POST #81: I CONSUME; THEREFORE I EXIST

I had a friend (long deceased) who used to go to Lord & Taylor every day (and I literally mean “every day.”) It’s not that she needed anything; her house and her closets were full but she found that shopping provided a “fix,” a way of getting away from everything that was going wrong in her life: her marriage, her crazy children, erratic lovers and so forth. It lowered her anxiety level, calmed her down.

About a year ago,  I wrote a blog entitled “Thrift Shop Therapy,” citing psychologist Erich Fromm’s theory that shopping (consumption) reduced anxiety and averted a societal nervous breakdown. I wonder what he would think about current forms of on-line shopping, even more pervasive and insidious ways to consume. “Instant Gratification”: Amazon can now deliver to your door within 24 hours. We used to call it “recreational shopping,” although “therapeutic shopping” was probably closer to the truth. We consume therefore we exist; if we stop consuming, we die. The package on the doorstep is life-affirming. Fortunately, when I tried to sign up for an Amazon account a couple of years ago, I was told that my credit card was “not valid.” Trust me, my credit card was valid…too valid. I took it as a sign from on high not to become an on-line shopper.

I have a friend who is addicted to on-line shopping, buying “bargains” whether she needs them or not. She recently informed me (gleefully) that she found her favorite sneakers “on line” for “half price” and ordered three pairs (she already has several.) It took a lot of restraint for me not to point out that she was never going to live long enough to wear out the sneakers she already owns.

In Post #33, I wrote about my love of thrift shops and tag sales, which I believe comes from a totally different place than recreational or therapeutic shopping. It appears to be a common condition among artists; I’m always running into one I know. We seem to need more visual stimulation than the average human being and, living in the suburbs, comfortable as it is, provides very little. It’s not like a city, with its ever-changing kaleidoscope of shapes, faces, signs and colors. The suburbs are visually boring: pleasant enough, peaceful, but boring. I love tag sales and thrift shops, not because I need anything – my closets, like everyone else I know – are packed with clothes and my house is filled to the brim with “objects d’art.” But I go out looking, at least once a week because I need the visual and social stimulation. It’s a chance to meet friends, old and new and, when the tag sale season rolls in, find myself in places I would ordinarily never visit.

Department stores and malls don’t satisfy the need for visual stimulation. They are too predictable, too formulaic. As soon as you walk in, you know exactly where everything is, what it’s going to look like and how much it will cost. On the other hand, thrift shops and tag sales are always filled with surprises. There’s a surge of adrenaline, a frisson of excitement when you walk through the door. There’s also an element of intellectual challenge. What is this vase you are holding? Is it a Tang dynasty treasure worth thousands or a $2 tourist souvenir? My favorite thrift shop (only open on Thursdays) is in the basement of the local Congregational Church. It’s a feast for the eyes – and for the pocketbook. $10 will get you a shopping bag full of treasures – whether you need them or not.

POST #80: THE WIFE OF BATH – or, Look Who’s In My Attic!

Madame X,   38"x24", oil crayon on paper

I have a friend who used to be an English Lit major at Oxford. He’s fond of checking out my latest paintings and pronouncing them “Chaucerian;” (sometimes, he calls them “Rabelaisian.”)  My first (and last) contact with Chaucer (until recently) was Freshman Literature in college. The instructor put the entire class to sleep reciting unintelligible excerpts from the Canterbury Tales in 14^th century English. Who knew that Chaucer’s most memorable character, the Wife of Bath, would turn up decades later in my attic?

Madame Y, 38"x24", oil crayon on paper

Truthfully, I don’t have Chaucer (or Rabelais) in mind when I create formidable sex goddesses – they come out of my subconscious - although now that I have reread the Wife of Bath, I see where they originated.  I always thought I was satirizing popular culture: TV and video stars; they make the Wife of Bath (married/widowed five times) look like Saint Theresa. Chaucer’s character pretended to be pious, very cleverly using Christian dogma to justify her manipulation of men. Since a married woman could not own property in the thirteenth century – the husband took whatever wealth she had – the Wife of Bath learned how to use sexuality to control the men in her life, bragging about her impressive “equipment” and her ability to deploy it. Chaucer describes her as having a noticeable gap between her upper front teeth, a sign of sensuality in those days. A friend of mine, not knowing about the Wife of Bath, got her dentist to fill hers in. She now complains to me that men don’t come on to her as much as before, attributing it to advanced age; I don’t have the heart to tell her it’s the dental work.

