Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I am working on a small 26” x 20” pastel painting called, “Harbinger” that, for once, is coming together rather quickly.
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Pearls from artists* # 623
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
At the time [the Renaissance], Bologna was unique in championing the professions of women. The home of Europe’s oldest university, which had supported female students since the thirteenth century, the city considered women artists as integral to its development. Praised by scholars, written about by biographers and adored by the locals, they were also supported by patrons of all social classes (from bankers to barbers), creating a varied culture of artistic patronage. (By contrast, in Florence and Naples, commissioning was reserved for select noble families.). Women were also encouraged to sign their work, as well as to paint self-portraits for the purpose of being known and, most importantly, remembered. No wonder scholars have recorded a staggering sixty-eight women artists working in the city between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
These notable exceptions remind us that women have always been perfectly capable of being artists. But while there could have been an abundance of women working at this time, in reality female artists were an absolute rarity, seen as ‘tokens’ rather than pioneers. (After de Rossi’s death [in 1530], no female sculptor is mentioned in the city’s records for 200 years.). And little knowledge remains of those working during the Renaissance period. Most of what we know has been passed down by male scholars and through legal documents, rarely from the women themselves.
Katy Hessel in The Story of Art Without Men
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Q: When did you begin drawing and painting? (Question from “Cultured Focus Magazine”)
A: This is a long story because my path to becoming a professional artist has been unusually circuitous.
I grew up in a blue collar family in suburban New Jersey. My parents were both first-generation Americans and no one in my family had gone to college. I was a smart kid, who showed some artistic talent in kindergarten and earlier. At the age of 6, my sister, my cousin, and I enrolled in Saturday morning painting classes at the studio of a local artist. I continued the classes for about 8 years and became a fairly adept oil painter.
At the age of 15 my father decided that art was not a serious pursuit – he called it a hobby, not a profession – and abruptly stopped paying for my Saturday morning lessons. Unfortunately, there were no artists or suitable role models in my family. So with neither financial nor moral support to pursue art, I turned my attention to very different interests.
Cut to ten years later. When I was 25, I earned my private pilot’s license and spent the next two years amassing other flying licenses and ratings, culminating in a Boeing-727 flight engineer’s certificate.
At 29, I joined the Navy. By then I was an accomplished civilian pilot with thousands of flight hours so I expected to fly jets. However, in the early 1980s women were not allowed in combat. There were very few women Navy pilots and those few were restricted to training male pilots. There were no women pilots landing on aircraft carriers.
In the mid-1980s I was in my early 30s, a lieutenant on active duty in the Navy, working a soul-crushing job as a computer analyst on the midnight shift in a Pentagon basement. It was literally and figuratively the lowest point of my life. I was completely bored and miserable.
Remembering the joyful Saturdays of my youth when I had taken art classes with a local New Jersey painter, I enrolled in a drawing class at the Art League School in Alexandria, Virginia. Initially I wasn’t very good, but it was wonderful to be around other women and a world away from the mentality of the Pentagon. I was having fun again! I enrolled in more classes and became a very motivated full-time art student who worked nights at the Pentagon. As I studied and improved my skills, I quickly discovered my preferred medium – soft pastel on sandpaper.
Although I knew I had found my calling, for more than a year I agonized over whether or not to leave the financial security of a Navy paycheck. Finally I did make up my mind and resigned my commission, effective on September 30, 1989. With Bryan’s (my then boyfriend’s) support, I left the Navy to devote my time to making art.
I’m probably one of the few people who can name THE day I became a professional artist! That day was October 1, 1989. Fortunately, I have never needed another job. I remained in the Navy Reserve for the next 14 years, working primarily at the Pentagon for two days each month and two weeks each year. I commuted by train to Washington, DC after I moved to Manhattan in 1997. Finally on November 1, 2003, I officially retired as a Navy Commander.
