That was easy!

Work in Progress – Blackstone River oil on canvas 40×60

It’s been a year now, since I started painting seriously, since I took this studio, and started this blog. I feel like the further along I go on this journey, the further away the prize is. I don’t even know what the prize is anymore, except this daily practice of putting paint on canvas. I’m working on this painting right now of a shallow passage of the Blackstone River as it flows around and over a grouping of rocks. I’ve made a few attempts at this, on paper and canvas. I love the way the water rushes by the rocks above the water, while the ones underwater, just as substantial, peek out and then disappear, leaving you to wonder what you just saw.

As an artist, I feel like an outlier. I deal in illusion; I apply paint to a two-dimensional surface and create the appearance of something that exists in three dimensions. In that sense, I’m not much different in intent from the painters in the caves at Lascaux, to the extent that we can know the intentions of Paleolithic artists. But at the very core of what they did is a symbolic representation of the world they lived in. And that, in the most reductivist view, is what I do. I’m happy to take my place along that continuum, but I am also a creature of my time. So I can’t escape thinking about the characteristics of the materials I’m using, the formal relationships created within the rectangle of a canvas, the idiom of shape and color and space and line, and all the artists that have come before me, and what I’ve learned from them.  And also, what it means to be working this way in the 21^st century.

I know that, for the most part, artists working now have abandoned this essential form of illusion-creation; it can be seen as trite, shallow, too dependent on parlor tricks that are exploited by the minimally talented without any original ideas. And artists are aware that all but a small subset of the viewing public actually prefers these illusions over more difficult art that addresses serious issues, like gender and identity and war and mental illness and environmental disasters…or art that depends on self-referential systems, or actions that cause the viewer to behave in a certain way, or art that is the culmination of the systematic rejection of hundreds of years of illusion-creation and consumption. Or whatever. The fact is, I deeply appreciate and like a lot of that art.

Still, I’m stuck with the art that I do. I’m skeptical of anyone who says they got an idea for a painting and then they made it. You can only make the art that you make, not the art that you set out to make. I truly appreciate that people like what I do. I just hope I don’t begin to pander.

I’m very interested in the appearance of things in the real world, how they shift in different light and change over time. How our perception of space and time are affected by what we see and understand. How we rarely see what we think we see. How what we saw a moment ago is gone, how what we’ll se in another moment may be completely changed. I’m trying to pay attention to these things, and make paintings in the process. It’s tough to do that day after day, to make serious art that doesn’t depend on tricks and short cuts. I get discouraged sometimes. This is where I am now – plugging away at these paintings. My subject matter – water, usually, — competes with the formal and the abstract. I try to maintain a fine balance of attention to both and neither at the same time. It’s a Zen exercise, I guess. I can only succeed at it for a short time every day, and then it falls apart.

After a year of this, and a few months of not taking my blog as seriously as I did in the first months, I’m realizing how important it is that I do both, paint and write. I’m rethinking the blog, considering what year two will look like. I just know that when I started this journey a year ago, I didn’t know if I could keep it up – the daily practice, the slog through uninspired days and weeks, the work of it. What I’ve learned is that I will never be on solid ground, and I don’t know if any artist is. But I keep coming to the studio, laying out the paint on the palette, putting on the music, and getting down to work. And that’s it. That’s all there is, really.

Summing up the month of March in one long sentence

Here’s where I am now: finishing up some smaller paintings, continuing to work on my six-panel tree painting on paper, hoping to start another tree painting as a follow up to the first one (completed, finally – terrible photo but here it is), getting samples of archival inkjet prints of some of my paintings (called, somewhat pretentiously, gicleé prints but they’re really just inkjet prints), realizing that I really need a better camera, feeling desperate to get more time in the studio, feeling pleased and gratified about a few recent sales of some of my water paintings, but also alarmed at my diminishing inventory, and trying not to panic about the healthcare deadline (we have health insurance until May 20…after that, who knows?). Whew. One long sentence to try to make up for the fact that I haven’t posted in the entire, eventful month of March. I won’t let that happen again.

A veil of obscurity

Veil, Work in Progress

I can’t always say that my art serves as a metaphor for my life, but I think it’s oddly appropriate right now. I’ve been working on this painting on and off for a couple of weeks while trying to escape the web of difficulties that seems to surround me and my family these days. But I’m starting to find my way clear; after a couple of challenging but focused weeks of work, my husband and I have managed to set up his new solo law practice in a small office overlooking the harbor in New Bedford, MA, where he now sits, working on attracting clients. While he does that, I can get back to the studio. And my blog. (If you know anyone in southeastern Massachusetts who needs a lawyer, I’ll give you his number. Family law, consumer law, what ever you’ve got.)

This painting, of a veil of vines obscuring the form of the tree, has been difficult to get to and difficult to move forward on when I could get to the studio. The challenge is not only to follow the tangle of vines to achieve some kind of visual order, but also to make a painting out of it. Yesterday I felt like I began to get there by paying more attention to the specific blue of the sky in the background. When I started to to see the effect of the dappled light on the branches, suddenly the space started to emerge. Looking harder, seeing more. In this case, I think it helped to be away from it for awhile, and get a fresh look.

I should be able to finish this soon. I have plans for the next painting in this series, which means, I guess, that I have some confidence in this direction and my ability to make something of it. I don’t always know why I choose to paint what I do, but I have to move forward with the faith that it will be revealed as I do it. So I forge ahead, sometimes blindly. It’s exhilarating, when it’s not maddening.

Keep calm, and carry on

Tangle (work in progress)

I have a shameful ignorance of the flora of New England, even though I spend a lot of time looking at it. I’ve been fascinated by the thick, unruly Oriental Bittersweet vines that seem to overwhelm the trees, particularly along the highway, and especially in the winter when the branches are exposed, stark and menacing. I didn’t realize, until I started looking at more of it, how destructive this invasive species is. The impenetrable woven fabric of vines, so visually rich to me, block the sun and strangle the trees, and discourage new growth on the forest floor. I’ve been wanting to paint it for a long time, and I’ve finally begun my first painting this week. The process of painting it feels like an “untangling”, and a logical follow up to the focus-intensive work I’ve been doing with water and rocks. It’s very demanding of my attention.
It’s been such a crazy, draining couple of weeks for me since Chris lost his job, that I wasn’t sure I was up to the task. But somehow, I find the process is restoring my optimism. It’s very much like meditation, painting like this. I’m not thinking about anything, really, just letting my mind follow the tangles wherever they go, losing and finding the threads, catching the bits of light, somehow making a painting. It’s so much better than worrying.

Will this change everything?

This isn’t about art, not directly. This is about the times. My husband lost his job this week, after 26 years of managing a law office dedicated to helping the poor with their myriad legal issues: eviction, foreclosure, domestic violence, child custody. These are the disasters he’s spent his legal career fending off for his clients. It wasn’t always satisfying; the clients could be irrational, uncooperative, demanding, ungrateful. The judges might be indifferent, or capricious. The opposing lawyers could be unreasonable. But all that’s true of any legal practice. It certainly didn’t pay well; that’s where it differed from most legal practices. But he was committed to the principle that everyone deserved access to the courts, even the sometimes irrational and uncooperative poor. Because when he won cases, he saved families. And, as hokey as it may sound, he preserved a little piece of what we value in our democracy: that in America, all should have equal treatment under the law. Without representation, though, there’s no equal treatment in front of a judge. That’s just the way it is. Everyone needs a lawyer.
There were times over the years when I got tired of the problems of the poor. I thought about the vacation house we could have if he were a lawyer for the rich. But, as a working class kid from Beacon, New York, who improbably found himself at the University of Pennsylvania studying history, he decided this was what he wanted to do. He went off to law school in Washington, D.C. still committed to that idea, and started his career at Neighborhood Legal Services in the bleakest of Southeast D.C. neighborhoods. We came back to New England so he could manage the New Bedford, MA Legal Services office, and he stayed there for 26 years, reluctantly giving up some of his management responsibilities after he had a stroke in 2009. He expected to retire from this job – but not this year. Definitely not this week. His program fell victim to decreases in funding and mismanagement by the board. They suddenly had to cut a million dollars from the payroll. All the highest paid staff (except, of course, for the Executive Director who engineered the mess, but that’s another story) got pink slips. He has until the end of February to transfer his cases, pack up the knick-knacks on the bookshelf, and be gone.

