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I've asked myself the "why painting?" question at length.
It was so weird to answer that I ended up writing a rather long
and convoluted essay for myself
about it. But it served to get at a few basic things: to start,
it is (as Sean Scully said at MIT in '92) an archaic activity.
The continuation of something physically that old and basic
is very appealing to me. It is not, structurally, dependent
on 'new' anything. It has a stubborn, relentless aspect to it,
along with an awesome history.
It is passive - I mean as an object. Not only in terms of just
hanging there on the wall, but also in its possibilities for
obscuring its own process. A painting
can lift itself, and me with it, out of time and present circumstance.
It can change my sense of the present very powerfully. That
can make me more aware
of time and space and the structure of experience itself. Big
stuff.
(I can go on to explain why I don't have the same kind of shifts
with other art media - but it would be 'long & convoluted'.)
When I'm painting 'well' I have the same out-of-time experience.
I think the shrink word is "flow". It is the best
of all worlds for me because I am doing
something willfully, consciously, and instantly seeing results
that are, in at least some ways, a complete surprise and beyond
me.
When I'm painting 'badly' I spend alot of time thinking of how
to make a painting-less life. I now know it would have to be
with animals or plants, and not
people; without alot of words. I'm really attuned to dogs -
we work well together and effortlessly understand each other.
I think I would try a life around
helping solve animal problems. I'm too wimpy to be a vet, but
I might make a good trainer. Or possibly a garden or landscape
designer. But there's the
'please the client' problem, and all those necessary words .
. .
My first decade plus as a painter I spent with landscape. Very
little that meant alot made it into those works except for my
affection for nature & space. So I
moved into abstraction. And I realize I paint out of only 2
sources: either how I am at present, or how I wish I could be.
If my emotional life is turbulent, then
whether I like it or not, all of that is what makes the painting.
Some of my best work is based on nearly incapacitating pain
and longing. But I don't set out to
do a sort of purge of my feelings (I know alot of artists who
do). It just happens without any need on my part to put it there.
Often I wish I could hide it. But
at that moment it is all that I know, and that is what gets in
through the paint. I've yet to find it scary - but it isn't pleasant
to do either. It is wonderful when it
is done, and I recognize what made it, but now, as paint, it
is this gorgeous thing.
When I am coming out of trauma I paint the kind of calm I wish
I already had. But it is a different kind of longing - to have
the same sort of self-sovereignty
the painting has. I have had moments of such intense calm - I
know it sounds crazy - but a calm akin to plutonium just sitting
in a container somewhere . . .
When a painting is successful for me it is because it is making
what I know or intuit real. Most of what I know to be my actual
experience there are no
words for, no pictures of, and it is sometimes hard to understand
or trust, or remember or hang on to. Having it in image form,
beside the thrill of seeing what
I haven't seen before ( and not being able to retrace the steps
of making it), lets me 'see its face' in a way. Confirms and
strengthens the internal knowing -
consequently the 'yes' response. It is about internal and external
simultaneously - about present and past, about being alive being
visible.
Getting there is mostly difficult and indirect. Like entering
the room you know you need to be in but having no idea where
the light switch is. But after 30
years of head-butting I have learned a few methods that help
me start - about colors, about layering, covering & re-exposing,
making different kinds of spaces,
warping space, scale - all that stuff it takes so long to begin
to understand in the studio. Only once have I done a series
of paintings that were mostly layed
out in my mind before beginning, and turned out well. It was
a great relief - more like doing the laundry than my usual experience
with paint. I sincerely
envy people who can do that all the time. I trust the paint itself
- feel less and less need to insist with it, to force it around.
The sensuality I treasure is the
visible one when I'm done - actual paint handling is pleasant,
but not nearly enough to make me paint.
I'm pretty omnivorous when I go look in galleries. I'm always
hopeful. I'm looking for what people have chosen to offer, but
will feel disappointed if
everything I see looks like it was done to be clever, or current,
or to show off technical skill. I am disappointed by what appears
to me to be made out of fear
of being ignored. Of course, my own frame of mind can blind
me to what is offered, and I lose. But it has the virtue of
being an anonymous transaction.
Only I am hurt if I miss the offer that is made. When I come
back form a weekend in NYC having found the work of a couple
of new painters I could
connect with, I am elated. A little of the hunter-gatherer thing
there, but mostly gratitude for my luck and their effort.
When I go visit a friend's studio, I approach it with great excitement
because I am very aware of what an act of intimacy that is.
Sometimes much more so
than any physical contact could be. I understand how important
a person's work is to them, how vulnerable they are there, and
how much trust and
generosity is required to let someone else in. So I want to
respond deservingly, with energetic thoughtfulness. (It was
a constant necessity teaching, and one
of the things that made it so exhausting.) I'm hoping to see
work that blows me away, that makes me feel the need to practically
genuflect to this person.
Even if I don't find the big thrill, I have never found nothing
there. That generous/greedy frame of mind always pays off.
I wish I could muster it all the time for every work I see.
My relationship to museums is a little weird. I spent so much
time in them growing up that they really feel like 'home' to
me. Especially the Mellon and the
Met. I walk in and feel calm, at ease even in throngs of tourists.
I know I will see 'old friends' there, hope to find something
new to be thrilled by - I know
that I am in a place that came into being because people believed
that what artists make is worthwhile (even if in their own time
it was thought worthless). And
it is a place made with the primary intention to share the thrills.
I am grateful for and respectful of that effort. To me, all
other issues are secondary to this
effort. Especially at the Met, I am always very moved by the
continuity through so many thousands of years - the human thing
of needing to make something
special, wonderful, something beautiful.
It is reassuring.
What do I long for ? So many things, Addison - I don't know
where to start. In painting I long to see someone else's experience,
or thought process,
or belief system, or I don't even know what. I want to see
ego fall back in its place. I long to lose myself courtesy of
someone else's efforts - or by my own
effort. To be made more human by it. I long to see the evidence
of a fully felt life. I'd like to leave the visual evidence,
I guess.
Artdeal
Mzine w/ Ana Guerra, July '99, in response to a few questions;
Ms
Guerra lives and paints in Beverly, just outside of Boston, MA,
USA
She
will have a solo show at the Creiger-Dane Gallery(Boston) in
2001
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