Life as a self-employed professional artist is endlessly varied, fulfilling, and interesting. I have never regretted my decision to pursue art full-time.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 631
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
I could see motion when I looked at Julie’s work. Her hand had moved there, in that way. She’d chosen this blue over that one. Seeing the act of creation – the way a work doesn’t come out fully formed but grows by fits and starts – made we aware of how delicate and fragile an artwork was. How improbable it was that it existed. Someone had agonized over this square inch. They’d poured themselves into that flink of a line. I thought of the bewildering piles of supplies I’d seen in studios: Vaseline, turpentine, wax, Q-tips, chopsticks, marble dust. It’s not magic that makes a piece. All the Hollywood visions of possessed artists throwing pieces together in a trance-like state overlooked the fact that this was work. Each piece may have started with an idea, but there was more to it than that. “An idea is not a painting,” Julie said, as she worked, her nose practically grazing the canvas. She was already thinking ahead to how she’d fix the brushyness of the tights, maybe go over the shoes again. The soul of the artwork needed a body. Seeing Julie work gave me a path to follow into the piece.
Bianca Bosker in Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See
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Pearls from artists* # 630
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
During the Victorian age, women, with their ‘smaller,’ less ‘creative’ brains, were considered incapable of becoming professional artists and were often restricted to ‘craft’ or ‘design’ (genres not considered ‘fine art’ by the establishment). This perception made it very difficult not only for women to be taken seriously as artists, but for their (and their female predecessors’) work to be sold. In order to get around this, nineteenth-century art dealers were known to scratch out a female artist’s signature and replace it with that of a male contemporary, which explains why many works by women have only just come to light. (No wonder so many of them hid self-portraits among their still lifes).
Katy Hessel in The Story of Art Without Men
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Travel photo of the month*
Chartres Cathedral, Chartres, France
*favorite travel photos that have not yet appeared in this blog
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Pearls from artists* # 629
Basquiat X Warhol Exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Photo: Christine Marchal
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
… scientists are right there with artists in insisting art is fundamental to being human. Art is one of our oldest creations (humans invented paint long before the wheel), one of our earliest means of communication (we drew long, long, long before we could write), and one of our most universal urges (we all engage with art, whether preschoolers, Parisians, or Paleolithic cave dwellers). I began to notice that art – or what scientists dispassionately call “human-made two- or three-dimensional structures that remain unchanged: – was everywhere: hung over the register at the hardware store, spray-painted on a bakery window, cock-eyed in a dive-bar bathroom. As humans, we’ve filled our lives with art since practically forever. The earliest known painting keeps getting older, but the last time I checked, archaeologists had traced the oldest portrait to a cave in Indonesia, where around 45,000 years ago, artists put their finishing touches on a fat figure with purple testifies for a chin. In other words, before Neanderthals went extinct, before mammoths died out, before we figured out how to harvest food or heal bloody wounds, humans applied themselves to painting a portrait of a warty pig. “It is clear that the creation of beautiful and symbolic objects is a characteristic feature of the human way of life,” wrote the biologist J.Z. Young. “They are as necessary as food or sex.”
Bianca Booker in Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
A: This is a preliminary charcoal drawing for my next “Bolivianos” painting.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 628
Beginning
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
We have nothing to go by, but still, we must begin. It requires chutzpah – the Yiddish word for that ineffable combination of courage and hubris – to put down one word, then another, perhaps even accumulate a couple of flimsy pages, so few that they don’t even firm the smallest of piles, and call it the beginning of a novel. Or memoir. Or story. Or anything, really rather than a couple of flimsy pages.
When I’m between books, I feel as if I will never have another story to tell. The last book has wiped me out, has taken everything from me, everything I understand and feel and know and remember, and … that’s it. There’s nothing left. A low-level depression sets in. The world hides its gifts from me. It has taken me years to realize that this feeling, the one of the well being empty, is as it should be. It means I’ve spent everything. And so I must begin again.
I wait.
I try to be patient. I remember Colette, who wrote that her most essential art was “not that of writing, but the domestic task of knowing how to wait, to conceal, to save up crumbs, to reglue, regild, change the worst into the not-so-bad, how to lose and recover in the same moment that frivolous thing, a taste for life.” Colette’s words, along with those of a few others, have migrated from one of my notebooks to another for over twenty years now. It’s wisdom I need to remember – wisdom that is easy to forget.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
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