Category Archives: Creative Process
Q: Why did you first decide to depict Mexican folk art in your work?
“Myth Meets Dream,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 47″ x 38″
A: As a Christmas present in 1991 my future sister-in-law sent me two brightly painted wooden animal figures from Oaxaca, Mexico. One was a blue polka-dotted winged horse. The other was a red, white, and black bear-like figure. See the two Mexican figures in “Myth Meets Dream” above.
I was enthralled with this gift and the timing was fortuitous because I had been searching for new subject matter to paint. Soon I started asking artist-friends about Oaxaca and learned that it was an important art hub. Two well-known Mexican painters, Rufino Tamayo and Francisco Toledo, had gotten their start there, as had master photographer Manual Alvarez Bravo. There was a “Oaxacan School of Painting” (‘school’ meaning a style, not an actual building) and Alvarez Bravo had established a photography school there (the building/institution kind). I began reading everything I could find. At the time I had only been to Mexico very briefly, in 1975, having made a road trip to Ensenada with my cousin and best friend from college.
The following autumn my then-boyfriend, Bryan, and I planned a two-week trip to visit Mexico. We timed it to see Day of the Dead celebrations in Oaxaca. (In my reading I had become fascinated with this unique festival). We spent one week in Oaxaca followed by one week in Mexico City. My interest in collecting Mexican folk art was off and running!
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Pearls from Artists* # 313
Barbara and Tomas in Panajachel, Guatemala
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Proclaiming that the object in Surrealism was fundamental, [Andre] Breton suggests a radical transition in surrealist creation, one that liberated the poet-artist from all constraints in the making of the artistic object. Breton’s text calls for a “revolution of the object,” suggesting that in the placing of an object into a new context, and thus attributing it with a new meaning – also called a “detournement” – which takes precedence. Drawing in his interpretation of Hegelian subject-object relations, Breton describes the “object” as a work of art that relies on a philosophical procedure, affirming the surrealist process as one that is realized in the experience of apprehending the object through a dialectical method. Citing the work of Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, Breton explains that an object may become a product of surrealist creation through the simple “manipulation” of it. Here ”manipulation“ is defined as a procedure which reveals the object in its original and new state at the same time. If taking an object out of its original context and placing it in a new space creates the potential for a creative act, then this text seems to validate the surrealist practice of collecting. As the collector acquired objects and unites them in a gallery or a home, they assume new significance contingent upon their physical juxtaposition to other objects.
Moon Dancers: Yup’ik Masks and the Surrealists, edited by Jennifer Field, Introduction by Christina Rudofsky
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I continue working on “Acolytes,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38” x 58.” It’s slow going at this stage as I refine my drawing and bring everything to a high state of finish. My work is all about details.
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Q: How much of your work is autobiographical?
“The Champ,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26″ x 20″
A: I suppose all of it is, in the sense that often I can look at a particular pastel painting and remember what was happening in my life when I made it. As I get older, however, it’s becoming more difficult to remember the circumstances surrounding my earliest work. Certainly, the cultures of an ever-expanding number of countries – Bolivia last year – are influencing my imagery for the better.
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I continue working on “Acolytes,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38” x 58.”
Comments are welcome!
Q: Do you have a favorite painting among all the work you have created?
”Shamanic,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26” x 20”
A: Generally, it’s the last one I completed, perhaps because it encapsulates everything I’m currently thinking about. At the moment my favorite is “Shamanic.”
I believe all of my prior experience in and out of the studio has contributed to making me a better artist and also a better person. So whichever work I finished last, seems the best somehow, and it’s also my favorite.
I wonder, do other artists feel this way, too?
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Q: What is more important to you, the subject of the painting or the way it is executed?
“Sam and Bobo,”soft pastel on sandpaper, 36″ x 31”, 1989
A: In a sense my subject matter – folk art, masks, carved wooden animals, papier mâché figures, toys – chose me. With it I have complete freedom to experiment with color, pattern, design, and other formal properties. In other words, although I am a representational artist, I can do whatever I want since the depicted objects need not look like real things. Execution is everything now.
This was not always the case. I started out in the 1980s as a traditional photorealist, except I worked in pastel on sandpaper. (For example, see the detail in Sam’s sweater above). As I slowly learned and mastered my craft, depicting three-dimensional people and objects hyper-realistically in two dimensions on a piece of sandpaper was thrilling… until one day it wasn’t.
My personal brand of photorealism became too easy, too limiting, too repetitive, and SO boring to execute! In 1989 I had at last extricated myself from a dull career as a Naval officer working in Virginia at the Pentagon. Then after much planning, in 1997 I was a full-time professional artist working in New York.
Certainly I was not going to throw away this opportunity by making boring photorealist art. I wanted to do so much more as an artist: to experiment with techniques, with composition, to see what I could make pastel do, to let my imagination play a larger role in the paintings I made. I was ready to devote the time and do whatever it took to push my art further.
After spending the early creative years perfecting my technical skills, I built on what I had learned. I began breaking rules – slowly at first – in order to push myself onward. And I continue to do so, never knowing what’s next. Hopefully, in 2018 my art is richer for it.
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Start/Finish of “Shamanic,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26″ x 20”
Start
Finish
This one was tough going, but finally it’s ready for the framer!
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I continue working on a large pastel painting based on another of my photographs from La Paz, Bolivia.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 299
“The Storyteller,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26″
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
The artist is always and for all time a seer, and artistic creation is always and for all time an act of prophecy.
The artist does not choose the prophecy. Rather, the prophetic shines through her work. It comes from elsewhere.
The artist therefore needs enough courage to stay true to the work at hand. Even greater courage is required of those to whom the finshed work is given, for their interests will always recommend dismissing the vision for fear of its implications.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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