Life with Clay (The Silica Kind)

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I’ve been thinking about my life with clay.

In 1976, it was a course to take with my mother who needed to get out of the house but stay close to home and a post-operative husband. We went to my parents’ town’s civic centre where a clay class was being offered informally. It was a ten-week, evening leisure class, and we met there after both our jobs, once she’d seen to my father. My mother made coil pots and slab, leaf-shaped bowls.

My first ever glazed clay piece was a terracotta pinch-pot that became a turtle. My mother kept it. It became the first in her subsequent collection of turtles. She collected so many over the years, stone, metal, glass and plastic ones, turtle broaches and pendants, realistic ones and comic ones, even children’s turtle paper clips, that I had two engraved on her footstone when she died in 2007. Whatever they represent to the world, I think that to her, they represented me.

Over the course of those ten weeks of evenings, I came to realize that clay was my home. I mean that I had never felt at home with anything as I did in the presence of clay ready to become whatever it allowed me to make of it. It was the most generous, the most cooperative, the most imaginative, the most communicative medium I had ever touched, but it demanded my full attention, much like a life partner does. From then on I worked with it intently, totally committed, and somehow communicated with it without difficulty though gesture and touch. No other language had ever come as easily to me.

Not long after that first encounter, my first sustained series in clay was a group of portraits of characters from stories I told to children at the time. In terracotta still, they were high relief faces and heads. If I remember correctly, the final series had fifteen of them, life-sized (what is the life size of an elf?) and as expressively realistic as I could make them.  I had always been interested in ‘the figure’ but being able to give physical, three-dimensional life to people who had lived full lives in my stories made me realize it is ‘the person’ I wanted to represent in my art, not just ‘the figure’.

From these portraits, my clay work progressed to more and more complex images using talc-body clay. One series referred to expressive personal objects as stand-ins for the person, and another combined the modeled human form or parts thereof with built structural environments. As I worked, my visual art was increasingly inspired by the ‘internal’ person, not the external; that is, by human psychology and philosophy. My most recent works are a type of narrative that reveals thought and attempts to capture pivotal life moments or moments of insight.

I love the feel of clay in my hands as it warms and responds to my touch. I love its mass and weight. I love the architectural and even engineering challenges it gives me as it moves from slip to dough to leather hardness and greenware to bisque to accepting colour, which changes upon firing. Each stage allows me to push the clay into new directions, to use different tools, gestures and energy, to delve deeper into my technique and my interpretation, and to discover new expressive possibilities.

            Of course I enjoy using other media. I love to draw, and I’m getting back to painting with acrylics. But no matter what technique I use to draw or paint, the image is still flat; it is non-existent viewed from the side. For me, the dimensionality of clay is as appealing as its malleability, its changeability and its flexibility. For me, no other medium can beat that.

The Ins and Outs of "Why?"

Why?

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There are many typical questions asked of artists by audiences. One questions the medium or technique used to render a particular image. Looking at say a clay piece, a viewer might ask the artist, “Why not bronze?” Or looking at an acrylic painting, “Why not oils?” Or in response to a work on paper, “Why not on canvas?” The implied assumption is that the work would be IMPROVED if it were in bronze or oil or on canvas, that the artist somehow made the wrong choice of medium or technique.

Where does that kind of subliminal judgment come from? Not from a true response to the work being viewed. The persons looking approach the work with a pre-set programming; one that has been sustained through the generations and about which they are not even aware.

In this sub-routine of the viewing experience, media live in a stratified critical environment. Such media as pencils, clay, paper, glass and fiber, for instance, have retained their low ‘art’ status because they were once cheap, meaning accessible, are associated with functionality, and over the history of art, they have been used for sketching, and some by women and children. Over time, they have also developed a reputation for being fragile or worse, for being impermanent, for not retaining their freshness for more than a few human generations.

