About the Artist's Unexceptional Life

I’ve been wondering what my topic would be this week. Many of my readers are artists. Many are not. I want to capture the interest of all (in spite of  what Honest Abe said about pleasing all of the people …). I had to think about what I know enough about to be able to speak of. And am I writing for my artist audience or my non-artist readers? Who am I anyway? Am I not both? 

This has been a typical week: a lot of painting which is going well. Some grocery shopping, a little cooking, no housecleaning (only gets done when there’s a dire need for it), some laundry, and much time on the phone with my kids. This morning I will write this blog, do some business stuff, (I’m uploading images of my pigment prints to Visual Art Source and will include a link to that new gallery page when I have it ready). In the evenings I usually watch an hour of something I get from Netflix and then settle into my cherished armchair with the book of the moment. I have thought a lot about what’s happening in Somalia and been horrified on a daily basis by much of what I see in our local newspaper. I will spend some of the weekend scanning and printing small paintings that I plan to use as collage material in current and future studio projects. And I will take some time off to read and probably spend some with the family. On the agenda for next week: painting, and a proposal for an exhibition I would like to have in the year 2014. Plus a repeat of most of the usual.

There are a number of things I’ve neglected to mention but I think I’ve got the bulk of it. That’s it, the fairly ordinary life of a self-employed person. I think it entitles me to write about art or anything that is ordinary. Oh, and I forgot. I do the (minimal) obligatory exercise three times a week with Jane Fonda. Into every life some rain must fall.

In a recent newsletter from painter Robert Genn, he uses these expressions when speaking of the generic artist: a higher calling, a higher path, the sensitive ones who struggle alone, a creative life and a life well lived, the most privileged of all. 

I have included a link to Genn because I have taken him quite out of context. But I have heard and read those terms applied to my ilk and find them unreal. So maybe there are those of us that live on a higher plane than most (Beethoven and Michelangelo?) but mostly we are working for a living and grateful for our ordinary lives.

All of this is my personal bias. Blogging can be wonderfully self-indulgent.

The image above is one of the little (17" x 11") pieces that I’ve scanned for use as collage material. The image below is the current state of the quartet I’m working on. Click on it for a better view. I’m using a variety of materials, mostly acrylic on 35” x 25” panels of heavy etching paper. Stay tuned for further developments.

About a Teacher

The image above is of some of the color samples I use in the studio to help me stay on track. And below is photo of a studio wall today. The quartet in the center of the wall is the major focus. Surrounding it are exercises to play with when the mood strikes. As I move on with the monochromatic paintings, I remember my first painting teacher. It was my second year at Cooper Union and I was eighteen years old. In our first year we did a lot of design: two dimensional, three dimensional and architectural, along with life drawing, sculpture, calligraphy, drawing, aesthetics and history of art. A fairly traditional line-up during the time that we were emulating and revering the abstract expressionists of the fifties. The instructor was John Ferren, a romantic figure just back from a long time in Europe. He had hobnobbed with Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky and Mondrian amongst other stars. We knew nothing of this history; he was our teacher.

He gave us a series of assignments that I am still working on half a century later. After allowing us to get used to the feel of painting in a shared studio environment and instructing those of us new to oil paints (we had used tempera and gouache in first year) he asked us to do a series of paintings, each one based on a primary color: a blue, a red and a yellow. We could push these colors to their limits of variation but no other color was allowed on our canvases. My attachment to the man began one day when totally frustrated with trying to make my red painting sing as I wanted it to, I took a bit of green paper and stuck it into the wet oil painting. Ferren spied this insurgence from the other side of the great studio room and sped towards me ready pour out his wrath. When he saw my prank he said: “Very funny, Gold, take it off.”  Our friendship was cemented one day when a large canvas I was engrossed in toppled from its easel onto my head. John Ferren gave me a turpentine shampoo along with advice about keeping my wits about me even when I painted. It was he who wrote the recommendation that was a strong part of the fellowship application that sent me to Latin America and set me on the course my life would take.

