Homage to a Beloved Friend

Bambi's Dream

acrylic on pannel

12"x16"x1.5"

I lost my darling Bambi today. The sweetheart was at the end of her energy - she’d not eaten much the last couple of weeks and nothing since yesterday. She lost a good six pounds in four months, which for a 19 pound, 11 year-old miniature schnauzer… I’m afraid it’s because of my broken arm. She was always fragile, a rescue dog with epilepsy, weak liver, arthritis, and soft teeth, but she was doing really well until my accident in January. 

I have no doubt that the stress we were under as I healed, including dealing with my other dog, her schnauzer buddy’s new diagnosis of chronic rhinitis, pushed her sensitive immune system over the edge. I suddenly kept finding new bumps on her body that turned out to be very fast growing cancers. By this morning she had three as big as golf balls and at least six others from marble to pea size. There was no way she had enough flesh to remove them all, and anyway, her lack of appetite was a good indication that she had more growing inside.

Until yesterday, despite her weakness, she was going for walks and chasing sticks in the garden. Today, however, she could hardly sustain her tail wagging. She couldn’t even swallow her pain pills. She was ready. When I wrapped her up in a towel, she just settled into my arms and leaned her head against my shoulder. In my friend’s car she curled up on my lap and held her bead up towards me. When we got to the vet’s, she didn’t shake, she didn’t try to jump off my lap to hide under my seat, she didn’t try to go to the other dogs waiting in the anteroom or to get to the exit door. She just sat, warm in my embrace. When we were called in and i sat once more with her she didn’t react to the vet’s touch as he shaved her leg and put in  the needle, she just lay against my chest, heart to heart as I stroked her,, her soft head resting on my arm. I only knew she was gone because her head slid down slightly towards my elbow. 

She loved to chase sticks in the garden and in parks, and balls and stuffed animals in the house. I made a kind of lane for her with a hall carpet  and a big pillow at the end against a wall into which she’d crash at full speed after catching her ‘prey’. She liked to bark at the world through the living room window, sitting on the back of the couch to look out, but when friends arrived she greeted them with such delight no one could resist her. She looked to me, her best friend, with such a mixture of mischief, joy, devotion and trust that I was blessed.

I think only those who share that much love with an animal know such a blessing.

It’s good I have done many sketches, drawings and paintings of her over the eight years she was my friend, and that I’ve caught many of her moods and movements in photographs. She is gone but will ever be present, and she will continue to inspire me, as do the other beings, human or animal, that I’ve loved and lost over the past number of years.

We Got the Power!

Looking

colour pencil on paper

30”x22”

C.Ascher

What keeps many artists motivated? A strong connection to feeling and emotion that drives their creative process.

I teach adults to make objects with art-making media. That’s the simple description of what goes on in the class. The complexity is teaching them how to make those objects be art, as opposed to being artistic or creative. What’s the difference, you ask? Emotional truth. Art happens not only when someone masters a tool, medium, technique or style, but when that process is powered by feeling. For something to be ‘expressive’, the art world’s word for emotional truth, it must express SOMETHING. And that’s where adult students run into serious trouble.

Now, the best place to go looking for true feeling is at the moment of first contact with an experience, whether that experience is physical, like riding a horse for the first time, sensory, like stroking a dog’s fur or touching a snake, emotional, like hearing about a loved one’s accident, or intellectual, like having an ‘aha!’ moment in a science experiment. All types engender strong feelings that remain with us long after the experience becomes history. For many of us, however, the clearest memories of feelings are of those we remember from childhood. By the time we’re adults, we’ve learned a number of feeling-suppressing techniques, like moralizing or judging, or ways of explaining, justifying or wallowing that obscure the pure, original experience. Our response as been-there-done-that sophisticates becomes not about remembering the feeling but considering what we did or thought about it, or what others expected us to. That makes imbuing works of art with emotional truth very difficult for students.

Example: In responding to an assignment given to her by another teacher, a friend recently tried to identify the emotion a favourite story inspired in her. The object was for her to then render not the story as an image, but the emotion it inspires in her. That’s a sophisticated exercise that depends on the student’s level of self-awareness: in a state of self-observed reverie, the student must recall the story’s emotional impact, not its content alone or the thoughts or ideas it subsequently inspired. Children do this naturally. Many adults have to relearn it.

