Lecture Notes: Elizabeth Peyton @ SAAM

Last week I went to hear painter Elizabeth Peyton speak about her work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She used an unusual but lovely method of doing so. She made a short statement at the beginning of her presentation, then showed us over 100 images of her works in silence. They were projected large on a screen at the front of the auditorium; a few members of the audience seemed annoyed by the lack of narrative and departed. Most of us, however, sat in rapt attention watching the luminous images flash by.

After the slideshow, Peyton took many questions from the audience. Here are my notes on some of her answers.

-Painting is love & beauty & history captured two-dimensionally and telegraphed back to us over time.
-Literature (especially In Search of Lost Time & Balzac's writings) is very important to her, especially in understanding the life of the artist.
-She likes to work in a smaller scale and tries to make her paintings project into a room, to take up the maximum amount of space with a small amount of materials
-Printmaking generates a productive awkwardness. It is freeing because no one is expecting anything, and one can make a lot of work at once.
-She feels very connected to Romanticism, especially that Romantic sense of being totally alive.
-Painting communicated transcendence in human beings. It captures what is transcendent in an individual (beauty, vision, intelligence, etc.) and communicates that across time.
-The best things she got out of art school are good friends and learning to be self reliant.

(image: Elizabeth Peyton, Live to Ride (E.P.), 2003)

Lecture Notes: Ann Hamilton @ NGA

Last Friday I was one of Washington's lucky few who got to hear genius/visionary/artist Ann Hamilton speak at the National Gallery of Art. AMAZING. I think the whole audience would have sat there and listened to her til midnight if the museum had allowed her to go on that long (unfortunately for us, they cut her off at 5 because the building was closing. Lame!).

She had a beautiful way of using anecdotes about her life, work, and creation thereof to explain her underlying ideas and philosophies of art making. Here are my notes:

-A studio practice allows you to pay attention to what you pay attention to. A studio cultivates the situation for this to happen.
-Art is a process of finding what you need.
-Conditions for that finding are created and cultivated in the studio.
-A studio is therefore a metaphorical space, and can be wherever an artist deems fit.
-Things she pays attention to: forms of attention, felt qualities, processes of accumulation.
-An empty table is like a blank page.
-Art can satisfy the longing for a presence so acute that you lose self awareness.

I only wish I had written more down!

< complaint > National Gallery, do us artists here in Washington a solid and publicize this stuff more, will ya? Act like it's the big deal that it is? And maybe also invite these major, major figures like Ms. Hamilton to speak at a time when more of us can attend? Because lots of us have day jobs. Also, universities? Why weren't more students in attendance to hear this contemporary master? Because I think it would have been educational for them. < / complaint >

In Search of Q, Perfection Edition

My Christmas gift to my tastebuds: a trip to my most favorite barbecue joint. It's down the hill from my parents' house in a strip mall in Little Rock. I don't have much other commentary....this place is pretty much perfect. Yum.

Studio Re-do

Last week's studio clean up turned into a full blown studio revamp, including rearranging the wallboards, furniture, and building a table. I had been mulling over this idea in my head for a while, because there was a large support beam in the way of one of my painting walls. So, I moved my storage/desk area to the blocked wall, freeing up the rest of the walls for work. I added some leftover paint from our home office for a little snap and energy (who wouldn't want a studio like this?). And now I'm back to getting some good work done.

Before

After:



I plan to open up the blocked basement windows at some point (currently serving as book and old work storage). But that's in the future.

Photo Essay: Things We Do at Home

Franke's


Dillard's


Friends


Catfish


Community Bakery


Sweet Babies


I-40

Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction

Yesterday I went to the Phillips Collection to see the Georgia O’Keeffe Abstraction show one more time before it closes on Sunday. It was a bit less crowded this time around, so I could look longer and closer at the paintings on the walls.

My favorite rooms were the early and late ones, especially the watercolors made in Texas around 1917 and the cloud and door paintings from the 1960’s in the last gallery. (The middle rooms got a little muddled up to me as a viewer, all kind of running together; I needed more visual breaks or contrasts in there to mark the passage of time in O’Keeffe’s career.) I felt like I could sense the full force of O’Keeffe’s willingness to experiment and chart her own path in these rooms.

Some of the didactic material on the wall included quotes from O’Keeffe in which she talks about trying to paint the way something made her feel, rather than just painting the way it looked, in order to convey her meaning to the viewer. She wanted to not show us a picture of Nature but give visual presence to the feeling of being in Nature. Yes.

