On Artistic Integrity

We're now approaching the Albert Pinkham Ryder School of Infinite Accumulation. The agony is insupportable, which is why I'm blogging instead. The sad thing is that I have the next painting completed in my head; I think it will be fun, I think it will be easy, but I refuse to start painting it until I've solved this one. Piggish of me. I hope this is just a transition, and not The Shape of Things to Come.

Last week, I did my taxes, of course. (Well, maybe not of course--you outlaws know who you are. :-) :-P) It shocked me all over again to see how little paid work I did last year, particularly in the first half of the year. Granted, I was injured, I was shell-shocked, I was writing a business plan, and I was preparing for my first solo show in Manhattan. But the record of my blithe inattention to financial facts was still astonishing, unless you take into account the fact that at the back of my brain, there was a little voice saying "A solo show on Madison avenue--you're bound to sell something."

Or not.

The lesson has been learned--I will never again show my work anywhere unless there is a person with both a vested financial interest in promoting and selling it, and a proven track record in doing so, in charge of the exhibition. A person other than myself, that is. I'm making exceptions for BWAC and studio tours, since I did sell work that way last year, and deadlines are good for me. But Small Works Exhibitions with $40 hanging fees are Right Out; likewise competitions with jurying fees, hanging paintings in people's storefronts so that they can sell coffee and inflict their bad video art on your friends, and schlepping large paintings across town to 'alternative' spaces, such as restaurants and loading docks. It was fun while it lasted, but I can't afford it anymore.

If I've heard it once, I've heard it nine hundred times--"It's good exposure." After a decade and a half of empirical observation, I've come to the conclusion that this is false. Most people are incapable of seeing art unless they are led by the hand to The Place Where The Art Is and told, "This is art. Look closely. It's valuable." It doesn't matter whether the Art is good, bad or indifferent; if it isn't in a museum or gallery, 95% of the people looking at it will see wallpaper.

You get paid for hanging wallpaper.

Now, I don't want to sound crass, bitter and materialistic. Of course I make art for the joy of it; but part of this joy has to do with communication. If there's nobody on the receiving end of this communication, I start to get droopy, not to mention paralyzed with terror about paying next month's bills. This may be part of the reason I've been somewhat blocked in the last few months.

So I've been wondering--how do you keep working with artistic integrity, assuming that a reputable gallery will never be interested in showing you, nobody will pay for what you create, and few people will ever understand what you're communicating? Is there a way? Why not throw down the brushes and go hang wallpaper for a living? Or just blog yourself into oblivion?

The answer seems obvious; make sure that each day is complete unto itself. Get up and bike to the yoga studio. Shower. Fix an awesome breakfast while reading The New Yorker. Book and work on a couple of clients. When the studio beckons, clean it, and put on some very awesome music while the sun streams in the windows.

Most importantly--be honest with myself about what is working and what isn't. Don't quit until the painting satisfies me, because it's not guaranteed to satisfy anybody else. Don't make "small stuff to sell" if I don't feel like working small; don't avoid doing a weird big painting because I don't think anyone will 'get' it.

You'd be surprised at how often the weird one is the first to go, anyway.

Looky, looky!

Danny gave me a sculpture!


He said I could "destroy it." Hmph. As if. There is a significant danger of its becoming a cat toy, but I found a nice high, inaccessible shelf for it. What a great present!

Working conditions

At this point, the Impossible Painting is getting to a place where there is so much paint piled on top of paint that the whole thing is in danger of falling off in great chunks, like an Anselm Kieffer.

This doesn't bother me at all, at the moment. I was thinking of doing a painting like this already; it just saves me the bother of having to get a new canvas.

Danny is coming for a studio visit this afternoon, which is something to look forward to. My ideal working conditions have always involved knowing that someone on the other side of the wall is working their butt off, just like me; every two or four hours we can break off, have an intense discussion about a random topic, then go back to work. This is why I didn't seem to need much sleep in art school. I don't isolate well.

However, solitude has its benefits when you are seized with a sudden need to play an obnoxious piece of music on a repeat loop for a couple of hours. It's a good thing that my downstairs neighbors are 9-to-5-ers, or I'd undoubtedly be alienating them with my sudden obsession with the one punk rock album I've acquired since 1995. I dunno, something about it just pressed my buzzer. Also I've broken out PJ Harvey's 'To Bring You My Love' for the first time since 2001. Pounding bass, crashing drums, and bad-ass women screaming things like "They love you, they want you, WHEN YOU FALL DOWN" feel oddly grounding and energizing just now.

