New Resident, New Work

Skye Livingston

Kansas City, Missouri

November- December 2014

New Resident, New Work

This is my introductory blog post for the Rensing Center and I'm delighted to share my studio practice and some of my current work in progress. I arrived about a week and a half ago and so far, it's been a whirlwind. Amidst the overlapping arrival and departure of residents, acclimating to the area, getting settled in studio and celebrating a birthday, it's been an eventful ten days, to say the least.

This is my studio space, just after I moved in and just before the fruitful production these past few days.

And here it is in its current state of production. I have a deadline to finish quite a few drawings for a gallery in Kansas City, so it was nice to have a direction upon arrival so that I could jump into creating. I'm currently residency hopping, so I came straight from a residency in Nebraska where I had started working on these in their current state, but I have been able to really develop them here. I'm excited about the direction of this work and can't wait to see how it grows at The Rensing Center.

You can read more about my work and residency lifestyle on my personal blog at followthenomadhome.com, and see all of my work on my website at skyelivingston.com

-Skye Livingston

The uncertainty principle

This idea, developed by W Heisenberg is one of the most famous and popularized ideas in quantum physics. It is rather a good choice because it is a fascinating one and once understood it changes the way you appreciate the world around you. It tells us that there is a haziness in nature, that the ever changing dynamic of "things" are a limit to what we can know about the behaviour of quantum particles. At quantum scale, the most we can hope for is to calculate probabilities for where things are (their position) and how they will behave (their momentum) and the more accurately we know one of these values, the less accurately we know the other. 

The uncertainty principle questions how we see and measure things in the everyday world. The painting you see are particles of light, photons, that have bounced off the screen or the canvas and reached your eyes. What you see is only what you see, it's a combination of some fuzziness that I created with what your senses perceive and what as you see you will interpret from it. Each particle bouncing from the canvas carries with it information about the surface it has bounced from, at the speed of light. The photon is a medium, what about the particles that create the painting? Observing a subatomic particle, such as an electron, is not so simple. You might similarly want to bounce a photon off it and hope to detect that photon with an instrument but chances are that the photon will impart some momentum to the electron as it hits it and change the path of the particle you are trying to measure. Or because quantum particles move so fast, the electron may no longer be in the place it was when the photon originally bounced off it. Either way, your observation of either position or momentum will be inaccurate and, more important, the act of observation affects the particles being observed.

That painting tells a lot about what my work tries to achieve, the fuzziness of nature, and the invisible force that our senses are trained to forget so that it's easy to live in a world where a table is just a table and it's always there, and where what we see as empty is just really empty. But hopefully, The uncertainty principle will give you a glimpse of what I see and how I perceive my environment, it'll give you an idea of the horizon colour when sun sets on the pasture and on the round old mountains, of how the clouds move in the sky, and of how peaceful our surroundings here are.

How Many People Did You Kill Today?

My first three novels were thrillers. One dealt with a murder and a shaman who stalked the protagonist across the outback. The second featured a Hindu-American FBI agent who had to access the powers of the dark goddess Kali to bring a serial killer to justice. The third (as yet unpublished) follows a Native American Lakota man who must stop the leader of a cult before he enacts the largest mass murder on American soil.
So, now I'm writing about an infectious disease specialist who discovers that mass outbreaks of violence worldwide are caused by a prion disease...a prion that has manifested due to all the religious hatred in the world. The novel deals with the intersection of quantum physics and shamanic wisdom.
Of necessity, a lot of people die. My life partner, who has kindly given up my presence in our home so that I could spend six weeks at the Rensing Center writing this novel, calls regularly to fill me in on all the messy house upgrades he decided to do while I am gone. To kick off one conversation, he asked, "How many people did you kill today?"
Many. And the death toll is rising.
That's the life of a writer for you!

Writing at Downton Abbey

For the two days I spent packing for this six-week residency, snow fell across North Carolina where I live and South Carolina where the Rensing Center is located. My partner and my parents were very concerned about the safety of the roads. Not only was the snow much deeper than usually seen in these areas, Southern states generally aren't as prepared to deal with heavy accumulations. They don't have enough plows to keep up with the weather, and main roads can  remain covered in slush that freezes overnight for days.
I of course assured my parents that I would be very cautious about when I left. Ellen, the center's administrator, kept me updated on local conditions by email. Weather apps, weather websites and national newspapers kept me in the loop about the storm's effects. My plan was to leave the moment things seemed clear....and if possible, to arrive on the date and at the time I had sent Ellen.
My partner was worried that I was too focused on the commitment I had made with the date. He urged me several times to put off my arrival by a day or even two just to be sure that the rural roads in South Carolina would be safe.
We had just finished binge watching the first three seasons of Downton Abbey on Netflix. The third time he asked if I would delay my arrival, I asked, "Do you remember that, every time a visitor is due to arrive at Downton Abbey, the entire staff goes into a frenzy getting things ready?"
He thought about that then nodded, unsure where I was going.
The house staff, I reminded him, freshen the bed linens and scour the fireplaces and clean the room. The butler polishes the silver, the cook orders special food and creates a special menu, a valet and maid must be assigned to each visitor. And then when the carriage or car pulls into the grand round driveway, the entire staff turns out to greet the visitors.
That, I told him, was happening at the Rensing Center. Ellen, her volunteer staff, the artists who came on the work program, and Friends of the Rensing Center were all making preparations for the next round of artists. By doing the best I could to arrive when I was expected, I honored the hard work and extra effort those preparations required.
The accommodations here are part of the draw. The artists were even encouraged to cut some of the lovely camellias on the property to liven up their studios and living spaces. (Camellia flowers, by the way, stand for perfection and excellence.) In the end, an important part of the Rensing Center's appeal is that it is accommodating.

under the light of Orion

Since I arrived here I have been obsessed with the sky. There is no light pollution in Pickens and very few clouds and every night I go out and look up and marvel at Orion which we can see right above us as mysterious as ever. What are you hunting here?
This morning, I woke up around 8:30, smiled because I was happy to be here and to have the time to do the things I love most, paint and write. I did my morning pages, then went to grab a cup of coffee and cookies, moved the laptop to the library, worked on my book for an hour and then painted. I painted surrounded by books and the soft music of the rain. I usually have great difficulties to work with small size canvases but this morning I had none. I used a small wood panel given by my weekend fellow painter Dylan (thanks again Dylan for that I'm not giving it back to you now) and whereas I thought, I'll just experiment on that because I'm not good with small size panels, I made this and I figured this is the product of Orion light bathing my every night.