Writing, Chewing Gum and Bliss

Last week a question was posed on a popular artblog “Why is it so many bloggers write as if they're chewing gum?” Frankly, at the time, I was too busy painting to compose an intelligent answer to the query. However, in the interim, I’ve considered the question and arrived at an answer dissimilar to that held by the art critic who initially asked the question.

It became evident to me that the critical issue is essentially a struggle between the word and the image. George Orwell, in his essay “Politics and the English Language”, warned us that if a writer “is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming…he is not really thinking.”

While the artist attempts to communicate one’s inner vision through the choice and rendering of materials, the writer is forced to use the medium of language. Logos—“meaning” can be derived from both experiences but will be expressed differently because of the media chosen.

Consequently, words, images and logos often enter into battlefields such as artblogs, websites, and even the production of artist’s statements. While marketing gurus encourage artists to take the plunge into the blogging experience, citing the importance of increased exposure, there is no consideration of the negative impact of poorly constructed or maintained presentations when this suggestion is tendered.

One of the other problems facing artists when considering blogging is the very real consideration of how one spends one’s creative time. Does one write or does one focus on one’s principle artistic endeavor?

Perhaps we’d do well to follow Joseph Campbell’s advice,”…. if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be."

Tellers of Stories~~Weavers of Dreams

While watching Charlie Rose’s show, A Memorial of those who died in 2007, I was struck by a question he variously posed in several of the interviews :“ What job-title do you want engraved on your tombstone?” One of the individuals declined the suggested appellations tendered, choosing instead the descriptive story-teller.

In The Four Truths of the Storyteller, published by the Harvard Business Review, filmmaker Peter Guber detailed what he believes are the four facets of storytelling that are crucial to its success: truth to the audience, to the moment, to the mission, and to the storyteller. It is interesting to apply these same principles to an understanding of narrative painting and determine whether or not the moment can be a universal moment or must be restricted.

It is my opinion the voyeuristic nature of humans also lends itself well to art, especially when considering Alfred Hitchcock’s comment, “I’ll bet you that nine out of ten people, if they see a woman across the courtyard undressing for bed, or even a man puttering around in his room, will stay and look.” Despite this, in today’s art market there is a distinct absence of narrative painting, such as demonstrated in Jan van Eyck's masterpiece, The Marriage of Giovanni Arnofino.

On a positive note, there are still some contemporary artists, such as Dana Schultz and Drago Persic, who have embraced this rarified genre and embed tales in their images. One is led to ask whether or not the reasoning for the contemporary absence of narrative painting is determined by something greater than a philosophical shift in the art world towards formalism.

Blake Gopnik, in an article in the Washington Post, Is Cubism's Revolution Behind Us? If You Think Picasso's Work Didn't Last, Keep Looking, addressed the issue of cubism’s impact on modern art. He offered several astute observations:

“Cubism realizes that all great art demands some generosity on the part of its viewers. Look up at the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and you know you're not really looking up at God creating Adam -- and that it's worth pretending for a minute that you are. Cubism pushes that idea about as far as it could possibly go. It asks you to forget about what pictures can really do and to try on some artist's confounding new notions of art's capacities and goals -- "to make the best of that obscurity, and finally to revel in it," as Clark says. We all know a cubist picture fails to represent the world in anything like useful or coherent ways. But there's something to be gained imagining it could. Cubism marks art's greatest "because I say so" moment, and thereby launches the history of fully modern art. Cubism says it's going to rewrite art's rules for representing things, and demands we go along with the unlikely fictions it creates. And that frees every later artist to make a similarly daring, even arbitrary move.”

The reality, however, is than in the thrust towards freedom, artists abandoned the narrative for the implied, the form, the obscure, and the inane. One might contend that it was easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as the challenge of narrative painting is in trying to provide a convincing relationship between form and content. The viewer must fully participate and have some sense of what is being conveyed by the artist, or alternatively be given permission to “create one’s own understanding of the story”. This sense of participatory relationship was noted in a press release about one of Drago Persic’s shows:

“The viewer is invited, indeed obliged, to participate in an effort to patch together the clues and fill in what is not actually there. Anything consistent that we might perceive - erotic or sinister, harmless or harmful – in fact takes place in our own imagination. The artist himself does nothing more than suggest.”

Furthermore, the artist must demonstrate acute skill in the rendering; a story's power to captivate and inspire is directly related to the technical skill of the narrator. It is difficult to balance cultural or historic meaning, use formal elements reveal the meaning of the artwork, and effectively manipulate scale, composition, paint application, color, and contrast to create a persuasive narrative. A good tutorial about narrative painting, using William Frederick Yeames’ painting “And When Did you last See Your Father” can be found on the internet, courtesy of the Walker Art Gallery.

One must not, however, presuppose that narrative painting is the purview of American or European artists. In fact, the narrative painting has a time-honored tradition found in Oriental and Aboriginal art. It has also been explored within the context of Ethiopean artwork.