But we still have a mortgage to pay. Teenagers to support. Medications to buy. A studio to pay for. Yes, a studio to pay for. Because no matter what happens, I intend to keep making art. There’s no going back now. But things will most likely change in the short term.

I could go on a political rant right now, about how America’s unwillingness to embrace the notion of universal healthcare actually impedes freedom, innovation, and entrepreneurial ventures, but I’ll just say that health insurance will cost us about $24,000 a year (yes, I’ve gotten quotes) if one of us doesn’t get it from an employer soon. So we can’t have Chris starting a solo practice while I build my art career. One of us will need to work for benefits. I sincerely believe that as a family, and as individuals, we’d both do better in the long term if we could take the risk of building a law practice, and an art practice, to serve our needs for the rest of our working lives. But we can’t. So we’ll see how that plays out. Wish me luck.
Every day, I’m still working. The habit is ingrained now, and I’m still present in the moment when I’m in the studio. I’m so grateful for the time I have to paint, and the opportunity to come as far as I have. And I’m not done. Today I’m getting my Rocky Shore painting ready to ship to Georgia, and I’m finishing up some small paintings. Art goes on.

Edge of the Pond, 12x12, oil on canvas

Goosewing Shore, 15 panels each 8x8

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.

Look harder. See more.

Sunset rock, Little Compton, Work in Progress

When I first started painting again in June, it felt like I could do anything. A good measure of my optimism was the sixty-day window I gave myself to develop the work habits that would make me an artist again. I passed that hurdle easily, which gave me the confidence to keep going. My work increased in complexity, size, ambition. I felt like I could do anything I set out to do. Then–surprise–it got harder. I started second guessing myself, my subject matter, my process, my ability to maintain focus. I worried that I wasn’t making enough progress, quickly enough. I found myself doing more rework, sanding away errors, working on a couple of paintings at a time. I’d hit the classic plateau, and I didn’t like it.

Yesterday, I decided it was time to take a day off. It was unseasonably warm in Rhode Island, a perfect day to drive back down to the beach in Little Compton where I’d started the latest two paintings. The sunlight was dazzling on the deserted beach. I sat on the chilly sand and took some time to think about what I was doing as a painter, and why, of the infinite ways that one could apply the formal language of paint on a surface, I felt most comfortable within the realm of representation. I don’t know that it’s a conscious choice, but I do feel that the power of my work is in the degree of attention I’m able to give to the specifics of the light. Which is why I’m so attracted to water, and the rich puzzle of form and pattern carved out by light on the surface. I think as my work got larger, and my time got scarcer, my process had started changing. And I was frustrated now because I’d forgotten the most important imperative of my work, which was to slow down and pay attention. Stop and look at the source again, so that I’m sure I understand what I’m seeing. Look harder, see more. How many times have I learned this? In almost every painting, when I slow down, look harder, I see more. And I unlock the painting.

Today, back in the studio with these two Little Compton paintings, I tried to do exactly that. In this case, it did break the impasse. What had been developing as a generic ocean scene started turning into something more personal and specific as I looked again at the video and the photos, paying more attention to what I saw, being more deliberate in mixing and placing the color. Now I feel that this painting is developing.

