Conversation for Critique

I have been receiving a lot of feedback about my posting "A Pleasure to Meet You", and since my computer does not seem to be posting my reply comments, I thought a fresh blog posting in response might be appropriate.

I want to assure all who have responded that I was not referring to any particular person or any particular event. Really. That so many people think I was talking about them helps me make my point though. Over the last few months, outside of the studio environment (which I distinguish from studio visits, when critiques are an obviously essential part of a studio practice), I have found people are either silent in their response to work or have only criticism to offer. It makes me think of the experience of going out to a fancy party after buying a new dress or getting a new haircut - people can say they love the new look when they don't (not what I'm asking for), they can say nothing (where it is easy to assume they don't like it because the change is undeniable), or they can kindly say all the things that aren't working - the dress makes me look fat or uncomfortable, the haircut is old-fashioned or boring or makes my ears stick out or whatever. Except maybe it's a new look for me that I love, maybe they just need some time to get used to it - or maybe I already hate it and am embarrassed that I had to go to the party looking like a freak. Or maybe there actually is one or two things that are a surprising change that make me look better - or could make me look better if that one awful thing was not there. All I'm saying is, making value judgments that are truly constructive requires a conversation. Maybe you think Dolly Parton looks a little slutty, but unless you ask her, you don't realize that that's the look she's going for, that that's her idea of beautiful. Telling her she really shouldn't wear that because it makes her look slutty is not particularly helpful.

I am always open to hearing people's responses and thoughts about my work. It's why I make the work. It's why I have this blog. The point I wanted to make was that as artists, we know that putting our work out there is a brave and personal thing, and encouraging words are just as needed as any well-intentioned criticism. And lately, they have been pretty hard to come by.

The Power of View

Everything feels quiet and still tonight, a little sleepy, and yet here I am.

I've spent the day preparing for my first artist talk. While it's generally not difficult for me to talk about my work, it's been challenging to come up with an approach that enables me to coherently and concisely explain, in 30 minutes or less, the dramatic changes in my life and art over the past few years. Speaking to a corporate audience (ie. the employees of Daimler Financial), I seem compelled to begin with: "I am one of you".

Wanting to explain the influence of my former life (as a New York corporate lawyer) on my art, I have decided that the premise for my talk will be Susan Stewart's assertion that "no artwork can be completed without reception." Although I never created art until after I quit my life as a lawyer (and it was a whole life that I quit, not just a job), I had always sought out the experience of art. If art is understood as a sort of collaboration between maker and receiver, then it seems less surprising that I could emerge from the rational, linguistic minutiae of the law into the expressive, poetic realm of the visual arts. Indeed, I believe an artist resides in most of us.

As an artist now, I am fascinated with the seductive nature of images - the fantasies they induce, the desires they stoke, the frailties they reveal - and the role the viewer plays in perpetuating their power.

In Other's Words

Today someone kindly described my blog postings as "long-winded", and I admit that they are, as I use them to think aloud about all that consumes me about art. But today, I will let a few quotes that are relevant to my art practice speak for themselves (from Susan Stewart in her essay "On the Art of the Future" in The Open Studio (University of Chicago Press, 2005):

"Artworks and persons inhabit a materiality vulnerable to decay and dissolution. They require acts of physical care as well as acts of disinterested engagement in order to continue, and they are finite nonetheless. They literally bear meaning, and once they are materially gone, they exist only if they are carried on in the paralife of reproduction and other forms of description; their uniqueness can no longer be experienced without mediation."

"Every gesture toward articulation is countered by the inevitability of disappearance. Within the realm of visual art, for example, to think only in terms of what has been made visible, or to go even more astray and think of visual representation as only based in what is available to sight, is to miss the long tradition of representing the invisible and the limits of vision by plastic means."

"Whenever art makes visible, it does so by referring to the invisible from which the visible emerges."

"Blockage accompanies vision; deprivation is the partner of sensation..."

I promise to return to my own awkward ramblings next time.

A Pleasure To Meet You

(It has been too long. The first posting of September only now! I will have to make up for it.)

