Clarification on Inspiration

"Today, Clyne is most influenced by the fashion industry and the images of perfection and beauty it perpetuates." Lara Cory article, Escape Into Life blog
This was written last week as part of a beautiful review of my work by Lara Cory. But this particular line has been haunting me since I first read it. Although seeing a critique of the fashion industry's obsession with perfection is an entirely fair reading of my work, it is not what influences my work. It is not what inspires me to make the work.

So what does inspire me?

Fundamentally, I am inspired by images and questions of why we want to look at them, of what desires they satisfy, feed, create. I'm inspired by the different ways we experience images -- does the meaning or role of the image change if we see it on the screen of our laptop, or in a glossy magazine? Does it matter if it is experienced as a huge painting amidst the lush display of an old European museum, or as a photograph imprisoned behind glass on the white walls of a gallery? The experience of images is never determined solely by the picture itself. It is an experience of the senses, of memory, of fantasy -- ultimately, of desire. As W.J.T. Mitchell writes in his book What do Pictures Want?: "...the question of desire is inseparable from the problem of the image, as if the two concepts were caught in a mutually generative circuit, desire generating images and images generating desire." (p 58)

So if images and their relationship to desire are my subject matter, then why do I choose to paint portraits? There seems no better object of display to inspire viewers to look than the human face, an object to which we are more highly sensitive to than any other object. My paintings anthropomorphize the image, presenting portraits not of women, but of images. And by using the face, the viewer is confronted with an unsettling and seductive exchange when, as James Elkins writes, "the object stares back". In fact, it is one of the greatest moments in the process of painting for me -- when I step back to look at my painting and the tiny fragments of eyes merge together and my painting looks back at me.

And then there's fashion. Why do I steal from the pages of fashion magazines to make my paintings? At its core, fashion, like images, is about desire and illusion. To put it simply, for me, fashion is the embodiment of image-making.

I hope that clarifies things, although inspiration is of course never finite, and not always easy to articulate. I should have done a better job at clarifying my influences to Lara Cory. What others view as the most interesting aspect of your work is not always the same thing that motivated the work.

It takes me back to the moment I knew I wanted to be an artist. I had quit my job as a lawyer and moved out west, and began taking basic art classes at the local art college. My first class was a course on principles of design and composition. Our final assignment was to create a self-portrait using the principles we had learned. When it came to the day to present the work, our instructor informed us that the person sitting next to us (ie. a random stranger) would present our work. Whatever we had to say about ourselves had to have been said in the work itself. When the student next to me presented my work, she said not only the things that I had hoped the work would convey, but so much more -- and all of her insights were entirely accurate descriptions of me. The work had said more than I had ever intended, had been more revealing than I ever imagined. I was hooked.

Self-Portrait, collage, Amanda Clyne, 2002

Now, as an artist, I struggle to contend with what I hope to express through the work and what others glean from it. Is your work about what you say it is, or is it about what others see in it? I think it is unavoidably and necessarily both.

In Remembrance

"The Sound of His Own Voice Made Him Cry the Most", collage on watercolor paper, Amanda Clyne, 2006


Detail -- sewn fragments of statutes, contracts, faxes and memos from my life as a lawyer.

This is an artwork I made when I was an art student, in remembrance of my experience of 9/11. Here is the artist statement I wrote about the piece:

To many people, the events of September 11 have come to represent the vulnerability of our security, the new threat and fear of terrorism, or the heartstring to pull to justify war. But on that day, I was a New Yorker living in lower Manhattan, working as a corporate lawyer, and for me, the two burning towers have come to represent the moment that became the catalyst for change in my life, for reassessing my priorities, and for searching for the passions and joys that were being sidelined by my ambitious career.

Sewing together fragments of the contracts, statutes, faxes and memos that consumed my daily life as a lawyer, I re-constructed the image of the two towers of the World Trade Center. I wanted the red thread to convey a sense of fragility, memory, and even the suturing of a wound. In contrast, I wanted the fallout of the explosion of the towers to be fragments of my own creation or of personal joys – my niece’s artwork, sheet music for my piano, photos of my best friend’s pregnant belly, generally images of my life outside the office full of art, love, family and beauty. And I wanted to rebuild the city with that joy, as indeed all New Yorkers did after the attacks.

The title of the piece comes from Jonathon Safran Foer’s novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”, in which the young protaganist who lost his father in the World Trade Center attacks struggles to answer the question, “Can any good come from this?”. I hope my piece reflects my answer – for me and the city I love.

An Interesting Life

An interesting life makes for an interesting artist. A more in-depth biography of my life so far, recently posted to my website:

"Being an artist was not my first choice. Frankly, I never knew it could be a choice at all. To me, artists were magical beings, fearless and gifted, born with gargantuan imaginations akin to the power of superheroes. Art seemed too important, too precious for me to violate with my amateur ideas and crude skills. Art was for looking, for admiring, for experiencing. For me, that would have to be enough.
So although I knew early on that I was not going to be an artist, I was determined that my life be anything but boring. As the drama and adventures began to unfold, I came to see my life as a series of starring roles in a string of Hollywood films. Here are just a few of my storylines:
    • Young teenage girl sexually assaulted by gang of teenage boys, fights for their conviction. Eventually graduates from university with a degree in Women’s Studies, and goes on to pursue law school.College girl backpacks through Europe for the summer, meets a tall, dark stranger and moves to the south of France for her first great love affair.
    • Young lawyer conquers Manhattan, negotiating billion dollar deals in the boardroom by day, dancing up a storm in the clubs by night. On her precious days off, she secretly trolls art galleries and museums, art books and magazines, wondering what if...
    • Junior associate at New York law firm transferred to Singapore, works in India, travels throughout Asia, begins to see the world anew.
    • Traumatized by 9/11, New Yorker quits her lucrative job and discovers she is an artist. Friends, family and colleagues are inexplicably and freakishly supportive.
I have studied at eight universities, earned three degrees, worked on three continents and lived in six different cities around the world. So far, my life has not been simple or straightforward, but now it is all fodder for my art.
Since graduating from OCAD University in 2009 with the medal in Drawing and Painting, I have been working in Toronto as a full-time artist. And I now know that artists are indeed not magical beings, but hard-working, obsessive, passionate mortals."

