Randomly Andy

Art History

Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately, almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.

Leaning back in their chairs, they talked and talked with their heads rocking from side to side. Words were said about line and values and composition, lots of words, such as are always being said.

From "Loneliness" in Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

The creative appetite is forever insatiable. Its tardy, insufficient repasts land in the belly with no more weight than the low-cal special at a seedy diner. Paradoxically, this paltry meal's main attraction, at least to the artist, is its green (lettuce), white (cottage cheese), and glistening gold (canned peach slice) composition of sundry textural elements atop a smooth, flute-edged circular form. The edibles, as such, are useless: they are merely props in a still life. Take, for example, White Plumes, Matisse's rosy portrait of an alabaster-skinned woman in a sumptuous Victorian hat. "What a beautiful hat!" an admirer of the painting once said to the artist. "Madam," replied Matisse, "that is not a hat. It is a painting."

The tawdry myth of the starving artist might also be served on a fluted plate, this one full of no calories at all, since people whose bellies ache for lettuce or cottage cheese or peaches do not make art. They may think on their hunger, but usually, they are too tired to think at all. They sleep for want of food. Not surprisingly, sociological and psychological studies of Western artists have found that most are born into the middle classes. Why? That well-fed status opens onto a psychic staircase. In art, a passage through which one can tumble is requisite because the creative act is at once ascension and descent. It goes from the stomach to the bowel, rises back to the heart, and ultimately emits from every orifice. That is the route of art. The creative compulsion may thrust and lift, but it wants to spiral downward.

To affirm this, one need only recall Gully Jimson, that artist's artist, late of Joyce Cary's novel, The Horse's Mouth. In most people's minds, Gully is inseparable from Alec Guinness, who portrayed him in the classic 1958 film. We meet "broke, difficult, conniving, uncouth" Gully right after he has been released from jail, having served a short sentence for a petty something-or-other. In a matter of a few schizophrenic minutes, our anti-hero goes from a state of utter self-disgust, illustrated when he grinds out his cigarette butt on a half-finished canvas, to a state of ecstatic rapture, brilliantly haloed by the film's lighting designer, when he sees an expanse of bare white wall in the plush apartment of would-be art patrons Sir William and Lady Beeder.

As luck would have it, the Beeders are about to leave for an extended holiday. Ravenous, Gully proceeds to "destroy their home (and that of their downstairs neighbor) with a huge block of stone and some help from a sculptor friend." Crushed, he returns to mooching and scheming until he happens on a bombed-out church scheduled for demolition, where, with a cadre of adoring art students, he paints his masterpiece on a once-holy wall. From his heaving belly, Gully vomits a voluptuous mural encompassing every sordid and blissful human folly under heaven and above hell. Then, just when the mural is complete and satisfaction is on the tip of his tongue, the church succumbs to the wreckers. That is the endgame of art. The creative compulsion, because it is forever insatiable, always tends towards the temporary.

That compulsion must be lodged deep within my bowel because my own life as an artist began scatologically. My parents have told me many times (by way of trying to rub it in, I suppose) the story of when I was an infant in my crib, whiling away some of my then-infinite leisure time. My amusement was smearing my own excrement on the wall above my crib, something that I am sure gave me as much pleasure as actually excreting it, and bringing to mind the point that while chromatically rather ordinary, human excrement is a wholly renewable painting medium. The result of that mural was symbolically similar to Gully's: my father had to buy a pair of nose plugs and repaint the bedroom in Dutch Boy pink. Fortunately, my defecatory desecration was attributed to my young age, and my creative compulsion survived the incident intact.

In truth, my artistic appetites only grew, fed by the gift, on my seventh birthday, of a John Gnagy Art Studio in a Box. John Gnagy was the father of television artists, preceding by two decades such instructional luminaries as Kim Novak and Elke Somer. His pedigree was his black goatee; his chapeau was a beret. When it came to marketing, he was a genius. The sheer size of the Gnagy Box, about three feet square, and the array of materials in it (miniature slabs of petrified watercolor, shot-size bottles of tempera, brand X crayons, finger paints, pastels, colored papers, synthetic brushes, and drawing pencils) made me feel like Laurence Olivier surveying the lands of Manderly in the film Rebecca.

