TODAY IS MY 55TH BIRTHDAY

AND I WOULD LIKE TO TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO SAY A FEW THINGS.

To all who are in my life right now, to all who have come back into my life, to all who are no longer a part of my life, and to all who have yet to arrive in my life – thank you for your gifts of friendship, insights, and passions you have shared with me, I would not be who I am today without all of you. I am truly humbled by the impact you have had on my life journey. And to those I have hurt or disappointed – I am truly sorry and I ask your forgiveness.

MY BIRTHDAY WISH FOR ALL OF YOU:

My wish is that your own personal life journey

continues to be as rewarding and challenging as mine.

That the dark, difficult and confusing moments,

only make the joyous and peaceful moments,

more precious and memorable.

And that you continue to have the courage

to share your own uniqueness, passions, creativity,

and dreams with a world that needs them,

as your life journey unfolds in front of you.

TO MY PARENTS:

Thank you for the gift of my birth day and setting me on this life journey.

TO MY WIFE AND CHILDREN:

Thank you for making this life journey so joyous and rewarding by your honesty and humorous support. Yes, I like donuts!

Thanks for taking the time to read this and bless you all.

Now go out and enjoy my birthday, I know I will.

Peace, 

Nat

A Ice Shell Game

Like ice on snow we create personal shells to block out our disappointments, our fears and our anger – all in the name of protection. The shell is a wonderful tool to hid behind while reflecting the world back at itself. The surfaces can be smooth, rough, or uneven but it will always act as a barrier, not protecting us from the world but from our uniqueness, our light and our happiness.

What’s hiding under you shell – you might be surprised!

Additional “Seasons of Love” samples!

The “Seasons of Love” series of prints represents the uniqueness of each of our own experience with love and evolution of that experience as we grow.

Love is a very personal response to our personal needs and wants as we project them on another soul. If we are awake in love, we will be able to see our barriers to a higher self-awareness. If we are blinded by love, then we only see a mirage of self-perfection. 

Adding to my visual language

So can anyone tell me what material(s) I'm playing with in this composition? 

Drawings - exploring the medium again!

It has been many years since I actively sat down with pen and paper to explored line and gesture. I'm finding it a frustrating but a great activity to become present to the moment. Quick sketches are a wonderful abstraction of life, with just hints of the original subject.

Compost Art!

It is amazing where we can find and appreciate unique and spontaneous beauty - all we have to do is open our eyes, our hearts and our selves to possibilities!

This composition came about when my wife, to have me make only one trip to the compost bin, stuck the old roses into the jar! Thank you Carroll.

Out of the corner of my eye...!

Often when I’m working, walking or cooking and my mind is wondering, I catch glimpses of what I think is movement, mirages crossing my peripheral vision. These visions are a sense that I’m not alone, that maybe I need to pay attention. But pay attention to what?

We all live very busy, complex and challenging lives and quite often we do not take the time to stop and pay attention to signs around us that might help or warn us. So the next time you see something out of the corner of your eye, stop and look. You might be surprised by what you see.

A Father’s Day Observation - In their Eyes!

Don’t for as moment think that fathers become fathers for some altruistic reason. We do it for what we get to see.

The look of a new born child as they take their first breath.

The look of a baby at a midnight feeding.

The look of a child in awe of a sandcastle.

The look of a teenager as you hand over the keys.

The look of a young adult as they choose their college.

We see ourselves in their eyes and we know ourselves. In their eyes we remember what is important – our love.

Now off to see my father, so he can look in my eyes.

Boundaries frame our perception of self – make them your own.

My art is about boundaries and how they give form and structure to our personal worlds that we agree to live in. These worlds are as unique as each of us. They are made up of our experiences, our failures, our successes, and our social and family history. These worlds form the bases for our dreams or nightmares and how we see ourselves.

Step 1: Imposed Boundaries

For most of us, our worlds are not of our own making but are the accumulation of experiences from our families, schools, churches and society because these forces domesticate us into the “real” world. This process can hypnotize us to believe in what otherwise we would not believe or make important in our lives. As we grow up, a difference between our domesticated world and our own world that we are building causes conflicts with the ones who domesticated us. This is seen as teenagers push parents away - rebelling against social institutions and norms - or even, as a small child, rage. All these responses are healthy and helpful in building our own worlds, but when conflict is met with compliance a new dynamic is set up.

