why make art? it and behind it

Why?

Don’t you love that question. Why make art? Why do love what you love to do?

So if anyone asked me, why I make art. Or why any artist makes art… I’ll share with you part of my journey to my answer to why it is such a deep pleasure for me.

My sister, Louisa, is writing a book about her childhood. She’s now into the teenage years where she and I went to an all girls Episcopal high school. Her inquiries about what I recalled about that time triggered memories of my first,shall we call it, “adult” art class. We were doing serious art: painting outdoors. And creating real paintings, as I understood it. We would roughly sketch the view and then try to get the right colors, right placements, etc. to represent what we saw.

WHAT we saw. The art teacher would come by and correct us as we worked and each of us would go, oh yeah. Accuracy was the goal.

When I got to art school, the first classes were drawing – drawing the nude. 15 minutes: capture this pose. Now this one. Now this. What lines mattered? Relative to what others?

And then came color courses: color mixing /layering(how to get that density/brightness of color); color relationship (such as making a color look like 2 different colors by its placement). How were paintings made in the Renaissance? How did the Impressionists use their tools? The abstract artists? How are paints different now?

All of this I was discovering in school. But I also was well aware that each and every one of us art school students was influenced in a different way. We all were …

Playing our own game. What we saw. How we translated that into art.

All of undergraduate work was about making the art. It was a deep dive and an ongoing adventure. I was on mine. My friends were on theirs.

Who wouldn’t want more? A number of years later, I decided to go to graduate school. I expected it to be similar since I enjoyed it so much. I loved the exploration.

My best friend from undergraduate art school, Stacey, had already gone through an MFA program. She warned me: “Graduate school will make you hate art.” She attributed it to the demands to put into words her art which I knew she made from a deeply intuitive place.

For me , the MFA program was both wonderful (the friends, teachers, art exploration) and, yes, very demanding: so much writing! She was right.

After it was all over and many of the friends had scattered, I looked at this thesis that took so long to write and thought to myself: all those words could have been summed up in 3 words:

and

I put them on a pillow: “it” on the front. Turn it over: “behind it” on the back. And the pillow, such fine art, right?

Although secretly, I consider it as such. Partly because, like DuChamps readymades, they are more of a comment than the actual material itself.

So then I was off and running with one pillow front after another: rosa on top, sub rosa underneath. You get the gist.

Years later, for Samsun and Amanda’s wedding, I made this piece for them. No back and front to it, but a play on Robert Indiana’s famous LOVE sculpture with the O in the word love tilted to the right: