August Newsletter

Painting, dancing, writing.

It’s the last day of August and I’ve been working on this newsletter since the start of the month, and it finally feels complete! I was going to add links to everything mentioned but I really don’t have the time to do a lot of that. I guess it’s not so hard to copy and paste words into your browser if you want to learn more. Will I add a picture? Sure. Here is something from the start of the summer where I talked about my art and captured a bit from a video edit on my phone, for a reason I don’t remember.

Summer is nearly done and August will be gone tomorrow. Here is my newsletter- broken into three parts/topics.

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Painting.

I recently watched (another) documentary on David Hockney and have grown to value his work a great deal. I wrote something about him and a show that the Monterey Museum of Art had of his iPad-drawings (and a few joiners) that depicted mostly Yosemite, a couple of years ago. My essay was a personal reflection on his works and an exploration of my “hometown” (I’m actually from a nearby city called Marina) branching out in ways I thought were exciting and new, but it was also about my re-meeting the kind of representational artwork I had a difficult time connecting with in the past. 

Specifically, I was interested in Hockney’s way with landscapes because the Monterey Peninsula is a place people go to see the views, and buy paintings of the views. Artists often come here to paint the views and I never wanted to be like that. It felt like doing so was to make work only for tourists (which doesn’t have to be a bad thing). For a very long time my perception was halted by that idea.

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties and in the Midwest, far away from my old, familiar landscape I never even thought about painting, that two women- the painter Shirley Luke Schnell and the writer Phyllis Moore, helped me very clearly understand that the artist and writer can depict or write about any subject and create and share worlds far beyond what that subject matter is. It can be a very personal thing and I think it’s a lot like magic.

Since then, while exploring lessons learned and finding what maybe I’ll refer to as my personal aesthetic “consistency”- I’ve painted depictions of pro-wrestlers (a few times) and I have a series of Air Jordan sneakers, as well as some big lizards and a portrait of Bernie Sanders, and aside from work I did on the shoes, I didn’t paint these on the Monterey Peninsula. I love them all and I feel as though I’ve proven to myself that I can work representationally and still reveal something that is personal, distinctive, as well as consistent. 

A long time ago I painted sort of abstracted flowers and allowed myself to use colors and lines that felt natural to me- and they translated into these “real world” depictions. I always thought I might return to that, but now I’m not so sure. Another one of my teachers from Kansas City, Julie Farstad, is currently painting giant flowers and they are just incredible and I feel that she is taking care of some kind of vision I might have dreamed about then- and doing a much better job than I would. (I haven’t talked to her about it, but I saw her posts about the work, online.)

In any case, I’ve challenged myself by creating my own “representational” works to explore my own world and try and answer some questions I had, I guess. I sometimes try to connect with others, through my work, in that way.

It may have taken this practice and engagement to get to the kind of understanding I have of Hockney now. I didn’t really give him much thought until I saw his video series that explored technology, like the camera obscura, in art history. I found that information during some searching for a high school art class lecture. After that, I was showing a student a Sister Wendy episode where she visits LACMA and her description of Hockney’s colorful painting of a road in the Hollywood hills really allowed me to start thinking of his work in a new way. It piqued my curiosity and this led to my driving through not so colorful Hollywood roads filled with commuter traffic after work and attending a show he had at the L.A. Louver, in Venice Beach. This was in 2015.

In the documentary I mentioned at the start of this newsletter, Hockney talks about the work I saw at this exhibition, and his explorations on perspective- his desire to depict a wide perspective, and how technology has helped him and all of us, start to observe reality in a new way that is how things are when we really look. Of course, this is really my own perception of his words. You should watch the film and see for yourself.

I’m truly taken by his constant and authentic interest and approach to seeing. Like a poem captures something that is elusive to the everyday experience of something- he wants to catch the momentary experience that is very special to living in this life, and share it with those who view his art. I really admire that.

There is something of that in what I am doing. I can feel it, but I don’t have an instinctive desire to depict what exists before our eyes. I think maybe what I am doing is rejecting that, on purpose.

The more I go about things in the intuitive manner that feels like I’m releasing something or translating something (this is how I’ve always approached art-making), the more I feel confirmed that my interest in the “real world” is most often rooted in the process of form, not in what I see.

Color, shape, texture, materials- the layering and time it takes (The word Shirley Schnell taught me, accretion.) to feel whether a work is complete or is what it should be, or if I need to make changes; this is what excites me and it’s what I feel I am trying to communicate to the viewer. The materiality and what I find as the beauty or ease of subject matter is what can potentially connect with the real world.

I think of the work of the contemporary artist, Thomas Campbell, whose painting and sculptural work isn’t really representational. He doesn’t seem to need to write a lot about why he’s doing what he’s doing and it makes me wonder why I feel the need to. Maybe I’m spoiling the trick by trying to investigate. Sharing with silent confidence might be the right way to go, but maybe that’s not who I am.

