driven

once again - in my copious amounts of free time at work, i have been reading and thinking... remembering and contemplating... this time about what drives an artist.

you may remember that i have been reading COLOR by Victoria Finlay. A couple of days ago I read a section where she described a little bit about the practice and attitude of a particular painter: J. M. W. Turner. Turner worked in the early part of the 1800's, and painted landscapes. Given my general dislike for landscape painting, I never really gave a second thought to Turner or his work beyond making sure I knew enough to pass my art history exams. However, when I read Finlay's description of Turner's studio practices, I felt more of a kinship with Turner. Even though his subject matter was one that I have trouble appreciating... he was definitely one of my people.

It seems that Turner liked to experiment with a variety of different pigments... some of them new and exciting pigments, some of them proven unstable pigments that would fade or change over time (sometimes over a very short period of time)... and he didn't seem to mind much what happened to his paintings once he was finished painting them. All of this, I completely understand. I can imagine doing many of the same things (minus the landscape imagery, of course). I, too, would enjoy playing around with new and exciting pigments (should they happen to come up with something new and exciting)... although these days it's both more likely and perhaps more interesting to try to play around with old (now uncommon) pigments. I read yesterday, for example, that saffron was sometimes used as a yellow pigment. Yes, the spice. The spice which I currently have in my kitchen. I read a description of how to steep it in beaten egg white to create paint... I would say I'm highly likely to give that a try. When exposed to light, though, it's very prone to fading, but will that stop me? doubtful.

More than the experimentation, though, I also understand Turner's seemingly indifferent attitude about what happened to his canvases after he had finished painting them. While I don't quite share that particular quality, I know exactly where it stems from. It has to do with the artistic process, and I would bet that a good share of my people would know just exactly what I'm talking about here. The best, most important part of the process of painting is the time during which it is actively happening. And by actively happening, I don't necessarily mean only when the paint brush is moving. Much of the "actively happening" painting can happen while it looks like absolutely nothing is happening. In my studio, anyway, I can spend hours upon hours sitting and staring at a painting, meditating with it in curious frustration - trying to figure out just exactly what my canvas needs. Creating a relationship with a painting is like nurturing a relationship with a person. Sometimes it's like courting a lover - you tread carefully and cautiously, constantly checking to make sure you're making the right move at the right time. Sometimes it's a little more like a parent/child relationship. This type of relationship typically crops up for me when a painting is finished and moving out into the world. It happens for me because of the intimate relationship I've had with the painting up until that time, and the fact that it's time for the painting to effectively grow up and leave the studio. It's not a particularly important time in the process of the painting, I suppose - but it's the way I think about the "goodbye" part of the process. The reason I feel that way about the "goodbye" part is as follows: when I look at paintings after they are finished, they remind me of that fantastically frustrating part of the process when I was actually working on them. The important part is definitely the working part. the by-product may be aesthetically interesting to look at to most people, but for me it's a reminder of the process by which they were born.

For Turner, I suspect he felt much the same way - that the act of painting was the important part. I suspect he just didn't share the same tender feelings about the by-product that I do. I suspect he didn't give a damn about the record of the creative process. He refused to "fix" paintings that had changed or faded after they were sold. It seems that he just didn't care about that once they were gone. Finlay even described finished canvases sitting on the floor, in which he had cut slits to allow his cats to move past them by going through them. While I can understand it, I don't quite share that cavalier attitude toward my aesthetically interesting byproducts (not even toward the aesthetically uninteresting)!

Interestingly there are other artists who were at quite the opposite end of the spectrum than Turner. Both Frank Lloyd Wright and Clyfford Still come to mind - both of whom insisted on having control of how their creations were treated and exhibited after they were finished and sold. Wright to the point of building furniture straight into his buildings so the inhabitants couldn't move it, and Still to the point of trespassing to steal or alter his paintings after they were sold, if he was dissatisfied with how they looked where they were hung. I would say that in the grand scheme of things, I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, with a slight bent toward the end where Wright and Still are situated, though certainly not to the level of their notoriously eccentric behavior. (I did, however, refuse to go to my own BFA show because I was highly dissatisfied with how my work was hung. I felt that the color of the wall behind them ruined the paintings, which disgusted me, and so I couldn't bear to go and see my work like that. Meanwhile I counted the days until the whole disgraceful event would end, and I greedily took my work back to my studio).