During this extended period of blog silence, I have expanded my studio space, planned two new major art projects (not paintings - details to be revealed at a later date), thrown out the failed paintings of the summer, and sent two recent paintings out into the world (at the group exhibition "Dreamers & Screamers" at Board of Directors). In the midst of this mania, I have been reading Susan Stewart's "The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics" - which I have been dying to blog about for days.

But before I do that (more tomorrow), I wanted to put a few thoughts out there to my fellow artists about sharing our artwork with each other. The art world is full of weird and wonderful people, and I certainly embrace the subjective and critical responses to my work from anyone willing to share them with me (hence this blog!). But lately I have been struck by how quickly people are to give an artist a "critique" of his/her work while forgetting to provide any positive words of encouragement or appreciation. Some stick to the adage "if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all", while some offer extended critical feedback without any prompting or request. But outside the classroom or formal (or even informal) critique environment, what is (or perhaps should be) the protocol among artists for responding to a peer's work? I know the word protocol implies a rigid politeness that would seem to defeat or detract from the dialogue that we want art to inspire. But is there not a distinction between debating the ideas raised by a work of art, and debating the merits of the work itself? I certainly agree that constructive criticism by our respected peers is an essential part of any artist's studio practice. But when considering the merits of an artwork (particularly with the artist), is it not just as important to consider what is working in the piece and not just what may not be? As artists, we all know the struggles in creating new work and the anxiety associated with the first public reveal. I am not advocating a falsified love-fest, but out of respect for the courage, passion and labor of our fellow artists (and frankly out of respect for art itself), is there not something to be said for giving an artist (and seeking in the work) some (truthful) affirmation of the artist's efforts? And if at first we don't see or experience the merits of a work, do we not owe it to the artist (and even to ourselves) to have a little patience, to stick with it a little longer. You don't have to fall in love with it, but maybe to just be open to the possibility, to be open to persuasion.

In Susan Stewart's essay "On the Art of the Future", Stewart draws an analogy between "the face-to-face encounter between persons and the face-to-face encounter with artworks." The following passage is worth quoting at length:

"Our meetings with artworks are embedded in the meanings and conventions we bring to encounters with other persons, and all nonmonumental art is a means of figuration in this sense. Yet, specifically, this meeting with an artwork that is in itself and for itself is analogous to that free ethical stance in which persons are encountered in themselves and for themselves - without prior determination of outcome or goal. When we consider an artwork as something meant, it is the intention and actions of individual persons that we seek to recover and come to understand in a project of implicit mutuality and heightened responsiveness or intensity." (The Open Studio, p. 18)

Stewart relies on the "paradigm for aesthetic experience" offered by Kant that asserts that "an encounter between persons and forms [is] in truth an encounter between persons - the maker and the receiver." (The Open Studio, p.19)

Perhaps this paradigm could soften the hearts of those who seek first to judge rather than understand, who revel in the chance to criticize rather than patiently find an opportunity for connection.

A Little More Inspiration

Petah Coyne

I'll begin with Petah Coyne, an American sculptor. One website (www.artsandculture.com) describes her works as follows:

"Unlike many contemporary artists who focus on social or media-related issues, Petah Coyne imbues her work with a magical quality to evoke intensely personal associations. Her sculptures convey an inherent tension between vulnerability and aggression, innocence and seduction, beauty and decadence, and, ultimately, life and death."

Love that.

And then I came across an Australian photographer, Rosemary Laing. After looking at Bettina Rheims yesterday, I was struck by the continuing theme. And yet after the explicit sexuality of Rheims' work, these stripped down photos by Laing are an interesting flip side. These photos are from her "grieving blondes" series.

Rosemary Laing

Rosemary Laing

I can't say the pink backgrounds do much for me, especially as a repeated element (they begin to look too staged), but I like the idea of them.

The photographers are definitely taking centre stage for me lately. My camera awaits.

Girls, Girls, Girls

My painting is definitely changing. I seemed to have turned a corner somewhere, and now all I want to paint is girls. Boys just don't seem to interest me as much these days (artistically speaking).

