Thank you George for the very nice introduction and thank you so much for offering me the opportunity to talk about my work here at VSC, a place whose history has personal and professional meaning for me, and provides a true community to so many artists. it is quite an honor. and thank you all for coming. I’m going to read a little background and then show slides.
I grew up in New York in a family that valued art and culture. My idea of modern art -- as it was called then -- was abstract. Bracque, Picasso, Miro, Mondrian and I. Rice Pereira -- were some of the artists I looked at as a child along with the American modernists -- Hartley, Dove, Ryder. And Sheeler. I did not know of Blakelock.
I also liked to play on the street and make messes, or concoct things with materials -- for no reason or purpose.
I thought of art as something available, familiar, almost homey, malleable. In other words, it could become political like Kollwitz, knarly like Beckman or Georges Roualt, aestheticised like Vuillard -- all of whom I was introduced to in high school in NY, along with contemporary art.
I went to Bennington College -- a small elitist liberal arts college in Vermont. The prevailing aesthetic was soft hard edge and color field in painting (Paul Feeley), formalism in criticism (Greenberg) although there were alternative voices-- that of Lawrence Alloway and Eugene Goossen, and I connected with those. I learned about architectural notions and got the impression there could be such a thing as a world view from Tony Smith. Welded steel both expressive and formal prevailed in sculpture (David Smith, Tony Caro).
The resolutely American New England-ness of the region and the introduction of industrial materials and methods with which to make art helped reorganize my ideas of art and my production.
In graduate school also at Bennington I became friends with one of my undergraduate drawing students. Liz Phillips opened up a world of contemporary sound with which I connected -- Pauline Olivieros, Steve Reich -- and a world that subverted visual form that intrigued me, and changed the way I thought about visual art -- Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, Fluxus.
After school, I tried to learn about art and architecture of the past. I traveled when I could.
Spanish painting spoke to me more than any other. I was drawn to Velasquez for his opulence -- of paint handling and of representation. I was intrigued by his conflicting observations of reality all represented within the same painting. I was drawn to Goya for making visible a darker side of life and I loved his gnarly subject matter.
Naturalistic form, melodic space, clunky shapes that become volumetric have always attracted me, too. As does a freedom in nature and with materials. I have always wanted an accessible art and for art to be part of life.
Fontana
Minoan pot
Malevich
Beuys (gold bronze on paper)
Masson
Angers
Looking at architecture became a way of thinking through notions of space and form and society.
Paestrum- I became interested in the viewer as participant. The Acropolis, Paestrum and various other Greek structures seemed to position a person in relation to the cosmos.
I also became interested in architecture as residue, added to and changed over time as cultures change. Such structures have continued to reinforce my inclination to make paintings that develop over long periods of time. My idea was and still is, if a painting has aspects of one’s life experiences layered upon each other, it would have the possibility of being more resonant.
Nurnberg parade grounds- architecture and art can connect us to a sense of ourselves in the world, and manipulate us, too.
Sacagewa
I made art and showed it but it wasn’t until my 1984 solo show at Max Hutchinson Gallery that my work began to receive attention. All the paintings in the show were dense oil paintings such as this one, about 77 x 77. I began the paintings during my first Visiting Artist job which was at the SAIC. It was there I felt my NY School roots and there I understood how important painting was to me -- not just art but painting. I taught myself how to use brushes and oil paint to make the paintings I wanted to make.
Molloy at Tournus, 96 x 100
In the mid-eighties I traveled to France where I looked at Romanesque art and architecture, and hung out with the painter Joan Mitchell. It was important for me to know someone from that era who was a committed painter, a woman, and a pro. I loved the Romanesque -- how forms mutated into other forms. Nothing seemed stable yet the structure was immutable. I began to use the poured and spread seemingly unintended paint as a scaffolding on which to hang my brush work.
Outside St Severin, 60 x 50
Wolff Gallery installation
Domination of Black, 33 x 29” 1991
I have always been interested in the natural and in what I thought of as the phenomenological, and valued the process of painting. In the early nineties, I began attempting paintings that relied more on pours and chemical changes. At times, opulent paintings resulted although opulence was nothing I consciously sought. I did want to affirm that painting could be connected to the urban world around me which seemed plastic and bright.
Through the Oaks, 83 x 95” 1994
I had also begun working with materials that were outside of the standard studio system for certain effects and to refer to the energies and entropies of the earth. I made this painting with the intent to have it carry well from a distance.
Canal St, NY 2 slides
At around this time I began to record my observations of natural phenomena, and I sought out the formless in the art of others. Beginning in the early nineties, my photographs functioned as observational records of life, like sketchbooks. Formlessness or anti-form interests me conceptually and presents a visual challenge. It is often visible on the streets of New York.