When I first got the Art Studio, I was afraid to use it. I knew that its contents would eventually be consumed, leaving nothing but an outsized empty box. So instead of setting about producing my juvenilia, I simply set the Studio out on the sidewalk and gazed at my delicious art paraphernalia, hoping the neighbor children would come to envy my astounding luck. As I vaguely recall, the art supplies were used up within just a few weeks, but luckily, that is an entire era to a child artist. I learned then that the parasitic companion to the creative compulsion is the fear of having no art supplies.

After writing the previous paragraphs from memory, I searched Google to verify the spelling of John Gnagy's name. Lo and behold, I found another person's version of my story, which only goes to show that the compulsion to create can, as I hinted previously, be stimulated through mass marketing. The story appeared on the Web site of a British watercolor artist named Linda Gunn:

Influenced by her grandfather, one of the first Disney animators, and a mother who exposed her to the Arts, Linda Gunn's interest in art began at an early age. Most significantly, a gift of John Gnagy's Art Studio in a Box - a set containing oil paints, watercolors, charcoal, pastel, and various drawing supplies, along with step-by-step instructions for each medium - helped structure Linda's art education and focus her artistic goals.

"Structure Linda's art education and focus her goals?" Yes, indeed! The titles of the paintings in Linda's online gallery of formulaic watercolors mark her as valedictorian of the John Gnagy School of Art Education: Yorkshire Cows, Midland Sheep, Dr. Owl, Naughty Raccoons, and my favorite, In the Cemetery, which treats us to three raccoons (the naughty ones, I imagine) departing a sweetly rain-drenched, graveyard-in-the-enchanted-forest under the cozy protection of a black umbrella. If my last name were Gunn, I would change my first name from Andy to Annie and shoot paint onto canvas with a buffalo rifle. In the John Gnagy aesthetic, art-making becomes little more than sleight of hand.

In sixth grade I returned to murals. I had been assigned my own territory on a twenty-foot length of manila paper that had been laid on the vinyl floor in the hallway alongside my classroom, and my stomach was growling loudly. That territory was India, and the intent of the mural was to depict, in tempera, the peoples of the world. I was painting an enormous elephant, and my self-imposed challenge was to mix a shade of gray that I would instantly recognize as essence of elephant. As I alternately added more black and more white, throwing in blobs of blue and dollops of yellow for nuance, the quantity of paint I produced became enough for an entire herd. Unfortunately, though I was oblivious to his presence, my teacher happened to observe me and roundly chided me for waste. Little did he know that the creative compulsion thrives on scolding. It loves to be crapped upon, no matter the color of the shit du jour. Ah, the contentment I felt as I mixed and mixed! I was an innocent wading guilelessly about in the paint pot, and had no idea that any color cut with white eventually turns to gray if you mix it long enough. That is the primary reason that overworked paintings always tend towards gray.

Having noted the insistence of gray, I must laughingly reveal that my most grossly overworked easel painting was a small portrait of a clown. I will call him Doctor Grey. I was in my early twenties when I painted him, and amazingly, I had already painted many pleasant portraits. The only clown I knew on sight was Emmett Kelly, so I must have thought him an archetype. But tragically, I could not translate that image from my mind to canvas. Not only did Doctor Grey not look like Emmett, he did not look at all in the pink.

Doctor Grey's pathetic little head rests on a V-shaped neck that narrows almost to the vanishing point where it meets his shrunken shoulders near the bottom of the picture. His five-o'clock shadow, which extends to his collar, makes him look like he might be cursed with an overactive pituitary gland. Doctor Grey's gigantic nose, though spatially undifferentiated from the rest of his face, resembles that of a proboscis monkey. Instead of looking like a happy-go-lucky red clown nose, it looks painfully inflamed. Doctor Grey has only one developed ear, which, had he been painted in profile, would have been understandable. But in my frontal composition, his barely visible little node of a left ear reads like a heart-rending mutation. In spite of its disproportionate size, Doctor Grey's right ear, which stretches from his severely receded chin to his flat-topped cranium, presents itself as an outgrowth of the neck, bringing to mind an overgrown corollary of the defect seen in his left ear. With no training in drawing, the painterly chore of indicating the contours that characterize a human ear must have seemed to me like climbing Everest. Underneath the visible layer of paint, I can imagine a host of scraped-off or painted-over attempts at rendering an ear. The creative compulsion, when undercut by a lack of facility, becomes constipated, which leads to fruitless overworking and the ultimate lie of calling unrealized paintings finished. Unable to shit, the frustrated artist simply gets off the pot.

