Visiting Liberty Blake’s studio is like stepping into a portal that gives the fortunate visitor a glimpse into the muses and the spiritual journey which the artist traverses. Her workplace and what she surrounds herself with allow us as visitors to appreciate the foundations of her visual expressive language in the body of abstract collages she creates.
Many of Blake’s latest works can be seen through March 13 at Phillips Gallery, in a curiously curated counterpoint also featuring the humor-rich narrative treatments on canvas by the late artist Gerald Purdy, who continued painting into his nineties and whose works are well known to this specific gallery’s patrons.
Blake’s newest pieces come from a creative surge following what she called a fallow period. Calling it an artist block, however, would be a misnomer. In part, her temporary pause in creating new work was triggered by distress over inaction about the climate crisis issues, national politics and general disillusionment about how one can overcome apathy or resignation during chaotic times. More importantly, for Blake, it was really about how to express purposeful opportunities that liberate one’s eyes, mind and soul to be grateful, appreciative and happy about the things that one loves most.
Essentially, Blake found her refreshed creative pulse on a third way, by lifting off into a new sky realm of possibilities. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote about this in his 1843 manuscript Either/Or. To move beyond the binary, he suggested, “Were I to wish for anything I would not wish for wealth and power, but for the passion of the possible, that eye which everywhere, ever young, ever burning, sees possibility.”
For Blake, observing birds opened up an elucidating focus. Blake was drawn to the tradition of interpreting the behavior, songs, sounds and flight patterns of birds, as signified in the ancient rituals of augury or ornithomancy. Birds have been powerful metaphors as prophetic messengers: doves for peace (Judaism and Christianity); hummingbirds for luck (South American traditions); parrots linked to fire and sun (Mayan mythology) and eagles as spiritual messengers in ancient Rome.
The Ancient Roman augurs marked rectangles in the sky with their Lituus, which was a sacred staff. These rectangles, known as templums, allowed the observer to focus on the flight behavior and patterns of the birds. But they also considered other natural elements: the brightness and direction of the sun, clouds, wind movements, storms, lightning, etc.
Thus, Blake’s collages replicate the augur’s process of drawing templums and the contemplation of all of the elements encompassed within those geometric shapes. We can readily relish our own desire of not wanting to miss out on the fragile, vulnerable landscapes portrayed in Blake’s collages. They foretell us the spiritual exuberance of appreciating Utah’s comprehensive natural ecosystem with such a compelling impact, by reminding us why we should embrace every possible effort to restore and preserve it.
Blake’s abstract collages, primarily assembled from precisely cut blocks of paper, enable her to create an abstraction of landscapes that highlight their most striking features and her particular visceral response to the memory of a specific place. Her compositions are intentionally developed with precisely shaped forms that come from salvaged and found paper. She is an avid collector of papers, including those with printed matter, which come from every purpose and function. Her collages entail fascinating insights into color theory and how artists explore its principles for aesthetic expressive impacts.
Image courtesy of the artist.
Blake’s collages emphasize her priority to correspond with and interact with nature. She pays deliberate attention to placing every element in her collages, which highlights the continuous process to find meaning, hope and order amidst chaos, turbulence and disillusionment. The landscapes reflect those instances of augury she encounters when watching birds, or the restorative effects of biking or hiking, or absorbing the holistic details in the surroundings of the Great Salt Lake, Antelope Island, Zion National Park, Guacamole Trail, Spiral Jetty, the Slickrock Bike Trail in Moab and Grand County, and Utah’s sagebrush and juniper zones.
Two examples epitomize the core of Blake’s latest show. Room with a View is composed of collected and salvaged papers including poster bills pulled from siding in Vienna. At the Pond reflects upon one of her favorite trail experiences (Guacamole Trail), at a small pond in a basin wedged between Navajo sandstone rock. As Blake explained, given the desert conditions, the summer heat dries up the pond so an opportunity to sit and watch how the sky is reflected in the pond when it is present is an ephemeral bonus of an interaction with nature.
The abstract collage is an erudite, heartfelt medium for Blake, who instinctively embraces Kierkegaard’s wisdom about manifold possibilities. Blake’s studio is a treasure trove of recovered, found and preserved objects, materials, papers, figurines, etc. It constitutes a cosmopolitan repertoire of building blocks for the vocabulary of Blake’s visual language. Every artist’s language is likely to start from doubt, disillusionment and struggle, but ultimately it manifests itself in a resilient reclamation of meaningful and transformative purpose.