I’ve been thinking a lot about abstraction vs. figuration as I prepare my new studio so I can get back to work. I was starting to worry that maybe abstraction, a place I’ve been moving towards, doesn’t really have that much currency anymore. Georgia O’Keeffe’s work is making me think again.

(side note/complaint: I overheard some of the most cringe-worthy school tours while in this exhibit. The docents seemed like they had just memorized a script and couldn’t deviate or improvise. Instead of letting students revel in the color and wonder of this great artist’s work, discovering it for themselves, they were being force-fed this predetermined narrative about the art and its meaning. Very depressing.)

(Image is O'Keeffe's Black Door with Red, 1954, from the Phillips Collection's website. Can't you feel that hot Santa Fe sun beating down on your head?)

Lightness of Being

A few weeks ago, I went to (yet another) gallery talk by artist Andy Holtin, half of Causality Labs, about the duo's exhibition at American University's Katzen Art Center. (I guess I am making up for three years of almost never going to these things by now going to lots lots lots.)

I really enjoyed Holtin's talk; his presentation combined the best aspects of casual conversation with high academic discourse. However, what I've been turning over in my head ever since is one particular phrase he use at the beginning of his talk. He described himself as "trying to be an artist" rather than beginning with the assumption that he already was one. I am really enjoying thinking about the implications of this phrase: that this is an identity we can put on and take off; that identity as an artist is not fixed; that an artist is never fully developed, always growing more fully into his or her practice.

Capitol Hill Pumpkins

Happy Halloween!

Notes on a Texas Return, Day 3

I am feeling a surprising and deep appreciation for being back in Texas. The oaks and grackles and horsey drivers rise up to greet me.

***
All the weird and funky nooks and crannies are out for everyone to see and seem to be appreciated by everyone. I feel that maybe Angelenos miss out on large swaths of their city; there, we are separated by freeways, but here they corral us together in loops and pens.

***
Though the air shimmers above the blacktop, the heat just gives folks one more thing to talk about; it dampens foreheads and backs of knees, but not spirits. Everyone is just in search of a good time, a cold beer, or a margarita and happy to let you have yours.

***
When I talk I can hear that my accent has come back. It feels like talking with big blown roses falling out of my mouth. It feels good and lazy.

***
I notice that women are different here than in California. LA women are facially subtle, keeping their features still and cool. Women here talk with their whole faces. I wonder if I do this?

***
Men here are different too. They automatically hold the door to let me go first, never stopping to consider if I might be a radical feminazi and therefore offended by their politess. They are chatty like the women, and lean on things with one arm, and probably think I am a bad driver in an oh-shucks kind of way. But I'm actually a very good driver, since I can drive a standard and have only totaled one car ever.

A Whole 'Nother Country

I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, during the 1980s and 90s. I remember thinking of cities like Memphis, New Orleans, and Dallas as distant metropolises full of glamour, neon lights, and general excitement. These were the places where my well heeled classmates would be taken by their mothers to shop for new school clothes or one-of-a-kind cotillion dresses, or would accompany their fathers to attend action-packed sporting events. Dallas had a special place in this starry constellation because a picture of it entered my family’s living room every Friday evening (in the form of J.R., Sue Ellen, and company on Dallas) and sometimes, with luck, on New Year’s Day (in the form of an Arkansas Razorbacks appearance at the Cotton Bowl). To my mind, Dallas, with its distinctive lit-up skyline and Neiman Marcus catalogs, was the epitome of a city; New York might as well have been on another planet.

Well, now I have the chance to learn about the real Dallas, to replace this childhood picture of it in my mind. For the next two months, I’ll be living and working at UT Dallas’ Central Trak artist residency, in the neighborhood of Deep Ellum. I’m looking forward to learning about a new art community and reconnecting with my Texas ties. I’ll be posting about my adventures here. Stay tuned!

Monique van Genderen at Happy Lion

I have been a couple of times now to see Monique van Genderen’s new paintings at Happy Lion Gallery in Chinatown, and I still don’t know what to think about them. I am seduced and repelled at the same time: the paintings’ slick, shiny surfaces and bright colors beckon but are ultimately inscrutable, like a tagged-up wall.

The 6’x4’ panels march around the gallery walls in lock-step, with flower forms, rainbow arches, and blocky areas of color flowing from one to the next. I kind of want to lick them (flavors like Tutti Fruitti and Daquiri Ice—Baskin Robbins circa 1985—come to mind), and I also want to wrap them around giant gift baskets for my girlfriends, like cellophane. The gallery space feels like a haute-couture fete. But in my jeans and t-shirt with fingers smelling like the egg roll I just ate, I am the frumpy girl at this party; I can’t untangle the refined language, perfect manners, and manicured surfaces of these abstractions.

