Trajectory: tracing the artistic journey

The trajectory of an artist’s career is as mutable as his or her life. Directions may be various, and many of them are unpredictable. A particular path may flow naturally and directly from its point of origin to its end; or, it may take many laps and turns, charting a labyrinthine course that sometimes twists back on itself at the close of a life.

And yet, throughout the years and changes of media, in periods fertile or fallow, there is an unmistakeable continuity to an artist’s work. That is what makes it recognizable.

What seems to remain constant is an image or theme that threads its way through aspects of an artist’s life and insinuates itself into all she conjures up. It’s been suggested that a writer has only one story to tell, and an artist, only one vision. Although much depends on the marriage of vision and style, as well as on the times in which one lives, that insistent image or theme continues to reassert itself in an artist’s work over the course of a lifetime.

So, whether drawing, painting, bending tubes, or assembling fragments of glass, there inevitably emerges a portrait of the artist’s inner self and world, informed by urgent necessity and by whatever means and methods are sympathetic to the expression of that self and world.