Lessons of the Poet

I love the word "poetic". For me it is one of the greatest compliments that I can give to an artist, one of the greatest compliments I can receive about my work. I can't say I know too much about poetry, but I love language, the play of words, and I am fascinated that almost every encounter I have with poetry or poets offers an insight into painting.  For instance, in her collection of essays "The Open Studio", Susan Stewart writes:

"...the conversation between visual artists and poets is always inflected by a knowledge of the limits of linguistic understanding. And just as a poet is struck by the ineffable dimension of visual experience, so is a visual artist conscious of the rebus-like aspect of visual choices, continually informed by memories of language and language's capacity for escaping the bounds of the material."

In "How to Read a Poem", Edward Hirsch writes extensively of the relationship between poet and reader, as well as the poet's passion to write. Throughout, the words "poetry"/"poet" could easily be substituted for "painting"/"artist". My favorite passage (a pretty accurate description as to what led my to painting) is as follows:

"There are people who defend themselves against being "carried away" by poetry, thus depriving themselves of an essential aspect of the experience. But there are others who welcome the transport poetry provides. They welcome it repeatedly. They desire it so much they start to crave it daily, nightly, nearly abject in their desire, seeking it out the way hungry people seek food. It is spiritual sustenance to them. Bread and wine. A way of transformative thinking. A method of transfiguration. [...] The are so taken by the ecstatic experience - the overwhelming intensity - of reading poems they have to respond in kind. And these people become poets."

And then today, inspired by a Facebook exchange I had with Canadian painter David Urban, I decided to troll YouTube for more lessons from the poet. The latest tidbit is the following video - I relate to his comments on the life of a poet, on the discipline of creative work and particularly his comments on translation, as I believe I am engaging in a form of translation as I learn to become a painter and shape my own language.

Catch-22

The same could be said for painting...

(the poet Louise Gluck responding to a question about the "danger" and "difficulty" of poetry)

Wilde Thought

"It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

From A to Zen

I definitely burned myself out this winter. It doesn't surprise me really. I've been a rabid workaholic most of my life, a textbook type A personality. But then over the last few weeks, I've forced myself to step away from the studio for more than just errands, art openings and family dinners. I went to the country, took long walks, worked on a collaborative art installation with friends, finished some overdue paperwork and started to complete the tasks of spring-cleaning in my house and garden. While my hunger for the studio has been gnawing at me, I've actually been reveling in this "free" time. Interestingly, I have had more new ideas during this time than in the last few months in the studio. I have had the space to allow my thoughts to float freely, somewhere between purposeful problem-solving and nebulous day-dreaming - that space where interesting ideas are born.

In the book that I read recently about painters in their daily studio practice (Joe Fig's "Inside the Painter's Studio"), most of the artists talk about how their ideas are generated by "doing the work", that in the act of painting itself, their art moves forward. They caution young artists to not sit around and wait for inspiration to strike. And while that's true, I think there's something to be said for giving time to a little aimless contemplation. For me, I find that my big ideas, those ideas that have lead to dramatic shifts in my work, have usually come when I'm away from the studio, when my mind has entered that floating state. Anthony Storr describes it this way (in his book "Solitude", p.198):

"...the mental state during which new ideas arise or inspiration occurs is exactly that which Jung...called 'active imagination'. [...] new ideas occur during a state of reverie, intermediate between waking and sleeping. Poets, like Yeats and Wordsworth, sometimes describe this state as being both asleep and awake. It is a state of mind in which ideas and images are allowed to appear and take their course spontaneously; but one in which the subject is sufficiently awake and conscious enough to observe and note their progress. [...] the creator seeking inspiration need[s] to be able to be passive, to let things happen within the mind."

The studio is not always conducive to this kind of process. The studio is work. The mind is focused on specific tasks, specific problems, specific movements, colors, brushstrokes and images. That is not to say progress is not made through the work itself, but a different kind of progress is made outside the studio. I recently read an interview with the performance artist Marina Abramović where she said (and I paraphrase) that the studio is really a trap, that it turns artists into employees, the studio into an office, and that art should come from living life. Now, I realize she is trying to say something slightly different than I am, that she is talking about inspiration and ideas that come from experiencing life and the process of integrating and translating those experiences back into art. But I heed her warning of the studio as a trap, of experiencing the studio as an office. And there is no question that since school ended, I have been making my studio into a similar experience to my former office life. For months now, I have found myself getting increasingly anxious, stressed, panicked by every failure, relieved by every success. My blog has been filled with words like "goal-oriented", "desire", "success" and "slaving".

