Each New Move
It really is all about the process
May 7, 2025
My favorite work of philosophy is Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
How do you explain the passage of time to a group of aliens who exist in a kind of everything everywhere all at once reality, who (apparently) neither age nor die?
[FIRST ALIEN]: Baseball? What is this?
SISKO: I was afraid you'd ask that. I throw this ball to you and this other player stands between us with a bat, a stick, and he tries to hit the ball in between these two white lines. No. The rules aren't important. What's important is, it's linear. Every time I throw this ball, a hundred different things can happen in a game. He might swing and miss, he might hit it. The point is, you never know. You try to anticipate, set a strategy for all the possibilities as best you can, but in the end it comes down to throwing one pitch after another and seeing what happens. With each new consequence, the game begins to take shape.
[SECOND ALIEN]: And you have no idea what that shape is until it is completed.
SISKO: That's right. In fact, the game wouldn't be worth playing if we knew what was going to happen.
[FIRST ALIEN]: You value your ignorance of what is to come?
SISKO: That may be the most important thing to understand about humans. It is the unknown that defines our existence.
I’m starting to think it’s the most important thing to understand about making art as well. I usually start with some sort of plan. Sometimes I even create a Photoshop sketch. But once I begin applying paint and paper, it all starts to shift. Each new move is a consequence. Even when what I’ve just laid down generally conforms with what I’d envisioned, it invariably presents a difference as well, some element I hadn’t anticipated. Each new application of paint or paper changes the areas surrounding it. Building the painting is about responding to the consequences with new consequences. And so on and so on, until the thing takes shape.
I must admit, I haven’t always been comfortable with the uncertainty inherent in this kind of art practice, but I’ve come to treasure it. If only I could learn to embrace the unknown so willingly in other areas of my life.
Facile Comforts
Check marks and a bullet-pointed list
February 4, 2025
I guess New Year’s resolutions are passé. That’s what everyone kept saying, anyway, as the calendar was turning over, people on the internet, sure, but also my friends in real life, even a woman talking into her cell in the line at the pharmacy. “I don’t do resolutions.” I dunno. I’ve got an awful lot of bad habits and character flaws. It’s not very evolved of me, I know, but I’m just not ready to board the bus to radical self-acceptance. I still want to fix myself, damn it.
Also — look. This is a crazy time, right? It feels like we’re already well into the Yeats poem at this point. The center hasn’t held. The falcon hasn’t heard the falconer. You may have some idea of how to cope with it; I sure as hell don’t. So please. Let me have have the facile comforts of check marks and a bullet-pointed list. If only for a moment, ☑️ feels like agency. It feels like order.
It’s illusory, of course. I’m writing to you in February about a January topic because Covid consumed most of my January. It wasn’t so much the fever, which came and went pretty quickly, as the tiredness, which dragged on and on. Still, it was just illness. Normal life-happens loss of control. It doesn’t tax my brain, unlike the morning headlines.
Anyway, I’m here now. Happy new year.
. . .
One of the items on my list reads PAINT LARGER.
That’s actually been my goal for awhile now. This piece, as-yet untitled, was inspired by our travels in Italy in 2023. I’m pleased with its textures and architectural elements, the stacked stories suggesting a place built up over long years, the pops of color hinting at a rambunctious present.
I was hoping to have another large piece ready to show you but it’s got its back arched and won’t get into the carrier. Next time.
Tchaikovsky-Colored Hills
Notes on my latest painting
October 8, 2024
When it comes to color, I can just about carry a tune. That’s it. I’m not one of those pitch perfect people who can instantly identify Cobalt Blue or Cad Yellow Light. When I reach for a hard note, like temperature, my first effort is liable to go flat, or sharp.
Like most people possessed of an ordinary talent, I have to work at it.
But color isn’t everything in art. It isn’t even the main thing, for me at least. I’m more interested in value than color. But, you ask, isn’t value just an attribute of color? All colors have a specific value, that’s true. I’m referring to the distribution of those individual values, the scaffolding of darks and lights that causes a painting to stand up. It’s what you see when you look at a painting from across a room.
Hot take: Get the value right and it scarcely matters what hue you choose.
(Okay, maybe not scarcely. It matters less than you might think.)
. . .
So wouldn’t you know it. With both of my new paintings, the element that sealed the deal wasn’t value. It was color.
