Just a quick note that I scanned 24 pages from the sketchbook I’ve been keeping from May 2011 to present:
If you would like that turning-pages feeling, you can view as a slideshow.
As always, I welcome thoughts, comments, suggestions etc.
Author: Vicki
The physicality of art
Visiting my parents over the holidays, I’ve become keenly aware of how physical and vulnerable my art is, and it’s made me think about what role physical presence plays in one’s creative energy.
The first condition is storage, and my parents’ attic is currently starting to swell with all the oil paintings I did in grad school. Many canvases are nowhere near finished, or to put it in more pragmatic terms, a sellable state, so I can’t honestly consider them “product” or “inventory,” so much as… these things taking up a lot of space. Knowing that they are there, lurking above my childhood bedroom and gaining several grams of dust a year, fills me with a sense of queasiness and dread. They make me reluctant to buy new canvases or start new work, and they serve as a heavy physical to-do list. Before I move forward in painting, I feel like I have to somehow deal with those.
The second condition is fragility, which is ironically one of the themes of my paintings. Among the fallout from Hurricane Irene was a moving box in the basement full of sketchbooks, all my negatives, and almost all the black and white photographs I’ve ever printed. The flood water ruined all but a handful of prints made on RC paper (and I can’t forget the professors who harped on about how much more archival and long-lasting the fiber-based photographic papers were). Leaving aside how this particularly delicate box got into the basement in the first place, I was kind of wrecked to think of all the hours – no, days – I spent shooting, processing film, pulling prints, burning and dodging, organizing… it’s all gone.
Losing all my black and white photography felt a bit like a metaphor for the shift from print to digital photography. I no longer have access to a darkroom, so it’s not like I was going to make more prints from those lovely negatives any time soon, but it stings to have them gone forever. I’ve heard similar stories of people losing hard drives full of digital images, or dropping a camera and erasing a memory card after a day’s shooting at a wedding, so I realize this loss of images is not confined to the more archaic photo processing techniques.
As I stood in the cold basement pulling apart moldy, disintegrated prints and tossing them in garbage bags, it kind of hit me that everything physical will eventually end up this way. No matter how carefully prepared, what quality of materials are used, how arduously and well-intentioned their preservation and conservation, everything we make and touch and use will fall to pieces and return to the earth. And somehow, that idea became much more beautiful and important than any of the student-quality photographs I was bitterly discarding.
Another thought crept into my mind, which has been something of a refrain since the time I learned to draw, “I can always make more art.”
What’s remarkable about artists, musicians, writers, and creators of all types is the ability to constantly produce more, new, better art. Our hands and minds pull from the elements, recycling the masterpieces of years gone by, and dredge up novel inventions, shiny and alluring new materials, new ways to answer the questions posed by a constantly new and old world.
The physicality of art contains both its eternal hope and its perpetual undoing. In the sometimes sisyphean task of being human, we watch things fall apart, then we pick them back up and try again. It doesn’t matter what’s come before, or what’s coming next: all we have is what’s in our hands right now.
The Allure of the Recognizable
I draw in public a lot, especially while riding the ferry or taking the subway. I don’t think much of it, since I draw all the time, but I realize it may seem unusual to watch someone attempt a detailed ink drawing while a subway car is jerking around. Then again, these are New Yorkers, who surely have seen everything.
I figured my drawing was largely unremarkable since people rarely remarked on it. Part of that might have been that I often have headphones on while I’m drawing, but I think it’s also the actual images, when people catch glimpses of them (I’m not the sort of person to hide my drawings with my coat sleeve, but I’m also not exactly putting them on display while I work on them). When I drew mostly abstract images, undulating folds and that kind of thing, few people commented, although once a teenage boy was delighted and asked to take a photo of this drawing.
Around Valentine’s Day, I did two drawings that were actually attached to real subjects, one a clumsy thing that turned into a rose, the other stemming from the idea that two people who were too much alike would end up attacking and consuming one another:
I happened to be sitting next to a guy who was telling his friend about his bitter divorce. Maybe he was more attuned to the subject matter on some subconscious level, and I think he figured I couldn’t hear him with my headphones on. He gestured toward me and said, “Jesus, that’s a hell of a drawing,” then asked his friend if he saw it. He may have gotten the same sense from an abstract field folding in on itself, but I believe it was the recognizable aspects of teeth, biting, and creatures with form that allowed him to have a visceral and immediate response to it.
Most of why I started carrying my sketchbook again and drawing more is because I want to get better at drawing. (Isn’t that ultimately why most people draw, in some way?) I’d like to more effectively marry what goes on in my head with what comes out of my hands, without relying on words and statements to do the heavy conceptual lifting. To that end, I realized that if I wanted to draw figuratively, I needed to actually draw figuratively, including specific, recognizable elements from the real world, or at the very least presenting the figures of my imagination in a language that others can understand.
I realize that feedback from strangers on the subway is hardly a gauge of whether art is successful or not, yet I do trust spontaneous comments to be a little more genuine than the studied, thinly veiled sarcasm masquerading as intellectualization and application of theory that I used to get during MFA critiques. After all, people don’t have to say anything, yet they do feel compelled to tap my arm and say something, even when I have my headphones on. Refreshingly, they don’t comment on the obviously “beautiful” drawings of plants and flowers or organic forms from nature. It’s almost always the drawings of hippogriffs, sea monsters, and bird creatures in bizarre surreal landscapes that elicit commentary. People struggle to find what they want to say exactly, because you don’t really want to call a monster beautiful, but they express an admiration of technical skill and a striking image, typically, “That’s really, really good.”