My pitiful clown portrait has only one redeeming quality: Doctor Grey's remarkable acceptance of his fate. I make this judgment not from vivid recall, but from immediacy, since it was only yesterday that I wrested Doctor Grey from my father's woodworking shop, where he has hung for thirty-six years, accumulating a thick veil of blonde sawdust over his still life. When I showed Doc to my eighty-nine-year-old father, all he said was, "Now that's my idea of a clown!" (See figure 1.)

The creative compulsion is molded (and sometimes made moldy) by the cultural norms that define selfhood. Discernable risk in a painting is a bedrock tenet of modernist aesthetics, reflecting the notion that because we were once devolved, "progress" has intrinsic value. Pubescent artists have not yet been pressured to become comfortable with discomfort, and do not yet know that the road ahead will be pot-holed with convoluted efforts at self-contextualization. Their worlds are not large enough for the kind of self-comparison that leads to egocentric insecurity. They are what they have been, only more so. This is the best explanation I can offer for my prolonged rabbi-painting period, which began in high school and continued into my early twenties.

My first rabbi, made for my grandparents, was nothing short of a fall from grace. Regrettably, I had made the youthful misstep of painting a hijab, rather than a kepaw, on the gentleman's head. Both head coverings are Semitic, but oh, the difference in political perception! My grandfather was rendered speechless upon receiving the painting. "Grandpa," I said to Boruch Wojewod (who was renamed Boris Ward at Ellis Island), "that is not an Arab. It is a rabbi." Even in a juvenile, the creative compulsion defends itself by attempting to explicate in language what it has neglected to make visually explicit. Herein lie the first steps on the road to a lifetime of "finishing" art works by placing interpretive placards alongside them at exhibitions.

To atone for my sin, I felt morally compelled to paint a second rabbinical portrait for my grandparents, which, though I did not know it, my grandfather donated to the St. Paul Jewish Community Center. I discovered this quite by accident when, a few years after his passing, I saw a photograph in the Highland Villager newspaper. It accompanied an article called "Need for adult literacy programs is growing," and had obviously been posed by the photographer. The image was a Russian immigrant woman, shown from the elbows up, sitting at a table and reading from an open book. Hanging on the wall above her was my second rabbi portrait, which I will call Zayde, meaning grandfather.

When I saw Zayde, about twenty-five years after having painted him and fifteen years after having been trained in art school, my jaded eyes fairly popped out of my head. He is an ancient, hawk-nosed, fish-lipped fellow clothed in a yarmulke and robe, sitting at a table reading a book that is devoid of content, his knobby elbows propped on the table, and his left hand, which is longer than his head, cupping his sunken cheek. His eyelids cover downward-trained eyes that are, in size and shape, exactly like the under-developed egg yolks that, to the delight of our taste buds, used to occasionally be packed with freshly slaughtered kosher chickens. I had painted Zayde from an illustration in a free Passover Haggadah that my mother had received with the purchase of a case of matzo, but a secondary source cannot excuse the degradation this wizened old soul had suffered at my hand.

How malformed poor Zayde's left forearm is! It looks something like the shrunken, specialized forearm of a kangaroo, which renders it unsuitable either as a trunk for the hand, or, because it is not visibly attached to his elbow, as a pivot to facilitate common human activities. To make matters worse, his upper arms are not attached to his shoulders, unless one can imagine his shoulders extending from his chest rather than his neck. This inference is necessary because the painting offers no indication at all of a neck. Rather, Zayde's head appears to float on his clavicle.

Zayde's hands, as I hinted, are almost as long as his forearms, and had he a functional body, he would make an awesome basketball player. But alas, I had painted him into a state of quadriplegia, for if, in my mind's eye, I imagine him standing or walking, the body beneath the painting would never allow him to do either. Alarmingly, or at least oddly, a post-modernist might delight in Zayde's anatomical tragedy, making mounds of aesthetic hay from his deconstructed body. Oblivious to his viewers, Zayde still hangs in the Jewish Community Center, occasionally being transferred from one wall to another and transcending modes of analysis. There he contentedly exists in a state of existential doom, compelled forever to read a book that is permanently out of focus and open to the same two pages. (See figure 2.)

