TBT – Big Spiral

Not many pictures of me remain due to theft and loss. So I am sharing some TBT art instead. I dug this baby out of storage this week. I painted it in the early 1980’s before I was Bessesdotter. Oil on canvas. Soft spiral shapes over a landscape, surreal and not yet complete. There is more to add to the composition and now that its out of storage I plan to make time to paint in oils again.

In childhood I painted spirals and abstracts but then tried to work on representational art. Abstracts, psychedelics, detailed line work and spirals became my signature not long after I met Allan Carter in the early 1980’s. He was bigger than life and he called himself ‘Big’ and so did we all. He was a character one could say, amiable, kind, and he made art from air or anything he could find.

I loved him–I still do. It was a youthful crush on an older artist who painted boldly and lived to create.

Allan liked my work and told me to paint what I paint, what came from inside me, not what other people want to see. “Be the artist” he would say to me. He didn’t have transportation and I would drive him to the art store where he would pick up a few supplies. Mostly though Big got his supplies from dumpsters behind art shops and print shops. He lived to make art and I honor his memory. Here is to TBT and Big.