This is the story my friend turned to for her assignment; she recounted it to me as it was told to her (there are apparently various versions but they aren’t the object here) :

Six men are stranded by a snow storm in their far north camp in the woods. They are away from their families, and it’s Christmas. The Devil appears to them and makes them an offer. He will send them home for the holidays and return them safely to their camp IF they refrain from swearing or cursing the entire time. The men agree. A canoe appears and they embark though the river is frozen. Suddenly, the canoe rises up and flies as they row. As it covers distance, the men agree that they will not drink during the revels; if they remain sober, they will avoid all temptation and be safe. All goes as planned with five of them, but the sixth drinks, swears at home, and on the way back, he falls out of the canoe and curses. Thinking the Devil won’t have heard, the men manage to haul him back in, maybe they gag him (that part was unclear in the telling) but when they arrive back at their camp, the canoe dumps them all in the snow. Do they end up in Hell? My friend didn’t know. In fact, she didn’t remember ever actually hearing any other ending to the story, though she inferred that the men had been damned by the one’s indiscretion.

In contemplating why this story resonates with her, my friend told me she had trouble trying to create an image to express her feelings. It is a favourite story of hers, but all she could think of as a related emotion was fear. The story’s moral was clear to her: sin and be damned.

“Are you religious?” I asked.

“No,” she answered.

“Why fear then?”

“I’m supposed to fear; it’s an example.”

“To some maybe. But is that what keeps the story alive for you, its moral?”

“Well, no.”

“Anyway, you’re thinking about it through your intellect, not connecting with your feelings. What struck you when you first heard the story?” I asked.

“The flying canoe!” she answered.

“What about it?”

“What a wondrous thing!” she marvelled. “What a sight that would be to witness!”

“There you are!” 

So her task, no simpler now but more true, is to somehow render an image that will convey her wonder. How much more compelling that expression will be than one programmed by other people’s interpretations of the story, by what it’s supposed to convey (perhaps only in that version)! However she chooses to render her image, it will be emotionally true to her experience of it. Now that will be a lesson well learned!

Starring Role

Starring Role

colour pencil on paper relief

C. Ascher

For a number of years, I agreed as a special favour to an artist friend and fellow teacher to be a guest speaker in her class. Besides teaching at the art centre where I am also a curator and an administrator, she teaches at a local university in the art education department. The class in question is meant to prepare potential art teachers to enter the secondary or alternative adult art educational system. My contribution to the class was to address the students as a professional working in not-for-profit art centres. Despite being squeezed into a regular class, I usually spoke for far longer than my allotted time and answered many questions thereafter.

For my first couple of visits, I was paid $50.00 by the university. This is a ridiculous amount for a university to offer a guest speaker, but I was told my friend had obtained it to cover my gasoline and parking costs since her class didn’t qualify as a ‘lecture series’. Since she felt the exposure to professionals was an essential part of her students’ education, for my last appearance when the university didn’t even pay that amount, my friend bought me  lunch.

Despite agreeing to speak to the class, I could not understand a university that puts teachers in a position where they must rely on volunteers to expose their students to professionals in their field, especially in education. Far from educating them to that profession, the message is disrespectful of both the profession and its practitioners. The teacher gets paid to teach but not the expert contributing to that teaching. The university is paid to provide a learning environment for all students equally, but not all guests are paid to help provide that learning.

I certainly understand that budgets are tight and volunteers and donors can add a dimension to the learning experience. Yet I have never known a guest from a university to volunteer to speak. At any rate, I would never expect it. As an educator, and despite working in a not-for-profit sector, I pay my guest professionals, They have invested time and money to achieve the level that makes them valuable as speakers, and it is my responsibility as a host to make sure that achievement is respected. In that regard, part of my responsibility as an educator is to make sure the students or audience to whom my guests present are aware of the value they are receiving. Also, if I am paid for my work, if the institution I work for charges for its work, then there is no excuse for us not to pay our guests for their work. 

This year, the class has been taken over by another person who has requested that I return as a guest speaker, again for one hour of a regular class, with no mention of any kind of renumeration. I guess the assumption is that since I agreed before, I’ll agree again. Now, I also cannot understand a university-level educator who invites a speaker to her class without first taking the trouble to speak with the guest, explain the working conditions and ascertain that the guest will indeed be willing to donate his/her time. The students’ edification may not be motivation enough.