Like an oxymoronic diarrhea of the soul, the creative compulsion always moves toward emptiness. Seeking meaning but finding none, it reflexively continues to exert itself, like a spastic bowel after an enema. Throughout my art training, which included looking at masterwork after masterwork from the post-World War II era, I kept asking my professors, a measly collection of abstract expressionist also-rans, "What does it mean?" Their heroes, Franz Kline, Ellsworth Kelly, and Willem deKooning, spoke loudly, but said nothing. Mind you, all their paintings "worked," (or so said these noxious drunks) but so what? Move me! Transport me! Fill my soul! K, K, and deK had mastered the visual elements of line, space, composition, color, and shape (or so said these fading farts), but even a babe in the art woods could see that they felt absolutely no obligation to content. This is the quintessential affront to Life, which is the most perfect marriage of form and content on Earth.

The compulsion to create, because it is a compulsion, is attracted to imitation, and in some cultures, copying is regarded as prerequisite art training. In a culture that is ruled by the homogenous art department faculty of a single university, impressionable students imitate whatever aesthetic is presented. Worse, that aesthetic is not presented as one point on an infinite horizon, but as the only point. Impossibly, the formation of a personal aesthetic must occur in a hegemonic teaching culture. What chance has an art spirit that is put so early in a vise?

My first college art class was a summer-long drawing intensive at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. It happened to be taught by a seasoned and thus beleaguered teacher, dearly beloved Paul Olson. Under his tutelage, I undertook what turned out to be a protracted and sometimes bizarre series of assignments, which I approached with an obsessive degree of earnestness. For example, Paul once said in passing, "If were in jail on a twelve-month sentence with only my sketchbook and pencil, I would never lack for something to draw. I would just draw my feet for a year." That was all it took. I filled an entire sketchbook with my feet, and got to know them better than any sane person ever should. Lest we think that each foot is a mirror image of the other, all we need do is try to make them look identical to discover that it is truly a miracle that we can walk upright. Toenails, like much minutiae, become excruciatingly boring. Even so, one soon becomes obsessed with grooming them, having stared for hours at miniscule specks of embedded dirt, uneven shaping due to hurried clipping, and cuticles that have mysteriously (and rapidly) advanced halfway up the nail. Thankfully, those repulsive nail fungi, nowadays so frequently the cause of rejection by one's objects of sexual desire, did not exist then, so one did not have to fret about indicating variations in nail color with a graphite drawing pencil.

Aided by encouragement from Paul, and motivated by a desire to find a major that would allow me to do my homework while listening to music, I forsook whatever else I thought I could make of my life to become an art major. This leap occurred during the Me Generation, when I was living in the lower east quarter of a happenin' old brick fourplex, the building in which my first cat died. It was owned by Alan Beck, a shy young computer programmer who loved classical music so much that his living room was fixed with two six-foot stereo speakers. Alan's house rule was that all tenants could play the music of their choice as loud as they liked, but in return, we had to agree to put up with Alan's head-rattling Beethoven sessions.

By then I had sickened of my feet, which allowed me to graduate to a more magnificent obsession: learning the whole of human anatomy. Doctor Grey and Zayde had helped me realize that instead of relegating myself to head after disembodied head, I must learn to render the entire human form. They had, in their respective silences, inspired in me an urge toward self-dissection. Coincidentally, my back bedroom, which I had converted to a painting studio, sported a full-length mirror, so for months, I drew my own naked body using Sanguine Conte crayon. I would strike a pose, survey it until I had committed its gesture to memory, and only then turn to draw. After that, I would develop each drawing in detail, observing the separate contours of my body limb by limb, joint by joint, and muscle by muscle. Such extreme introspection inevitably leads to paranoia about one's body image, so after a while, I began to see all my body parts as deviant and repulsive. Needless to say, this obsession inculcated my entire self-image, and I began to see myself as nothing but object, a lump of cottage cheese on a fluted plate, imprisoned in a reductive psyche that shrunk ever deeper into itself, avoiding the edges of assorted papers and canvases even as it strained to leap from them.