. . .
This painting went through god-knows-how-many evolutions. I loved the Tchaikovsky-colored hills but struggled to create a painting around them. It finally came together when I surrounded the saturated color with raw neutrals and grunge. A marriage of opposites may be my favorite thing to do in paint.
Learning What Works
The art of mistake-making
July 30, 2024
Hello! It’s been a minute. Welcome to those of you I met along the Sculpture Garden-Stone Arch-Edina-Ann Arbor trail. It’s been pretty wonderful to talk art with so many engaged and thoughtful people.
____________________
Overheard at the art fair:
Mother: “I don’t want to hear about it anymore. I understand the status of your Band-Aid.”
_____________________
During fair season it’s been a challenge to paint as inefficiently as I’d like. I need to make mistakes. I need to lay paint down and take it off, attempt solutions that produce new problems, learn what will work by trying things that don’t. Maybe “mistakes” is the wrong word for this as I think of it as part and parcel of the creative process. In any event, it takes time.
“Painting has a unique relation to time. A painting that has been done quickly has a different energy from a painting that has been done slowly. A painting that has been done quickly is like a newly decorated room and the air is fresh, empty and echoing. A painting that has been done slowly is like a room that has been quietly lived in: it acquires a mysterious stillness.”—Celia Paul
I’ve made plenty of mistakes on the business side since taking my art on the road. In general these feel less unavoidable and salutary than the art mistakes. But in the year that I’ll become eligible for Medicare, I’m grateful to be doing something that lands me on my ass from time to time. It’s good to stretch, always.
____________________
Nice people at the fair: “Look, we’re not buying any art today so let us buy you a beer.”
Me: “Uh, okay.”
____________________
Now I’ve got to go watch videos so I can learn how to use the mat board cutter I just bought (one of the aforementioned business mistakes: paying framers’ prices for custom matting). If you look for me at Powderhorn, I’ll be the woman with the neatly matted prints and intact fingers. It’s best to stay positive.
____________________
Man at art fair whose mother was married to Art Garfunkel for two years.
____________________
Crazy Season
Be careful what you wish for
April 21, 2024
My hope for 2024 was that I’d get the opportunity to really test the art fair market. Well, I have. I will.
<gulp>
I’ve been hard at it, covered in paint till the wee hours. It’s beginning to catch up with me. I’ve dunked my paintbrush in coffee and wine, which might’ve qualified as interesting artistic choices if I hadn’t been planning to finish my beverages. I’m losing stuff — phone, glasses, scissors. I logged into zoom for court the other day on a screen festooned with drips and blobs. Apparently, a good portion of the paint I’d been flinging around in my studio-cum-office that morning had failed to hit its mark.
Outside The Box
Notes on my latest painting
March 3, 2024
So I was having lunch with an old friend a while ago — an old foe, really: she had the prosecution gig once upon a time in County X, I had the defense. We clocked in each day like Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog (“Morning Ralph” “Morning Sam”), then set to work trying to Looney Tune one another till the whistle blew and we signed out for the evening (“Night Sam” “Night Ralph”).
Anyway, Pat was asking after my art, as, bless her, she is wont to do, and I mentioned that I’d recently been working more with collage. The next time I saw her, Pat had a box for me. When I went to lift it from the trunk of her car, my back muscles froze in disbelief. What did she have in there, the Encyclopedia Britannica?
“Collage material,” she pronounced.
I poked around in the box after I got home (number of big books, check) but I was caught up in a project at the time so I left it. Fast-forward a few weeks: I’d reached the possessed-but-stuck stage with a new painting, which, trust me, is not a comfortable one, and I had the thought, it was grasping at straws, really: maybe there was something in the box. A found shape, a stealth color. Something that could be used to unify, or disrupt. An amulet that would ward off stuckness.
So I dug into the box. I say this in the most admiring way possible: that shit was weird. Pat told me later she’d picked up most of it at an estate sale. There were books on M.C. Escher and Andrew’s pop, N.C. Wyeth; a sheet music booklet for the vaudeville song “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” with a picture of Betty Grable on the cover; and — this brought me back — a copy of Alfred’s Basic Guitar Method, Book 2, the program from which I’d been taught as a child, though I never made it past Book 1.
