1) How did you get going as an
artist?
When I was
5 or 6, my grandmother used to take me with her when she delivered
groceries. We used to pass a churchyard with a statue of the
Virgin Mary. I was mesmerized. I thought it was magic. She'd
have to pry me away. Then when I was about 8 my father bought
himself some oil paints and set up a still life. He let me paint
along with him and I loved it. My parents let me take "art
lessons" at a local frame shop in Stony Brook, New York,
where we lived. The teacher was a painter named Anne Tuttle.
Anne used to go to an art school in Madison Connecticut every
summer and took me with her there to study with
Robert Brackman. Brackman was a masterful American figurative
artist who taught at the Art Student's League at the time. I
got a great foundation in composition; color, portrait and landscape
painting; talking to grownups, and drinking coffee at the Madison
Art School.
2) What do you credit for your love
of art, and what lead you to
dedicate your life to it?
My love of
art is something I discovered in myself at an early age. I think
it started with that feeling I had as a child in front of the
statues in the churchyard. I found I had an ability to draw and
that delighted me. It was really a thrill. I think my art provided
me with a way to transcend certain aspects of my reality
it was a spiritual experience, though I didn't always call it
that. That's what hooked me. I had a lot of encouragement from
teachers too. One time I asked Gary Stanton, my high school art
teacher if he thought I was dedicated enough to be an artist.
He was very supportive. I knew from the beginning that it was
going to be a lifetime commitment.
3) What do you think the kind of
work you do has to offer the art community at large?
What my work
offers is a kind of energy and freedom. There are unlimited ways
to explore 3 dimensional space in a 2 dimensional format. I think
my strengths are imagination, ability to integrate plastic elements
such as line, form, and color to create and describe space in
a somewhat (not entirely) abstract way, and the playful quality
I sometimes see in my work.
4) A lot of people think that twentieth
century art will end up on the
trash heap, if it hasn't already. What contributions do you think
will
last and why?
Actually,
I have nothing against the trash heap. I'm one of those people
who thinks that what you see on the way to the museum is just
as beautiful and valuable as what you see in the museum, and
that stuff on the walls is only there to inspire you to look
around on the way home. 20th Century art is a big topic...Futurism
and the industrial revolution, cubism, fauvism, expressionism,
abstract expressionism, constructivism, conceptual art it's so
inclusive. I think everything will last, but only time will
tell!
5) How did your art education affect
you as an artist? What about your
recent experiences?
My teachers
were all very influential, as were many of my classmates. First
there was Brackman. I was only 12 or 13 and painting alongside
grownups and getting a lot of attention because I could draw
and had a good sense of design and color. I started getting a
big head about it. One time when I was studying with Brackman
I was working on a still life. I had laid out the composition
and placed the objects. I started painting, and decided to work
on an apple. I painted the apple beautifully, but pretty much
left the rest of the canvas bare, except for the drawing. I was
really proud. Brackman used to come around and
critique our work, with an entourage of students following him
and hanging on his every word. He came over to my painting and
poked his finger at the canvas apple and said, "Never do
a thing like that!" I was devastated. He was telling me
the painting needed to be worked on all at once, the colors orchestrated
together (you can have solos, but they have to be in the context
of the whole piece). I went outside and cried and cried. It was
a painful but important lesson in humility as well as composition.
I wanted him to tell me how great I was. My self esteem was
entirely contingent on getting praised for my artwork. Later,
at
RISD I was with a number of talented and exciting students with
diverse stylistic and artistic backgrounds. It was a hard time
for me. I was torn between the traditional training I had and
the desire to understand and explore more contemporary ideas.
I also struggled with the need to prove myself. I still feel
good when I get compliments on my work, especially from my colleagues,
but I'm less dependent on it as I get older. Nowadays, I try
to keep in contact with people whose work I admire. Sometimes
I contact an artist I don't know but want to meet by email or
regular mail and have developed a few relationships that
way. Supportive alliances with colleagues are very important
to me.
6) What do you think makes contemporary
art attractive to some and not to others--what accounts for the
love-hate relationship it has generated for the past hundred
years?
First of all,
I think that people like to feel safe, and some people feel foolish
if they don't understand something. Feeling foolish can lead
to contempt for that which is not understood and a lot of "contemporary"
art raises more questions than it answers. I love Judy Pfaff's
work. It's so dynamic and energized, and its always faithful
to it's inspiration. Easel painting will never become extinct,
as long as there are painters. That doesn't mean John Cage isn't
doing something fascinating too. There's room for everything.
The thing is the energy and the desire, not the materials or
the size or the fact that it's popular or permanent or not.
7) If there was a fire, accepting
that you value all the work but could
only save one piece by one artist, and knowing that it might
have to
represent what was great and good about our time, who and what
would it be, and why?
Guernica.
It's an amazing painting both formally and for it's profound
social comment. But it would kill me to leave behind works by
Dubuffet, Tapies, DeKooning, Cy Twombly, Leger, and so many others.
8) What is it about the inherent
rivalry among individual artists and
the private nature of the work that makes the art community so
weak and divided?
What an interesting
question! My husband (Bill Warfield) is a musician. Sometimes
I'm struck by the contrast between the collaborative nature of
performing music and the isolation of painting. Not that musicians
aren't competitive! But composers need musicians, arrangers need
composers, and musicians need each other to make the music come
alive. They love each other while they're playing. You can tell.
The music washes away all the pettiness; at least for the moment
it is being performed. It's what makes their hearts beat, if
it's real. I can only speak for myself. I know I'm very ambivalent
about the
"art community". I need other artists and want them
to flourish just as I want that for myself, but sometimes I get
jealous. I start to think there's not enough to go around. Not
enough money, approval, gallery space, attention. That happens
when I'm not focused on my own work. I guess that's human nature.
I joined a co-op gallery in New York so I could be part of a
community and not have to deal with the constraints of commercialism.
It makes me feel good to do service that way, and I have an opportunity
to interact with artist I probably wouldn't get to know if I
was out there on my own.
9) What keeps you going?
The work itself.
Nothing can compare with the sense of discovery when a painting
starts to come together, when you do something and don't exactly
understand it but it's clearly a breakthrough and you've reached
another level. Sometimes I see it in a colleague's work, and
I love that too. Almost everything I do is so I can have a few
of those moments in my life. The promise of those moments keeps
me going. Making art is it's own
reward.