All of this reminded me of a conversation with my friend Roxie, during grad school. We were sitting in a bar sharing a beer at the time, which was very appropriate for memories of my friend Roxie. She compared the artistic process to the idea that the journey is the important part, not the destination. That in fact arriving at the destination isn't necessarily as exciting as it's cracked up to be. It's not a let down, necessarily - but it can be rather anticlimactic. The journey is the real meat of it - the real excitement. Roxie compared it to sex. feel free to let your mind chew on that one for a while.

My personal favorite part of the artistic process is always definitely the most frustrating part. It's the part where all of the contemplation and exploration happen. The more frustration a painting involves, typically the better the painting in the end, the more intimate a relationship between myself and the painting - and the more fondly I will remember that particular painting experience. It isn't about actually solving the puzzle, though... it's more about the journey along the way to solving the puzzle. The solving of the puzzle always eventually happens, and that's not the important part. It's what was learned and experienced during the process of it. it's why I paint.

I paint because I have to. Most of the people who know me well probably consider my biggest fear to be spiders. They're certainly high up there on the list, but at the very top of the list is losing the ability to see or use my hands - rendering me unable to paint. loss of sight would also mean i couldn't look at art anymore, nor experience my love for color... but worse would certainly be losing the ability to create art. I don't want to live in that world - I wouldn't see the point in it. I paint because I am a painter with every fiber of my being. I am a painter because I can't live and not be a painter. it's something that I am compelled to do. I once took the Birkman personality test, and the result was that I scored the highest possible score in art. The man who interpreted the test for me told me that was rather rare, but that when it happened, the person would not be satisfied or happy unless that particular element (whatever it may be) was a part of their life. That is certainly true for me.

This week is a good example of exactly that. I have paintings in progress upstairs in my studio, and I have wanted to go upstairs and work on them all week, however life has gotten in the way of that. I have had a number of other things planned after work every day this week, and have not had enough waking hours in the day to be able to go upstairs and paint. I feel like I'm going mad. I feel frustrated. I feel compelled to go upstairs and paint, yet I haven't been able to do so. I sit at work with nothing to do (yet unable to go home) for 8 hours a day... most of that time I spend dreaming about the colors I would mix, and which brushes I would use to pull that paint across the paper. I think about the smell of linseed oil and the different pigments in my boxes of paint while I'm driving to and from work. I begged one of the art teachers to give me something to do this morning, so I could handle the wait time before I could get to my paintings. (as it turned out I didn't have the time for that either - I got called away to sit in and sub for an extremely boring and dissatisfying health class this morning... where I also wound up standing around dreaming about dragging paint across my self portrait upstairs).

i would be painting this exact moment, except I'm exhausted. I don't think I would be terribly productive in the studio right now. I want to wait until I'm well rested and fresh. I doubt i can drag myself to bed without going into the studio to play with my paint, at least for a few minutes, though. I'd like to complete a quick and simple layer, to prepare for the painting that I expect to do tomorrow. Then maybe I can sleep well and dream about my pigments, and get the rest that I need. I don't think I've gone to bed at a decent hour all week long - which is why I'm so exhausted now.

I have found myself wondering this week whether other people feel quite so strongly about certain aspects of their lives as I feel about painting. For example, does my friend Kari feel so strongly about writing that it would be impossible for her to live in a world where she could no longer write? Would Alyssa go utterly mad if she wasn't able to cook anymore? Does my husband have some secret thing that he loves with every fiber of his being that I don't yet know about? He tells me that he does not, and I find myself utterly bewildered by the idea of living without such a compulsion. It's beyond my realm of experience, and therefore unimaginable for me.

integrity

exactly one week ago today, my friend Marilee said something to me that has stuck with me, and resurfaced in my mind over and over again, and helped me to reflect on my own artwork (as well as the artwork of others) in a variety of ways. I don't recall exactly how the conversation started, but it likely had something to do with some of the newest and freshest ideas that I have for exploring paint and space. Whatever it was, it sparked a conversation about one of my older pieces of work, from when we were both students, and a comparison to other contemporary works we've seen recently. The piece of mine in question was one where I had stacked two canvases together, and cut through the first to make the second visible. Among the other contemporary works that were mentioned were some belonging to Titus Kaphar, who is a promising young, Black artist, who makes intriguing pieces that question and re-shape ,or re-frame (so to speak) Black history. In some of his works, he borrows imagery from art history, then literally cuts into the canvas and (again, literally) re-arranges the elements to give the work different connotations. Some of the re-arrangements are subtle, while others are not - however I find that the shift in meaning and mood of the work is always great. What Marilee said to me that caught my attention was about the treatment and integrity of the surface of the canvas when those of us who are incline to do so, cut into the canvas.

