art and pain

the man said Art doesn't work without pain.

i have been taught to disregard statements like that but, sometimes, when i look at my own work, the painful origins of my images are too stark and strong to deny. i read his statement again and see that it is honest, accurate in a way that makes me uncomfortable. uncomfortable maybe because i am an american and i want to seem tough, cool, collected, unshakable. then i remember i have a blog and i remember the things i've written on this blog and the reality of the situation dawns on me: OH SHIT! MY BLOG IS ON THE INTERNET! EVERYONE CAN SEE IT! hahahaha! silly, i know, but i try not to think about it. i've actually been pretty successful at convincing myself that no one reads this thing and that all my words here are really just skipping stones across a quiet lake. it's better for me to think that way about this practice because otherwise i might not say anything at all. i might become too embarrassed, too ashamed of my own life, my own lived experiences and expressions of pain. i might hide instead and cry where no one can see.

but where would be the benefit in that? where would be the art?

it is more than pain, something beyond pain, but pain nevertheless, in each contour, in every shimmer... because life is like that too. some things must be alchemised if we expect to be able to look at them. some types of pain has to be romanticized in order to even be carried. some pains are just that great, just that crushing. a conversion must take place. we develop new eyes, new words, new hands that are capable of holding new pain. we must, if we must continue.




Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

— Anaïs Nin

the investigation continues

oh me, oh my... i'm such a fucking nutcase sometimes. ha!

(i have to laugh at myself.)

i woke up feeling remarkably lost and somewhat defeated today. it's wearing off now that i've ranted and raved inside my notebook and discovered that the root of the issue is that i am simply afraid. simultaneous fear of failure and success. they are probably actually the same thing. and not knowing what to do with myself, which direction to go in. i'm talking about the business end of things. career concerns and all that. which, honestly, i'm sick of thinking about because that's something artists have little control over anyway. all anyone can do is know what they value. that's it. and then work hard based on that set of ethics. nothing more, nothing less. the world spins and things come as they may. the conciliation there is that Quality attracts attention. as does devotion, staying power, refusing to give up. and that is, across the board, true for everyone. and that's something i've only recently learned to how to actively trust.

this season of self-discovery has been hard and strange. and it remains hard and strange. it isn't a process that ever really "ends". like art, it is a life's work. and as i proceed, i see how completely necessary it is to being/becoming an artist that one undertake self-investigation. and pairing that with going through the portfolios and taking pictures and really looking at what i've got, seeing the progression that has taken place over the passed two years, seeing how much growth has been had during that short amount of time, and realizing how naive i can definitely be, is exhausting. but it's also pretty encouraging too.

but it's also fairly daunting. anxiety producing. we live in a culture that demands we KNOW what we want. in the 6th grade you're expected to have a career chosen already. that's ridiculous. and almost everyone i know is on Plan D at this point. i'm one of the lucky few that figured out what i truly wanted to do with my life pretty early. but that doesn't make things any easier necessarily.

certain questions have been put in my head recently. questions that i'm simultaneous thankful for and a bit pissed off about. but that's just fear talking. fear of taking risks, fear of the unknown, all that stuff everyone deals with to one degree or another. i'm still too green to KNOW what kind of career i'm going to have. that seems like something you can only see when you look back over the course of a life. there's no way to know that at the beginning. and i am still very much at the beginning.

and so i am wrestling with wants and needs and dreams. and i look at my drawings and paintings and poems and see a definite lineage emerging- the influence of particular artists and writers whose work has hit me so hard, left such a deep impact on my heart and mind that their whispers stand strong in my ear. i'm attempting to listen to them... draw courage and poise from them. persistence is a necessity.

i got some really good advice from an artist friend of mine who told me to not only look at The Work of artists i admire, but also their resumes so i can see how they got from point A to point B. it's helpful and overwhelming at the same time. so many residencies and programs and grants. this is the Competition end of things and i feel anxious about leaping in to that pool. i want to leap in... i guess i just don't know how to. and there's no other way to learn how than by doing it and to accept the fact that there are no promises and no safety-net.

the drawing in the post below and the work pinned over on the side-bar to the right is work that i feel very connected to. committed to. love.

and so that's the road i must go, the road i must trust, the road i must protect. it is the work in this grand array of modes and styles that needs a wall other than my own.

and so the question becomes one of place. and how to catch those eyes.

or if i even want to catch them right now...



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the thing i like most about this blog is that i can throw all the work out in to the world in the form of a JPEG, show my process and meanderings, talk about my concerns and fears and attractions. it's a notebook. but the actual items are still here with me. not everything is "show worthy". and this morning i realized that that's a great thing: i have them. at least some of them. and i can look at them, hold them in my hands, spend time looking at the real thing. they function as maps. documents of the questions i ask. they help me define my values as an artist and as a human being.

i also went back to the beginning of this blog and looked at the work i was making at that time. the change is glaring. the work has undergone a huge metamorphosis- a deepening. this is something i can be proud of. i can look at these images and see progress, see the struggle, see the moments of "failure", and then see that i didn't give up as a result. proof of life. proof of love. proof of seriousness even if/when the work wasn't "serious".

i've been thinking a lot about that e.e. cummings quote: it takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

(side note and digression: i don't write in all lower case as a nod to him or bell hooks. it started in high school when i wanted to be a writer and wanted capital letters to emphasize importance rather than the beginning of a sentence. i didn't even know who those two people were at the time and then felt very smart when i finally stumbled across them. ha!)