I’m curious to know how other artists, or anyone trying to do creative work, or solve a knotty problem, get themselves past that impasse. For me, it turned out to be a simple idea: Look harder, see more. I may have to make a sign for the studio so I don’t forget it again.

Occupying my studio

Like most of us, I think, I never set out to be rich. Sure, when the Powerball jackpot starts to creep up to stupifying sums, I buy a ticket and start to fantasize about setting up a foundation to promote arts education and helping my friends and family become independent of the capricious labor market. (And, oh yeah, buying myself a really nice car.) But the goal that I had for myself when I was young was, I guess, to build some variation of my parents’ life – cooler, more intellectual and enlightened, of course – but similar in scope and balance: some work, some family, some travel, some friends. My parents were not rich; far from it, but they managed to raise eight kids in relative comfort on my father’s salary as a machinist.

I entered art school at the tail end of the greatest period of painting in the history of American art. The postwar abstract expressionists established new ways of looking at painting, and new ways of existing in the world, shifting the art world’s high beam from Europe directly on to their community in New York City. None of them were wealthy (yet). They lived in walk-ups and lofts (drab industrial spaces, not the lofts you see advertised in the Sunday New York Times with their lavish kitchens and luxury surfaces), did whatever they had to do to pay the meager rent, and partied, drank, talked, smoked cigarettes and made the most amazing, lush, exploding, lyrical paintings anyone had ever seen. Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner, Willem DeKooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko…these were my heroes in the 70’s. When I read about them, I learned about lives rich with intellectual activity, insecurity, bravado, ego, experimentation, despair and joy. But not money. When I started art school, one of my first teachers told us that maybe 1% of us would make a living from our art. One percent. That made an impression. The culture of the starving artist was pervasive. Keep your rent low, another professor told us. And frankly, that was okay with me.

I remember when that changed. It was in January, 1980. I was in graduate school in Washington, DC, maybe an unlikely place for an artists’ community, but there were enough of us to inhabit a couple of abandoned office buildings downtown, a few blocks from the National Gallery. Much to my despair, and the despair of all of my progressive friends, Ronald Reagan had just been elected president, and the Republicans were beginning to arrive in the city. It felt like an occupying army of extreme capitalists, taking over our streets, our restaurants, our culture. We felt, in ways that maybe we couldn’t articulate, that things would never be the same. And we were right. Nineteen-eighty was the year that the wealth of our nation began to flow upward, into the pockets of the well-off. It didn’t take long before the culture shifted; the poor were vilified, greed was admired, and the starving artist was suddenly just another chump. The cheap studio space gradually disappeared and was turned into luxury housing. And we found ourselves less and less able to get by on the marginal employment that artists had always counted on so they could continue to do their work. Keeping our rent low was no longer possible, not while the rich were getting richer and driving up the price of everything.

I’m not blaming the political landscape of the 80’s for my ultimate drift away from art, but it definitely contributed. It was a seminal moment for me. I wasn’t ready for the shift to careerism and commercialization that eventually brought us Jeff Koons and the celebration of the excesses of consumer culture. Many artists tried to subvert the culture by making art that couldn’t be bought or sold, that was experiential rather than material, or pure conception. But that wasn’t me; I loved paint. I loved the materials. I loved the Abstract Expressionists’ exuberance. And I found myself creatively choked off, afraid that I would become poorer and poorer while I tried to find where I fit in artistically.

It was clearly a crisis of confidence that drove me into hiding as an artist, and the fear that I’d been born into the wrong era. It took years to get past it. Maybe it was just a failure of imagination and nerve. For a long time, I couldn’t even look at or read about art. Now that I’m painting again, I wonder what that was all about. Maybe it was as simple as this: I was afraid of being left behind economically, so I took a job in publishing. The irony is, I was left behind anyway. That’s a fact that just makes me laugh now. I counsel my kids, teenagers struggling to find a foothold in the adult world, to find something they love to do, and follow that path. Because there’s so much uncertainty in this world, and you just can’t predict where your life, or the culture around you, will go. Wherever you end up, you should arrive there with your integrity and your dreams for yourself intact. Otherwise, what do you have?