After reading back over what I just wrote, I see that my interpretation of these paintings could be called feminine, as I have described them in the language of Vogue or the late Domino. I get the feeling from her artist statement that van Genderen would be okay with that. She describes her work thusly:

“Paint hangs on the surface, exposing the structure of the panel, not unlike the various states of dress a model for couture might display, showing contour and line through bone beneath the fabric.”

She goes on:

“Let’s say they have nothing to do with the figure at all, it is at least true that the works were made by a feminine hand, trying to carve out theoretical space in this world. For weaponry I resort to scale and boldness of color in order to cast about my subjectivity. Abstraction and materiality are the indicators and the language for what lies beneath.”

Subjective experience, beauty and meaning in pattern, idealization of feminine difference: aren’t these hallmarks of Feminist art? So maybe I was right after all to picture myself in a room full of beauty queens who are preening for my gaze yet are aloof from the need for my regard at the same time. I am still left not knowing what to think, but I really want to join the dance, all the same.

Van Genderen's work is on view through July 11. Image is an installation shot from the gallery's website.

Art Notes from Culver City

When my landlords come over every so often to clean up the yard and look around the place, I make myself scarce and go see gallery shows if I’m not working at the museum (I guess I have a hard time getting studio work done when other folks are hanging around). Today was one of those days, so I lit out for Culver City.

I didn’t do my research very well ahead of time, as several galleries were closed for installation. But of the shows I did manage to see, it seemed like big, heavy-hitting dude art was an overarching theme—I’m especially thinking of Kehinde Wiley at Roberts & Tilton and Jedidiah Caesar at Susanne Vielmetter. I don’t mean this as a criticism. Sometimes hyper-real, towering paintings or hulking piles of trash and resin are just what you need to take you out of your own head and into another place, time, or existence. But a couple of group shows, that seemed to be involved with other concerns entirely, caught my attention more.

One was Keeper of Light at Sandroni Rey, an exhibition of smallish portraiture in diverse media. The one work in particular that I looked at for a long time I later learned is a daguerreotype made by Chuck Close; it is a small, mirrored surface imprinted with the image of a sunflower. A viewer can only clearly see the sunflower when she stands with her own reflection intersecting it. I felt myself to be part of this artwork in a very connected and intimate way, as I bobbed and weaved to see the whole image—maybe living with Dan Graham’s work for the past few months at MOCA has made me especially receptive to this line of thinking. (Keeper of Light up til May 23.)

I was also interested in the group photography show Mysterium at Kinkead Contemporary, around the corner on Washington Blvd. These were also small scale, and seemed to me when I was in front of them to be about the non-verbal, and unexplainable and ineffable beauty. Now that I am home and have read the online press release, I’m not sure I was in tune with the curatorial thread….however, still worth a look. (Mysterium up til June 13.)
***
I chose Culver City for my outing today because I had heard about a show of unmade bed paintings at Walter Maciel Gallery. However, I had to wait a while to see this one, as the doors did not open at 11 as promised by the sign on the door. So, I circled back and saw this show last.

Frank Ryan’s 20-odd paintings (all sizes, all surfaces, all times of day and night) of an unmade bed (his perhaps?) seemed to me to be meditations on the beauty of the mundane and the every day. The paintings are all of the same bed, in the same room, with the same linens; however, the objects, pets, and points of view change or move from painting to paintng. Taken together, they look like a choreographed dance of light (duvet) and dark (sheets) forms rolling, folding, and bunching around each other. Individually and up close, they are both fast studies of subtle and specific lighting situations and built-up abstractions of brushstrokes on brushstrokes.

I loved this show very much, but I am biased towards all things bed related. You should go see it for yourself (up through June 3).

(image is an installation shot from Frank Ryan's show at Walter Maciel Gallery, from the gallery's website.)

Travels and Brief Mentions, Long Overdue

After a year-long exile, I went back home for my birthday at the beginning of this month. I’m a little ashamed to say that my memories had faded a bit. As soon as I woke up from the long, dark plane ride, I was gobsmacked by the green and the wet, like my eyeballs had been painted with chlorophyll. I marveled at the crazy, figure shaped oak leaves, the heavy, moist air, the big, muddy river. I missed out on barbecue, because I’d eaten too much Big Mista the week before (party leftovers!). Catfish, Franke’s, and red beans & rice were on the menu instead.

***
I saw a couple of art shows over a month ago at Jancar Gallery in Chinatown that I kept meaning to blog about, but clearly I’ve had other things (food! party!) on the brain. So even though the shows are down, I still want to give a shout out to Jancar for some rockin’ feminist presentations: Ilene Segalove upstairs (hurray for old-skool, patriarchy-skewering photo appropriation!), with Alison Foshee & Katina Huston downstairs (three cheers for obsessive, super crafty, mixed media blitz!). This show made me smile bigger than any has in a long time.