It seems to me that if an artist is skilled in their technical abilities and has imaginative faculties and is willing to not climb on board of the train leading to the familiar territory of abstraction, the realm of narrative painting is a wide-open field awaiting exploration. Perhaps this is the next frontier of postmodernism.

Courage versus the Blank Canvas

I find that starting to paint is equally the most exhilarating and also the most daunting aspect of the creative process. While ideas percolate in my mind long before I pick the brush or palette knife, and I long to express myself, the very sight of the blank canvas often intimidates me. In talking with other painters, I’ve discovered I’m not alone, as most of them share this emotion. The trick is to prevent one’s feelings of intimidation from allowing too much time to pass before the inspiration is devoured by loss.

W. H. Murray, the writer and explorer offered words advice for those of us who hesitate in his book, The Scottish Himalaya Expedition:

'But when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money--booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets:

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!'

Getting started often is nothing more than seizing the moment and either sketching one’s idea on the canvas or paper. Sometimes even covering the pristine white canvas or paper with a wash of color is sufficient to drive intimidation from the room and allow courage to sully forth.

The burning passion to express one’s self will emerge and ultimately may be met by genius. Truly, Goethe was writing from experience!

Time, Art, and Sacred Space

Memories entwine, a skein of visions, half-recalled moments, bits of poetry and prose until there is a need to pull something specific from the tumbled masse. Even then, one is sometimes surprised by what is delivered to the conscious awareness.

Salon recently published an article by Cary Tennis entitled Go away, can't you see I'm writing?! that sent me on an internal journey to Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique. Theoretically, they are connected by a root of feminist philosophy. While this is true, their relationship is deeper for me, however bleak.

The arguments Virginia Woolf introduced over seventy-four years ago in her slim but monumental A Room of One's Own, are still relevant today. When I first was led to the book, I felt the way countless other women felt when they read Betty Friedan's book---someone had articulated a problem facing women--my issues--and once the problem was "identified", it would not , could not, be silenced. Regardless of which field of art a woman is attracted towards, the reality is that it remains a struggle to seek and retain resources of time, money, and the peace delivered by "A room of one's own" in the pursuit to create.

The need to have a "sacred space" to create is vital for artists, but often women share their "creative space" with others, putting their own expressive needs aside to make room for dinner, children, or a myriad of other interruptions that delay or entirely halt the creative process. Woolf beautifully offers justification of space as a key element for the woman writer :

"One goes into the room –– but the resources of the English language would be much put to the stretch, and whole flights of words would need to wing their way illegitimately into existence before a woman could say what happens when she goes into a room. The rooms differ so completely; they are calm or thunderous; open on to the sea, or, on the contrary, give on to a prison yard; are hung with washing; or alive with opals and silks; are hard as horsehair or soft as feathers –– one has only to go into any room in any street for the whole of that extremely complex force of femininity to fly in one's face. How could it be otherwise? For women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated with their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics."
---Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1957) 91.

While one might put pens, paper, or even a computer aside, it is yet more difficult for the artist whose medium is something other than language. Material considerations flood forth, and the issue of space then keenly competes with the reality of costs associated with one's art. Is it any wonder why most individuals are hard-pressed to cite the names of ten women artists when you recognize the Atlantean struggles women painters and sculptors have had to endure to create then have their work be noticed?

There was an excellent article in the UK's Telegraph about Claude Cahun, a talented surrealist photographer from the 1920's whose work remained lost to us until the 1990's when it was re-discovered. How many other women artists are lost in the mists of time, their work destroyed, unappreciated, or simply unknown?

Distraction... invention... experience....even the discounting of one's own worth are part of the "recipe" women bring to the creative expression. Moments stolen in time are alchemically transformed into a visual mandate for vita, life.

Many years ago I stumbled across a poem that has haunted me ever since. I've danced with the poem over the years and now understand what words and images will never touch. The poem follows:

Woman Enough

Because my grandmother's hours
were apple cakes baking,
& dust motes gathering,
& linens yellowing
& seams and hems
inevitably unraveling
I almost never keep house
though really I like houses
& wish I had a clean one.

Because my mother's minutes
were sucked into the roar
of the vacuum cleaner,
because she waltzed with the washer-dryer
& tore her hair waiting for repairmen
I send out my laundry,
& live in a dusty house,
though really I like clean houses
as well as anyone.

I am woman enough
to love the kneading of bread
as much as the feel
of typewriter keys
under my fingers
springy, springy.
& the smell of clean laundry
& simmering soup
are almost as dear to me
as the smell of paper and ink.

I wish there were not a choice;
I wish I could be two women.
I wish the days could be longer.
But they are short.
So I write while
the dust piles up.

I sit at my typewriter
remembering my grandmother
& all my mothers,
& the minutes they lost
loving houses better than themselves
& the man I love cleans up the kitchen
grumbling only a little
because he knows
that after all these centuries
it is easier for him
than for me.

~~ Erica Mann Jong~~