These considerations are not really a part of the viewing experience; they are knee-jerk reactions by people coming to look at art already convinced that supposed fragility, impermanence and accessibility reduce the value of a work of art, and that media like paper, clay, pencil or fiber are less ‘art’ than such media as canvas, oil and bronze. Also, for some, somehow, their association with function sullies their potential purity as art media. Art teachers, galleries and museums sustain these attitudes – the MOMA, for instance, has separate museums for works it deems ‘craft’ and ‘art’ based largely on the work’s medium not its intent or effect (Yet Picasso painted on clay, Chagall made stained glass, Duchamp’s urinal became iconic, Andy Warhol based much of his imagery on functional objects…).

It’s a great victory for the art dealers. It is in their best interest to promote and sell an artist making bronzes (multiple times) than one making clay pieces, or one painting in oils on canvas than one working in print on paper. Why sell something for $3000 when you can spend as much time and sell for $30,000?

Self-sustaining longevity is, after all, a big selling point, and it can justify big prices and hefty gallery commissions. A work that lasts with little help from its owner is more desirable than one that needs care, or that can be damaged by dusting, for instance. As long as there’s no war or shortage of metals, or as long as they’re not dropped or banged, bronzes are forever, and as long as there are no floods, no direct sunlight, no mould or too much touching, oils are forever- if they were painted well to begin with. (Yet, fine art museums have staff and spend much money on display, restoration and preservation of their collections).

Ok. To a person or especially public institution investing considerable amounts of money on a work, self-sustaining longevity  might be relevant. However, judgments based on this question rarely have a place in a viewer’s pure viewing experience. All media well used require serious technique, and all works, no matter their materials or functionality, express through their media.  There are probably many fascinating reasons why the work is in one medium or technique and not another, but the most important is that it’s in the medium or technique the artist chose. That could be the starting point of any query, not what the artist didn’t choose.

The Old Quarter

Riding the Wave

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Ok people, we need to talk about what seems to be a 21^st century phenomenon: retirees taking art courses and expecting to exhibit and sell their creations.

            Many of you come to art after a working lifetime in other fields, all geared up because sometime in your youth or childhood, you must have done something artistic (with apologies to Rogers and Hammerstein). You are adults +, have perhaps been highly successful in positions of power or authority; perhaps you brought children to adulthood and usefulness, perhaps you have accomplished miracles as members of philanthropic associations and/or garnered respect for your knowledge in and contributions to your field. Or conversely, maybe you endured or even hated the domain that ate up your creativity and felt dissatisfied and under-appreciated in it; you have spent a lifetime dreaming of something more exciting, maybe something sexier.

Then you have retired, or approached retirement. Your profession no longer needs you, or you no longer need it.

            What to do? Too many of you come to art classes expecting to just cross the floor, to sashay gracefully into being ‘an artist’ at the same level and with the same ease with which you were something else, and for the same or better acclaim. Perhaps you’ve held on to that pleasure or praise you got from a teacher long ago, or nurtured the idea that you’d have been an artist if life hadn’t conspired against you. All you have to do is to just do it and all will be well.

            I hate to be the one to bring this up but I must point out that it doesn’t quite work that way.

Seniors retire and come to art classes as adults, expecting to pick up where they left off, forgetting they often left off art as children or youth. They believe that the knowledge, skill and attitudes, but especially the desire they had then are sufficient, that with a couple of courses here, a few how-to’s there and very little practice in between, they will become ‘artists’.

It doesn’t seem to matter to them that art is a living practice,  that its tools, its materials, its subjects, its styles, its themes and its concepts have kept pace with an eve-changing world. They disregard the fact that others have dedicated their lives to research, discussion, debate and practice to sustain, grow and popularize the profession. They will be the artists they were as children or youth and ignore, even disdain, the entire body of knowledge and skill that has evolved into today’s art world.

As an educator, this is my lesson if you are one of these seniors: Forget supplementing your retirement income. Make art because you have your own images clamouring to be expressed, for which you will take whatever time it takes to learn and develop the necessary skills, techniques and concepts. But do so aware, connected. If you are the artist you imagine you always were, if you really love art, not just the romance of it, then you will engage with all aspects of the profession to fill in the gaps in your knowledge and understanding. You will find this exciting, not onerous; you will not lament the money, space, time and effort it will take. You will support the profession not just as a maker, not just to exploit what others have accomplished, but also as an informed viewer. You will respect what it is to ‘be’ an artist.