I’m going to check out some more shows this week, so stay tuned…

(photos above are of the Arkansas River, taken by me; and of Alison Foshee's works Basketroid and Supernova, both mixed media and 2009, from the Jancar Gallery website.)

In Search of Q, Part 2

To any regular patrons of the Atwater Village Farmers’ Market on Sundays, this is old news. I, however, tend to be a weekend lay-a-bed, so it was not til a couple weeks ago when I had a craving for tamales that my nose led me to the source of my newest barbecue crush: Bigmista. That weekend I demurred, going instead with the old tamale standby for lunch (pork and sweet corn, obviously). M suggested that, even though my nose was swooning for the heady aroma of wood smoke and melting fat, I didn’t want to get my hopes up to have them dashed by subpar Q. So when we got home, I did some research and discovered other bloggers raving about Bigmista. I resolved to give him a try…

This past Sunday, we did just that. Two Mini Mistas (a sandwich, a side, a cold drink), both with pulled pork, one with beans, one with potato salad (cole slaw was gone by 12:30). I focused on the meat first, after pouring out my little plastic cuplet of sauce and dipping my finger in—sweet and smoky, black-peppery like what I encountered in Illinois. I sampled the meat with my fingers too, since it overflowed the bun. MMMM! Tender juiciness, just the right amount of slick greasiness, it rivaled Whole Hog, my personal back-home favorite, next to McClard’s (which, really, you go to for the atmosphere and maybe the tamales, which are wholely different from tamales as experienced out here, served with ketchup and Saltines).

I took home a catering menu, from which I can order meat and sides by the pound. I think Bigmista is going to be making an appearance at the upcoming Team M 30th Birthday Party. Be prepared with your wet naps.

***
ps – oh! The potato salad! So good, made with mustard like it ought to be, like my Aunt Inez used to do. I think she would approve.

How y'all doin?

Hi blog-o-sphere! I didn’t forget about you, just taking a break during which I became hypnotized by our national political life and simultaneously mired in the cadmium-yellow-medium/dioxyzene-purple poo-brown muck of my studio. I’ve been kind of bogged down in there, so I haven’t felt like I had much to say with words, either.

So, I organized a crit group! I invited some of my fellow museum educators (who are also artists, but more importantly are extremely good at talking about art) over to have a look-see. Turns out things aren’t as dire as I thought. They helped me figure out why little things that start out with promise turn to crap, and they gave me a couple of insights into things I am doing that are starting to get somewhere. So now I feel like I can see a few more steps in front of me down the dark hallway of art making. I hope I also gave them some similarly useful feedback; I know we talked for a couple of hours, so with luck something smart came out of my mouth at some point.

***

I have been thinking more and more that I seriously lack in the personal connections department. Even though I have lived in LA for over two years now, I barely know any other artists (and if I do know any, I don’t know them “as artists,” if that makes sense, but in other contexts). It’s so dicey getting to know people here…it seems like everyone is afraid to make friendly advances, because they might be interpreted as concealing ulterior motives (like, can this person introduce me to that hot curator over there?). Maybe it’s just because of where I’m from, but I am used to sharing what meager art resources or knowledge I have, quite openly and with the intention of being generous. There was so little attention paid to art in my hometown by the general population (how 'bout them Hogs?...not that I don't love them too, but) that us artists had to really cling to each other for support. So I guess I am flailing around, trying to find some other people to grab onto. I hope I have found a few.

smelly memory

a few days ago i went thrifting and came home with a few choice items. i hand washed these and left them to dry in the bathtub. afterwards, every time i went into the bathroom, i was hit with this certain smell....a smell like wet coats hung up in the hall to dry, with a touch of soap or dryer sheet. exactly like the smell of the hallway in my old illinois apartment building.

at this time of year as the season just barely begins to change, i think back to moving to illinois from arkansas, to my first good apartment, and being alone in it after my family had left. the promise of a fresh start, crisp blue skies, all walks through fallen leaves to the library or the parking lot or to a snug bar downtown...the future promise of good steam heat, promised by the wet coat laundry smell in the basement near the boiler the super will light in a couple of months, steaming up through my clicking, tapping radiator vents to fog the windows and turn the streetlights into fuzzy halos.

coming home from the library, wooly-gloved hands full of books to read in bed under blankets. sweet garret life, traded in for sunny skies and Santa Ana winds.

diggin' in the dirt

tomorrow morning i head up to san francisco to install some work for a small solo show at The LAB. so in preparation, over the holiday weekend, i gardened (instead of packing, washing clothes, or getting my ducks in a row)!

we have a beautiful backyard spot, but it has some serious gaps in the plant department. i started the greening process by the path up to our front steps, with the help of some succulent cuttings from my mother-in-law and some cactus parts i found around in the neighborhood yard trash. turns out prickly pears are really easy to root.

grow, my pretties! quick, before the landlords come back! :D

Eastside Wins!

