Anyone paying attention here over the past few months will no doubt notice all the change. Some may even be thinking that I have lost my mind. The truth is I have found it. When I set out on this journey I had a distinct vision for what I wanted and how I wanted to achieve it. Unfortunately things got off track and it took me a long time to make the adjustment.  Initially my desire was to incorporate essence into my visual art as I had done by infusing fragrant dried flowers and oils into an acrylic polymer that was applied to canvas. The earliest of these paintings date back to around 1992. I have one of them hanging in my living room.

This image is of a close up. It has an infusion of dried Chamomile Flowers and green tea leaves. It also had the oil of chamomile applied to the flowers before infusing. It no longer gives off a scent, but the general idea was to be able to continue to scent it with chamomile. I had experimented with several versions of this, and was at around the same time thinking about Scent as Installation. I then went off on a tangent and began to create the essence for it’s own sake. At the time no one was doing this and there was nowhere to go with it. No markers other than Perfumery. Which was (and still is) for the most part a mass produced industrial product. I have always loved scent and even perfume, but knew that this was not who I was nor was it what I was doing with scent. My ideas and vision were my own, based on my life and experiences. It was a scentual, liquid expression of what I had been doing with paint.

Closing my Cincinnati studio in June, and having the summer to think about direction, I was able to re-focus my attention on what was important to me as an artist. What was important to Soivohle, and how I wanted to move forward. As I have mentioned before, We are in a new space now and I am getting it set up.

I also hope that with this new interest in the Olfactory Arts, more people will begin to write about scent art. Not as the quirky step-child of perfume or a leg of the perfume industry but as a stand alone entity, where the word perfume or perfume speak never enters the picture.

I guess at the end of the day,  I might wish (just a teeny bit) that I had beat Christopher Brosius to the punch and snagged the title “I Hate Perfume”  and then again,  I am very happy with where I am now. I only wish that the ride to get here had not been so darned bumpy…..