Betsy Damon (USA)

Betsy Damon (USA)

Betsy Damon was born in 1940 in New York. She graduated from Skidmore College in 1963 with a Bachelor of Fine Art, and from Columbia University in 1966 with an MFA. Damon is a US-based artist and water activist, and is also founder of the Keepers of the Waters.

Damon’s proposal and design for a large-scale water conservation project was accepted by the Chengdu government in 1996. In 1998, this world’s first urban eco-park, Chengdu Living Water Garden, was completed. The project won the highest international award for waterfront excellence, the International Environmental Design Award, and became the Chengdu case study for the Best Urban Practice Area at the Shanghai World Expo in 2010. Damon has lectured extensively in the United States, Europe, and China, and has been a guest artist at numerous universities. For more than sixty years, she has dedicated herself to protecting water, listening to water, and leading audiences to interact with water, thereby promoting a deeper link between humans and nature. Betsy is a world-renowned ecologically focused artist, whose work encompasses a wide range of media, including painting, installation, performance, and video. She has participated in countless important exhibitions worldwide. Recent exhibitions include Anti-Internationalism at the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands and Connecting Drops at SUNY Stony Brook in New York. Betsy Damon has also published books such as Director, Living Waters of Larimer, Principles of Water, and Water Talks, which is presently being translated into Chinese. Her works of art are collected by institutions and collectors internationally.

Betsy Damon’s lithograph series arises out of Meditation with Stones for the Survival of the Planet, which began at the Soho 20 Gallery New York in 1982, performing the wisdom and healing powers of stones. At these full moon events, Damon would divide participants into groups of 6 to 8 people. These groups would take turns gathering in a circle to discuss how stones had the power to be used both as a weapon and to heal people. Participants were then asked to lay on the ground with their heads at the center of a circle with their legs radiating outwards aligning feet at the circle’s perimeter. Damon, who had been an avid collector of stones, then gave each person a stone, directing them to place the stone on their body in a place where they needed to be healed. She would ask them to consider, “What’s one thing you want to make sure survives on this earth? What’s one action you can really take?” After completing the interactive performance with a guided meditation, the next group would then be invited to begin this process anew. Betsy’s Damon’s belief was and still is that such mindful and conscious interactive performances help people to heal themselves, and then in turn to heal the planet.

According to the artist, we must first heal ourselves before we can heal the earth. Hence the title of her performance artwork, Meditation with Stones for the Survival of the Planet. This lithograph series created in 1983 by the artist was inspired by these performances. Solo Press (New York, New York) provided Betsy Damon with use of their lithography press. There she received the guidance of a Japanese master of lithography in producing these original artworks. In this series, three of the artworks exhibited: Earth, Sea, and Sky belong to a limited run of 30 prints created 40 years ago. Most of these multiples are in collections throughout the world. All other lithograph prints exhibited here today are one-of-a-kind.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

Lithograph Series I: Earth features two large stones constellated by an array of smaller ones both between and around them. According to the artist, stones are water come into solid form. It is important to spend time examining stones, especially when they are laying in a riverbed. Imagine how they are formed of solidified water. Imagine how, then, they have been shaped by water flowing around them. Watch the water running over them, around them, cast into vortices of movement in relation to the stones.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

In Native American indigenous tradition, every stone is seen and felt to be a sacred healing object. In the 1970s and 80s, Betsy Damon performed both alone and in collaboration with other artists at many venues, and particularly on the streets of New York. In some of these performances on the streets, people would lay flat in the streets with stones on and around their bodies. In Lithograph Series II: Sea, the color palette is the cool blue of the sea. Two large square surfaced stones were laid on a stone printing plate, with scattered stones arranged around them. Each separate color in these lithographs (there are usually three or four main colors) required a separate print run, creating a rich and dimensional visual affect, mirroring the complexity of human existence in the natural world.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

According to the artist, these lithograph prints were quite difficult to produce, and required a good deal of experimentation to achieve the affect she was looking for. The challenge was that everything you see in the print was caused by an interaction between stones and the lithograph plate (which is also made of stone). Each color wash (Lithograph Series III: Sky has a particularly complex color palette) involved a separate set of interactions. The artist felt this series well worth the effort it took to make, as she felt it could be an effective way of engaging people in the reality of stones.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