Dandy kicks me in the butt...

and I am grateful.

I do think I have finally managed to crack the monster painting, after turning it sideways and having a revelation about the direction the background color needed to take. It still needs work, but I can now look at it without turning away in shame and despair. You don't get to see it till I'm done, though.

"What shall I do without you?", ink on paper, 2002

But the truth is both that I have acknowleged that I am still in a stage of creative gestation, and that I have been working my butt off for MONEY during the last week and a half. Which is tedious but at this point, seriously necessary.

Also, I am undergoing a shift of mood and consciousness, in a springlike direction.

"your eyes have their silence," ink on paper, 2002

I actually started more of those little erotic drawings that Steve the Poet likes so much, which I stopped doing completely at the end of 2002. I am shocked by how rusty the new ones are, but encouraged by the fact that I'm in the mood to do them at all.

All those 'plans' I made for the paintings I was going to do this year, last year, don't seem to make any sense anymore. The fact is that I am a different person this year, and I'm not entirely sure who that person is. The fact is that last year, I was a walking scab. Even the paintings I did then, some of them, look like scabs.

This year, every day I wake up and think, "man, I'm waking up. What I mess I was last year." Still, most of the time, I'm not present or aware. But I'm more aware of how much I'm not aware, which is a start.

Yesterday, after the snowstorm melted (!) I wandered into Manhattan, knowing that I would most likely have a hell of a day today (four clients; could have been six, if there had been enough hours and enough stamina) and just Was. Went to the Strand and snagged the first two books of Neal Stephenson's "Baroque" trilogy, which I am seriously behind on reading, and Kenzaburo Oe's "Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age" which looks dark but gripping. It's been ten years since I last read Oe and I think it's about time. Then I went and tried to spend my Gap gift certificate (this season's clothes are impossibly bland, but they have finally gotten around to making jeans that fit my figure), had dinner at Dojo, and bopped around the East Village, looking for something to either take me out of myself or put me back in. Did not succeed as such, but the moon was out, and I clocked some mileage.

Was going to write a contemplative post about the love I have for my clients, but after four of them today I am too drained to do anything but surf and sleep. God bless.

Stood up, thank God

My 11 AM client called at 10:30 this morning, to tell me she'd be late. Lovely! More time for me to linger over tea and journal.

At 11:45, though, I called her cell phone to suggest she reschedule. What was she thinking? I have a life.

At 12:15, the doorbell rang. I graciously invited her in, explained that I was unable to bump her appointment up AN HOUR AND A QUARTER, and booked her for next week.

Thank God. I have three and a half more sessions scheduled for today, for a grand total of four hours and fifteen minutes of hard physical labor, and if this girl had made her appointment, that would have been five hours and twenty-five minutes. Always assuming that I ended on time. My friend RA says that I could hold back a lot, since he says I put about ten times the energy into a session that his other MT friend does, but that's the way I do it. I was not looking forward to feeling like I'd been run over by a truck.

I'm glad business is picking up, though, right in the nick of bankruptcy. Spring is like that. I'm noticing that it seems to take about a year and a half of consistently doing business in the same place, to develop the community recognition that you're there, you do a good job, and they should call you. I'm now getting phone calls from people who say, "I found your card, and then a friend of mine said you were great, and another friend, and another, so I called."

It also makes me realize that it was literally true that my ex-boyfriend sabotaged my livelihood right when I was on the brink of solvency. He operates wholly in bad faith. In order to accomplish anything significant, you have to first set your intention, then plant the seeds, then nurture them to fruition. He chopped me off at the roots just as I was beginning to blossom; I can see, now, that this may not have been his conscious intention, but it was definitely his unconscious agenda. Lord, I'm glad that loser is out of my life.

Oculus Arts

Check out the very awesome new project headed up by my friend RA Friedman. Also check out the very awesome photos on the splash page, taken by yours truly. I had no idea I had such talent as a plein air photographer--it just Seized the Moment.

It was really fascinating, last year in Philly, to see how, when you give random passers-by some props and the opportunity to express themselves, the vast majority of them will rise to the occasion with astonishing creativity and aplomb. People would literally grab a costume and assume an entirely new personality almost instantly. I was particularly impressed when one very large young lady grabbed a very small silver top, one that I myself would not have attempted to fit into, and unhesitatingly pulled it over her head. It fit. Very large young ladies evidently know more about stretch fabrics than I do.