"Lust" (from the "Seven Deadly Sins" series),
 68"x44", oil on canvas

Chaucer didn’t invent lusty, manipulative women, although he was probably the first “modern” writer to describe one. When women are powerless politically and economically, they use the weapons at hand.  Who can blame them? The Wife of Bath is, on rereading, rather despicable. Despite women’s recently-acquired “equality,” they still lack the political and social power of men and quickly learn to rely on looks and sexuality to get them what they want.

The first Wife of Bath I knew (although I never made the connection with Chaucer until recently) was my mother’s older sister, Tanta Natasha, a well-endowed Russian Jewish beauty. Like the much-married Wife of Bath, she had been married and widowed several times -and had God-only-knows how many lovers in between. She smoked, drank schnapps, flirted with men, told risque stories (which I didn’t understand) and quickly remarried after any of her husbands passed away. She taught all my cousins to smoke and encouraged them to have affairs. Although my mother detested her, I thought she was great and I’m sure she (not Chaucer) is the unconscious source of all the femme fatales who appear in my work.

POST #79: LISTENING TO PICASSO, or LOST IN TRANSLATION

When I met my husband many, many years ago, he gave me his precious copy of the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. It was his way of “testing me,” checking to see if I was “wife material.” Anyhow, I was less than impressed with Rilke (although I wouldn’t dare tell him!) until I decided to try to read his work in the original German. Not that I could read German, but I knew enough to be able to sound the poems out. That’s when I realized how good Rilke was; like many poets (and writers), he probably got “lost in translation.”

Connected Mona Lisas (Picasso style)
Oil on Canvas       30"x40"

The Rilke incident came back to me yesterday when I started to write this post. I had finally gotten around to reading a book I have owned for many years called Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, put together by noted art historian, Dore Ashton. She begins, apologetically, by saying that Picasso refused to write about art (thank God!) but often held serious verbal discourses with his friends. Since all these quotes are based on their notes (memory is notoriously uncertain) plus translation from two, possibly three languages (Spanish to French to English), we have to take them with the proverbial grain of salt. Many, I must say, sound like something Picasso WOULD have said, so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Here are some quotes I thought might interest you, ostensibly from the mouth of the master.

Have you ever seen a finished picture? To finish a work? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul.

No, one doesn’t stop by oneself. You work and behind you stands somebody who is not a professional and it is he who makes the decisions.

Cubist Self Portrait
Oil on Canvas      38"x24"

Everyone wants to understand art. Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand it. Gertrude Stein joyfully announced to me the other day that she had at last understood what my picture of the three musicians was meant to be. It was a still life.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself. And to try to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.

Photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote and even from the subject. So shouldn’t painters profit from their newly acquired liberty, and make use of it to do other things? 

In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish: love must be proved by facts not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.

Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

Orgy Scene
Oil Sketch on Canvas    40"x48"

And my favorite (an explanation of a sketch on wrapping paper for a cut-metal sculpture):

It’s a chair, and you see that it is an explanation of cubism! Imagine a chair passed under the rollers of a compressor; it would turn out just about like that. 

Anyhow, the best part of my little book on Picasso aren’t his quotes but his drawings. Since they’re probably copyrighted, I didn’t want to use them so I rummaged through a couple of my old portfolios for some suitable drawings and damned if everything I ever did didn’t have a touch of Picasso in it!

As a friend of mine used to say (unoriginally): "If you're going to steal, steal from the best."

POST #78: EVERY ARTIST HAS TEN GOOD YEARS

A sculptor friend of mine was fond of saying that “every artist has ten good years.” I would argue with her, protest that this wasn’t so but her words scared me. What if she was right and my “best years” were over (or, worse yet, never going to happen.) Since I was teaching art history at the time, I set out to prove her mistaken. Instead, the more I looked into her theory, the more she appeared to be correct. Why are there only ten good years?

Untitled Street Scene I
Charcoal and oil stain on canvas. 67"x45"

Let’s examine the pattern:

First, few artists emerge from art school fully-formed. Most take at least ten years to find their own personal language and develop the technique and skills they need to build their reputation. Then there is the peak period, the time (the next ten years) in which they do their best work, the art for which they become known. After that there’s usually a period when they concentrate on buying property, marrying, having children, paying psychiatrists, cultivating dealers and collectors, living the “successful” artists’ life. This is the time in which artists tend to repeat themselves, lose their creative edge: divorce, drink, fritter away the talent that made them famous. And then, if they are lucky, there is a late period, when all is calm, the storms of life have past and the artist is free once more to concentrate on his or her work –  if he’s lucky.