Recovering from an exhausting month of travels and painting, today I amused myself with Fashion Television re-runs. One episode showcased the work of French photographer Bettina Rheims (whose photographs I've posted here). Her work is amazing. Portraits of the feminine, they exude the complexities of female sexuality and desire. The more I looked at her work and heard her speak about it, the more I wanted to pick up my camera and take photos of my own. I was fascinated to read that once Francis Bacon had achieved commercial success, he began to commission photographs from a professional photographer so he could specify particular poses and expressions that he wanted to use in his paintings, giving him more control than he had with the reproductions he so often used as sources. As I find myself increasingly occupied with the figure and particularly interested in portraiture, I am wanting more and more to create my own images. The technical challenges involved in such a venture overwhelm me at the moment, but there must be a way. It may dramatically alter the subject matter of my work, but perhaps not. I guess I won't really know until I try.

All About Steve

Yesterday I went to the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal - an amazing building on gorgeous grounds with a bookstore to die for (although I have a special thing for bookstores generally - a bit of a book fetish, really). Since it's the end of the summer, there was only one exhibit on - the rest of the building was closed off in preparation for the new fall shows. The show I was able to see was called "Speed Limits", about our culture's increasing obsession with speed. Upon walking into the first room of the exhibit, I saw a video of moving vehicles (rockets, cars in traffic, planes taking off, etc) projected into a large square on the floor. It took me a minute or two to look up and see a projection of a different video on the ceiling - of snails moving across a white, wet surface in real time. Fast. Slow. I get it. I can't say this is really my kind of thing. But an artist friend of mine, Steve Shaddick, has work that addresses a lot of the ideas that were explored in the exhibit, and I quickly started to see the exhibit through his eyes. I have to say, it became a lot more fascinating. I was charmed by things I don't think I would have taken notice of without having been familiar with (and a fan of) Steve's work. People must have thought I was crazy, because I think I had a smile on my face the whole time thinking about the fact that some integrated media artist had actually entered my brain enough to make me think this stuff was actually interesting!

The experience reminded me of my trip to New York with Nitasha - an artist friend who has a serious dark side and a fascination with things much more grotesque and disturbing than I can normally stomach. But having gained an understanding of her perspective of the world through her art, I found myself looking at artworks that were slightly gruesome or nightmarish in a very different, more curious, even more patient way than I ever have before. I looked harder, with a much broader set of intentions, with a much broader perspective.

And isn't that what art should do? To help us see poetry and potential in things from which we might have otherwise turned away?

Over-Exposure

On my last day vacationing by the Ottawa river yesterday, I finished reading a book about Francis Bacon - interviews, commentaries - a lot of it setting out his biography and how it related to his work. After awhile, knowing all the sordid, twisted details of his life started to actually take away from his work for me, not add to its power. The author repeats over and over how carefully Bacon managed his image, but interestingly Bacon seemed more guarded about how he felt about art and his own work than he did about revealing his private (and not-so-private) demons. Considering I've started this blog, and am revealing almost daily my thoughts and feelings about my work and art in general, it's made me think about whether that sense of "mystery" that Bacon supposedly cultivated in his work really had anything to do with its success. While, as an artist, I'm fascinated with his process and his ideas, as a viewer, I think there can be just too much information. Obviously the viewing experience can be enriched by a deeper understanding of the historical and theoretical context of the work, but at the end of the day, it is a painting to be experienced visually. Isn't it? I hate to bring up Barthes again, but he touches on this idea when he writes of closing one's eyes to best see the photograph (or in my case, painting):

"Absolute subjectivity is achieved only in a state, an effort, of silence (shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence). The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its usual blah-blah: "Technique,", "Reality," "Reportage," "Art,", etc.: to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness." (Camera Lucida, p.55)

Francis Bacon's paintings don't touch me because of my knowledge of his relationship with Peter Lacy, or of his reliance on the images of Muybridge and Velasquez, or of his alcoholic rampages. My relationship to his work may begin with sympathy, but a connection is made through empathy - the "I see how you feel", becomes an "I feel that too". I think viewers (and especially art historians) can go too far in trying to understand the ins and outs of the artist's perspective, when the artist's purpose is not to make a diaristic statement, but to evoke/provoke an experience in or connection with the viewer. Ambiguities and contradictions in the image keep the image alive and provide a forum to explore those aspects of our nature that lie buried within ourselves. I'm not sure what this means for this blog - but I certainly don't think you have to read it to experience my paintings. This is more about the journey than understanding any particular painting.