           

When Things Get Crazier

The Lure

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            Becoming a juggler was not in my life plan when I set out to be an artist but a juggler is what I have come to be in this circus that is my life as an artist. My big top is the interface between making art and doing everything else. See me teetering on the very uneven ground destabilized by the current economy and world politics, juggling three full-time occupations, each squeezed into part-time time: making art as an ongoing, body-of-work process; teaching others to make, think and talk about art; and exhibiting art by other artists who themselves are jugglers in their own circus big tops.           

The show must go on. Busy-ness isn’t any excuse. These days, my current even more-than-usual busy-ness is due to an upcoming exhibition of my own work, so the added pressure of preparing for it is actually a blessing! I am one of the artists in a trio entitled and themed “Inner Narratives’ that will open on September 3 and to which I will be contributing work in clay, pencil, and mixed media assemblage. Today is… August 12! The day of the opening is nearing at an alarming rate.

The work to be included in the exhibition is almost ready. I don’t usually like being unprepared to crate and transport the work a month before the opening but it’s been a struggle to even make new pieces. They are demanding: given the inner narratives theme, they require a level of reflection and focus not easily achieved with repeated interruptions. And the interruptions are certainly not only repeated but equally demanding of my reflection and focus.

What is difficult in this juggling act isn’t the busy-ness – I love all three aspects of my professional life - it’s being able to free myself from the two other aspects of my thinking and visualizing when I go into my own studio to work.

Teaching is a demanding profession for me, whether I do it in the school system, say as a high school teacher, in so-called ‘alternative’ contexts such as co-ops, art centers and not-for-profit environments, or independently, out of my own studio. While different, and regardless of the age group I’m teaching, what all these practices have most in common is the teaching itself. To do it well, and like any good teacher, I have to have expertise, of course, as well as a clear focus and a well-defined course intent. I have to have a tight, progressive curriculum, and a well-prepared series of lesson plans. Since no two groups of people making up a class are the same, and individuals in each group need different levels of instruction, explanation and supervision, I also have to be able to switch and adapt the class improvisationally, in real-time and in direct response to the students. This means I have to immerse myself in techniques, subjects and themes from their most basic levels – levels I have long since integrated in my own art – to their most complex – levels I am myself in the process of exploring. While my teaching has to be authoritative, I also have to work from a completely open position, with sympathy/empathy for the students’ ideas and needs. This complicates my own process.

Similarly, being the curator of an art gallery that does not focus on sales yet that must support or enhance the Value of the artists’’ work requires a specialized type of approach. By Value, I mean not the commercial worth of the work but the importance the medium, the technique, the imagery and the narrative, thematic, conceptual or philosophical content have for the artists themselves. I have to understand and integrate these things as if I were each artist I exhibit to have a sense of how to install, light, write about, promote and conduct tours of the exhibits as the curator. To do this, I must visit the artists’ studios, grill them about every aspect of their work, read everything about them or those by whom they are influenced, look again and again at their art and think about it as an artist, as a viewer, as a historian, as a critic, as a teacher, and finally as the curator.

Walking into my studio each time after I’ve taught a class or mounted an exhibition becomes like a medical procedure, say a brain transplant. It takes me time to reconnect my artist brain: I have to seek out, recognize and disconnect concerns and imagery that are for or about my students or the artists I show. It’s a job to re-identify who I am when I’m creating, not a different person from my teacher or curator self but the same person coming at imagery, my own, from a completely different perspective. This takes time, and I’ve had to develop numerous cleansing rituals to help me proceed such as writing in a studio diary, singing and dancing around to my favourite music as I prepare the studio, going methodically through my sketch books and plans and carefully lining up the tools and materials I’ll need for the work ahead. It’s a good thing I work alone because in extreme cases, I also talk to my images as I encourage them to materialize. Until I actually start creating, I feel like Dr. McCoy in the original Star Trek 3 series episode entitled ‘Spock’s Brain’, where he had to restore Spock’s brain to his body (Written by Lee Cronin and directed by Marc Daniels).

