Another (very good) student asked me Thursday during crits if I thought of my work as feminist. She and a friend had been looking at my paintings either on my website or on the Harbour Gallery site and they had been thinking about their own process, how they worked from their own personal lives and in that way, being female, they thought of it as feminist artwork.
That’s an interesting perspective. One I have pondered often and also, not at all. If I were to think too much about being a female painter in what has been over the centuries a very male-dominated occupation, then I would either stop painting (not very likely!) or gear my work to address an issue that I feel would be limiting. I prefer to paint because I am intrigued by the process, because I have a vision that transcends the personal, transcends me and my life.
As I see it, there are two distinctly different ways to approach making art. The first is to take a very personal idea/feeling/thought and make it universal; the second is to take a universal idea/concept and make it personal. I, of course, prefer the latter. That is in many ways what attracts to me abstract art: that I am not in the painting. I start out with very personal imagery and feelings: photographs (of people who have deep significance to me) silk-screened onto canvas that I collage onto the larger canvas. Then I write on top of that whatever thoughts are generated from the photographs. Obviously all this is nothing that I want anyone to see! But I do want the feelings to generate the painting. And for it to be “read” without my personal “life” as part of the story that someone else reads. (Something like the novelist writing from his or her life but not telling that story, just using the energy of their life.)
In NYC there was a well known artist who sews (and I don’t know if he still does) his paintings. They are very good paintings. For a few years in the 70’s, even before I became acquainted with his work, I did some sewn canvases. At that point I was looking for a way to clean up my paintings, to make the “statement” of the work clearer; they had been too “fuzzy,” no definite imagery, just a color field with some faint lines. In the sewn pieces, I would stain canvas (with thinned acrylic paint), cut it up and sew it back together in more obvious forms than I had been using. But people would usually comment on the fact that sewing equals female (even though most tailors have traditionally been male). If you want to push the point, I use male/female imagery now: circles/lines. But I don’t think much about that part of the painting, just about what feels right, what works at that point, what makes a painting sing, more about what kind of song than who is singing it.
I told my student that I used to think that the best thing to be, as a female artist, would be black (and tall……I just hit five feet which actually usually surprises people as my paintings are big and have boldness that belies my size, I am told). As a (tall) black woman I could proclaim ME, but as a short Caucasian, I don’t really think it is worth talking about. It is not the uphill battle of race discrimination, along with gender, for me.
And what I really feel most (strongly) is that the paintings REALLLY should speak for themselves!
Posted by leya at December 11, 2004 03:58 PM