Out of hibernation

To all the lovely people I enjoyed fabulous conversations with, last night: I am not actually a babbling narcissist. It's just been a long winter, during which I haven't left my studio quite often enough. Or hardly at all. It was really, really, really great to talk with you.

The BAG party and auction Came Off, I believe; the food was great, the band was great, we had a quorum and managed to unload all the art. Auctioneering was more difficult this time around, because I had a reputation to maintain. Thank you, Danny and Jack, for showing up and smiling encouragingly.

My only major screw-up was totally spacing out on discussing the 'relic' photograph by the upstate artist, who chisels Homeland Security signage on rocks and leaves them out in nature. He propped it on the floor, and despite the fact that I spent half an hour before the auction picking his brains, in the stress of the moment I forgot to look down. This may have been for the best, since the top auction price fetched for the figure drawings was $50, and this was his break-even point on printing and framing. Much better to wait until we have some actual collectors in the gallery, as opposed to other starving artists.

I swear that I did not forget to push his photo just because he told me that Andy Goldsworthy was "spurious." I may not agree with him at all, at all, but I have more integrity than that. I gracefully held my tongue when he ranted that Andy Goldsworthy is an over-marketed simpleton with no sense of context, whose only contribution to art history is the coffee-table photography book.

This is the sort of thing that my painting T.A.s used to say about people like Georgia O'Keefe. "Just a coffee-table art book," they would sneer.

I ask you: what in the world is wrong with coffee-table art books? I have dozens. They refurbish my spirit. They provide a gentle reminder of the transformative experiences I have had, in those moments when I was fortunate enough to be in the Louvre, or the D'Orsay, or the Tamayo Museum, being knocked upside the soul by the actual art. Most people are not so fortunate; their budget for plane tickets to the Louvre is limited. Coffee-table art books are the only way most middle Americans ever get to experience art. They sneak their grace into people's lives, quietly, of a Sunday afternoon after brunch. They occupy the cracks. I am all for coffee-table art books.

I am also all for Andy Goldsworthy, as I have mentioned in the past. In fact, Andy Goldsworthy is on my very short list of twentieth-century artists who humble me, inspire me, and make me want to be Just Like Them. (The others, in case you are interested, are Isamu Noguchi, Lee Bontecou, Anselm Kieffer, and Rufino Tamayo.) You will notice that none of these artists live, or lived, permanently in Manhattan. They are not Scenesters; they don't give a rat's ass for 'contextualization,' at least not as a primary concern, when articulating their muse.

And calling Andy Goldsworthy 'over-marketed' struck me as disingenuous, to say the least. I mean, the man gets up at 3:30 AM to stick icicles together with his saliva. Every day. He's been doing this for twenty-five or thirty years; he was doing it for a good dozen years or so before the first coffee-table book hit Barnes & Noble. I have no idea how he fed himself, let alone his family, before that. I think his wife must have done it all. This man is not a Cynical Pragmatist. He does what he does, and viewing the detritus of his goofy, pointless little process brings peace to my soul, in a way that rocks with Homeland Security messages on them never will.

It wasn't that I didn't like the anti-Andy guy; he was a fine person, and had some sound things to say about life as a community-college art professor. But I believe that the concept that Art is primarily about defining one's Position vis-a-vis Modern Society, and Culture, and Art History, is a dangerous and paralyzing one. I know it paralyzed me, back in my art-school days. When one is in the studio, one has to go forward primarily on one's own energy, skill, knowlege and intuition. Having a sense that every move you make is relative to the moves made by all other artists past and present, and to all the sociopolitical problems of the current era, is far, far too much pressure. Every move of your elbow is subject to the burden of Infinite Relevance, and the sensitive twenty-four-year old is quite likely to crack under the strain. I nearly did.

So that's my two cents.

Later, after the auction, I moved on to J. H.'s party in Greenpoint, where I monopolized curator David Gibson's entire evening. I felt sort of bad about it, but he assured me he didn't mind, and he knew all the people in the catty stories I regaled him with, which was comforting for both of us. I checked out his blog, and I highly recommend it, although if you're on dial-up like me, be forewarned that it takes about twenty minutes to load. He appears to know a whole lot of very good painters; I am humbled and will have to spend some serious time tracking them all down.