Should I ever ‘retire’, it will only mean that I’ll stop juggling. My aching joints will be happy. I’ll try to do each of my three ‘things’ separately, perhaps alternatively. I’ll mostly sculpt, draw/paint and write, of course; these are absolutes. They are manifestations of the brain function, ‘artist’, that fits most snugly into my cranium. But I will still teach, because it is amazing to awaken or encourage the art passion in someone else, and I will organize exhibitions, because it is my most satisfying way to celebrate and support my community.

Until then, however, a juggler I must still be, today in my studio, tomorrow visiting other artists’ studios, the day after conducting a tour of the group exhibition for which I am the curator, the day after that back in my studio…

Of Art and Sports

Chorus Line

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As a youngster, I had two loves: making things with my hands and being physically active. In indulging the former love, my great joys were drawing, modeling clay into fantastic forms, making articulated figurines out of paper and creating stories which I would enact for my dolls, a very appreciative audience. To indulge the latter love, I danced as often and in as many ways as I could, I swam like a fish, I bicycled everywhere I was allowed to, and I played first soccer for which goalie was my favourite position, basketball and then volleyball with a killer serve.

In studying to become a better artist while simultaneously practicing to become a better player, I was struck by the similarities between the two activities, art and sports.To create an image, I had to think about the page from edge to edge, to think of it much as I was told to think of a soccer field. When I decided where to put each detail of a drawing - in a drawing of ‘home’ for instance, say a house, a couple of trees, two dogs and my brother trying to fly a kite -  it was little different from when I studied the positions of players on the field. The better the composition of the elements in my drawing, in other words, the better the details interacted to animate the page, the better a drawing it would be, just as the better a player worked to move the ball over the field in concert with other players, the better the game. 

When I kicked a ball toward a goal during a soccer game, or bounced it off my head to deflect it course, when I scoped out another player’s position and prepared to pass or receive the ball, or when I ran across the field to intercept an opposing player and claim the ball, my thinking process was no different than when I pushed graphite and rubber along page to create lines, when I ran crayons across a shape to give it volume, or when I moved clay from hand to hand to give it form. This is what gave me the greatest joy - I felt that what I learned doing one led me to better understand and control doing the other: making art made me a better player because I played the game like I was creating a composition, and sports made me a better artist because I became more agile and had more stamina.

There were even better prizes for doing both activities at the same time. 

Making things in three dimensions with materials like clay and paper, making stories with words, making shapes and rhythms in space with my body and even making noises (hopefully music) with my voice made me feel really connected with world around me. As an individual, as a ‘me’, I could respond to what I saw, express what I felt, see the result of my actions and the manifestations of my ideas in concrete ways. And if I got to show to and in that way share these things with others, my existence was confirmed, whatever their response. I also understood that by my looking at other peoples’ creations, they  became more present for themselves and for me as well; they became part of my imaginings and ideas.

On the other hand, swimming, never alone in the ocean but on crowded beaches, bicycling with my friends and playing sports gave me a sense of communal movement not just in space, but also in time, I moved harmoniously with my friends and therefore acted collaboratively in my society. I belonged, because even if my fellows spoke other languages or lived by different codes, we covered the same territory, experienced similar sensations and played by the same rules.

That understanding led me to the conviction as an adult that thinking about and making art and thinking about and participating in sports are essential, interrelated forms of human activity, essential for human development. While they have different ends, they develop and share interconnected aspects of the mental, or conceptual, apparatus. A game is composed of a series of actions played out by a combination of fixed rules and responsive, improvised reactions on a fixed surface by opposing forces joining to create a challenging but satisfying experience. Creating a work of art is exactly the same, except instead of other players on the same team, the artist teams up with media and tools, and instead of members of an opposing team, the artist’s challengers are the problems she/he has to solve to compose a successful image.

Both these human disciplines, Art and Sports, practiced simultaneously at all ages, develop instincts, stimulate the senses, create skills and provide experiences that are essential for all other endeavours, from the simplest to the most complex. Without them, without a hands-on, problem-solving, actual, physical relationship to materials, tools, body and space, creativity becomes about reiteration, not invention, about money and profit, not about meaning and exchange, and mental flexibility gradually is replaced by single-minded dogmatism while physically, people become prone to a sedentary, non-participatory or only virtually participatory life-style. Without them, people are dulled down, reduced to their most basic functions, they are not elevated to their highest potential.