During this obsession, I was also obsessed with John Prine, so when at last I attempted a painting from these drawings, the result was that I painted myself into obesity, squeezing into a picture plane that could not have contained my height and girth had I raised my head to look outward. On canvas, and in my overactive mind, I had become the pathetic heroine of Prine's poignant ballad, Donald and Lydia.

Lydia hid her thoughts like a cat
Behind her small eyes
Sunk deep in her fat.
She read Romance Magazine
Up in her room
And felt just like Sunday
On Saturday afternoon.

Lydia's body bulges, but she is as flat as stale beer. For her, space has no depth and mass has no volume. She is being relentlessly pecked at by chubby little birdies, but she is at once oblivious to them, surrendering to them, and trying in vain to hide from them. It is these simultaneities that mark the introvert. There is a perfectly good window through which Lydia could probably squeeze if she tried, but the freefall that would follow is simply too frightening. Like a wingless Icarus, she might get burned by the sun. Wait. Is there a perfectly good window? "Madam," I said to Lydia, "that is not a window. It is a painting." (See figure 3.)

The last paintings I ever attempted, about twelve years ago, were such an extreme exercise in obsession that they finally rid me of any urge to paint. In my ultimate moment of art insanity, I decided to make paintings of some of the exquisite beaded medallions that I had been obsessively collecting on my travels in Native America during the previous decade. To prepare for this folly, my father cut several twenty-eight-inch plywood circles and braced them on square frames that would be hidden from view, but allow the circular boards to sit on an easel or hang on a wall. Then, with the enthusiasm of a sixteen-year-old starting her first paying job as a cashier at the Del Farm Grocery, I copied, bead by bead, three of my favorite medallions onto the boards. The most complicated painting, and the final in the series, is a design in which stylized feathers work as petals extending from a central focal point, bordered along the medallion's outer circumference by looped openwork. I have just (obsessively) counted the number of individual bead images on this painting, and there are 1,187 of them. (See figure 4.)

Such a crescendo of compulsion can only lead to that last, terrorizing tumble down that steep psychic staircase, the descent that leaves you scared shitless. Because I had unknowingly chosen oppressive tedium over joyful exploration, when I finished my beaded medallions, I was done with painting forever. Each was meant to be a truthful, indebted enlargement of its seed or pony bead master, even though the thousands of round beads mysteriously turned into ovals when I drew them. It did not even occur to me to correct this handwriting error because I had lost all sense of joy in the process of working something out visually. Instead, I had acquired the habit of forcing oval pegs into round holes for the sake of a quick end to my misery. Though it is convenient to blame my demise on art school, the truth is that I probably never enjoyed working out visual problems as much I enjoyed talking about them. In hindsight, which is where truth usually shows itself, I probably only wanted to do what John Gnagy taught Linda Gunn to do – paint pretty pictures of simple subjects.

The creative compulsion forever wants to return to what it was when one was grateful for its presence. It wants to repeat itself even as it pushes against its past in a never-ending process of obsessive reinvention. In art, the doing must be its own reward, since the fruits of an ecstatic process are bound to be sweet. To make a habit of making art, the urgent, irresistible hunger must be for engagement, not aggrandizement. The act of making must be enthralling, engrossing, and fed from the inside, but it must ensue in a place that invites outside influence and is capable of digestion, differentiation, and the creation of metaphor. That place is the gut.

I may be done with painting, but I will never be done with art. That is the point of this art history. It has taken many more words than necessary about lines and values and compositions to report it, but that is because art matters much more than we may think. German philosopher Walter Benjamin, in his classic 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," posits the idea that artworks possess "auras." An aura is not visible, but it is, paradoxically, the quality that allows our souls to be filled by what we see. It is what Hannah Arendt, in her biographical essay on Benjamin, calls the "wonder of appearance." Some artworks (see figure 5) have such powerful auras that the hungry soul gets filled beyond capacity and wants to burst out of the body like a water balloon. Mine is such a soul. I will feed my art hunger until I burst and die. I will never be done with art.

Posted by gilat001 at September 3, 2005 5:52 AM