Unlike the first three artworks in this Lithograph Series, which each belonged to a limited edition of 30 prints; this, along with 5, 6, 7, and 8 is a one-of-a-kind, created on the lithograph plate in an instance of inspiration of color and form. The rust and earthen tones hearken to the tableau we saw in Earth of this series, but here the main stones seem to be effaced by their constellations, leaving behind a plethora of forces which shimmer in layers of affect.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

Unlike the first three artworks in this Lithograph Series, which each belonged to a limited edition of 30 prints; this, along with 4, 6, 7, and 8 is one-of-a-kind, created on the lithograph plate in an instance of inspiration to play with color and form. Warm stone lifts off into the yellow and ochre spectrum, towards the sulfur of earth’s decomposition, into fermenting phases of water as it continues its transformation accumulating into metals, where particles lose their dynamic flow, steadying into earthen and then petrified state.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

Unlike the first three artworks in this Lithograph Series, which each belonged to a limited edition of 30 prints; this, along with 4, 5, 7, and 8 is a one-of-a-kind, created on the lithograph plate in an instance of inspiration of color and form. Obsidian departs from the colorful palettes of the other 7 artworks in the Lithograph series, engorging itself with the absolutes of black and while, while luxuriating through spectrum of greys and silvers. This is a study in light and dark, featuring the stones that are all small to medium in size, arranged in spiraling movement from the inside towards the edges of the composition.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

Unlike the first three artworks in this Lithograph Series, which each belonged to a limited edition of 30 prints; this, along with 4, 5, 6, and 8 is a one-of-a-kind, created on the lithograph plate in an instance of inspiration of color and form. In the Dark resembles Obsidian in that it leaves behind the colorful palettes of many others in this series, choosing to hover within the fields of an even higher key contrast of light and dark. See here the two large squarish stones that we saw in the Earth, Sea, and Sky artworks, but with the additional elements of bubbling forms of stones that seem almost to be birthing themselves from the mother stones.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

Unlike the first three artworks in this Lithograph Series, which each belonged to a limited edition of 30 prints; this, along with 4, 5, 6, and 7 is a one-of-a-kind, created on the lithograph plate in an instance of inspiration of color and form. Sunset fittingly resembles Sky in this series, but in Sunset, we appreciate the rosy hues which deepen towards the center stone, which in turn radiates towards the smaller stones in its orbit. This color palette recalls the artist’s belief in the healing powers of stone, in this case providing us with the warmth of personal and centered feeling as we interact with others in this world.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

From an early age, Betsy Damon was fascinated by mist, especially the way mist appeared as it hovered over the smooth surface of a body of water. She would wonder how it was that life really began. She wondered what it was that initiated life on earth. At last, through contemplating the appearance of mists over water, she came upon the answer—it is water that gives rise to life.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

In her passion for observing the appearance of mist as it hovered over the surface of calm water, the artist, who was living during the summertime with her parents at Squam Lake (New Hampshire, USA), would get up very early in the morning to see the sun come up. It was during this hour of the day that water would rise from the lake in the form of very subtle, and yet evident, spirals. This began Betsy Damon’s lifelong devotion to study of vortex movement in water.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

The moon is our connection to the greater cosmos. It exerts a formidable force upon earth. Indeed, water tides come and go in response the moon’s gravity. Betsy Damon’s use of Chinese ink signifies much about Chinese culture that the artist loves, from Chan Buddhism as well as Daoist natural philosophy, to aesthetic principles of calligraphy and painting. The artist also enjoys the practical and material properties of brush painting, with its high degree of sensitivity. It doesn’t seem to need any manipulation, but naturally serves the artist’s body and idea with very little effort. Damon believes that the act of drawing is a kind of training in how to see. Chinese ink has the quality of inviting one to really look, to see into the essence of one’s subject, thus having a direct and originary experience of one’s environment.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

A spiral is a vortex. It is the singular force that creates life. This is the form of our hearts, which pulse in the motion of a vortex, creating life. Betsy Damon’s discovery of the vortex movement of water, and of our hearts, began when she began awakening early in the morning to take a canoe out on to Squam Lake to observe the way water rose into mists in the form of spirals. The vortex motion throws off pollution. Indeed, the water molecule is always seeking to attain its most pure form, to attain its most powerful state of being. According to Damon, “The motion of water in a vortex manner is what water does. It’s the consciousness of water.”