Thomas Campbell paints skateboards as well as canvases, he sews papers he prints on, he sculpts, he makes movies about skating and surfing. He takes photos. He skates and a lot of other things- and all of these parts make up what I see as a clear and distinct artistic presence. (I talk about him a lot with my students as he lives in the Santa Cruz area and has a positive way about him that I think is good for creative teens.) I tend to think that artists that come from the world of skating have an innate “real world” connection through the sport and culture that allows people to enter into the work and concepts that feel more mysterious. 

*I also have had a hard time finding female-identifying skaters that seem to so easily slide into the world of contemporary art as their (historically) male counterparts, but hopefully that is changing.

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Dancing.

Another thing I wanted to explore in this August newsletter is my work with dance. 

I grew up watching American Bandstand, Soul Train, Solid Gold and Dance Party USA- shows where we watched people dance. Fame, Flashdance and Breakin’ were hit movies about people compelled to dance. (Do I add Footloose to the list?) I still remember asking two of my childhood friends (sisters) to teach me how to dance. I still remember how they showed me how to move with rhythm and how great it felt to do this in time to music and in some kind of unfamiliar unison, with the two of them.

I still remember the two boys who showed up on the blacktop during recess in the fifth grade in red Adidas track suits and a big piece of cardboard and a boombox that blasted Planet Rock. We all stood in a circle around them and did the same move my friends taught me, swaying and alternating legs and hands, clapping and snapping- as a way of showing support and enthusiasm for their liquid movements and acrobatic twirls, flips and spins on the ground, in time to the music, in the center of us all. I was hooked.

I feel very fortunate to have attended a school dance in elementary school with a DJ that played Rick James and Cameo, Cutie Pie by One Way (that was my favorite). Most of the kids were terrified of getting too close to each other, but perhaps it was the way dance was presented to us in TV and movies- we ended up being a giant crowd of kids moving and playing on our own, together, and in rhythm. Many of my classmates were raised in families that supported dance in regard to cultural experiences as well as local parties to celebrate weddings and birthdays. I was a hyperactive and somehow very happy kid from a toxic little family that welcomed no one and celebrated nothing, so it was new and I was GAME. Life should be fun, whenever possible. I knew that, and dancing was fun. Not just fun, it was and is deeply connected to music. A physical interpretation that can click into the cosmic realm, if it’s done with sincerity.

Back then, school dances were great, wedding receptions for sisters of friends and friends who, once we reached high school, got jobs that held holiday parties that hired the same local DJ’s who played at our dances, were a blast. Hungry for more (and once we were driving), my friends and I would search up Bay Area nightclubs that allowed younger people to enter. This led to our discovery of House music while “acid parties” and rave culture trickled into our tiny corner of the world.

Dancing on my own was my drug back then, and it still is. It gets me to a transcendence and connectivity that I think I’m trying to get to with my art. It’s the invisible form that is there. It IS there.

If I dance for long enough, I can literally feel the unity that is talked about in some House tracks and it often brings me to tears, right there on the dancefloor. Sometimes everyone seems to look at each other in a way where we feel the truth of our being one system and there with that moment we are connected, but then the song changes and that feeling is gone, but then I look over and there is someone else in that same “zone” through the shift in sound and rhythm. So I know it’s not something solid or real for everyone at the same time. But it also is! Like a trance. I think it’s a lot like magic.

There is this move “do.” I actually “came up with it” in San Francisco when I was about eighteen. It’s really all about my arms and hands. My college friends called it my “triangle dance,” and it’s this thing that comes to me when I feel completely aligned with the music and the energy on the dancefloor. I mention it because when that happens, when it’s really good- I guess I pretend I’m weaving some kind of glowing string, not unlike the shapes, lines and swirls we can see in the smoke that comes from incense burning, and I’ve found myself trying to physically create this in my artworks. This is my version of Hockney’s interest in seeing and making that way of seeing and feeling into something tangible. This is my view.

My art is kind of trying to prove it or capture this, but I’m not on a mission to convince anyone, aside from myself and those who can know and/or feel it.

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Writing.

I just happened to discover a book I really just started by Jane Alison called Meander, Spiral, Explode and it’s linking so many things up for me.

The book is about the structure of narrative and ways we’ve been forced to perceive, prepare and structure prose. She thinks about the idea of the “arc” of a story and how it’s been defined as a sexual kind of mirror. She mentions how it’s distinctly male perception of the sexual experience and that she experiences sex in a much different way- likening it as a mirror (as well) to the ways one might structure or experience a story. I completely get this!

I have this writing project that I went to graduate school to work on. I’ve published stories from it here and there and used some of them for performative readings in creative spaces over the years.

Since it was my thesis I workshopped it with those who were also in the fiction track. I don’t know if it’s something I want to or will do anything with, other than those stories I’ve “let out,” but what remains from that process is my instinct back then, to present the linked short stories to readers in a non-linear manner. I’ll do something with that, but probably not the content. My instinct that wasn’t met with a lot of encouragement at the time, has been confirmed by just a few pages read from Alison’s book. I’m stoked about that.

The ways of seeing and depicting, the ways of moving that feels like I’m capturing or connecting elusive things, as well as intuitive ways of sharing and experiencing written narratives- all somehow meet up with each other in my mind and it’s what I’ve been thinking a lot about. Thanks for reading.