Anyone who’s been to art school in the last 10-15 years has probably been told, ad nauseam that figurative art is dead, that “no one paints that way anymore,” that to try to present something real in a fundamentally flat, Greenbergian plane is an amateurish fallacy, a dalliance with naivete, an utterly passè and dull pursuit. Yet human beings living in time and space are continuously drawn to things they recognize, to images that evoke memory and association, to triggers that don’t just “seem like” something they recognize, but actually are the thing in question. I think it’s a mistake to be as dismissive of popular opinion as artists and art world folk seem to be; when I really consider the art that’s praised and the art that’s dismissed, the overwhelming experience is one of the emperor’s new clothes, and someone’s got to be the one to say this is all nakedly absurd.
When I think of my all-time favorite paintings, very few are pure abstractions, even though I incessantly defend the liminal and sophisticated emotional power of abstraction. Usually I am drawn to abstracted versions of recognizable images, van Gogh’s wheat fields and skies, Cezanne’s adorable houses in the middle of wooded hills, Georgia O’Keeffe’s moon reflecting in a somber lake, or even Tiepolo and Veronese’s attempts at describing sunlight and euphoria with pink clouds and Prussian blue skies. Maybe my taste is hopelessly pedestrian, or I’m drawn to these images for purely sentimental reasons, but I just plain like them, and I don’t have to wrack my brain to sort out what in hell agonizingly clever game the artist is playing. Is accessibility in art an inherently bad thing? Is obscurity used as a shorthand for depth and insight?
I recently read a fascinating article by Jerry Saltz, discussing the tendency for current contemporary artists to retreat into a sort of post-postmodern insider game of deconstruction, secret coding, and layering with obscurity. His identification and attribution of the sources of these tendencies are spot-on, I think, and the more I’ve talked about his ideas with fellow artists, writers, and historians, the more and more insightful I’ve found them to be. People whose vocation used to be marked by a fearless openness and sensitivity to the world are now becoming the secretive, reluctant hipsters of caged messages and creations so overwrought with concept that one requires a Wikipedia entry to sort out what the hell is on display.
I can’t help thinking about how easily my generation has accepted the dismissiveness in Homer Simpson’s snide appraisal of Marge’s figurative painting (in the Jasper Johns episode), “Oh, honey, I’ve always liked your art. Your paintings look like the things they look like.”
People have been making images for millennia. Up until the past fifty or sixty years, the vast majority of that has been figurative, taking aspects of the real world and reimagining them in a new language or interpretation. As a species, we like the physical, material world, and as entrancing and delightful as abstraction is (and trust me, that’s most of what I do), I really believe there is still a serious, relevant place for figurative works, evidenced simply by the allure of the recognizable that I and my fellow subway riders experience every single day.
Website Update
I have finally added some new content to my art website, which is sorely outdated and continues to lag at least 3-6 years behind what I’m currently doing.
I’ve got lots of good excuses, but the fact is, I like making art more than websites. I hand-coded that site in 2003 using tables and HTML, so it is slow and laborious to update. I usually put off updating it because I claim I’m going to redesign the whole site any day now, but that day still has not come in half a decade, so it’s probably time to quit pretending.
So what did I add?
-
The biggest update is my MFA thesis exhibit, Burgeoning. That page links to images, installation views, and detail views, as well as a PDF of my corollary statement. 
I added a second section to the Painting area of my portfolio, a loosely-organized series of small works called Entangled. There are actually a number of other works that belong in that series but, I must sheepishly admit, I haven’t even photographed them yet. Soon?-
I added a new series of Works on Paper, called Coming Apart. This is a small series of works from 2006 done with acrylic and occasional other materials like graphite and permanent marker. - I included a link to a PDF of my Curriculum Vitae, and I updated the Press and Publications section with some of my scientific work.
And because I am apparently in a race to occupy the most bandwidth possible, I updated the Contact section with links to my other websites and places I can be found on social media. I haven’t decided if this is a good idea or not, since I do tend to say a lot of silly and unprofessional things, but I am who I am, so I might as well own it.
I’d love any comments, questions, suggestions, or other feedback you may have about the updates or the work itself, and I hope to have more updates coming soon.
Thinking more than painting
As I mentioned in my last post, I finished the sketchbook I’d been keeping, from the spring of 2010 through May 2011. I scanned every page of it (save for one that was a list to myself), and you can view them all here, or as a slideshow, if you would like the experience of flipping through the pages.
I’m pleased with what I’ve learned about drawing and composition through this book, and I’m really happy with some of the ideas I explored in more depth than I usually do. I can see that in the second half, I moved from essentially doodling to actually thinking about form and how to represent it and communicate about it.
How this applies to painting remains to be seen, since I am most frequently consumed with schoolwork lately, or obsessing about nature.
But what matters to me right now is that I am thinking, that I’m in a really open and enthusiastic place in how I’m looking at the world and experiencing it. It’s lamentable that I lost my focus during grad school and got so overwhelmed with my personal life that my painting became half-hearted diagrams of scattered emotions, but that time has thankfully passed.
This afternoon the light was coming through Venetian blinds in my window, and a gentle breeze was moving the trees and leaves outside, as well as the blinds themselves. This cast an array of shadows that I found utterly enthralling, across the corner of the painting currently on my easel.
In response to this subtle but powerful observation of a moment so small and ephemeral, something started tugging fiercely at my heart. I know, in my soul, I need to paint more.