HOOK

was in all these business worlds and wasn't having any fun and then she played with her kids and she was like, wow where did the fun go? And I wanted this moment, when she was explaining this, to be trans- formed. So I added a lot into her hair, going back to Medieval art and art from the Weimar Republic. A lot of that art was a-enuated and nervous drawing. The colors were flat and I was looking to try to make the color not too flat, to do something different with the color, but not cartoony. That's how I worked. And I just kept adding more layers. It's that level of purposeful acci- dents that makes her latest works so engaging. You see where she has scraped off paint, using dif- ferent blades to get different ef- fects. She generally uses acrylic paint and Cray-Pas—a specific style of oil pastels—to manipulate not only the paint, but the canvas itself. One of her more recent series of work is based on water. "We really have to care for the water no ma-er who you are in the world, no ma-er where you are. It's a precious thing," she says. "So these have Cray-Pas and then I layered on top of them paint and more Cray-Pas. I started with this as a background and I took paint and let it do what paint does and let it run. And what it would do is go around these raised shapes almost like a river or tributary. They kept evolving. I did 26 of them so I call them an alphabet." The results are stunning. Tiny tribu- taries of blues flowing down the page around grey rocks made of Cray-Pas. Each one subtly different, each one emoKonal and hear,elt. "I wanted it to look like you're gazing down into the river and there're rocks here and there're rocks there all popping up and the water is going around them." It is soothing to look at, and a well- spring of emoKon comes flooding Straus admits she doesn't always know where she's going when she starts out. But that, she insists, is part of the joy. "SomeKmes I just start out with a mark or a really vague idea and I'm not even sure what I'm thinking about," she explains. "As I start working, whatever I'm thinking about gets into the work. I feel that the more you work, the more ideas you get. It's a relaKonship between me and the piece. I'm seeing what's happening and it's telling me where it wants to go. SomeKmes I think, no, I don't want to go there. Go this way! Or someKmes I do go where it's leading me. When I first started painKng, I took an adult ed class, and the person teaching taught us to start out with very thin paint in linseed oil. Paint with that as your sketch and as Kme goes on keep adding more color and oil to it and less linseed oil so it gets thicker. That's a good basis, the idea of adding. It's ok if you make a mistake. Almost like when someone plays the guitar and you hear their fingers moving on the strings, that acousKc sound. It's such a nice sound. It's fun to see that." forth when you contemplate her themes. "I want people to quesKon what they see," she explains. "We live by a river that has not always been treated as kindly as she should have been. Think about what's at the bo-om. What the fish are eaKng, what you're swimming in. Not to say that you shouldn't, but just that we could all do be-er. We could do a li-le be-er. We don't have to go crazy but we could do be-er." She doesn't always know where she's going when she starts out. But that, she insists, is part of the joy. "I want people to quesKon what they see," she explains... HOOK 35 In some ways, that is a perfect encapsulaKon of Straus' current work. She is doing be-er. Taking old work, old ideas, and recycling them, scraping off the old to create the new. The results are simply mesmerizing. terrystraus.net

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