Why did I accept the invitation before as a volunteer  but will not now? Whereas I at least knew the original teacher’s skills and teaching philosophy, I don’t know the new teacher, have no idea what she covers in the class, or her attitude to art education or to art itself.  These details are important for my agreeing to address the class as well as to my preparation for the presentation and the method of its delivery, especially since the very means by which I was  invited goes against all I believe about education, art and the respect of artists.

At the very least, as a professional in a complex field of practice - does the university understand that teaching art is a complex field of practice? -  I would expect that the class spend time preparing to receive me by doing research and agreeing on a series of key questions relevant to their learning. This was not proposed. Lastly, I was asked to cover a demanding, multi-faceted subject, with visual aids yet, in a mere hour squeezed into a business-as-usual class context. All this demonstrates an alarmingly casual, even dismissive attitude to me and to ‘our’ profession.

I have not accepted to speak in this new teacher’s class without renumeration. Instead, I have offered her and her students a free tour of the art centre where I work, a two-hour session during which I will answer the student’s prepared questions about adult art education in a so-called alternative context. It’s a test. Do they value what they ask of me enough to at least make the effort to adjust their schedule and gather where my talk will make most sense? We will see.

I Want to Be An Artist

Empty Promises

photo collage c.ascher

How many parents have reacted with restrained horror upon hearing their child announce “I want to be an artist”? You, reader, might well be one of them. Perhaps you stood there, or maybe you will soon stand there, momentarily regretting having asked your son or daughter, “What do you want to  be when you grow up?”

How many children who answered “I want to be an artist,” when asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” had their self-determination crushed by parents (or teachers) who re-directed them into other lives? Maybe you were one of these children. How did your parents react?

Here are typical, self-identity destroying reactions to children's announcements that they “want to be an artist”:

1) No worries, you’ll grow out of it.

2) You’ll starve! You need a real profession.

3) Absolutely not. You must follow in MY footsteps!

4) Don’t be silly. You’ll need to be supporting us in our old age.

5) You are going to be a … (fill in the profession) and I will have no argument!

6) And become a selfish, arrogant human being?

7) And maybe become a gay or lesbian homeless drug addict? Is that what you want?

8) No child of mine will be a sissy! Hockey, now that’s a real profession!

9) What will the family and friends think?

10) Well dear, talent is something you’re born with.

11) You have to be rich to make it as an artist.

12) Not until you bring up your marks in all your other school subjects!

13) Only if you become an industrial designer or maybe a graphic artist. How about a game designer? An engineer! An architect! That pays well!

14) Happiness and fulfillment don’t put a roof over your head. Believe me, I know!

15) This life was good enough for me, it will be good enough for you!

16) Your teachers haven’t noted a special talent. Aptitude tests point you to … (fill in an employable job)

17) Oh dear. That doesn’t LOOK like a … (whatever the viewer thinks the artwork should portray)

18) Well then I won’t pay for your education.

What were you told? How did it affect you? Did you become an artist anyway? Do you regret following or not following your own ambition? 

Don’t tell me, As an artist, an art teacher and a gallery curator, I hear the longing, the regret, the self-doubt every time I meet someone who believed, accepted or lived by any one of these or similar assertions.

And the worst of it?  These parents (teachers) convince themselves they’re acting in the children’s best interest!

Artists and Rebellion

We're trying but...

photo collage

Ah, artists. Wonderful and strange folks.  I have been one of them for much of my life, but I’ve also dealt with them in my roles as educator and gallery curator.

Artists are wonderful because they (most of the good ones anyway) express truths as they experience and know them, often bravely, often going against the expected grain. They don’t like to be told what to do, they in fact often see themselves as exempt from the dictates of fashion, taste and expectation.They aim for insight, honesty, engagement (the good ones anyway).

Many artists see themselves as revolutionary: they see it as their duty to rebel against strictures, dogmas, and submission requirements. They expect others to meet them and their imagery head-on, with open arms. They aim to have AN EFFECT on those who gaze at their work, much like a bolt of lightning has, or a Grand Canyon has: big, life-changing, important but most of all recognized and appreciated. They expect to be respected.

