Love the way she is pulling collage into painting...
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Instances of Disorder
Louise Erdrich Quote #2
And now the second quote...about being a writer and having children. As there are so few instances of women talking about being artists and mothers, and as I am nearly 8 months pregnant with my second child, I am very interested in any meditation on the link between making art and motherhood.
"By having children, I've both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. [...] With a child you certainly can't be a Bruce Chatwin or a Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona. If you value your relationships with your children, you can't write about them. You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one's inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I'd have written with less fervor; I wouldn't understand life in the same way. I'd write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I'd probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I'd have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I've made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor."
"By having children, I've both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. [...] With a child you certainly can't be a Bruce Chatwin or a Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona. If you value your relationships with your children, you can't write about them. You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one's inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I'd have written with less fervor; I wouldn't understand life in the same way. I'd write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I'd probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I'd have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I've made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor."
Louise Erdrich Quote #1
In high school I fell in love with the books of Louise Erdrich. I recall writing a paper on one of her first novels, Love Medicine. I actually haven't read much of her writing of late, so I can't vividly recall why I loved her so much. I do think it had to do with her being one of the first writers who helped me see that it is possible to phrase something in the most particular of ways--in a way that no one else does, or has ever thought of before. This inclination toward invention has grabbed hold of me ever since.
My mother sent me this week's Writer's Almanac; Louise Erdrich is quoted extensively. The first quote I have to record here involves book-love, which I very much relate to:
"We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif—books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at beside, to be dutifully examined—to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can't imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is."
My mother sent me this week's Writer's Almanac; Louise Erdrich is quoted extensively. The first quote I have to record here involves book-love, which I very much relate to:
"We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif—books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at beside, to be dutifully examined—to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can't imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is."
Monday, June 6, 2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
Everyone's oddness
Yesterday evening I happened upon the below entry from Anne Truitt's wonderful, wonderful journal Daybook. (I read the book for the first time the summer before my freshmen year of college and have perused it periodically ever since as it is a wealth of thoughtfulness about being an artist.) I record this passage here because she writes what I experience as I move through my days between the studio and the home--so much of life and living for me is remarking on how amazing is this color against that one, in the context of a room or a person or a collection of everyday objects. Just yesterday I took pictures of a bowl of shelled fava beans, (which will no doubt find there way here soon) not because the bowl of shelled fava beans was in and of itself so remarkable (though I might argue for the remarkble-ness of fava beans actually, tossed with garlic, olive oil and parmesan) but because my eye loved the settled repetition of their piled up shapes, as well as their pale green color. Somehow those fava beans relate to painting for me.
From Anne Truitt's journal Daybook:
24 October
I opened my eyes a moment ago into the maple leaves outside my window. Almost simultaneously with the act of identifying them as these particular leaves and thus placing myself, I saw them as paintings, an arrangement of values.
The other afternoon when I was entertaining my daughter Mary in her bath, she asked me whether I thought artists were "just born that way." I said I thought they might be. "How?" she asked. I said I didn't know, but that there was rarely a time when I wasn't half-consciously translating what was around me into terms of art, that as I stood at the door--for I was on my way out when this exchange took place--I had been absorbing her brown body against the white tub, the yellow top of the nail brush, the dark green shampoo bottle, Sam's blue towel, her orange towel, and could make a sculpture called Mary in the Tub if I ever chose to. These elements arranged themselves into proportions of color, the weights of which gave me the meaning of what I was seeing. Mary and I laughed, partly out of the pleasure of talking to one another and partly out of the wry recognition of everyone's oddness.
From Anne Truitt's journal Daybook:
24 October
I opened my eyes a moment ago into the maple leaves outside my window. Almost simultaneously with the act of identifying them as these particular leaves and thus placing myself, I saw them as paintings, an arrangement of values.
The other afternoon when I was entertaining my daughter Mary in her bath, she asked me whether I thought artists were "just born that way." I said I thought they might be. "How?" she asked. I said I didn't know, but that there was rarely a time when I wasn't half-consciously translating what was around me into terms of art, that as I stood at the door--for I was on my way out when this exchange took place--I had been absorbing her brown body against the white tub, the yellow top of the nail brush, the dark green shampoo bottle, Sam's blue towel, her orange towel, and could make a sculpture called Mary in the Tub if I ever chose to. These elements arranged themselves into proportions of color, the weights of which gave me the meaning of what I was seeing. Mary and I laughed, partly out of the pleasure of talking to one another and partly out of the wry recognition of everyone's oddness.
Friday, May 20, 2011
Summer--finally...
It is 8:15 as I write.
I am still in my walking clothes. Chris is making an omelette for us both--with broccoli from the garden. Just-cut broccoli is a revelation; I didn't know it tasted that much better than broccoli in any other state of being! We have no place to go but our studios today.
It is our summer--finally. Grades are posted, classes are ended, so the business of full-time studio work can really begin. Last week I returned from my third residency at the Hambidge Center for the Arts, a fitting beginning for summer. I focused on small collages, and so I spent a lot of time sitting at the desk pictured above. From my perch in Hambidge's light-filled Garden Cottage, I made a slew of collages which have helped me think through how to approach some bigger paintings I think, some bigger collages too--we'll see of course. For now I can breathe deeply and relish this season's beginning.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)