Untitled Street Scene II
Charcoal and oil stain on canvas, 72"x67" 

I got to thinking about this subject because I am in the process of preparing a talk on Chagall. I wanted to concentrate on the work he produced from 1911 to 1915, the period he spent in Paris prior to World War I, but because I am part of a Judaic Studies lecture series, the sponsors asked me to focus on his years at the Yiddish Theater in Moscow, right after the Russian Revolution. By the time he fled Russia in 1922, he was famous and in my opinion, his best period was mostly over. The irony is that much of the work he did in Paris was lost, so we’ll never know the full story.

And so, I’ve been looking at the artwork I have stored in my attic. Are my ten best years ahead of me, behind me, or am I now in the middle of them? Or worse yet, am I never going to get there? I tend to think my “best” years were spread out: a year here, two years there. Then a crisis would occur in my life and I’d have to stop working. That’s why I’ll probably never “fulfill my potential” (assuming I have one.) In order to be a great artist (or even a consistently good one) you need to be able to set everything aside, ignore the needs of those around you and just create. If you try to be a well-rounded human being with a “life” you’re never going to get the unbroken time you need to fulfill your potential.

By the way, (in keeping with my theory) when Chagall did his best work in Paris c.1912, he was free of any personal obligations and distractions. He had a modest stipend, cheap housing (at La Ruche), no emotional entanglements, no wife or children, only a fiancée a thousand miles away. He stayed away from the other artists at his rooming house (whom he claimed copied him), socialized with poets and potential patrons, but mostly, holed up in his pie-shaped atelier and worked. 

POST #77: LET’S AGREE TO DISAGREE

"New Popular Restaurant" 
photocopied drawings mounted on cardboard, 6'x4'

I recently ran into an old friend at an art opening who told me how much he enjoyed reading my blog but how he “didn’t always agree.” “That’s great,” I told him. “I want you to disagree, only please let me know why.” I like it when I get a dialogue going; just remember that if I fail to make my case, it is often in the interest of brevity. I don’t think anyone wants an essay by Meyer Shapiro when they read my blog.

For example, in the post I wrote about artists who base their work on photographs, I neglected to discuss Degas and his reliance on photos; several of my readers picked up on that. Well, the truth it, I did write something about him, but cut it out of the final text which I thought was too long. In a way, he is a perfect case in point: Degas used photos as reference but he didn’t copy them and it’s the copying that deadens artwork. After all, how many geniuses like Turner are there? He was famous for his visual memory (pre photography) and could recall something he saw years later down to the last detail, including the weather.

Note: There’s an interesting movie about Turner currently making the rounds that you might want to see, mainly for the way it shows his technique.

"Gluttony: a Deadly Sin" 
black gesso drawing on cardboard, 6' x 2'6"

Another anonymous “critic” wrote in scolding me for selling art made out of “impermanent materials” such as cardboard. Who says I try to sell anything? Those of you who know me know that you have to literally tear work away from me. If I like something, I want to keep it and if I don’t like it, I wont even give it away. Marketing is not my thing. And besides, so what if the work isn’t permanent, “archivally stable”? Won’t last forever. Will you? Will I? Did Picasso worry about the buyer when he created his cardboard guitars more than a hundred years ago? Does Damien Hirst feel guilty collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars for a shark disintegrating in formaldehyde? Or Banksy for a wall that might be demolished? This is the modern world; nobody is painting  (or building or doing anything) for eternity. There are no Piero della Francesca’s any more and even his work didn’t last forever. Diamonds might last, but not artwork.

"Waitresses" 
black gesso and oil crayon on wrapping paper, 30"x22"

By the way, I love when my readers weigh in, even if it’s to say they disagree, or they don’t like what I am doing. Many years ago, I had an exhibit of my paintings at the old Bruce Museum in Greenwich in the days when it was a musty, dusty Victorian mausoleum. When the exhibit (very German Expressionist stuff) was over and I took the work down, I noticed that someone had placed a note behind one of the stretchers. “I hate your work,” it said. I can’t tell you how pleased I was that someone felt strongly enough to tell me what he thought.

POST #76: THE CAMERA NEVER LIES

Lower East Side, c.1955

Since the invention of photography in the mid eighteen hundreds, artists have always had an uneasy relationship with the camera. Is it a crutch or a competitor?

