Statement

Ordinary Acts and Daily Routine

The images in my paintings are of observed and imagined scenes where one can be in relationship with others, the world, and the self. Meticulously fabricated and deliberately arranged, my paintings call attention to a tradition of craft and beauty that highlight, through the making, practices of slowness and care. The paintings celebrate time-intensive work, the rhythms of the seasons, and a tradition of the handmade that speaks to the possibility of and wish for a kinder, gentler existence. My paintings celebrate ordinary acts and daily routine.

Subject matter aside, the way I make my work is a performance of slowness. The painter's intimacy with process reflects a broader, intentional way of experiencing and interacting with the world. Aesthetic experiences dislodge us from our worries, connect us, enable us to imagine what is possible and cause us to feel less alone. I am part of a lineage of artists who think craft and beauty can help imagine, define, and build a more relational world. Opening a space to pause and reflect craft and beauty can arrest time, illuminating the complexities of the human condition and subtleties of life that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Drawing inspiration from the landscapes, gardens, and vernacular architecture of seaside New England, my work features the cottage as a site of contemplation, rest, and contact with nature. In a catalog essay about my work, artist and curator Julie Poitras-Santos writes, “Cottage rooms are often spaces where many things happen together – dining room tables and living room chairs bump up against one another and determine the function of each time of day. Typically modest dwellings with a small footprint, cottages soften the rhythms of daily life. The architecture is designed in accord with the natural world. Only the essential is considered. Eclectic period chairs, ceramics, carpets, and other household objects build up the space of Spaien’s paintings, just as the Arts and Crafts movement speaks of quotidian attentions and care. Her paintings reassert the vitality of the handmade.”

The field of painting has been my research for the last fifty years. Making a painting is an act of contemplation, construction, and problem-solving; a choreography that is equal parts spiritual, scholarly, and domestic. Each time I make a painting I am researching how to paint, what a painting is, and how it functions. I agree with poet and art critic Barry Schwabsky who wrote: “The ordinariness and simplicity of painting in today’s world is one of its most important characteristics.” The creative act is a human act, and a painting is an attempt to communicate something about our experience. Painting is like writing only instead of arranging words, the painter arranges colored shapes.

Helen Molesworth conveys my sentiments in her catalog essay for the Karma gallery exhibition (Nothing but) Flowers when she writes:
“ ....I persist in arranging [flowers] in vases, and placing them in tableaux. It occurred to me recently that, when I did this, one of the things I was doing was wordlessly saying, ‘I believe in today.’ Surely the first step toward a hopeful future, or hope for the future is to commit oneself to the day at hand. The flowers in their vases, assembled in a way to draw attention and spark pleasure, are akin to the making of an altar, a devotional space dedicated to the everyday. And can it be this simple quotidian act is a form of care? Might the act of arranging the flowers be a small offering toward the repair of the great violence of the world?”

Molesworth calls this a “devotional act of world-building” – a world-building that centers ordinary acts and daily routine.

Painting the invisible substance of daily life is a devotional act. The images I compose are visual reminders of the relationship between the spiritual and familiar earthly rhythms that keep us rooted to each other. A kind of sustainable utopia is found in established, well-worn paths. The ordinary anchors us and makes us more human.