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

All hearts, from the whale and horse to the human and bee, are designed alike. They may be different in size, but they all operate on the principle of the pulse, of the vortex-like contraction. This principle of the vortex, in which the heart pulses, is the same as the principle of movement in water, which when moving in a vortex motion stays pure and clean, serving life in the most meaningful and efficient way.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

This Chinese ink-wash painting once again pictures Betsy Damon’s early life experience of mists rising from the waters of Lake Squam. The emphasis here is upon the way in which waters descend from the sky in spiral, while also rising from the water to the sky in a spiral manner. The artist believes that all waters are connected, and that waters transform through their phases and states in a complete circle. Water falls onto the earth and then goes back up into the sky. However, there is a small amount of water that gets constantly added to the earth’s total water, coming from water from outer space that gets melted and trapped into our atmosphere. The artist points out that when water falls from the sky, waters in lakes or oceans form droplets which reach up to meet falling drops. She is fascinated by the way these two waters will mingle, and at the length of time it takes them to fully merge into one another.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

The artist painted this painting while sitting in her New York city apartment. This is an example of how an artist has such a deep experience of nature that even when isolated within concrete walls, they can still recall an image of what moved them. This recalls traditional Chinese painters who, not able to travel to natural scenery they wished to paint, woud rely on memory to create a painted image of what was in their heart. This image, along with All Waters are Connected, was painted while writing about the eight principles of water, part of her most recent publication, Water Talks (Steiner Press, 2023).

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

This Chinese ink-wash painting once again pictures Betsy Damon’s early life experience of mists rising from the waters of Lake Squam. The emphasis here is upon the way in which waters descend from the sky in a spiral, while also rising from the water to the sky in a spiral manner. The artist believes that all waters are connected, and that waters transform through their phases and states in a complete circle. Water falls onto the earth and then goes back up into the sky. However, there is a small of water that gets constantly added to the amount of water on earth. This comes in the form of water melted off the ice in outer space that gets trapped into our atmosphere. The artist points out that when water falls from the sky, waters in lakes or oceans form droplets which reach up to meet falling drops. She is fascinated by the way these two waters will mingle, and at the length of time it takes them to fully merge into one another.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

In this performative artwork, the artist invites a community of participants to join her in visiting the banks of the Bitter Bamboo River to listen to the river. This is an activity that Betsy has engaged in with communities around the world, always leading people to water not to drink liquid with their lips, but rather sound with their ears. However, it is not so much our ears that will hear the water, but rather our hearts. When Betsy has asked participants in the past to relate what it is they heard, she has more than once heard something like, “The river says it’s doing fine. The river told me to heal myself, to relieve and heal myself of what makes me suffer. That’s what the river wants me to do.” Indeed, Betsy believes that before we can heal the earth, we must first heal ourselves.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

This multi-media installation artwork created in New York, New York as well as on-site here at the Riverside Art Center is a culmination of many of the visual elements and natural principles that the artist has been working on throughout her sixty year career as an artist and water activist. The initial building block of this artwork is the image of water created in the shape of a biological heart. Damon’s observation that all living hearts, whether belonging to a human, whale, pig, or bee, are essentially the same in shape and function draws an important connection between all sentient beings on earth. Also, the observation that the biological heart pulses and contracts in the motion of a vortex draws an essential connection between the heart and water, itself. Water moves essentially in a vortex-like motion. When water is allowed the freedom to move in this vortex-like motion, it remains healthy and life-giving.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

In this beautiful meditation on water, we can enter into the life experience of the artist, Betsy Damon, who over a career of nearly 60 years of water activism and artistic creation, has focused on just what you see here—the movement of waters. We invite you to pay attention to ways in which, when rain drops fall into the waters below, the surface of the water reaches up to receive each drop. According to the artist, it takes a few full seconds for these two drops, one above and one below, to fully merge into one another.

Piece Description:

Text: Sophia Kidd

Betsy Damon is a feminist, performance artist, and environmental activist. ‘Keepers of the Waters’ is a community-based water activism initiative, which was founded and directed by Damon in 1991, who traveled to China in 1995 to 1996. The artist invited local and international artists to create public performances and installation art to raise awareness of source water protection, particularly the Funan (today known as the Jinjiang) and Lhasa rivers. Footage here is archived at aaa.org.hk, where one can find hundreds of images, newspaper clippings, artist proposals and mock-ups, along other ephemera and archival information. This project is widely researched outside of China, and we are happy to be bringing this information to our Riverside Art Center audiences, so that memory of such an important project in this region of the world will take its rightful place in the canon and history of Southwest China Contemporary Art.