Fluid Forms

"The human body is above all a mirror of the soul,
and that is the source of its great beauty."
-- Rodin, 1925

Watercolor is so underrated. I'm returning to some watercolor experiments that I began many months ago, and it never ceases to amaze me how it is one of the most sensual, unpredictable, heavenly media. Too closely associated with flower paintings and seascapes, watercolor seems born for the body. These are some of my favorite watercolor paintings by Auguste Rodin from the turn of the century -- bold, sexy sources of inspiration.

 


 

 
 

 

Eugène Carrière

I discovered the work of French Symbolist painter Eugène Carrière after leaving the Alexander McQueen show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last week. I saw this small painting hung in the corridor of the museum. Through my new McQueen-infected eyes, the work struck me as particularly haunting, with a renewed contemporary relevance.

"The Communion", Metropolitan Museum of Art

Here are a couple of Carrière's portraits that I think have an equally eery, fragile presence.


  

Beyond the Dress

Installation of Alexander McQueen at Metropolitan Museum of Art

High expectations can be a dangerous thing. Once you expect something to be amazing, it is far too likely that you'll end up disappointed, or worse, that the truly amazing will no longer be able to actually amaze you. But the much-hyped Alexander McQueen show "Savage Beauty", which I saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this week, easily surpassed every sky-high expectation I had.

There are enough reviews of the show that I don't think it's necessary for me to repeat all the accolades again, but I'd like to share a few thoughts I had about the show:

Art, Not Fashion

When I first arrived at the museum and saw the throngs of people waiting to enter the show, I admit I felt a little jealous that a fashion designer was able to draw a larger, more excited crowd to the museum than any art exhibition I had ever seen. Inside the exhibition, as each viewer stood in awe, patiently soaking in the exquisite nature of each McQueen dress, jacket and pair of shoes, I was a little hurt that I so rarely see such attention being paid to the artworks of the greatest painters and sculptors.

But then I realized that we had all been duped. While I'm sure many, if not most of the visitors had come to the show because of their interest in fashion, Alexander McQueen (and the absolutely brilliant curatorial team at the Met's Costume Institute) made sure that we were not looking at just clothes and accessories, but at a fully realized artistic vision, one that incorporated sculpture, painting, performance, installation and new media, all under the guise of fashion. I remember years ago seeing the Armani exhibit at the Guggenheim. I loved the show but the dresses and suits were - let's be real - just dresses and suits. But the McQueen show was so, so much more. It was art in its most masterful, dark, and poetic form of expression. When I left the show, the world looked different. McQueen had undeniably infiltrated my vision.

A Second Skin

I love the abstract nature of fashion and how it plays with form, movement, color and texture. When I look at fashion, I see abstract paintings. One day, I plan to paint them. Throughout the McQueen show, there was certainly no shortage of extraordinary sensations. My favorite was an organza dress, so intricately layered that it created the impression it was made entirely of smoke, the floor-length skirt appearing to rise from the floor like dry ice. But from the very beginning of the show, it was clear to me that McQueen's works were impervious to abstraction. The garments and accessories are so thoroughly steeped in narrative, that the body itself becomes an inextricable element of his design. Some garments seem to attack the body, while others seem to have instigated an irrevocable process of metamorphosis in which the woman is in the midst of transforming into a hybrid being, morphing with creatures that offer her new forms of protection and defense. And a few garments violently suggest the aftermath from some sort of dehumanizing body-snatching invasion. With each garment, the dress covers the body not as a decorative article of clothing, but as a second skin, as if it were a kind of natural outgrowth from our dark, mutating, genetic make-up.

The Perfect Eulogy

At about the half-way point in the show, my eyes welled up with tears, and I spent the rest of the show fighting them back with only moderate success. It was all so overwhelming, so haunting, so brilliant. By the end, I felt like my heart and head would explode from a potent mix of ecstasy, emotion, and inspiration. The metamorphosis suggested in his garments seemed to be taking place inside me. But there was still another show I wanted to see -- the Richard Serra drawing exhibit. At first, I wasn't sure that I could absorb another visual onslaught, and when I first entered the Serra exhibit, the weighty, spare, geometric drawings seemed better suited for another day. But as I began to wander through the exhibit, I began to see Serra's drawings as the perfect eulogy for Alexander McQueen himself. Confronted with one of Serra's large towering black squares, the entire surface immersed in the heavy scrawls of rich, caked-on paint stick, I saw the roughly textured surface transform into the delicate ruffles and decaying lace of McQueen's creations. Standing back to take in the drawing's impenetrable blackness, grand scale and stark form, I experienced a dark, monumental silence. It seemed the most fitting conclusion to McQueen's truly epic exhibition, and the most eloquent representation of the lingering, tragic void left by his senseless death.

Richard Serra (detail of drawing)
Richard Serra at Metropolitan Museum of Art