Step 2: Controlling Boundaries

There are many reasons why we pick the route of compliance: dominant parents, physical or emotional abuse, abandonment, or simply the lack of social models that fit our selves. But with this action, we begin to hide from ourselves, leaving us to find meaning and purpose in the worlds reflected back to us by others. Our world becomes not of our own making but one of resignation with boundaries that hide us from our own uniqueness, in silent pain and/or hell.

Step 3: Painful Boundaries

As we continue to hide from ourselves, we become more and more invested in this external/domesticated world that we start to defend as our own. When our true world/self starts to intrude, as it will because we are all unique, the boundaries of the domesticated world start to vibrate and create fear. Boundaries are very unstable because they are not real but are mirages that require an enormous amount of energy to maintain. When we grow tired of holding up these boundaries/mirages, our fear becomes visible as anger, control, hiding and denial.

Step 4: Addictive Boundaries

As time progresses, the amount of energy spent to maintain these mirages increases. We begin to look for tools to augment our power to live within these boundaries. Alcohol, drugs, sex, love, gambling can all become addictions in our battle to make the mirages acceptable to ourselves. As these addictions take hold, our true self is pushed farther back below the surface of our self-perception and is lost in the cycle of fear and pain.

If this cycle continues, our connection to our own uniqueness will become lost and we will die emotionally, and eventually physically. The one thing that can break the cycle is the one thing that we are fighting against: the destruction of our domesticated world.

Step 5: Dynamic Boundaries

By letting the boundaries fall, we are able to build a world that celebrates our own dynamic uniqueness. Often, domesticated boundaries fall only in a crisis, allowing us to tear apart the cycle of fear and bring down the world of compromises. At this point we have a choice: take on new external worlds and go back into hiding, or confront our pain, discover our uniqueness and build our own world. When you stop compromising yourself, you realize how toxic the beliefs of others really are when not questioned. The quickest route to yourself is to do the opposite of what we have been domesticated to do. Not easy, but worth the journey. It’s working for me.

Gail Wiggin, aabalone[red] - experiencing Typographic Nudes

For the purpose of this blog, I have named Nat’s works “Greetings” (the painting in our reception area) and “The Day” (the painting at the end of a rather dark, windowless swath of office).

Greetings

No matter what the “headset” when entering our office, a person usually breaks into a smile or inhales in surprise when eyes meet this work. It’s lively presence demands attention simply cannot be ignored. The surface is an exercise in paradox—flat, linear forms that interact with ambiguous dimension. A story that can’t quite be seen seems to be going on just outside the canvas. Strong horizontals bisect the work—and yet they don’t. At second glance, while the forms are defined with hard-edged lines, the shapes themselves have tubular dimension and weave themselves into rather confounding complexity. We think, “Wait, where is that going? And where does that come from? And, that makes no sense but I really like it!” Only in one area is there a familiar perpendicular interaction—all the rest is freeform melody that changes with each viewing of the painting.

The red and black beckon powerfully from some primitive level and the white completes the invitation-- but wait, the third colors not white…it’s cream - a significant choice by the artist. Cream warms up what would be a complementary white and makes it a symbol—so we experience the color as an organic light source rather than as an absence.

The Day

In all truth, this painting completely changed the tone of our work area. It sits on a wall that used to be a blank dead-end that nonetheless drew the eye-- and consistently disappointed. Instead, we turn the corner and whoa, we recognize the characters but ask “what are they doing?” Gone is all semblance of a familiar axis… there’s not a perpendicular in sight. The lyricism makes sense in this painting. There’s a perfect balance in the upper reaches that confidently coalesces into a single black stroke that funnels down towards the bottom of the work like a tornado’s arm. It has an agenda and it is to harness the senses. Something is being created here. We can almost hear the wind blowing.

Gail Wiggin, April 1, 2009

(Thank you my friend for your wonderful insightful words. As an artist, It is a privilege learning how others see and live with my art.)

Winter Residue

Sometimes the most telling truths are just in front of us and all we need to do is look up from our lives to see them. Or down at our feet, as I discovered on a morning walk this weekend.

