|
|
|
Remember how to think about your art, an analytic mode for artists— Critics have their ways of thinking about art (and everyone is a critic, even too often the artist is); and artists can have their ways of thinking that are different from the ways that critics think. Even though artists and critics might use the same words to ask the same questions, the difference is that when the artists ask the questions, they already know the answers that came in their experience of making. Critics surmise through their critical apparatus; artists know through the memory of their actions. And so when as an artist I turn to critical analysis of my work (I do not know what "critical" means except as judgment) I use objective terms to place in the world my subjective experience of the event of making. And the terms I have learned to use that seem to fit my experience are.
The following discusses my 1981 large watercolors in terms of the first two series. For subject, form and content, however, readers and viewers will have to look at the paintings and draw their own conclusions Click here to go directly to the paintings. The source of the 1981 large watercolors was that I had become tired of making the smaller 40 x 30 inch watercolors of 1978, had become tired of making the Tarot prints of 1979-80, and had determined yet again that if the big boys could make big things and be great, I could make things as big as theirs (well, not quite) and be great also. Just like when I had read in 1967 that the greatness of American art lay in part in its majestic size and had thereupon begun the large acrylics of 1967-70, so once again to the battle. I had become tired of making the 40 x 30 inch watercolors. After all, when I had first shown them and in the heat of inspiration and making, I had sold none and the only critical remark I received—the only response of any kind—was that Henry Hopkins (then Director of the SFMOMA) had said they were “over framed.” Hopkins’ remark had been especially galling to me because I had designed the frames so carefully to reflect a restrained opulence… thin gold metal frames, with wide, warm mats for paintings intentionally rich and complex in color and form and subject. I had seen when I was just out of school a print of a painting by Vuillard… it was several women in a room at night, the lamps had silk shades, and there was a glass case with ancient Chinese artifacts on the table and beautiful old paintings on the walls. It was a room where cultured women lived and I wanted my paintings to be right for such a room. I did not think about nor care if my work might look wrong in a modern museum with too large and too white walls; I wanted old culture, the culture of generations rather than the new culture of the striving new rich that Henry Hopkins had to interest in his museum each day of his life. No, I did not think about the character of modern taste—I thought these works of mine might form it to their character—but when I heard what Henry Hopkins thought, I realized I did care and for that reason as well as that I seemed to have come to the end of the creative rush of them, I soon stopped the 1978 watercolors and began the 1978-80 Tarot series of drawings/prints/paintings/collages. But then, after a couple of years and all the Tarot images that my method for making them could produce, I tired of the Tarot work (and my show of them in 1981 was mentioned by no one in no way, not even the frames were worth a comment) and so in early March of 1981 the power of ambition once again seized me and I began to paint big. So, the source of this work? I think Freud put it “fame and the love of women.” I had the love of a woman, but I needed fame to justify myself in the world. So make it big—use the small medium of watercolor to make the biggest watercolors in America and so become the most famous artist in America. We live by dreams. The dreams are foolish and embarrassing and never come true. But they drive us. * The source of the large watercolors was, then, the desire for fame, and the goal (to the extent that source and goal are different) was to have fame. I did not get any. There was a show of the large watercolors in spring 1982, I gave a gallery talk about the paintings and how they were made and what they meant. Several rich collectors came, smiled and went. An artist who had been badly injured in an automobile accident and had just received a large compensation check came to the talk and bought one of the paintings afterward. That was that. There was no review and I did not get famous. But, there’s sometimes another source for works of art, that source too easily invoked and as easily faked, the source that is the core of the self. And that—the search for the core of the self as the ever flowing spring of life as the source and goal of making art—leads to the medium and method and outcome of the making of these large watercolors in 1981. As I said, I gave a gallery talk about it when the work was shown in Palo Alto in 1982. The talk and its slides have been lost for years, but I remember it went like this: * How I make my paintings…To start the talk, there was a slide of the studio. The door was open and inside you could see the first of the 1981 large watercolors (March 7, 1981). I had taken the slide of the studio right after making the painting because I had been so happy to have made the breakthrough into it and what I felt would be a very productive time to follow. Then there were slides of the interior of the studio, how the peak of the roof comes down too low on the side walls to make space to hang work but how that same high peaked roof and low walls makes a floor space definitely longer than wide and how the floor boards emphasize that direction to make a flow of space like the polarization of a magnetic field… and that this flow of space was the first element of my work in the large watercolors. The next slides showed how I set my painting—the blank paper stretched on a 72 x 48 inch drawing board—on boxes so that it was about 18 inches off the floor… floating in the studio space the way a compass needle floats in the magnetic field of the earth. The next slides showed how I smeared some water on the paper, how I put my thumb partly over the open mouth of a bottle of ink, (I had made special ink that was mostly non-water soluble India ink mixed with a water soluble ink so that if the ink got wet after it dried a halo of the soluble color would develop around the jet black of the India ink) and threw the ink onto the paper… And then the slides showed how I made a few massive calligraphic strokes with a large Chinese brush… a few strokes because Stephen Pepper had said in the aesthetics course I took at Berkeley so long ago that we could perceive no more than five marks as individuals before they start to coalesce into some larger whole—or just mud. And then the slides showed how I took up the drawing