But in the last few weeks, with time away to wander and ponder, I have been finding my way back to that quiet, excited, ecstatic place within me that teems with ideas. After being overloaded with purpose for months (probably years), I'm becoming addicted to this new zen state of mind.

I'm back in the studio now. It is definitely time to return to some purposeful work - who are we kidding, I still love the feeling of hyper-productivity. But this time, there will be a little more purposeful purposelessness on the schedule.

In Storr

A few not-so-random quotes from Anthony Storr's book "Solitude":

"Can you imagine what it is like being a prisoner for life, your dreams turn into nightmares and your castles to ashes, all you think about is fantasy and in the end you turn your back on reality and live in a contorted world of make-believe, you refuse to accept the rules of fellow-mortals and make ones that will fit in with your own little world, there is no daylight in this world of the 'lifer', it is all darkness, and it is in this darkness that we find peace and the ability to live in a world of our own, a world of make-believe."  (Storr, p. 56, quote by a prisoner interviewed by Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor for their book Psychological Survival)

"...that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life, and must be always appeased by some enjoyment. Those who have already all that they can enjoy must enlarge their desires." (Storr, p. 63, quote by Samuel Johnson)

"To allow his genius to become apparent to himself it was necessary that he should dare to give up aiming to please. Cut off from everyone by deafness he discovered the vulnerability of the spectator, he realized that the painter has only to struggle with himself and he will come, sooner or later, the conqueror of all."  (Storr, p. 53, quote by André Malraux regarding Goya)

To Become, To Be

There is a myth about being an artist, or at least there used to be. Historically, the status of the artist has gone basically from craftsman, to professional, to individual genius, to anyone with a creative impulse. Most recently, it seems the artist is back to being constructed as a new and improved professional - expected to be educated, trained, with multiple degrees and advanced credentials, with lots of entrepreneurial spirit and marketing savvy. Aspiring to be an artist has become about getting in to the right school, earning the right degree, producing a "coherent", "consistent" body of work, and then hawking it in the right way to the right people, ie. those people with the power to anoint you as a "real" artist, worthy of belonging to the profession. It seems pretty straight-forward really, almost reassuring. If you want to be an artist, here is the path, here is the career plan. Best of luck.

Having briefly had another profession before becoming an artist, I am fascinated by this process of becoming, this quest to earn a new identity, in this case the identity of an artist. Even describing the act of making art seems fraught with difficulties. When does it begin? Do all nascent efforts qualify as the "making" of art, the act of "creating"? What does it mean to "pursue" art? Do you pursue it like a child chasing after a runaway puppy in a field of flowers? Or is the pursuit more treacherous, more akin to a soldier stalking an elusive target through muddy, blood-soaked minefields, doomed to be annihilated at any moment? Is the pursuit never-ending, or is there a moment when you can declare that you've caught it, that you've conquered it, that from now on, art somehow belongs to you.

In Joe Fig's book, "Inside the Painter's Studio", the first question he asks each of the artists interviewed is when they considered themselves to be a "professional artist". Each artist talks around the question, acknowledging that such a milestone is probably considered objectively to be when they were first able to pay their bills from the proceeds of their artwork alone. But most seem uncomfortable or unsatisfied with that assessment. They each have a very individual way of determining when they began to identify themselves as an artist, with or without the added designation of "professional". Throughout each interview, the thing that quietly emerges is the idea that art is not a job, not a career, not even really a pursuit. It is a life. Each of the artists expresses a patient commitment to a daily process that persists in the face of the uncontrollable and unpredictable vicissitudes of the art market and of life, whether others may perceive it as their "career" or not.

Perhaps this is obvious to many artists out there. They don't question the need to make art, they have identified themselves as artists since they were first given a crayon, and they experience the making of art as second-nature. For me, that is not the case - perhaps more so because I left a different career to do this, so it has seemed only natural to pursue this new venture with a similar attitude to "success". It has taken time for me to transition from my old identity to this one as artist. It has been a process of shedding my old self, habits and expectations, and slowly slipping into a new skin, exploring its capabilities, and even discovering what may be a few special super-powers.