Winter had added its stamp of grime and salt on our urban landscape. This residue obscured the road markings as the residue of our history can obscure our ability to react to emotions objectively. Emotions come with a history of causes and effects that color our responses but have no present day relational meaning.

The winter will be washed from the roads by the spring rains, highlighting its marks as they were meant to be experienced - as we should with our emotions.

Removing the extraneous!

Sometimes the only way to truly see what is important in a composition, or in life, is to remove the extraneous elements. In the photograph, the composition shows its true elements when the stark contrast between the white of the snow and the horizontal band of trees and distant mountain is accentuated.

In our lives, it is important to strip away the extraneous elements to truly see our own trees and our own mountains through our everyday landscape. A landscape that is often colored in shades of anxiety – will the bills be paid, will the kids find their way, and will anyone listen to us?

Looking in the mirror – who do I really see?

About 10 years ago I was on a personal journey of discovery. As part of this journey, I joined a group of creative souls who met every month for support, encouragement and insight into our selves. This group was not large but had a creative diversity that allowed all of us to be seen by many points of view. During our meetings, to facilitate personal growth, we would be presented with questions, words or thoughts to respond to.

One of these group responses was to describe our relationship with 3 words, exposure, expressive, expansion. What came out of these words was a self-portrait, a mirror into my relationship with my father. These 3 words meant that I needed to expose my true self, by expressing who I was in my art, so that I could expand beyond my father and who I thought he thought I was.

This portrait shows a determined and purposeful self, finding his voice through his anger. Now I know this portrait is a mirror into my self and finding the truth in myself as a father, husband and artist. My art is a mirror into who I really am. The painting was left with parts undone, as was my own journey.

In the past year this personal journey has started again, it’s been almost a ten year hiatus but the themes, the dreams and the hope to understand and celebrate myself has been rekindled – just in time.

Snow Day – A Winter Muse

The winter muse doe’s not come often to southern Connecticut. So her arrival is always met with a mix of apprehension and joy! She has a wondrous way of removing us from our daily focus and allowing the dream of possibilities to settle on ourselves. Her winds silence our factual voice for one of consciousness. She asks to concentrate on our place, our hopes and our soul.

As winter dances around our home, teasing and challenging, we take up skills that fulfill our human nature. A fire is built, banana bread is baked, a driveway is cleared (a adult excuse to play in the snow), and a family is close. We are brought closer to the experience of intimacy – external boundaries are suspended.

What will you do on a snow day?

P.S. I will miss knowing that John Updike is out there creating – but am comforted by his legacy.

Biography

Nat Connacher is a painter, photographer and designer creating visual expressions of what he sees and feels around him.

Nat’s painting was selected for inclusion in the 2007 Stamford Art Association, 27^th Annual Faber Birren Color show, where he was awarded the Faber Birren Color Award. In 2005 & 2006 his paintings where included in the Silvermine Guild Arts Center’s 56^th & 57^th Annual Art of the Northeast exhibitions. In the 2006 Art in the Northeast Exhibition he received the Mary Vann Hughs Award. Nat is also an avid fine art photographer. His photographs have been accepted for display in the Stamford (CT) Art in Public Places exhibits, “Celebrating Women”, Summer 2004 and “Color/Forms”, Summer 2005 and are in a number of corporate collections.

Nat is president and creative director of Connacher Design where he combines his different artistic interests to develop visual dialogues between his clients and their audiences. His areas of expertise are corporate identity, branding and visual information design for print and the Internet.

Nat holds a Master of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from Yale University and a Bachelor of Design in Communication Design from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

A native of Canada, Nat resides in Stamford, CT with his family.

Artist Statement

The liberation of letterforms from their recognized social function is the foundation for my abstract paintings. The new forms I create, allow me to explore the conflict between external and internal expectations in our personal lives. By painting bold, large, graphic, simple and colorful abstractions of letterforms, I highlight the boundaries that shape our feelings, self-image, and our relationship with the world.

These abstractions are a metaphor for our human landscape. The shapes and edges are expressions of vulnerability and pain in the search for intimacy.

We are all trying to discover who we are in a society that projects personal success in terms of position, wealth and looks. In reality, those things have nothing to do with who we are or want to be. It is in those moments of tension against what is told to us and what we know is true that I find the inspiration for what I do.