This is why I don’t believe that governments which separate pure art and sports education in schools, or that eliminate both altogether from the school curriculum are acting without malice.

Art at Home

Pals

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It’s true that we have put the world in a tight spot. People have incurred too much financial or environmental debt by consuming too much and wanting more, and companies are too focused on profit at all costs, if not worldwide domination. We are obsessed with growth.It seems as if it’s difficult for us to establish equity and balance, even peace, to the detriment of…everything.

What isn’t true is that in this environment, art is a luxury. On the contrary, in this environment, art is a gift from the gods. Though it can be provocative, the exchange between art and viewer is individual; it does not rely on statistics, mass production or marketing, social media, generalizations and common denominators – it does not DEhumanize or DEstabilize. As such, living with art is the perfect rebellion against all the individuality-consuming social forces massed against us, the perfect antidote against feelings of isolation, powerlessness and resignation. It’s why the greedy and power hungry don’t like it for anyone but themselves.

That said, I have always been committed not just to making my own art, but also to showing original art by other artists. Up to now, I’ve focused on creating exhibitions with an educational mandate, underplaying sales in favour of fostering informed, responsive involvement by everyone concerned. After years of trying to bring audiences, artists and works of art together in various not-for-profit art galleries however, I’ve learned that something is increasingly absent. What’s missing is a level of intimacy essential for the connection process to happen at the deepest and most beneficial levels. 

Art needs time to reveal itself to a viewer, but as much as that, it needs to be present in a viewer’s personal, intimate environment for a real connection to occur. Seeing a work in a gallery, even if on repeated visits, the viewer remains separated from it by the space, around it, The Gallery (or Museum), and everything it represents. Ownership of the work changes that. The work hung in a personal space can have an effect on the viewer directly, by being viewed deliberately, indirectly, by the viewer’s unexpected, arresting glances on the way to doing other things, and subtly, by the ever present energy it discharges as it lives in the home.

As Director/Curator of a not-for-profit municipal gallery, I have spent too many years watching viewers walk away from artwork with only a surface understanding of what they see because the viewing experience has been mediated and temporary. While they are receptive to being delighted or titillated, curious about techniques (sometimes competitively) and eager for information, many walk away deprived of the real connection, the real pleasure the work can deliver over time to them personally, even if it is of a difficult subject or stylistically challenging.

This is why I’ve started including in my schedule of ten educational exhibitions a year one dedicated to selling the work of gallery artists. It is time that I encourage my audiences to buy such things as paintings, sculptures, and drawings to take them home, to live with them. People need to be reminded that original art made by artists, rather than being on the one hand a luxury item or an investment, and on the other less necessary than ‘practical’ things, is actually a humanizing part of any space we create for ourselves, no less necessary than windows, running water and roofs.

My Friend Bela

Super sized!

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I recently watched the DVD of Dracula with Bela Lugosi directed by Tod Browning, the Universal 75^th anniversary edition. To think of where vampires have been since his 1931, iconic performance! He is the father of a veritable hell’s worth of pointy teeth and neck fetishes, blood lust and sexual dysfunction. Those eyes! Those hands! That accent! No wonder he is a cult hero.

The accompanying featurette entitled Universal Horror and narrated by Kenneth Branagh was however, a reminder of something we tend to forget: the monster movie genre grew in parallel with the effects of the First World War and matured in tandem with the Second World War. The monster concept, whether mad scientist doing unspeakable experiments on helpless victims, deformed and vengeful creatures driven mad or to rage by social repudiation, or the poor, alienated victim whose longing for kindness and love is misunderstood by those he frightens, ‘the 20^th century creature’ is not an imaginary invention. As attested by scenes from J’Accuse, the 1919 film by Abel Gance, the ‘monsters’ in the physical world became the veterans returning from war hideously maimed or disfigured, or horribly traumatized and terrified, and abandoned by the societies they served.