Underneath the sheet music I discovered a copy of “The Warren Report About President Kennedy’s Assassination,” printed on bound newsprint, now yellowed; and the February 2, 1969 edition of The Minneapolis Tribune Sunday Picture Magazine. The entire issue was devoted to Apollo 8, the first crewed spacecraft to 1) leave low Earth orbit and 2) reach the moon (the actual moon landing took place six months later.) It included the first-ever photographs of an Earthrise and the far side of the moon.
The person whose things were now mine had been a photographer. There was a trove of prints: shots of tree roots, iris petals, sunflower cores, pear skins; small-town garages and movie theaters; winding rural roads guiding the eye to a vanishing point; the Foshay Tower back when it still commanded the Minneapolis skyline.
There are worse ways to try to know someone than to learn their enthusiasms. Though I never discovered my person’s name, I felt like I’d been gifted with some inimitable part of them because I’d seen what excited them. It turns out that was my amulet. The random bits of life are life.
This painting is for you, unknown friend.
Masterpiece
The board game, not the PBS program
December 26, 2023
We weren’t an art museum kind of family, growing up. We were a Velveeta and sitcoms and pop-up camper family. My mother brought three kids to the union with my step-father; he brought three. The main thing the six of us had in common was that we were all stuck orbiting a calamitously ill-advised marriage.
(Also, were there even any art museums in Miami when I was young? I know it’s all chichi and Art Basel-y today, but then?)
We were, however, a board game family. Or, more accurately I suppose, we were board game kids. I discovered art by way of Masterpiece, the old Parker Brothers game. The rules, such as they were, were silly. You tried to outbid the other players at an art auction, but a good percentage of the paintings turned out to be forgeries. I can still remember how this rankled — your fortunes in a game should have something to do with your own wits, they shouldn’t be governed solely by dumb luck.
But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the game I was interested in; it was the set pieces, the paintings. There were two dozen of them, ranging from Bernardo Martorell’s St. George and the Dragon to Picasso’s Sylvette (Portrait of Mlle. D.), a half-millennium of art reproduced on 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 inch note cards.
I found the paintings by turns puzzling, charming, shocking, mysterious, preachy, fantastic, cryptic, soothing, engrossing. I didn’t love them all. Renoir’s On the Terrace was, even then, too pretty for me, El Greco’s The Assumption of the Virgin, too didactic.
My preteen imagination latched on to the paintings in which the action was frozen mid-scene: Winslow Homer’s The Herring Net, Gustave Caillebotte’s Place de l’Europe on a Rainy Day, and that most narrative of narrative paintings, Hopper’s Nighthawks.
Chagall’s The Circus Rider made me think that the soul has a color, and it’s blue.
I remember feeling all angsty about Jackson Pollock’s Greyed Rainbow. Why was this Art? What was wrong with me that I didn’t get it? It felt like an inside joke of some kind, one that I was meant to be the butt of. While, today, I’m completely and happily reconciled to Pollock, I remain familiar with the angsty feeling — it still overtakes me from time to time in the contemporary wing of my local art museum.
One of the Masterpiece paintings is an obvious forebear to the art I make. But, looking back, I’m unable to remember anything I thought about Hans Hoffman’s The Golden Wall. I guess it didn’t make a big impression on me.
A decade later, I was living and studying in Chicago. I wandered into the Art Institute one day and THERE THEY WERE, my Masterpiece paintings, in the pigmented flesh (the Art Institute affiliation is noted on the backs of the game cards, but I hadn’t retained that information). The first one I spotted (I can’t remember now which one it was), I was like, oh my god that’s from Masterpiece, and then, improbably, I spied another. At some point it dawned on me: they were all there. I got as close to each painting as I could, greedy to drink it in with my own eyes: brushstrokes, edges, how paint was lacquered or dabbled on, oh wow signatures. I stood back to allow the effect of each to wash over me, observe how its color vibrated or whispered, absorb the architecture of its values. The next day I went back and did it all again.
It would sound overly theatrical were I to say that that day at the Art Institute was the second-most formative experience of my painting life (Masterpiece being, of course, the first) so instead I’ll say this: on that day, I was newly on my own, a thousand miles removed from other people’s crap decisions, beginning to become comfortable with thinking what I thought and valuing what I valued. The Masterpiece paintings came to represent that for me — as, in truth, they always had.