A couple of weeks ago, just before I went to DC, I was in Culver City looking at art. There were a couple of interesting shows, such as Andrea Cohen at Walter Maciel and Soo Kim at Sandroni Rey. But everything else....wow. Boring-ass, half finished, sloppy painting carried the day. Even Takashi Murakami at Blum & Poe seemed repetitive and so-what after the MOCA extravaganza this fall. So I finished that afternoon feeling profoundly bored with art and wondering if my own work is similarly blah (not a good feeling with a couple more shows in the pipeline).

But yesterday, gallery-going and looking at paintings were redeemed for me. I went to Kristi Engle Gallery in Highland Park to catch the tail end of Mary Addison Hackett's solo show there. This time....Wow! I could feel from looking at these paintings that Hackett was really going for it; they glowed with her joy in their making. I got up close to study these paintings, and I felt like each one held a hundred little lessons on how to paint: here's how to make crisp linear marks but not make it over-labored; this is how you paint things out and make it look like you meant to; here's how to smoosh one color into another; this is a good way to reference another painter (Phillip Guston, in this case); fluorescent paints open up whole new worlds of color. Rock on!

Tomorrow, June 7, is the last day of this show. Go check it out!

Here & Now @ Transformer Gallery

Last week I was in Washington, DC, installing work for the group show Here & Now at Transformer Gallery. The show had already gained some press around town, because part of it (at a satellite location) got shut down by the City. So, despite a huge rainstorm, we had a really great turnout at our talk and opening reception (thanks to Steve, Justin, and BMac especially!). It was wonderful to learn a little bit about the DC area's art community and to be part of it for a little while.

It was also a wonderful experience to go to a new place and make artwork. I was more or less improv-ing as I worked, letting the experiences I had in the city, in the gallery, and looking out the window inform my choices. I felt very open to the world around me for that whole week, expecting to find inspiration in every face or around every corner. Thanks, DC!

Final installment of Here & Now, with work by me and the amazing Valerie Molnar, on view at Transformer Gallery through June 14. Go see it!

In Search of Q

A couple of weeks ago, on my birthday, I developed a craving for some barbecue. Out here, "barbecue" is a term loosely used, pretty much covering anything cooked outside. Maybe even some things cooked inside, such as Korean barbecue. It can even refer to the event or act of cooking itself. Where I am from, we refer to most of this type of food as "grilled" (and to the event as a "cook-out") because it is cooked directly over the heat source at high temperatures for a short period of time. Barbecue (or BBQ for the spelling-challenged) is an altogether different thing, not so much an event as a particular substance.

It requires a smoker (or other indirect-cooking contraption) and lots of time. Folks often think it is all about the sauce, but here they are wrong—good quality meat should be used (either pork or beef, depending on one’s regional proclivities), and the sauce or marinade should serve to compliment, not mask it. Spicy and sweet, smoky, or vinegar-tangy, again depending on regional preferences, the sauce should work its way under your fingernails and puddle in the corners of your mouth, providing a few hours or days of lingering stain and smell (wet naps are useful here). Its richness and fat are best alleviated by cole slaw (some put it directly on their sandwich) and iced tea.

So, because of the non-specificity of this term "barbecue" in the West, my search was not an easy one. I was not helped along by the birthday-cake malaise that set in, so it wasn't until last weekend that I ventured forth to a spot near the Culver City gallery district called JNJ Burger Shack. Despite the name, this place serves up some mighty 'cue and is one of the few places in town where you can eat on site. M and I both ordered pulled pork sandwiches, with orders of potato salad (which was perfect, made with mustard and sweet pickle like my Aunt Inez does) and beans on the side. Also a slice of sweet potato pie and lemonades (iced tea and cole slaw were not on offer). The sandwiches arrived, meat overflowing buns, dripping thick, black-peppery sauce; we tucked in and cleaned our plates. We did not eat for the rest of the day.

The proprietor of JNJ Burger Shack is from Louisiana. He wants to retire back there one day for some peace and quiet. But I hope he sticks around for a little while longer -- I'll be needing a few more of those sandwiches.