They say that the process by which tolerance is built up to something strange or frightening is slow and incremental: one small relaxation of the fear leads to another until it disappears altogether. You would think therefore that our society, bombarded as it is by images from war zones, terrorist strikes, natural disasters, abuse, assaults and on and more would be done with fear and respond courageously, compassionately and with ready help to those who are traumatized or victimized in our world.

Alas, no. Fear is apparently not enough; we now need to be terrorized. What we seem to have developed is not a tolerance but a hunger, even a vampire-like lust, for horror. It turns out we like being appalled. We want to be taken to the brink of our instinctive flight reaction. We find it titillating, exciting, as long, that is, as we can sit safely in theaters or in our homes and watch it happen to others. Films today indulge us, especially with the wonderful capabilities of animators sitting at computers who indulge hyperactive directors, who indulge box-office-mad investors, who cater to addicted gamers and thrill seekers. But even more, the news indulge us, by bringing to our very living rooms the images and the experiences we are hugely relieved not to be experiencing ourselves.

So we come to the horror scale, or to the horror of scale. In movies, the bad guys have had to buff up, they’ve had to become more ingeniously evil, more gigantic, and more resilient to death. Battles must now involve the entire galaxy – our poor heroes can no longer ‘just’ be human, they must be enhanced by technology (magic is for children!) and grown in labs, or better yet, replaced almost entirely by machines. Where once ‘average persons’ had the possibility of rising above their human smallness to achieve great, heroic deeds, now they need a state-of-the-art, fully staffed, small country-sized laboratory and a bank account to match to even step out of their living rooms. The Greek (geek?) gods have returned thanks to state of the art technology! How physically puny the ‘normal’ person ha once again become in our fantasies, and how monumental has become the arsenal behind which he must hide!

But so-called ‘real’ life horror has also reached such monstrous proportions that it dwarfs, no, it micros the average person. Think of landscape-devouring pipelines that can eat up entire First Nations’ rights and threaten land and sea. Think of resource and worker consuming multi-nationals. Think of weapons easily available to any fundamentalist hive, weapons that can be snuck in to public places and take out people by the hundreds. It’s a competition between them and those who not only deny (thrive in?) the horrific effect of greenhouse gasses, but also eagerly plan and wait for the day Armageddon may come to pass. Talk about a blockbuster!

Well, there are increasingly powerful social forces that push the horror factor way off the tolerance scale for me. Even the visual arts, my home, have become the domain of the gigantic: huge installations, massive sculptures, land-art that covers miles of territory, production costs off the accessibility scale…

I think, looking back, that Bela’s Dracula was plenty monstrous, and King Kong or Godzilla were big enough in their original format, making them bigger has only proven we’re running out of original ideas (by the way, get new characters and story lines, Star Trek movies! Tolkien adapters, write your own romances!).  We’re just trying to outdo what has come before, bigger, meaner, louder, more expensive, art imitating life or life imitating art, both out of ideas and unable to envision a future or to stop or change the flight response.

Maybe we’ve ‘monstrosified’ so much we’re hyperventilating, gone so far we’ve titillated ourselves into irreversible terror. Maybe we’ve come to realize we’re not the be-all in this world, that we really are puny and vulnerable and not as smart as we thought we were since all our arrogant ingenuity might be the end-all of the world. You’d think it would make us want to scale back, to slow down, to breathe a little. As I said, maybe we’re not that smart, maybe now we’re just prey for our monstrous creations.

It’s too bad. Because I, for one, still like my heroes even Frodo-sized, and while I think having a home 3D printer, a talkative, interactive house - I’d like mine to sound like Bela Lugosi please - or a personal slave android that looks like Johnny Depp might be nifty, I still prefer to get my own hands on a bag of wet clay and make a sculpture I can load in the kiln by myself, or tap my fingers arthritic writing a children-sized story or diary-style Blog entry maybe a few people might read. Then, I’ll walk my dogs and go sit my happily tired body to rest as I sip a delicious cup of coffee watching my flowers grow.

Who needs flesh-eating, invisible alien invaders with impenetrable exoskeletons only a nuclear explosion will deter (or terrorists or pipelines?) The mosquitoes are monsters enough for me.