After I blogged the other day about moving to my dark side, I got an email from a friend who seemed a) surprised that I had a dark side, and b) perplexed that I would want to revel in that side to "suffer" for my art. While I think it is safe to say that I'm a half-full kind of girl, we certainly all have a dark side - traumas, insecurities, vulnerabilities. But it's not that I want to "suffer" for my art. Nor do I want my art to be a navel-gazing endeavor. I just think that art that taps into those unresolved or unsatisfied parts of ourselves connects with people in a more honest and meaningful way than art that is supported merely by interesting philosophical ideas. What I was trying to say, was that I want to be more fearless in my art. Art is a very revealing venture, whether you want it to be or not, and I think most often it is the bravest among us who create the best work.

Who Doesn't Like Bacon?

OK, I can't take it anymore, it's time to talk about Bacon. The whole purpose of the New York trip was to see the Met's Francis Bacon retrospective, and it certainly didn't disappoint. It's impossible to blog about it all, but there were certainly some major ideas that emerged for me.

Firstly, those damn gold frames. Bacon required all of his works to be framed in gilt gold frames with glass - the glass being the most unusual aspect. Seeing a painting in the flesh is, quite literally, being able to see the flesh of the paint. By putting his work behind glass, it was hard to see some of the subtleties of the dark glazes, to feel the visceral swipes of thick paint, to savor the soft gloss of the paint's skin. The exhibit explained that he primarily worked from photographed images, and since my own work deals with the relationship between painting and photography, the way I saw it, he had begun by transforming a photograph into a painting, and then by framing it behind glass, had basically transformed it back into a photograph. The final framed object was experientially a photograph of a painting. Also, I think it's interesting that although Bacon's instructions were strict with respect to framing his work for display purposes, the reproductions of his work are of his unframed paintings. Since Bacon worked from reproductions, he was certainly very conscious of this secondary life his paintings would have, and yet he did not require the reproductions to be of his framed work - which just reaffirms to me that when the paintings were viewed in reproduction as actual photographs of the work, the frame and glass just became redundant.

Secondly, there is no denying that Bacon quite willingly, and regularly, went to his dark side. A very dark side. Throughout the summer I have been becoming more and more conscious of how cerebral my work is, and wanting, with some trepidation, to explore a more explicitly sensual/emotional content. Working with Nitasha and Rebecca in the studio this summer has only strengthened this desire - their work is raw, intense, brave. It's making me feel like a wimp, over-thinking everything. Although art always exposes something of who you are, and while I have come a long way this year, I think I am still very much in hiding. And I think it has been easier to hide in landscapes and abstraction. But once you start using the figure, more and more becomes exposed. As Nitasha and I drooled through the Bacon exhibit and then trolled the New York bookstores looking at endless numbers of art books, Nitasha kept commenting that the paintings and images that struck me, that I kept being drawn to, had quite a dark sensibility. In the past year, my work has slowly been revealing a more romantic, feminine desire, and now it seems a darker side is starting to come into the mix. Certainly, if anything is going to bring out your desire to revel in the dark side, it's a Francis Bacon painting.

Thirdly, a more minor point, perhaps, but something I couldn't stop thinking about as I looked at Bacon's paintings. His distortion of the figure is incredibly sculptural, as if he had made a plasticine maquette of the figure and then twisted and pulled it into the form that he wanted to paint. Picasso, Matisse, de Kooning, all painted the figure and yet explored their ideas about the body, form and gesture in sculpture as well. The more I looked at Bacon's paintings, the more I could not fathom how he had not been drawn to expressing himself through a sculptural medium. It began to peak my curiosity as to how I might approach my ideas in sculpture. Looking at works by artists such as Petah Coyne, Sherry Boyle, Michele Oka, I have to believe my ideas have a place in the third dimension.

