Always learning.

This past Friday I had an opening at BICA Gallery, my first experience of the Bend Art Walk. A lot like Portland's First Thursdays, it was a kick - 4 hours of intensity. I met four artists whose names I'd seen in local reviews but had never encountered in person. We traded ideas and experiences, drank wine and laughed a lot. I had a terrific conversation with one of the other artists in the show about education, art, forest fires, and life. Gallery visitors were open, eager, and willing to ask questions, listen, and talk. I've always enjoyed a good opening and hadn't realized until now how much I've missed First Thursdays.

So . . . the learning part. The paintings with easily comprehensible titles were the ones easiest to discuss, to answer questions about, and to evoke deeper conversations with viewers. The ones with esoteric titles that needed explanation made people's eyes glaze over. One of my first encounters was with a man who didn't pay any attention to the titles or words about the art, but walked up to me shaking his head and laughing and asking about the energy and emotion behind the work. He seemed to get it on a visceral level and didn't need to know anything more. I don't remember exactly what he did for a living, but it was something like car sales or construction. But he had the purest understanding of what was on the canvas - the paint itself without a story. The fact that he seemed to think I was wacko only enhanced my view of the depth of his comprehension.

Honesty. With all good intentions - to make my paintings more accessible to viewers - I began to title them after what they resembled. So there were landscapes, butterfly wings, tree frogs, and rivers. It gave people a way into the painting, to read a title they could understand and apply it to the painting in front of them. And there were correlations in color and shape between the abstract painting and the verbal referent.

The dishonesty on my part comes from the fact that I had no such intention before or during the painting process - to "make" a landscape, butterfly wings, tree frogs, or rivers. The process of painting is the subject of the painting. This probably isn't such an awful thing to do, except that I sometimes began to paint "toward" a title or a series. So I began to think of the paintings as landscapes, or whatever, during the process and afterwards. The pure intention began to fade.

This was a trap I set in my own path. It may be at the root of my problems in writing the artist statement. Now I'm caught and struggling, and no wonder, to return to the pure act of painting balanced against the visual outcome of the act. That's where I started. Finding a subject matter outside the painting, even just as a title, is misleading and counter-productive to me as a painter and probably ultimately to the viewer as well.

There are a number of solutions to consider (I hate paintings called "Untitled"), and I'm not sure yet which direction I'll go. Suggestions welcome.

A good point from Tree Lady! Maybe at the end of the painting day isn't the time to try to make sense of anything (other than Law and Order).

At a panel discussion several years ago when I was in art school, one of the gallery reps said that on a slow day the assistants pull artists' statements from the files and read them aloud for laughs.

Someone (Elvis Costello, Miles Davis, or ?) said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

A former teacher of mine, Anne Johnson, did a project several years ago using scraps of artists' statements that had been cut up and used for note-taking. She edited them into a melange of the impossible - intentions, justifications, and deadlines - and made us all laugh.

As a former gallery co-op member, I've heard some amazing artists' statements from applicants - belligerent, arrogant sad, intentionally and unintentionally funny, poetic, awkward, pathetic.

So where am I?

My BFA thesis is probably still my clearest artist's statement, but at 12 pages long with appendices and a bibliography doesn't condense well to a single page (generally the limit for galleries and calls for artists). I have about a 25-word statement that I rattle off when someone asks me face-to-face about the work (it changes all the time), but it sounds airy-fairy when written as a formal artist's statement. Somewhere in between the two there has to be the perfect solution.

The dilemma is that I've probably written 300 to 400 artist's statements - sometimes there is a new one every day, complete or incomplete - papers scattered around the studio floor, 3 by 5 cards strewn thoughout the house, a jungle of Word documents, random thoughts while I walk the dogs. It's what I do when I quit painting for the day.

The pattern that seems to have evolved over the years is that whatever I say in words about my art is untrue the next day. Verbalizing about whatever it is that I think I've discovered seems to kill it. Clarity lives only in the painting, and in the process of painting, itself. It's frustrating for someone who has always thought that her logical and verbal abilities are up to the task. But painting is livelier than that and eludes the net. It is deeper than the ability of words to mean. It is the quarry, in both senses.

Ten years out

Ten years out of art school, still painting, still loving it. The abilities increase. The thought behind the art deepens. I become adept with paint and can do nearly anything I want to do. People look at the work, and an increasing number of them understand and appreciate the limb I go out on.

And every day, over and over, I write and rewrite an artist's statement, trying to distill into a few words the motivation and hoped-for result of the painting. It changes much more than does the painting itself. Are the words conversational, confrontational, theory, poetry? Do I dare tell the truth, or is a story more appealing? Should there be a long form and corresponding short form? Should it be hard, or easy?

More to follow.