This attitude is wonderful in their practice, when they are in their studios struggling or collaborating with their media. They then are alone in their universe, masters of their imagery and technique, free from influence and constraint to express, explore, experiment, create and please themselves in the process.

Problem is, many don’t quite get exactly what it means to be ‘revolutionary’. They don’t quite understand the role of ‘the rebel’.  Artists are strange because, for all their creativity and courage, they don’t get it at all when those against whom they rebel don’t appreciate their revolution. They expect respect, but they also crave indulgence  They are surprised, even hurt when their images succeed in provoking, when the reaction of those whose expectations are challenged is dismissive or even hostile rather than celebratory.

Rebellion is by definition provocative; revolution is in effect disturbing and confrontational. It’s counterproductive to expect permission to be rebellious or approval when one is revolutionary.

 When I teach artists or curate their exhibitions I tell them this: I’ve discovered in my life that my art evolves and grows when I strive to be rebellious and revolutionary in my practice, permission and approval be damned.  However, I’ve also learned that my profession stalls if I’m blindly so in my dealings outside my studio. I will get neither recognition nor appreciation if I all I achieve is to sabotage the efforts of those in the business who would otherwise work with me to our mutual benefit.

I hope artists get it.

More Thoughts About Process

Five Stories

photo collage C. Ascher

Art making isn’t just about sudden ideas, immediate visual stimulation or pop-up images. It’s a process: it’s a sequence of thoughts and a series of actions that explore the ways feelings, ideas or inspiration can be married to medium through gesture to go extract the deepest personal meaning they represent. The aim is expression, but it’s also connection, it’s showing, but it’s also sharing.

I recently invited member artists of a local association to create work for an exhibition in response to the theme ‘Fire’. Many of the participants went with the first image that came to their minds as they considered the theme.  They approached Fire as an object.  Among the works submitted were various versions of these images: cats contemplating a fireplace, people sitting around campfires, still-life images of objects illuminated by candlelight or lamplight.

Others, however, took the creation process further to consider other possibilities. One painter showed a dragon spewing fire, in another’s work a phoenix burst into flames, in a third, candles burned as if for a religious ritual. There were numerous forests being consumed by yellow and red flames (a propos given the forest fires that raged in western Canadian provinces this summer), and volcanoes erupting. They rendered Fire as a subject, broadening it

Then there were images that dug further still not just to describe Fire as an objector or as an action but to capture sensation or emotion. One painter rendered a flamenco dancer at the height of her passion. Another represented hot peppers as they waited on plates or in a shopping basket. A third captured the wisps of smoke from a dying – or igniting - oil lamp wick. A fourth pictured Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire”. Another showed the burning of a funeral pyre in India, a Sati (or Suttee, a banned practice where a widow burns with her deceased husband).

Some abstracted their Fire. They focused on the way that reds, yellows, blues and other colours interact as a fire burns, on the movement of the flames and on the transparency of the smoke. Neither on object nor subject, they rather focused on expressing the elements of fire through their medium, oil, watercolour or acrylic for instance, and through their usage. The painterly technique itself is what conveyed the image’s meaning.

During a critique of their exhibition, many of the artists revealed that they had little direct or current experience with fire. Candles and fireplaces or memories of long-ago campfires were about the limit of their contact. This led us to a discussion about the levels of thinking involved in the interpretation of an idea in art. As seen from the descriptions above, artists have many choices in considering how they will approach a subject: form the common (or popular), to literal (or descriptive), to representational (descriptive + subtly experiential) to interpretative (personally and expressively experiential) to conceptual (or philosophical and universal). Or all of them combined.

It’s important for artists to understand their relationship to their subjects, just as they understand their relationships to their tools, media, techniques and styles. There is a difference between the image, sensation or emotion that arises out of artists’ lived experiences (being burned by a match as a child, or causing a fire or falling in love before a fireplace for instance) to a subject suggested by observation, contemplation or a call-for-submissions (watching a cat laze before a fire or my imposing a fire theme on artists who have little current or personal experience with it). In other words, are artists approaching their images as an expression of personal truth or as a contemplation of a more objective truth, or both?

The most successful images long-term combine lived/felt experience with a broader, more profound understanding of what that image might convey beyond the obvious or the expected.