I am interested in art that does not cover over the underside of life.
Francis Bacon is a big hero of mine,
Francis Bacon, George Dyer
I am also interested in an art in which presence refers to absence.
Brussels, my photo
Rachel Whiteread shelf pieces
Tony Smith, Die
R72, 1999
My altered x-ray series consists of X-ray and MRI films of strangers, friends, and colleagues that I have responded to with paint and chemical and physical interventions. They serve as elegies of those passed, and act as reminders of our own vulnerability and mortality.
Leipzig installation of altered x rays
Köln installation of altered x rays
Seeing ones own work installed is clarifying. Although the artist is always the first viewer, the artist’s role as viewer expands when the work is outside of the studio. Seeing these installations enabled me to focus the conflict between abstraction and figuration, and seek that in my paintings.
The brightly colored scraps overflowing from a gross dumpster had a surprising and unruly beauty.
Their liveliness contrasts with their identity as remnants from one of the many sweat shops that employ illegal immigrants in New York City. As an instance of the fundamental discord between visual pleasure and moral conscience, Sweatshop Dumpster represents some of the contradictions and conflicts of life as experienced in the 21st century. The photograph gave me the courage and conviction to transgress formal rules and conventions in my painting.
When I first began to go back and forth between New York and Greensboro, NC where I was teaching, everyone in NY said, isn’t it beautiful there? But I was disconcerted by so little visual art. And my associations of violence and white racism overpowered my pleasure in nature. Looking at the majestic trees and lush beauty I imagined past lynchings. This traumatic underside filtered into my work, along with the lushness. I made this painting in NY and it’s called Strange Fruit 2004
The following paintings were among those shown in a 2004 exhibition at Jason McCoy.
Things Belong to Her and She Belongs to Other Things, 46 x 48” acrylic, charcoal, copper, oil, oil pastel, pastel, pigment on muslin
I developed this painting over many years. It was the first in which I consciously eradicated opulent, seemingly natural, skeins and pours of paint by scribbling over them with charcoal and pastel, then messily erasing and blurring some of that scribbling. This method derived from my view that nothing is purely natural nor unmitigatedly beautiful, nor ever still or final or closed; there is never one place, nor is there one way of being. This is a method I deployed with
A Condition of Nature, too
in which I used the charcoal as a tool to move paint to cut any sense of ease of handling. I had a sense during this period that existence in this century is difficult and hard won, and I wanted that to filter into my work. My handling of materials and process and space have been the means by which I have attempted to make content available.
Heart of Darkness 69x71
Diasporic Identity 69x71
The fact that the identity of so many people, including my own, derives from their being of a diaspora is interesting to me and I was trying to think about painting through that filter.
At the End of the Mind
and The Periphery 2004, 29” x 46” acrylic, charcoal, copper, oil pastel, pastel on muslin
In The Periphery, also made over a period of years, deliberate mark-making of my hand contrasts against the natural or phenomenological, as represented by pours. The deliberate marks travel from the border to the center. I hoped my process would suggest the potential for borders and margins to become central, paralleling migratory aspects of life in the 21st century.
The sensual retains a place in my work
The following works are my most recent:
Permeability 29 x 26”
It was pointed out to me by Barry Schwabsky in relation to my 2004 show that more time you spend with the paintings, that is, the more chance you give a painting to be a space, not just a surface, the less significant the imagistic elements seem, and the more involving is the experience of viewing the painting.
Contingency, 17x19
In my present work the phenomenological and its less sensual aspect -- the formless -- co-exist with the marks and color that are seemingly and resolutely intended. Mostly, I am interested in making the issues I have worked with all along more extreme. In subverting figure/ground relations, I attempt to make a definable structure increasingly instabile, to make the imagistic elements less important in favor of a virtual space.
In Postcard From the Volcano, 12 x 15
Although linear elements temporarily seem to stand out -- as “figures” against a more atmospheric ground, lending a sense of structure, over time they revert to instability, merging back into the mix.
In Contingency and Permeability, 71 x 69” the cracks of the raised surfaces operate as drawing yet at times revert to their literal physical nature. They are imbued with color but the color spills out of them and becomes the ground. I am aiming for a deeply resonant virtual space.
Counter-discourse, 28 x 25
Here the figure and ground shift and reform continually. Absence and presence change places.
LAst
This is a painting I am working on.
My work continues to develop and expand in response to the ongoing complexities and contestation of contemporary culture. I remain convinced of painting’s resilience as a medium with which to express some of the most profound, complex and elusive aspects of lived experience in the twenty-first century.