That's us, ever so long ago. I still think of him with great affection; he is one of those people that I would like to meet again and share a bottle of wine with. I would tell him about how that long ago assignment so intrigued me because I never got it quite right. This time I will put a bit of green into my red painting. I don’t have to follow the rules any more. And from what I read about him now, he never did.

About Beautiful

I am at the beginning of a new series of paintings and am deliberating about how to do them. I plan to make panels of color that will be hung together in groups of three, four or five. There will be a red panel and a blue panel and an orange panel, the whole rainbow. As many and as different as I have the time and energy to paint. The challenge is to keep them as simple as I envision them and lusciously beautiful at the same time. Their reason to be must be only their ravishing presence.

Beauty comes in an infinite variety of forms and has much to do with time and place and person. I remember as a youngster seeing some of the lingerie of my mother’s trousseau and thinking it unattractive. I found it very lovely some years later. Beauty can be delicate or brash, moving and tender, or heartbreakingly sad. It can be serene and bring peace. Music can evoke all that and more. I want to do it with color. Mark Rothko did it in his way; Pierre Bonnard in his. I have been looking at the work of artists (too many to name here) who have used color in some magnificent way, everyone different and lovely. Now I will do mine.

I have been warming to the project by making the small color panels seen in the photo above. I must have made a hundred in the last week. They take lots of layers, several different materials in addition to the acrylic paint and require a kind of “back and forth” process. They are for practice and I am using them as interim work and will go back to them when I get too serious about the larger pieces.


These are the beginnings:

I will upload photos now and then as they progress, maybe even including the times that they look awful and I am stumbling in my path. There are thirty-one of these panels in four different fairly large sizes.

As I said in a recent note to a friend, I never quite reach my objective in terms of drop-dead gorgeous color, but it doesn’t matter. This is more about the quest itself than it is about reaching goals. What matters is doing it. In the long run it doesn’t matter how successful the work is by anybody’s lights. There is, however, a reward in the paintings themselves. When finally hung together in carefully orchestrated groups, they will have some of the joy that I felt while making them. And that will be enough. Until the next round.

John Kenneth Galbraith: There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting. 

About a Brain

Last week I said: “I am an idiot when it comes to numbers”. I need to enlarge on that to get to what I want to say today about how a brain works and sometimes doesn’t.

Back in grade school a teacher asked me to explain the perfect score I got on a test as she could not see any evidence of the path I took. I know now, because I still do it, that I visualize numbers and move them about in a way that does not follow the steps I was taught. I have used this kind of thinking all my life but when I was the age I was then (somewhere between six and eight years old) I wasn’t aware of how I operated. I got a shameful zero on that test and was accused of cheating. I don’t know if that experience was the deciding factor and caused my lifelong antipathy toward numbers. It certainly didn’t ease the way.

This morning I came across this: “I often hear artists say that they are too right-brained to do left-brained business tasks.” It goes on to explain how that is a mistake. I had been painting but returned to doing business in response to some requests for information about my work. I was struck again by the change in how I felt about my life, myself and the world around me when dealing with pricing, computer glitches and time spent on the phone. I enjoy meeting the people who appreciate my work and sales make me very happy. But self-promotion, pricing, databases and mailings are not my cuppatea.

In my studio, I am untroubled and competent. I don’t mean that the work is easy. It is a constant series of choices, decisions and problem solving. I screw up on a regular basis and have to back-track and make right what went wrong because I chose the wrong color or texture or paint viscosity. But mostly, at the end of the day, I feel a serene satisfaction and a well-earned right to rest. After a day spent doing business, even when everything is going smoothly, no glitches anywhere, I come away feeling as if I have been unproductive and what little I have accomplished is meaningless. I am baffled by stuff about right brain, left brain. My brain has been with me for a long time. It has served me well but there are some areas of extreme non-expertise that will never get any better. Who am I trying to fool?

Sculptor Louise Nevelson: “In my studio I'm as happy as a cow in her stall. That's the only place where everything is all right.” 

The image above is Change, ©2000, acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, 13” x 44”.

The 50% sale at Artful Home has ended but will continue in my studio. My moving sale of pre-2006 work continues until we find that elusive perfect space. Email for information and appointment.   