I think an artist today is simultaneously a craftsman, a professional, a genius, and a shmo with a crayon. I think at different times, at different stages, and to different extents, I am one, or some, or all of those things. And I see that finally I am beginning to cross the threshold of becoming in to being.

Bellowing Desire

An extended passage from Lee Siegel's collection of essays entitled "Falling Upwards" - this passage is from an essay reflecting on the work of novelist Saul Bellow (but I'm not posting this because of an interest in Saul Bellow...):

"The world's siren song, its sweetness and strangeness, is the ordeal of Bellow's heroes. Life fills them with such a sense of promise and beauty that, in the end, they turn inward as a way to escape the inevitable disappointments that plague passionately receptive natures.

Men of most powerful appetite have always been the ones to doubt reality the most" says the African King Dahfu to Henderson in Henderson the Rain King. These life-famished figures are contemporary; they cannot, Dahfu continues "bear that hopes should turn to misery, and loves to hatreds and deaths and silences, and so on." They are contemporary in precisely this sense: the more their desires expand, the further reality recedes.

So Bellow's heroes leap away from disappointing reality into ideas, and then away from insufficient ideas into sex, and away from sex into fantasy, and back to culture, and then back to experience - and on and on, in an infinite regression of distancing from the episodes in life that fall short of life's promise. They must protect their psyches from the insult of inadequate conditions. This psychoacrobatic motion is anarchic, like laughter; and it reproduces the odyssey of Mozart's music, which modulates from earthy to sky to the far end of heaven and back to earth.

Bellow's heroes are in flight from reality to the heart of existence. They flee from life for love of life. Henderson is both strengthened and harried by a small persistent voice deep inside him that repeats, "I want I want I want." There is something terrible about these protagonists who are so consumed with desire. They burn life away with the intensity of their wanting, feeling, thinking, and almost always find themselves alone, barely alive, far away from other people. It is as if their defeat by desire were also the fulfillment of their desire. A wish for deprivation lurks in the depths of their voracity."

Touché

Recently, a friend loaned me a book called "Inside The Painter's Studio", which is a series of interviews by Joe Fig, who asks a number of established artists a set of questions about their daily studio practice. For the final interview question, each artist is asked, "what advice would you give to a young artist who is just starting out?" So far, Malcolm Morley's response is my favorite:

Well there's a great story about Mozart who was approached by a young composer. The young composer asked Mozart for advice on what he thought he should write: whether he should write a saraband, a suite, a romance, a symphony, etc. So Mozart looked at him and said, "Well, in your case, I'd write a waltz." So the young composer was very sort of angry. And he said, "But Mozart! At the age of ten you wrote a symphony!" And Mozart replied, "Yes, but I didn't have to ask anybody's advice." So any artist or student that asks advice is already a failure in my view.

It seems particularly apropos for me after my latest blog. The other artists in the book respond to the question with a similar sentiment, but use the kind of earnest, encouraging words that we most often hear from our mother ("just be yourself", "follow your heart", etc). I think Morley's response is a much more brutal but effective slap in the face.

Tyranny of the Hypothetical

I've been struggling lately. It goes without saying that painting is always a struggle, and that's to be expected. But it's much more than that. I think in the last few months, it's really hit me how hard this whole artist thing really is. As a student, you're so protected - assignments, mentors, mandatory feedback, all wrapped in a whole lot of big dreams and naive optimism. But it's different once you're on your own. I finally finished my degree last April, and then shared a studio with a few friends until September. Since then, I have worked obsessively, alone. For the first few months, I reveled in my new-found privacy and space. I made big strides in my work and produced painting after painting after painting. But since Christmas, the months have been ticking by, and while the obsessive working has not diminished, I have become increasingly conscious of my largely secluded existence.

In so many ways, working day after day without interruption or distraction is a gift, a privilege, a luxury. But it is also trying. The deluge of critiques that I so often longed to be free of while in school has abruptly dried up, and too often I find myself thinking back to the soggy old comments made about my old work to see if they can continue to guide me with the new. It goes without saying that they are woefully inadequate.