and that quote has become extremely important to me this year. extremely.

i think it's important to have good manners and be friendly (to me personally as a mode of interacting with others) but i don't want to make polite or friendly art. i don't want to make Shock Art either but i want to be able to do it if the work requires that of me. i want to be a person who is courageous and passionate and brave enough to make mistakes and risk failure. i want to be dedicated to art. and diligent. and faithful. i want to make smart art, concerned art, passionate art... art that has a function and can offer a site for discussion and hope. even if it is angry hope. that site is what makes Art a necessity.

check out Claes Oldenburg's lovely manifesto on this.

ahhhhhhh. fucking bootstraps. sigh.

but this stage is important.

i know it.

i won't deprive myself of it.

onward. upward. trembling... but moving moving moving.

wondering, wandering, wondering...

yesterday, i had the same conversation with three different people about how to define a "body of work". what is the criteria?

materials? concept? aesthetic? serial? a combo?

one friend offered up the word Time as part of her personal approach to grouping work together and calling it a Body- that the work in the collection is representative of a particular time in her life... a time (or era, moment) defined by particular concerns... not necessarily whether or not the work LOOKS a certain way. another friend offered up the phrase "themed accumulation" which i really like. and again, nothing really about the LOOK of individual pieces but rather the concerns of the work. there is freedom in that. i like it. but it also starts complicating my already complicated issue.

my practice is, by nature, full of multiplicity. though i speak to the same concerns in all my work, the voice changes. multiple personality disorder, for sure. and though i joke about that a lot here on the blog, when sitting down to the task of putting things in order, i get lost pretty easily at first.

right now, as i continue to wind my way through all my portfolios, taking pictures and seeing what i've got, i find recurrent themes or modes or LOOKS that guide me in putting all this work in to Bodies... but i also see how these Bodies are really body Parts... and how they relate to one another and how i got from point A to point B, shifting through voices, making the issues deeper, more complex and multi-faceted. like Sharon Olds' book "Satan Says".

i see how i do not stand firmly in either camp: critical vs. emotional. my work is a blend of the two. i care about both spheres equally. i think both are necessary. the union is necessary.

and so... how to group things? since the aesthetic i operate in is so strong - black and white - i have to be very careful when putting things in a line. they all LOOK good together because they are unified by palette. but just "looking good together" isn't enough. we black and white artists run the risk of looking "slick" if we go off looks alone. and, in art-speak, SLICK is not a good thing to be called. it means the work is superficial.

and so grouping work based on looks alone isn't going to work for me.

also, i very rarely stumble in to a "series". when i try to force a series, the inspiration for it dries up pretty fast because i start feeling like i'm just making the same painting over and over and over again and not really investigating anything. i'm much more interested in artists like Banks Violette who create collections of work rooted in concept, who trust the intelligence of the audience, who understand that the audience is entirely capable of seeing (or even making) the lines that connect one piece to another... that the audience can see the corollary between a painting and a drawings and a quilt and a found object thrown on the floor. it doesn't need to be ALL drawing or ALL painting or ALL sculpture. the audience does not need everything spelled out to them that way. to me, it's so interesting to see artists working across disciplines, embracing different modes and means of creating an image or object... giving substance to an idea by whatever means suits it best.

when i was first at CCA, i said that to a teacher and the teacher said "if you attempt to be a jack-of-all-trades, you'll be master of none". at the time, that statement was definitely warranted. definitely. i was all over the place in a very uninteresting way at that point. the work looked amateurish and floundering. and that's a stage everyone spends a pretty big hunk of time in. also, i didn't have any real conception (at that point) of what art is good for, how it can be harnessed, what its Past has been, and what it is up against now (thank you critical theory!). also, i really had no clue what I wanted to use art for... what I cared about and wanted to speak about and wanted to wrestle with. now, i do. and 2 years later, that same teacher totally encouraged me to let a painting be a painting and a drawing be a drawing and YES go ahead and nail a rope to the wall and a doll head and a rope of my own hair and see how these things function together. see how these seemingly "disparate" items speak to one another, see what dialogue arises. and it is so compelling (i think) to work that way. i love seeing other artists take that approach within their practice. it creates multiple layers of meaning. so much meaning that everyone, no matter what camp they belong to, can get something out of the work. it's an inclusive way to work.

the audience trusts the artist. artists who reciprocate that trust, artists like Banks Violette and Kiki Smith and Jordan Kantor, create spaces for experiences that are amazing and deep and i admire that so so much.

and so, as i go through this huge documenting phase, i continue to make new work too, getting inspired over and over again by having artwork spread all over the house. and i see that the lines connecting one piece to another are totally there, that the audience will see them too, and that my job is to not overload the issue... to not appear slick, the keep it sincere and meaningful and to really wrestle with the ideas i investigate by not compromising the work to any degree. especially not by sticking to the easy connections: all drawings on one side of the room, all paintings on the other. it feels false for me.

but tell me- how do YOU define a body of work? what criteria do you use? what assumptions do you discard? and how big must a collection be? could a collection consist of only 4 pieces? can it be small? do writers allow themselves the luxury of saying "these 4 poems or pieces are all it takes. finished!" visual artists do that all the time. if it is cohesive, it's cohesive. does size really matter in that regard? "narrative" will occur no matter what when you put two pieces of art side by side, whether or not they are similar.

so how do you group things? how do you define a body of work? what strictures do you impose? what is your governing logic? tell me. i am eager to learn.