   

About the March of Time

At the beginning of this year and for several months thereafter, I worked in my studio at assembling thirty-two collage paintings in a series I named “The Structures”. I described some of that process here and included some images. That took a few months and then for a few weeks I devoted myself to contacting those people who sell my work and attempted to add to that list. I had to put the new work out in order to exchange it for the money I require to continue with this operation. I interrupted to get ready in a hurry to open my studio for two weekends and do my own selling. I hadn’t left enough time to do it all: the framing, printing, making the space visitor-friendly, taking down half-finished work to make room for the studio-expo, sending out announcements and such. Fortunately my unpaid help, daughter Laura, was on hand to do much of the labor at my side. And the event was, as usual, thoroughly enjoyable.

There was some more marketing after that and then one day I started fantasizing about painting. I kept myself lashed to the computer and imagined the different ways I could apply paint to a surface. I was contemplating a kind of intense color different from what I had done before. I made a deal with myself. I would do an hour or two at the computer every morning before going out to the studio, to update business stuff, still only about half done. I had photographed the new work, spiffed up the images, put all the new pieces into my database, and uploaded them onto my web site. I had titled and priced and written descriptions of everything. I need to say here that while this sounds like it might be a smooth-flowing operation, it is not. I am slow to make decisions; I type with two or three fingers and I am an idiot when it comes to numbers. So okay, it takes me a while but I do a fairly good job of it finally. Except there has been no finally. After failing to keep the bargain of those pre-studio morning hours, I made a different deal. Alrighty, then — paint for as many days as it takes for you to be ready to stop for a while, a week, two weeks, whatever it takes. But, by God, if you don’t get to the marketing, the sky is going to fall in. 

So I have been painting. This is real painting, with a brush and paint, not assembling collage elements or preparing paper or canvas, or using other media to embellish the final surface or varnishing completed work. No, this is painting and it is satisfying and addictive. I’ve been at it for several weeks and it only gets better. At the beginning I was cold. I forget how paint works and how to get the effects I’m after when I’ve been away from it for a while. And now I wanted to bring another kind of vibrancy to it.

I unearthed some large old unfinished works on very heavy paper. I often put work aside because I see a potential that I don’t know how to make visible. When I looked these pieces over and I saw exactly what they needed and felt completely clear about how to make it happen, I laid out paint and went to work. And after a few days I was right on track, the work moving along almost effortlessly. I am so happy with it. I know what I am doing. There is so much to do that I want to do. There is so little time. The marketing will get done. I wonder who will do it.

Writer Isaac Asimov said “If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I’d type a little faster”.

The painting above is Partition, ©2011, acrylic & mixed media on etching paper, 26” x 16”. My 50% moving sale (still haven’t found a place) continues at Artful Home until the 28th. The image above was in their newsletter with this note from the CEO:

And then there's Joan Gold. I first saw and purchased Gold's paintings in Seattle a few decades ago, and have admired her work ever since. Imagine my thrill when she became one of the newest artists represented by Artful Home! Take a close look at her paintings; Gold's obvious love of paint, her strong lines reminiscent of both Diebenkorn and Navajo blankets, and her juicy color sense cause my heart to skip a beat. Feel free to fall in love over and over again.

About the Elusive Muse

I’m going to meet with some artist friends next week to talk about a concern common to the trade: What to do when the muse departs? I’ve been rolling it around in my brain to come up with my own take on this oft experienced plight.    My first thought is that there is no muse. Art is work and workers get tired and depleted. “Burned out” we say now. We don’t get any more scorched than the office worker or the executive, but we all get tired. Body and brain tired.

If one thinks of oneself as an artist, there’s that sudden “uh oh, it’s gone”. Who am I now? What am I without that identity? My answer (funny how I have an answer for everything.) is that person is exactly who she has always been. Maybe a bit older. I do not mean to take this lightly. I have known and still do all the anxieties that come with the calling. But do we not take ourselves a bit too seriously? Do we not exalt our practice above and beyond the simple labor that producing art is? There, I’ve gotten on my soapbox; this issue is dear to me. What we do is honest work. We used to belong to guilds, the forerunners of labor unions. We took on apprentices. No aptitude tests required. It’s easier if we give up trying to be MichaelAngelo. If we have that light within ourselves, it will shine.

