Recalculating

Salt Pond, Goosewing, Work in Progress

I love my new life. I want to keep it going. One night last week I walked through Copley Place in Boston on my way to meet some friends, and realized how completely I’ve been enclosed in my work bubble and how out of touch I am now. People were Christmas shopping! They had Louis Vuitton shopping bags full of stuff! My first thought was, “Well, these people have jobs, I guess.” My second thought was that I really wanted no part of this getting and spending. The fact is, I can’t afford to shop. I was never much of a shopper anyway, but now, the less money I spend the better I feel. It feels like a real accomplishment to find a way to squeeze more out of less. Every time I pass up some shiny trinket (especially things I would have bought previously without a second thought, like these boots , for example), I’ve bought myself a little more time to spend in the studio. Probably sometime soon I’ll have to give some serious thought to bringing in some income, and hopefully there’s a way to make this art practice pay, but for now I’m just happy to be doing it. My family, fortunately, is on board with reduced consumption, a smaller Christmas, no dinners out (although we’ll have our Christmas Eve dinner at the Indian restaurant; it wouldn’t be right not to), and although I have had more than a couple of early morning anxiety attacks about the heating bill, the anxiety is manageable, balanced by the immense satisfaction I get from finally building a body of work that’s mine.

This is something I’ve wanted to paint a long time: a wall of golden reeds that edges the salt pond behind Goosewing Beach in Little Compton, RI. This is the third painting I’ve done in Little Compton, and as the season advances to winter and the colors deepen, the structure of the space is reduced to a skeleton, and it becomes more visually interesting to me. I hope to finish this (there are actually two separate panels here, each 48″ x 40″, so the entire painting is 96″ x 40″) by the end of the week, take a short Christmas break, and begin planning for the coming year. I’ve been at this for six months now. I’ve completely recalculated the direction of my life in that time. I look forward to what’s ahead. And yes, I really look forward to finding a way to buy these boots someday.

Still haven’t found what I’m looking for

Goosewing Beach, Little Compton 48x48

As I’m making my way through the six paintings about water, I can see some evolution in my style, my approach to the painting, and the results. I’m getting more confident, looser with the brush handling, more willing to take chances and push the color. Still, I worry. What is my work supposed to be? What’s in its DNA that will eventually be manifested somehow? Can I force that to happen by sheer will or perseverance?
I used to worry about making it new, making it different, making it surprising and fresh and astonishing. I really did. I think that was one of the things that paralyzed me years ago, the implicit pressure to produce art that no one had ever seen before, that broke new ground, that shocked or offended or poked fun or demanded your full attention. I looked at a great deal of art like that, and some of it I liked a lot. Some of it I didn’t; there seemed to be a lot of art that required the audience to follow an intricate path through the artist’s semiotic language and history and interior life and obsessions and knowledge – that can be wonderful, if the destination is worth my trouble, and there is, indeed, a path. Too often that’s not the case. I don’t like to disparage other artists’ work, because I know how difficult it is to work every day to create something with substance and meaning and heft. But some art is just bewildering or dull. Difficult art can be wonderful, even deliberately opaque and hermetic art, if there’s a reason for it. I admit, I can’t always tell, but that’s sometimes just because I don’t want to give it the time.
I can do MFA-speak when I have to. Whenever we’re all together in New York I take my kids to the Dia Beacon, in the little Hudson Valley town where my husband grew up and my mother-in-law still lives, and try to explain Robert Ryman and Sol Lewitt and Donald Judd, all of whom I love, to the teenagers, who really want to understand. But I have my guilty pleasures. I love paint. Dripping, messy, exuberant paint. And I love the illusion of natural space created by the messy dripping paint. I know, it’s been done since the Renaissance. But I think that places me on a noble continuum, and I can live with that.
I don’t know where this is going, finally. I find that frustrating and exciting at the same time. Evolution is slow. I just have to accept that, and keep going, confident that I’ll get where I’m going, wherever that is. I don’t care anymore about making it new or astonishing. I just care about making it authentic, which is harder, in some ways.