditation on the beauty and power of redemption
“I see these scraps as a metaphor for our lives, how there are some things we've done or been through that we aren't so proud of, parts that we might want to forget about or hide from others out of shame or embarrassment, and some parts that just seem to have no value," Crystal explains. "These scraps of paper I use are representations of this. Any one of these pieces of paper found on their own would be considered trash; they are nothing special, they are dirty, they have no value, and they are certainly not appealing to look at. I think especially as women, we tend to feel this way about ourselves sometimes, but when you put these pieces all together, they form a complete picture." Pieces of corrugated cardboard, ancient book spines with stray linen threads still stuck in the brittle yellowed glue, and scraps of faded text — in Crystal's hands, they join to form stories about love, compassion, and finding wholeness.
Crystal's path, like those of many artists, was not a straight road from an early art class to life as a full-time artist. From the time she won an all-school drawing contest in third grade until the day she stepped away from a beyond-stressful, full-time job to follow her passion, there were twists and turns, starts and stops. There was the disappointment in not attending The Art Institute of Chicago and the trials and joys of raising a blended family of seven children. The seemingly insignificant incident Crystal points to as a milepost on the journey, though, was the day a co-worker —someone Crystal barely knew at the time — stopped by her desk, handed her a magazine, and said, "This seems like something you would like." It was an early issue of Somerset Studio, and Crystal says, "I remember opening the cover and having such a physical reaction to what I saw inside that I had to close it and wait until I got home to look again. I cried through the entire thing. It was like Dorothy forgetting she was from Kansas until someone showed her a scrapbook from home. I kid you not: It was that dramatic, and it was the reawakening of my dream to be an artist someday." The reason that dream had been forgotten for so long is the genesis for the work Crystal does today, work that is based on the ability to rise up and make sense of the hard parts of being human.
"My father was an alcoholic," she says of her childhood. "My mother was very good at pulling the family together, but behind closed doors it could be chaos. I was a teenaged mother, and that's a very difficult thing, and you carry all this stuff with you and you think, 'What does life have to offer to someone who grows up in these circumstances?" It has quite a lot to offer, it turns out, and, for Crystal, the most important offering is the chance to reach out and connect with other women who have had similar experiences with which they still struggle. Her work allows her opportunities to connect with others with whom she wouldn't otherwise have that chance. One of the most satisfying experiences of sharing her work comes when someone makes a strong connection with a particular piece, sometimes tearing up when they first see it.
"Magical is a good way to put it," Crystal says. "It is an experience that, every time it happens, I feel honored and blown away that I get to do this, that this is my life." Her own life experiences, her natural empathy, and her strong religious faith combine with her talent to open her in a way that wasn’t possible before she began making art. "In the past, I might feel somebody's emotions but feel burdened by them," she explains.
When Crystal first began making art, after that long hiatus between childhood and finding the world of mixed-media, it was tough. She was, remember, living in a house with eight other people, seven of them dependent on her for cooking and cleaning, guidance, and helping with homework.
"I remember early on — this was at least a decade ago — the only place I could find in the house to create was sandwiched between the cinderblock wall and the heater in our basement. I put in a card table and some shelving units and hung a curtain across the 'door.' After dinner and on weekends I would hide away down there and practice techniques and dream." Eventually: of course, the children got older and began to leave for college, and suddenly there was an empty room, which, Crystal reports,
"was heaven." But the stress of raising a blended family and working a full-time-plus-overtime, high-stress job and trying to juggle her rising desire to make art with everything else became overwhelming.
"I guess you could say I realized I was ready to transition when I couldn't pull myself out of bed in the morning and do even the simplest tasks in order to get myself to work on time," she says. She gave notice, and her employers left the door open so that, over the next several years, she could come back and work as she needed to until she trusted that she could make it as a full-time artist. She gradually learned to quit trying to plan several years ahead and simply trust in just the next small step, one at a time, one after the other.
Today Crystal has moved up out of that tiny hidden space in the basement and out of that first abandoned bedroom and has an entire main floor master bedroom as her studio, with lots of light and plenty of space to work on multiple collages at once. Each one begins with a substrate, most often 140-pound watercolor paper, and builds from that.
"After several years of the hats and fairy wings stage — and hearing my husband tell anyone who would listen that he was afraid to go to sleep for fear of waking with a dunce cap glued to his head — I started to realize that I was getting to be more excited about the collages I was creating for the background than I was about whatever I was using as the focal point in my work." The old photographs she had once loved no longer seemed compelling, and the stories she had felt it was her duty to tell in her work now seemed to want to tell themselves without her having to spell out their words for them.
"It was a really big deal for me to start leaving off the pictures and just put my collage work out there. It felt like starting all over again vulnerability-wise," she says. The next turning point in her journey came with acceptance into the American Craft Expo in her hometown of Chicago, one of the top shows in the country. "Putting myself and my work out there in a public forum was new to me. It was one thing to post it online and hide behind my computer; it was quite another to have to sit in a booth. space and watch how people reacted to it. It was a very scary—but very rewarding— move for me." She began to gain confidence in her own voice, moving into art-making territory that was uncharted and that left her feeling vulnerable and exposed.
"There was a point that I had started going through some intense personal counseling, and as I began to find my voice as a person, I began to want to add my own marks to my work." Instead of relying on found text to tell the stories in her work, she began to relax into mark-making with graphite, pastel, and ink, learning to trust that the viewer would be able to read the story through their own eyes and their own personal experience. As she learned to trust the process, she began teaching intuitive collage at art retreats and showing her work in galleries across the country. Her first book is due out from North Light Books in 2015. It's a heady time for Crystal, but she's anything but complacent about her ongoing journey
"One of the biggest challenges for me is being in this space between my current style and wanting to learn the next new thing. I am back to that place I was when I first discovered mixed-media. There is an ache so deep inside that I can barely contain it; it is very nearly a physical pain. I’ve come to relate it to childbirth. I see in my mind's eye what I want to do, what new technique or style I want to develop, but I'm not there yet. My abilities haven't caught up with my vision. It can be a frustrating thing to experience, but also very exciting. I've been through it enough times now that I know I won't be stuck in the in-between place forever, and there will be a day when I can actually produce that somewhat intangible thing stirring inside of me."
All really great collages Chrystal!
thanks for publishing the article from 10 years ago...it's all really fascinating and it's wonderful to see how tuned in you are to the changes in your life and art. Sharing this kind of growth gives me pause to look at myself...perhaps in a way that's what a vision board is all about. I'm thinking my word could be "growth" but it's not really exactly right...I'm still thinking on these things. thanks.