Is it an honest aid or a dishonest bag of tricks? When I was in art school, nobody admitted to using photography for anything other than occasional reference. Of course, I now know that lots of artists I admired such as Ben Shahn and Reginald Marsh were avid photographers and that might (though I’m sure they’d never admit it) explain their incredible “drawing” ability. If we go back into the 19^th century when photography first developed, painters like Ingres tried to beat photography at its own game, painting hyper-realistic portraits that were sharper than any photograph, more flattering and in color! If you could afford the price, a painted portrait was the preferred way to go.

Lower East Side, c.1955

In the 1960s, a group of Photo-Realist painters rose to popularity, along with innovators like Rauschenberg and Warhol who made extensive use of photographs in their work. Rumors abounded about the Photo-Realists; were they really so technically facile that they could make a painting look like a color photograph? Viewers were impressed; artists had finally beaten photography at its own game. But, maybe there was “trickery” involved? Could these paintings really be painted prints? Or made from slides projected on canvas coated with a photosensitive gel. Who knew? Their secrets were guarded more carefully than members of a medieval guild. I remember once going to a talk by a well-known artist who painted trompe l’oeil architecture on the side of buildings. I asked him how he did it. A projector? What kind? He skillfully avoided answering me. Did he think I was about to get up on a fifty-foot scaffold and put him out of business? However, he wasn’t taking any chances.

Lower East Side, c.1955

Ultimately, my problem with photorealism is that it sees too much; doesn’t “select” the way the eye does and ends up neither a good painting nor a successful photograph. Over the years, I have occasionally tried working from photographs and while they provide me with details I might not otherwise remember, they tend to look flat and forced, not capturing the totality they eye sees. If I am going to use a photograph as the basis for a painting, I am better off trying to use it for reference, rather than actually copying it. In fact, I don’t even like painting from a model or directly from a scene; my memory provides a kind of transcendent reality that I personally prefer.

When I first went back to painting, many years ago, I drew my subjects from the local newspaper’s Society Page photographs of clubwomen, bankers, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Kiwani, etc. My favorite work from that period is entitled “Retired Airline Hostesses Arranging a Benefit” which showed two smiling ex airline “hostesses” posing for the camera. In those days, they were forced to quit when they got married, so they retired young. Also, stewardesses were taught  something called the “American Smile:” pleasant, soothing and totally vapid. My painting might have been done from a newspaper photograph; I don’t remember, but it certainly wasn’t “photo realistic.”   

POST #75: A.D.D. A Desirable Disorder?

A few months ago, one of my adult children announced that he had been diagnosed with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). “How could that be?” I protested, “you’re one of the smartest and highest functioning human beings I know.” And what’s more, he added, I (his mother) also suffer from ADD (is it inherited?) And so do most of my friends (is it contagious?) What is this world coming to? Are the Martians sending down Gamma rays to damage our brains?

So, of course, I Googled “Attention Deficit Disorder” and came up with a gazillion hits. It’s apparently a very popular disorder, with lots of people, mostly children, suffering from it. I use the term “suffering” in quotes because not everyone suffers and, for some people, it’s the gateway to an extremely productive and creative life. If you go by what I read on line, some of the brightest and most creative people around are “ADD” and actually profit from it. Here’s a rundown of what I learned. I don’t have all the “symptoms,” but I do have many (and so, for that matter, does practically everyone else I know.)

1) We often suffer from mood fluctuations, going from periods of intense productivity to periods of inertia and apathy

2) We feel like we haven’t achieved our potential, even though by society’s standards, we may have done quite well

3) We procrastinate, especially when it’s something we’re not eager to do

(that sounds normal to me) and have a hard time getting started

4) We tend not to follow through; we start projects and don’t finish them

5) We work best under pressure although when we have to concentrate, no one does it better than someone with ADD

6) We’re often late (our distractibility)

7) We’re good at finding inventive shortcuts

8) We prefer creative work and are often in the arts (or law, someone told me)

9) We like diverse forms of stimulation and may earn our income from several      different sources

10) We are “adrenaline junkies” who like high risk and danger

11) We work best under pressure, when time is running out

12) We have intense, often painful romances

13) We like to learn visually rather than by listening

Now here’s the best news: According to what I learned, ADD’ers as a group tend to be exceptionally bright, creative and high functioning. They are capable of “hyper-focusing” when they have to, producing work of especially high quality. They also can ‘multi task’ extremely well.

Of course, I could treat my ADD with medication; anti depressants supposedly work quite well and would help me focus. But why be normal when being ADDled is so much more fun?