board while everything was still wet and lifted it side after side each of the four sides up and then down until everything that could run had run in each of the four directions… and how close to my body the painting was as it ran in each direction and how much that tipping and tilting and running in the painting was also in me. Then the slides showed how I sprayed color from a little mouth atomizer into various parts of the painting, joining my breath to the tilting and dripping of the four directions of space, and how also I would mark and smear and paint with gouache what seemed to appear in the tangling of the dripping and spraying and staining… And the next slide showed how when that first frenzy (yes, it was a frenzy) of activity had passed, I would sit at the bottom of the painting as it now lay back down on the boxes and floated visually above the floor, how I would sit at the bottom of the painting, open my legs and take the painting’s image into myself and put myself into its image as it slowly dried over the next half hour or so. Then there was the next few hours or the next day after the painting was dry—what to do with this thing now that the thrill of making was over and the depth of color had died away in the drying in the way that watercolors do. What to do to bring life back to what had been so glorious only a short time before. I told the audience of my gallery talk that what I do is “follow feeling,” and to illustrate this had made three slides, the first showing a piece of paper with the words “Follow Feeling” lettered on it in blue tempera. The second slide showed the paper sinking into a dark pool of water and the words “Follow Feeling” already running and dissolving; the third slide showed the paper lifted out of the pool as the blue of the words ran down the paper to drip and be lost in the pool’s dark water. And so the following slides showed how I followed feeling and worked into the painting, using whatever skills of painting and sophistications of aesthetic knowledge I had to follow feeling wherever it might lead… either to some aesthetic and (what was the term? the core of the self?) personal content that could satisfy me, or to failure—no matter how smart I might be, there might be only dead mud at the end. And the painting that I had made as a demonstration of all this was very near to dead mud at the end. Yes, I had found my body as a tree that was also somehow a stag, and had found near the base of the tree and the feet of the stag a vial of silver water that was marked with a slash of red for life… but most of the image was dull mud and I had been mostly forcing and faking “the source that is the core of the self.” * And that—“the search for the core of the self as the ever flowing spring of life as the source and goal of making art,” yes, that was what I wanted my audience to learn of the medium and method and outcome of the making of the large watercolors that were all around them in the gallery as I gave my talk. But I am afraid that my talk was more an entertainment than a revelation; and so I too had simply faked the making of my work for an hour as they had nodded in appreciation and faked their understanding of this medium, method, outcome and goal of a work of which they had not the slightest idea. That talk was more than twenty years ago. I have learned a lot since then about falsity and truth, about entertainment and revelation. And have learned also that these paintings of which I was and am so proud are yet many of them for me more entertainment (“professional art”) than truth (“the core of the self”). Yet, yet, when someone sees one of these paintings and is moved, who am I in the midst of my pride to denigrate their true feeling in front of a work of mine of which I may be not so sure my own feeling was true? These questions came too forcibly to mind a few months ago as I set out to photograph all of this particular body of work (64 paintings) for my retrospective at the Oakland Museum. After photographing some thirty or forty of the paintings I began to feel that in the making of the them I had been too often “cranking them out” for fame and one upmanship, and that too much of the content of the paintings was infected with what might be called the “disease of professionalism.” “Professional” with all that implies: talent, technique, sophistication and respect from peers and public; able to do whatever necessary whenever necessary. There’s only one necessary that the professional might not notice and that is the core of life. And the “disease” of professionalism, to paraphrase Tolstoy in his What is Art: “Art is the infection of feeling from one person to another; but since artists must make a living, they have learned how to imitate feeling when they don’t have any.” Not long after I had made the 1981 large watercolors, the core of life arose like a terror and a glory and a loss and a mourning that would take the next ten years to live through. * And another note about “professional”—why can’t I let go of this?—whatever we do in both our public and our silent, private lives, we lay it out in the world with all our passion and soul. True or only a sham, nonetheless and either way, we are—truly—out there. And that is the truth of life and of art. Thinking about these 1981 paintings and my denigration of them, they had all the passion of life that I had learned until the time right after I had made them. That too often in order to reach the power that I sought, I had to use such worn out signs as the phallus and vagina I did and still regret. But I knew no other way. That I would in a few months learn other and more powerful ways of the representation of the passions of life and the core of the self I did not know. Do not blame me now for my ignorance then. Yes, I already said in the paragraphs above what these last two paragraphs have said again. When we have a sore that does not heal because it itches and we keep picking at it, we know it will not heal because it is not healed. Some artists keep itching and picking. I am one. No itching sore, no picking and no work (professional or not). And, certainly for such artists as I am, the irreconcilables of personal truth and professional achievement are an itching sore sometimes but only temporarily scabbed over. Just now, in writing this in November 2002 more than twenty years after the time of the paintings of which I write, I have torn the scab and the itch remains. * Now that I have finished denigrating my 1981 large watercolors as being perhaps more “professional” than “true” (are these mutually exclusive?) here is a selection of those—diseased or not—I liked best then and still do now. Works of art should “speak for themselves.” It happens, however, that as I made these paintings I kept notes about what the paintings were saying to me.
Links to all 1981 Large Watercolors...
Click here for Directory to all 1981-1991 paintings |