Of Memory and Photographs

The Landlord

photo collage C. Ascher

            It’s a funny thing about memory. There are different kinds. There is the pop-up memory that surprises us as we’re living in the now. There is the lingering memory, perhaps of something pleasant or someone for whom we cared, or the inescapable memory of a trauma or conflict. There are those just-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue teasers, or those deeply buried rotters that slowly poison our lives, those we sense are there but that we cannot, or will not access. There are those we’ve integrated so thoroughly into our skill or knowledge that they support – or sabotage -everything we do. Or there are memories that hook into us like fishing lures, their pull powered by the suction of our black holes, which we are constantly trying to escape.

Even funnier are those memories contained in photographs. There you are standing in a place or surrounded by people you don’t know. The photograph remembers them, it remembers you there, smiling, or mugging, or holding someone’s hand, but you look at it frowning, uncertain, surprised, with no memory of it at all. Perhaps you don’t even recognize yourself, perhaps other people have told you that baby is you there as they reminisce about how you were this or when you did that as you sit there skeptically, mistrustful, thinking they might be pulling your leg.

Well, that last is my experience of memory and of old photographs.

A friend recently told me he’d been looking at photographs of himself throughout his life. He remembers the places and the people clearly. The thing is, a man of sixty-seven, he has an amazing memory that stretches vividly back to when he was at least two. He remembers the houses and streets where he lived in another country, he remembers the names of people gone from his life for almost sixty years, he remembers objects he had and things he did and all manner of experiences as if he lives them anew with each remembering.

What amazes me is that he doesn’t need photographs to remember these things. All one has to do is encourage him with questions, one leading to another, and his past opens up to a listener like a movie being replayed. I sometimes envy him. There are too many things in my past that I only know about because of what other people remember. They are stories that make the photographs they show me seem vaguely familiar but that do little to trigger real memories of my own.

In another way, I consider myself the luckier one. When he talks about his past I hear in his voice such melancholy, such longing, such pain as he remembers I sometimes wish the photographs didn’t exist to confirm his experiences. It’s almost as if they help to transport him back physically:  there he is standing on a dock about to board a ship, an excited five-year old; now he’s standing and laughing beside a best friend; there he is throwing balls for his favourite dog to catch; or he’s staring proudly before the façade of the first house he bought.

That is the problem: when he relives the past he does so as the person he was then, as the child or the teen again; when he revisits it through photographs all he sees is himself, even when he’s not pictured.

For a while it worried me that he was becoming more and more consumed by these memories, that his random perusal of the photographs was causing a kind of emotional malfunction because it made him jump from event to portrait to place without regard for when he experienced them in his life. He’d forget that the child he saw smiling and holding a teddy bear was happily ignorant of what would happen a year later, or that the girl with whom he held hands in the picture would no longer love him shortly after the shutter released. He relived the ‘then’ but suppressed the ‘now’. He was unaware that his backward gaze as he ignored the present erased all his experiences in between, but also made him see colour where there was only black and white.

Now he’s taken to ordering his photographs in an effort to tame his memories, thinking that placing them chronologically will have a reassuring effect. He’s also taken the suggestion that, photo or no, he write his memories down with as much detail as he can remember, one a day. He must set the scene of each memory, describe the circumstances and the people and articulate the thoughts and emotions he remembers feeling at the time. This is makes him externalize them in a way that reverie, even when looking at the photographs, cannot.

So I tell him this: As you do this work, think like an artist. Don’t be sucked in by the emotion and don’t let the photograph help you disregard the present. As you sort the pictures, be the photographer, the one who holds the camera, not the unsuspecting subject in it being fixed in time. Imagine you, the today you, are taking each photograph, not just looking at it. And as you write, pay attention, let the memories inform you, note the hidden details or the things those pictured could not see coming, link one photograph to the next with the things the camera didn’t capture.

See the past with the knowledge you didn’t have then, for instance that your family was boarding a boat because it was being driven from its native country by a hostile new national government, that you would never see your friend again because he was left behind, that you had to abandon your dog. Flesh in the environment, the history, the politics, and the other external things you now know influenced the “then” in ways you could maybe neither avoid nor control.

The thing is, he needn’t be a victim of the emotions the memory triggers; he needn’t fear or wallow in them. He knows much more than he did then, he is much more than he was then. If he can let that knowledge lead him to new insights and discoveries about the person all those experiences made him today, good and bad, how much richer will the remembering make him!