are you ready for this, readers? in this post, i'm going to share something that's been bouncing around in my mind for the past year and a half. i've been meaning to share it now for ages - but haven't found the time. but today i'm gallery sitting at Art/Not Terminal, and it's been an incredibly slow day - so time is something I have a lot of today. it's also special that I get to write this piece while sitting among art by other local artists. it's very fitting. sometimes things just wait to happen until the timing is perfect, don't they?
so here goes. as you may remember, i was displaced from my classroom for most of last year, and sat around watching the clock tick away the minutes at Wilson instead of teaching. during that time I did a lot of learning about art. but more than that - learning about what it means to me to be an artist, and gained some accidental insight into how an artist chooses their medium - or perhaps the other way around.
first, i read a fantastic book on the history of color by Victoria Finlay. She wends her way through the rainbow, traveling to places of historical significance for each of the colors she explores. i learned a lot about my people through her experiences. i learned about secrets and wars, adventures, and discoveries, all in the name of color. color is one of my very favorite things. i know color theory inside and out, and mixing color on my palette is second nature. i know how colors will mix with each other so well i can almost do it in my sleep. but what i don't know a lot about is where all of the colors on my palette come from, when they were discovered, and just how old they are. Victoria Finlay opened up that piece of art history for me, and i've been fascinated ever since. I'm very thankful for her exploration of the subject. upon reading the last page in her book, i came quite close to simply turning back to page 1 and reading it again. instead i opted to order a few more books on color - but hers so far has been my favorite.
around the same time i was reading her book, i found myself in one of the clay classes at the school, chatting with another art teacher. this is a person i will opt not to give a name to. it's a person that i have a rocky relationship with now, but this piece of our history came before the rocky bits. this piece of our story i cherish above all because it taught me something about myself. the important part of this memory is that i was challenged to take a slab of clay and treat it like a painting. it was a great exercise for me. the piece came out well, but the really meaningful part - as is so often the case - was the experience of making the piece, rather than the piece itself. i have worked with clay before, but always within clay vocabulary, and in clay terms - so i hadn't exactly had the same thought process that came up for me this time. this time i was working with the vocabulary i use as a painter, and thinking of the piece in the same terms that i think about abstract painting. the slab itself was shaped similar to a small painting. i did carve into it, and add literal texture to the piece. it is 3-D, though shallow, but hangs on the wall like a painting. i added colored slips to the piece, and that was the most similar part of the experience to painting, and also the part that sparked my thinking about how an artist works, and how that process informs our choice of medium. clay dries at a particular speed, and that can be sped up or slowed down, depending on what you do with it. paint does the same thing, of course, but i find that paint is more flexible than clay is. but of course i would say that - as i am a painter, not a potter, and i'm sure my lack of knowledge about clay hinders my ability to make it do what i want it to do. but more importantly i find that i work best with paint because paint is readily suited to the way that i want to work. i don't want to fuss all day about how to extend the working time of my material. i want to spend that time working on my piece. i also want to spend time sitting with my piece. i tend to wait for them to tell me what they need. sometimes it's peaceful sitting with them, sometimes it's turbulent sitting with them, sometimes frustrating - but eventually they all tell me what they need. sometimes that takes years. i find it difficult to do that with a clay piece. it would dry out before i finish with it. i only took a couple of months to work on the clay slab I was given, and even the amount of drying out it did in that time proved problematic. parts of it cracked when fired, because they were put together with slips that were too wet over top of clay that had already dried a bit underneath. i didn't mind it - but it means that i can't work with that medium the way i would prefer to work. never truly the way i work as a painter, which seems to me the most authentic way of working given my personality and needs as an artist.
i also spent a couple of months sitting in a hot shop about a year ago. they placed me there at the end of the last school year. i was the token, walking, talking teaching certificate for a couple of glass blowers who actually taught the class. it was fun watching, and i met some wonderful people - but the job itself was glorified, highly educated, highly paid office assistant. definitely not what i got my MAT to do... but it did provide a little further insight for me. i never worked with the large furnaces or blew glass, but i did work with the small torches to create a few beads, and did a little bit of work cutting glass for mosaic work. i learned something about color with this experience. there are certainly gorgeous colors of glass to be had - but working with color as a glass artist is significantly more limiting than working with color as a painter. i can make an infinite number of colors at my palette rather easily by mixing together just red, yellow, and blue. it's more difficult for a glass artist to do the same thing with any degree of accuracy, or even ability to see what the final result is going to be if working with hot glass, as it all glows red while it's being worked. working with mosaic, an artist could place small bits of color next to one another, and create a situation where the colors mix in the eye, as with pointillist paintings... but that's about the extent of the flexibility that i'm aware of. (nevermind the high expense of buying colors in glass. paint is by far cheaper). i do long for the ability to suspend marks in space the way a glass worker can, though. my favorite pieces were the simple bits of colored glass suspended in the center of the little paper weights that the kids did when they were first starting. i could stare at them for hours, enjoying the 3D equivalent of a textural brush stroke... but it's not enough to turn me into a glass artist. i also found myself thinking that if i were working with the large furnaces, i'd be tempted to stick my fingers into it the way i might with clay... obviously not a wise idea, but the idea of not being able to touch the thing i'm working with - of being constantly removed from it while creating it - bothers me. this is the same reason i'm not a digital artist. i'm not interested in making art that i can't physically touch during the process of creation. one might argue that it isn't wise to stick my fingers into some paint pigments either (and indeed, i constantly remind my students that unless it's marked "body paint" they shouldn't paint themselves with it, because some of it is quite toxic) - but lets get real. i do it. i do it all the time. lately i wear gloves in a half ass attempt to ward off cancer... but i still do it.
i've learned that we artists work in our chosen medium for a reason. it's more than the fact that we've been trained in one particular medium, or have had more experience in one medium - it goes back farther than that, and probably explains why we sought to be trained in that medium in the first place... our medium chose us because it's the one best suited to who we are, and how we work. trying out other mediums has been fun, but more importantly has shown me exactly why i don't regularly work in them. they're just not quite the right fit for me. i'm a painter. i'm a painter to the very core of my being. it's in my bones. and now i have a little bit of insight as to why it's painting that's in my bones, and not something else.