The final element of Bacon's show that has stayed with me (beyond the sheer power of the paintings themselves, of course) is the small display they had of Bacon's source materials. Bacon once said "Images breed images in me." Actually seeing the images that had resulted in the paintings was a fascinating peek into Bacon's creative process. Although there were no sketches, his works look as though the impeccable compositional structures were well thought out before paint ever touched the canvas. But it was very inspiring to see how these paintings of "genius" were sourced largely from very accessible, unremarkable images. With the cynical approach to the appropriation of images in post-modernism, it can be intimidating to rely on reproductions for source materials. There is a stigma somehow of a kind of failure of the imagination. Artists like Bacon prove otherwise.

There is no question that the Bacon show was a mass of inspiration for my studio practice, but at the end of day, most importantly, experiencing the show was a thrill, a privilege, a sheer heart-wrenching pleasure.

Such A Dirty Mind

On Friday, Nitasha and I ventured out to Chelsea to see if there was anything worthwhile. I always find it's pretty hit-and-miss in the Chelsea galleries, and I wasn't optimistic for the August shows (New York is deserted in August). Generally, I would say there were mostly misses this time, but there were a few great things.

One of the highlights was a Cecily Brown painting from 1999 ("Boy Trouble" - left image) that was hung in a group show called "Naked" - a collection of almost 50 figurative paintings from as early as the 1800's to today. The Cecily Brown painting was one of the best I've seen of her work (I saw the Oct 2008 show at Gagosian and had mixed feelings about it) and it was definitely the best piece in the show. The paint handling was a tour de force - varied and exciting. While the style was loose and gestural, there was a great sense of editing, just enough control that every smear and mark oozed with intention. I thought it was a much more powerful piece than those from 2008. The newer work is much more chaotic, full of anxiety and a hyper-kinetic energy - the initial confrontation with it is impressive, but with a longer look, the paint overwhelms every representational reference, making the experience more of an adventure in painterly abstraction than anything else. But in this 1999 painting, the energy seemed to emanate from within the figure itself - a man with a huge erection dominating the canvas.

But since I've always considered myself an abstract painter, it makes me wonder why I wouldn't prefer Brown's 2008 paintings that have been obliterated into abstraction? When did I cross the line from abstract painter to conceptual painter to (gasp!) FIGURE PAINTER?? While I have been using the figure in my work, I wouldn't say my work has been ABOUT the figure. But maybe it should be. Maybe I want it to be. Maybe it already is. Dear God.

And then there's that huge erection. Really? I'm certainly no prude (and I love this particular painting), but I don't understand why so much of the figure painting in contemporary art (that gets any international attention) seems to be either graphically violent or pornographic. It's just so OBVIOUS. Are there not more subtleties to be explored in the human condition? And even if sex and violence are so fundamental to human nature that any image of the figure cannot avoid them, are there not more interesting and complex ways to address them? In Camera Lucida, Barthes talks about how some photographs are endowed with a "blind field" - that the punctum of the photograph (discussed in my posting yesterday) implies a broader image/context than the photograph explicitly shows, which the viewer makes seen through his own assumptions/imagination/input. That seems much more interesting to me. Why do these artists feel compelled to display the contents of their own dirty mind, when it seems much more confrontational and provocative (and ultimately more effecting) to create an image that forces the viewer to delve into the contents of their own dirty mind. I think Kara Walker is one artist who does this particularly well - the disturbing implications of her work come from the viewer making the final connections in the images she creates, a much more potent and shocking experience for the viewer - although a lot of Walker's work is still pretty graphic, I think her more ambiguous images are much intriguing and arresting.

Speaking of the erotic image, Barthes writes:

"it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate the photograph and that it animates me. The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond - as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see: not only toward "the rest" of the nakedness, not only toward the fantasy of a praxis, but toward the absolute excellence of a being, body and soul together." (p.59)

Admittedly, it's much harder for the artist to involve the viewer in the completion of an image, but as Barthes argues, those are the images that the viewer retains in his/her memory - when the image is completed by SHUTTING the eyes.

My fascination with these issues may mean my work is heading somewhere new - sensuality, eroticism, seduction...more subtlety and suggestion...it may be a whole new world.