I’m so happy to be painting now. I know I’ll never be rich, and that’s still fine with me. But I can at least control how I spend my time. It’s a simple thing, but for me, it’s everything.

Over the weekend I set up a website for my work: Jean Nicolazzo Paintings and Drawings
I’ve posted almost everything I’ve done since June, when I embarked on this experiment. I look forward to filling up the portfolio with many more paintings. Maybe I’ll have a career in art after all.

Sunset Rock, detail. Work in progress

Five miles uphill. In the snow. Both ways.

Little Compton Beach WIP

Yes, I do feel as though I’ve been slogging uphill. First, there was the wood glue debacle. I made three frames, intending to stretch the final canvasses for the water paintings, but when I started stretching the canvas, the frames fell apart. All of them, one by one. The glue didn’t hold. This was a new problem; I still don’t know why that happened. I bought new glue, a different brand, rejoined all the corners and let them set overnight. I’m happy to report that Gorilla Wood Glue is far superior to whatever I’d been using, and the frames and canvasses came together straight and sturdy, albeit a day later. But also the work itself is developing more slowly. I think this actually represents progress; the paintings are more complex, more deliberate, and ultimately – I hope – more rewarding. I’m working on two paintings now, both of the seashore in Little Compton, in the southeastern corner of Rhode Island. I found there was considerable downtime when I work on just one painting, whether it’s for technical or creative reasons, and I thought if I could switch gears and work on something else in the meantime it might help me get past whatever the issue is in the first painting. It seems to help. This is one of the two. It feels good to be painting the ocean again, and the weather was perfect this week for image gathering on the beach. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m in this for the long haul, that there will be setbacks, that progress doesn’t always show itself immediately, and that some days just aren’t fun.

I’ve always admired Michael Mazur’s work, but lately I have developed a greater interest (for obvious reasons) in his “pond edge” paintings and prints. All that lush color and exuberance and life! When I look at these I start to despair that I’ll never have the time for my work to reach this level of fulfillment. But I’ll keep on as though I have all the time in the world. Because otherwise, what’s the point?

A new season in the studio

Water#2, Work in progress

I rented this studio on July 4th, and apparently in the excitement of the moment I forget to ask an important question: is it heated? The answer, unfortunately, is not really. There is heat in the building, but it’s not turned on yet, and even if it were, there aren’t any radiators on the 4th floor. We’re on our own up here. During our freak late-October snowstorm on Saturday I turned the little space heater up to high, and over the course of several hours moved it closer and closer until I singed my hair. Today I ran out to Lowe’s and bought another, larger heater and hauled it upstairs, plugged it in, and promptly lost power. It seems that I share a circuit with Jeff, the sculptor next door, on which I was running several lights and two space heaters, and he was running power tools and more lights. So we were both out of luck. We switched some things around to different outlets until we found a configuration that let us both get on with our work. I can’t say it ever got comfortable up there, but at least I didn’t have to paint with gloves on.

I did a lot of reworking on the rainshower painting. Something just wasn’t coming together for me, and in response I was working much slower. A few paint strokes, stop and look. A few more, move the painting to another wall, look again. I know this pattern; I slow down when I don’t have confidence in my direction. It was becoming obvious that I had to do some major reconstruction, and the more I resisted, the more glaring it became. I was hoping somehow that if I continued to work on other parts of the painting, the deficiencies in the center would take care of themselves. Needless to say, that was wishful thinking. Once I accepted the inevitable and scraped and repainted the offending part, the rest of the day was really productive. The end of the day came much too soon. I could have worked for hours longer, despite the cold. I’m eager to get back and finish this piece.