My friends are talented women, dedicated to their craft. No slouches they. Two are preparing for shows and feeling uninspired. Where is that muse that I said doesn’t exist? Well, if you ask me (I’ll ask myself, thank you), that muse resides within. She does not descend all misty and lovely and generous, bearing visions and zeal from above. She is who we are, artist or human of any line of work. And that part of ourselves that creates can no more go on undernourished and overworked than can we run a marathon with no training. (God help me if I were to run one under any circumstances.) No, the muse needs care. Give her a rest, feed her with whatever it takes to revive her (a new medium, a visit to a museum, a vacation, anything). Maybe one just needs to tire of not working.

There is another possible explanation for the lost muse syndrome. That is a kind of performance anxiety that can afflict artists of all genres, often even after having the experience many times over. It can cause a severe case of painters’ paralysis. I have dealt with that and needed help and got it. While the process has to be repeated in its entirety each time it appears, the artist usually survives intact and the show goes on.

Also mentioned as a topic for the scheduled meeting was “being invisible”. I’m not sure what that’s about. My guess is it’s about being an older female in this culture. It could also be about not getting the attention one wants for the art one produces. Or maybe it’s more like not getting it in any of life’s situations. These women are not shrinking violets. I doubt that they have any trouble making their presence known anywhere. But getting the response that would satisfy, whether as aging females or artists of any gender requires that we make some noise. As an artist, talent alone does not do it. It takes a lot of work to make even a small splash. There are a great many artists producing fine work; those that profit by it are few. I long ago decided that whatever benefits I reaped apart from the joy inherent in the task, was gravy. If I could support getting up and going to my studio every day, what more could I ask for? Well, as it happens, quite a lot. But I am also fine without it. I can pay the rent and buy the food and the paint. And as for dealing with being invisible as an aging female, as long as I can call attention to my presence, I’ll do just that.

Singer Tom Glazer: For hundreds of years people have talked about artists having inspiration, but often, some persons would say, write us a symphony or write us a song, on commission. The artists would come up with a masterpiece without waiting to have their muse inspire them.

My pre-2006 paintings, reduced by 50% for the moving sale, are available now online at Artful Home. The painting above, included in the sale, is Silence, ©1996, acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, 17” x 44”.

About Being Civilized

My manner of writing requires that I spiral into myself, somewhat like a corkscrew, to reach that place within where I really reside. Only when I get there can I write anything that feels true. 

I have to be careful about what I take from that place as I am naturally opinionated and critical. How then to be really truthful and not cause offense? Well, it means choosing my words thoughtfully and considering with care the possibility of irritating my audience, or worse, alienating them. If I want to keep my reading public, and I do, I need to be honest and at the same time, prudent. Sometimes the beast escapes for a moment. My guess is that most of us harbor a wretch who poses no danger to anyone but ourselves. There’s a difficult balance to keep; sometimes I succeed and sometimes I’m not brave enough. I’m getting there.

I find that the most honest of writers, those that bare themselves bravely and dare say it all, are poets. There is more pain, fear, anger and love in poetry than in prose as a general rule. Some times, as was the case when I read Anne Sexton I become afraid for the writer. How could she dare to become so visible?

Painting, like writing, is grateful for the time you devote to it. I went to school; I read about it; I learned from other painters, but mostly I have learned by watching what paint does when I use it and by staying with it through the highs and lows. The highs have been rewarding and during low times, the painting itself has been the reward.

I speak here often on subjects that I do not completely understand. The creative operation puzzles and surprises me, but always, always, I am grateful for it.


For those who have been waiting to buy a painting, now’s the time. I am planning to move, as soon as I find the right space. To ease the ordeal, I am selling pre-2006 inventory online at Artful Home, at a 50% discount. The sale begins next week on July 13th; I will send out an email announcement as a reminder. The painting above is Interlude, ©2001, Acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, 9”x 26.5”.