Of course I work hard at challenging myself - and I do. But you see, there's the rub. When you depend on your art to pay the bills, the art-making process can quickly become stiflingly goal-oriented. There are deadlines, collectors, galleries - and along with all that, is the increasingly anxiety-ridden awareness that the work is not being made for my eyes alone, that it is intended to go out into the world and be seen, scrutinized, and ultimately judged.

Most artists that you talk to or read about say that they don't care what other people think. Maybe that's true. But there's caring what other people think in a grovelling, pandering kind of way, and then there's caring what other people think in a hoping-to-connect, trying-to-communicate kind of way. And while I certainly don't advocate the former, I think the latter is much more complicated. When I was at school, the critique process at school gave each of us a test-run for our work from a bunch of interested and educated viewers. The whole process was an implicit affirmation that it does matter what other people think - as artists, we're literally trained to care. But now that that constructive process is gone, I have had to replace that audience of actual viewers with an audience of my own imagined hypothetical viewers.

And there has been the root of my struggles. My imagination seems to breed these viewers who are not only highly critical but fickle. They befriend my doubts, play hide and seek with my intentions, and dress up my instincts with costumes that don't fit.

But then today, just when the growing, chaotic crowd of bullying hypothetical viewers were beginning to stampede, I experienced an unexpected gunshot to the sky that has scattered the masses. And suddenly I feel emboldened, even liberated. And at least for today, the hypothetical viewer is just me.

A Sign of Intimacy

In my Collins English Dictionary, the word "intimate" is defined, in part, as:

deeply personal, private, secret
having a deep or unusual knowledge
of or relating to the essential part or nature of something; intrinsic

For me, there is no question that painting has a distinct capacity to express intimacy. I would argue that at its best, painting always does. Which is not to say that all paintings are intimate expressions. Many (too many?) are not. Which means it cannot just be the medium itself that evokes a sense of intimacy. There must be more to it than just paint. But what exactly?

What role does the iconography of the painting play - can a still life, a sprawling urban landscape, a figurative portrait, a graphic abstraction, each convey an "equal" (not necessarily similar) sense of intimacy? My initial instinct would be to argue no, that the human body/face has an unfair advantage. It must be easier to feel intimate toward a person than a pear, a building or a shape. But there are simply too many examples (innumerable, really) of painted objects, views and blobs, that, through the eyes of many viewers, evoke as much (if not more) intimacy as peering into the face of a stranger. And if that is true, then perhaps it is not what is painted, but how it is painted.

So then is it the artist's touch that humanizes the surface into a sensual being? If so, is any touch sufficient or do we all have to be de Kooning? Chuck Close used an airbrush in his early work to remove the baggage that comes with a strong gestural imprint, but when face to face with the real paintings, the surface cannot be said to read as mechanical. In contrast, Richter's blurred photo paintings are clearly of the hand and brush, but I can't say I would describe my encounter with these works as one of intimacy.

Does the size of the painting matter? Can an enormous painting be as intimate an experience as a miniature? The immersive experience offered by a large canvas can swallow the viewer into its vision, but is that really what we would describe as intimate? But if the canvas is too small, does the viewer dominate it like a giant to a child, keeping the viewer at a remote distance like a photographer looking through a viewfinder. De Kooning spoke of sizing his works to relate to the scale of the human body. I like this approach, and have been adopting it as of late, but I know this cannot be the only viable option to creating an intimate relationship between painting and viewer.

Color must play a role in it somehow too. In my own work, I have found using too much of the synthetic pigments that have no real existence beyond the chemical usually severs the intimate possibilities in a work. But is that to say that must always be the case?

Of course I am sure there is no definitive rule to be discovered. In the video of Chuck Close that I posted yesterday, Close wisely states, "Problem solving is way too over-rated. Problem creation is much more interesting." So the problem I have created for myself is to grapple with the question of intimacy, to strive to create paintings that engage the viewer in an intimate confrontation. As Jonathon Lasker wrote in his essay "Paint's Body" (and one of my favorite quotes about oil painting):

"We are all at present, more divided, less empowered, and certainly far less connected to the effects of our world than we should be. It is for this reason that I am deeply involved with the textures of a medium capable of universalizing so much lost intimacy."