For hundreds of years (perhaps more), artists have been searching for ways to merge painting and sculpture together. Some attempts have been more successful than others. The end result is usually that it looks like a sculpture with color on it, though this is not always the case. I think Marilee felt that some of us painters who cut into our canvas get a little carried away with turning it into a 3-dimensional sculpture, and lose sight of the fact that it is also a 2-dimensional surface with loaded potential for the illusion of space. She felt that mine still honored the integrity of the 2-dimensional plane. I suspect that fact had to do with how 2-dimensional my cut canvas was really treated. Though I did create real space, I still treated both canvases as the 2-dimensional canvas that they were. I am a painter, after all. it's what I do. I also happen to love color and texture; and I also happen to not be a sculptor.

Interestingly, I was first inspired to cut into my canvas by a sculptor. I spent my spring term of 2003 studying art history abroad in Rome. A few months before we left for the program, our professor, Jeffrey Collins, gave us projects to research. I had a villa, and a particular (modern) segment of a museum. The villa was easy enough to figure out how to research, but the museum was another story. I had to first look up what was in the collection of the museum. One of the few things I do remember unearthing and researching was a sculptor by the name of Lucio Fontana. Unfortunately he is not a well remembered artist from the 1930's, but he is far from forgotten. Every now and then I stumble across one of his works in a museum and always feel as though I'm greeting a good friend when I see one. There are two distinct types of works that I usually see by Fontana. Some of them are obvious sculptures that were probably first made out of clay, and then cast as bronze. They range in size, but are usually at least 3 ft tall, rather round, and tend to have large gouges clawed or dug out of them. The rest are on canvas or paper, and have slashes cut into them, or sometimes small holes that look like puncture marks. But don't be fooled by his use of the canvas and paper - though the materials come from a painter's toolbox, he treated them very much like a sculptor. It's not a concept that I fully understood until I tried a master study of one of them. He did use paint, but he treated even the paint as though it were clay. He didn't approach texture the way that I might, by layering and scraping, or splashing and dripping, or heavily brushing at the canvas. He laid on a thick layer of paint, and then sculpted that layer as though it were clay. The actual 3-D effect is fairly shallow (although Fontana played with it extensively - he went to the effort of dramatically lighting and video taping the canvases as he moved the light, to enhance and show off its sculptural quality).

Below are a collection of photos taken of Lucio Fontana by the photographer Ugo Mulas. The photos were staged, but meant to show how Fontana worked. The one in the middle, on the top is one of my all time favorite photos of an artist. Though Fontana is a sculptor at heart, I know that posture well. I've adopted it countless times myself, while facing a blank canvas. It's the posture of an artist preparing himself for the great task of giving birth to a piece of artwork.


Given my conversation with Marilee regarding the integrity of the 2-D surface, I find myself looking back to Lucio Fontana again - at first glance it may appear that he respected the two dimensionality of the canvas - but being a sculptor, I have a strong feeling that he didn't respect it in the way that Marilee and I would as painters. Though the canvas itself is even more intact than my piece is, his is far less about painting, and far more about sculpting than mine is.

I got the impression that the amount of 3-D sculpture that appears in Titus Kaphar's work bothered Marilee on some level. I, on the other hand, found it exciting. I find it to be one of the rare examples where a painter is including sculptural elements in an honest, and meaningful way, while still remaining at heart a painter. Without the two dimensional elements in Kaphar's work, the 3-D elements would not have held nearly the same meaning. Likewise, by cutting them, he was not only revising history, but making a point of doing so. In one large canvas in particular, an entire figure was cut out (sort of like a paper doll, still attached at his feet), and thrown on the floor. The figure himself had been painted as a strong looking fellow, clearly someone "important" from history (I don't recall at the moment who he was), but the canvas looked limp, flat, and flimsy. I felt it made a rather powerful statement about how Kaphar felt about that particular fellow.

In my copious amounts of paid free time, lately, I've wondered just exactly what constitutes a painting. Does a stretched canvas necessarily mean it's a painting? After my description of Lucio Fontana, I would hope that it's clear that my answer to that is no. But how exactly would I categorize someone like Titus Kaphar? Personally, I see him as an artist perhaps alone (or at least fairly lonely) in a small and elite group of artists who seem to have a strong hold in both the worlds of painting and sculpting at the same time. I can't say for sure which camp I would put him in. I think his work necessarily needs both, and wouldn't be nearly as powerful if one were omitted. I see that as a fantastic thing - and something which I think a lot of artists have striven for, but a place in art history that few have actually achieved. All of my musings on the topic make me wonder just where Titus Kaphar would categorize himself, or whether he would bother at all.