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| One work from my first series of advertising paintings |
I can often tell when somebody went to art school by the kind of
work they do.
One of the best compliments I ever received was that a KTEH TV art
auction where the auctioneer trying to sell my painting (“House across the
street on 17th St.”) said that he didn't know anything
about this artist but it didn't look like the artist had been to art school,
but if she had, she "didn't let it affect her too much" […something
like that.]
When I was very young my older sister, Jeanne, taught me how to
paint horses draw horses. I made the usual childhood art such as tulips in
tempera or horses in watercolor that were entered in an art show at the yacht club. At
the opening, I remember being too shy to stand next to my pieces but looking at
them out of the corner of my eye. I still find openings extremely painful.
When I was six, my mother gave me her oil painting set. She had made
precisely one painting with it. She set me up with her oil set, easel and panel
in the in the basement laundry room, and I was instructed that the next time I
felt like getting up really early on a Saturday, I was to go down to the
laundry room and paint. I did make several paintings. Subject matter was a
picture of a girl in a Jackie Gleason movie, a very sad movie, and pictures of
my friends from memory. And horses. I made about one or two a year.
Our favorite books were the Eloise
books. Sometimes Jeanne would badger mom to get her to buy a Mad magazine. We would devour it. We loved
the movie satires drawn by Mort Drucker. Best friend Mary gave me a
subscription to Mad in the 1990s and
I was surprised to see that he was still drawing for them. Such a master of pen
and ink!
When I was, maybe, eight, Jeanne gave me a book by Charles Adams,
the cartoonist. It was a bit mature for me, but I loved the ink wash drawings
and the weird family. The next year she gave me another one. I still love those
little books.
My entire life we received the New
Yorker magazine weekly and I studied the cartoons. We also had art books in
the house, which included New Yorker
cartoon collections, Peter Arno, Masterpieces
of the Louvre, the Prado and some graphic wartime photography books that my
deceased father had collected. I was lucky to grow up in a house like that.
At some point, best friend Mary and I had the Little Artist Club in the playhouse. I was the president and she was the vice president. We had an art opening in Mary's basement to which our families came. I also remember writing a play with another girlfriend and a story about a horse called "Sparky".
The summer I was about to turn 9, we drove across the country to go
to Nevada where my mother got a divorce from her second husband. It was an eye-opening
experience to see the country; to see Vegas, San Francisco, LA and other
places. Route 66, Yellowstone, Mt. Rushmore and the Badlands, Grand Canyon, Caves. I collected the little soaps from every motel we stayed at
because the graphics were so cool. We got back to
school before Halloween.
The summer that I was 11/12, my mother decided it was time to get married
again and this time she wanted a rich husband. Her second husband married her
for her money (which was left over from my father’s estate). My sister was 15,
almost 16. My mother wanted to go on the grand tour just like the Hollywood
movies, for my sister’s “coming out”, and to get us more cultured. So we went
to Europe. To drive to Nevada, we used an AAA travel agent who made us trip
tiks, little maps to follow, and I think they booked this trip also.
We stayed at really expensive hotels and took the Queen Elizabeth
cruise home. We stayed at several Ritz hotels: the Ritz in Paris on Place Vendome,
the Ritz in Madrid where we saw Delores Del Rio in the elevator, and maybe in
Rome. Sometimes we ate in these hotels and the waiter would stand next to your
table watching for your every need, such as a dropped escargot fork or to
refill your water glass. Sometimes there were two waiters per table. Jeanne was
learning about wine and would order wine for her and Mom. Jeanne always had a
gourmet sense of taste. I remember eating mussels all over Europe. In Vienna, we
did not stay at the expensive Saacher but we stayed at another slightly less expensive
hotel, possibly a Ritz. When we were waiting to check in, I dropped something
on the marble floor and I had like three young bellboys about my age rush over
to pick it up for me. In the Netherlands, we got in so late we missed dinner
and ordered room service. We ordered three chocolate soufflés thinking they
were little desserts but they were each large small pizza sized soufflés. Mom
let us eat as much as we could. It probably cost a fortune and it tasted
sublime. In London we had reservations at Claridges, but by that point my
mother realized she couldn't afford it, and we stayed at a cheap hotel. I think
she spent a fortune on that trip.
But what was great about staying at the fancy hotels was the art
they had on their walls. I remember in Paris, they had a lot of still lives
made with palette knife. Thick oil paint flowers. Also pictures made of jewels
or glass. In the hotel in Nice, we stayed at the Négresco, the entire room was
covered with fabric. The ceiling was pink stretched fabric gathered in the
center. It was so luscious. And in the halls they had marble busts down the
hall and the elevators. I remember going to each floor to study the busts in
the hotel while I was waiting for mom to get ready. That was my favorite hotel.
And we hit almost every museum in Europe, as well as a lot of other
attractions such as French Chateaus, the coliseum, a biennale in Vienna or
Venice (?), the beach in Rome, flamenco dancers in Barcelona, a bullfight, Shakespeare’s
cottage, etc.
It was a mind-blowing trip. Seeing the Louvre, Rembrandt, Ingres,
Vermeer. I can still remember seeing many great paintings for the first time. I
remember running through the Prado because we didn't allow enough time. Trying
to find the Goya's, my mother's favorites.
In the museums we would kind of go around the room at our own speed,
without getting lost from each other. But I would linger in front of paintings
with really handsome men and think about having them as my boyfriend. My sister
was interested in a lot of grotesque things like Bruegel or the insects on the
Flemish still lifes.
Of course, I remember seeing the statue of David. And being
fascinated by his hand. I walked going around and around trying to get a peek
at his other parts that growing up in a family of three women I didn't really
understand. I didn't understand the whole male apparatus. Florence, Venice,
Amsterdam, Austria, Germany.
We went to Denmark to replace some of my mother's China or silver. I
guess it was an excuse. But I remember many hours while she was looking over
silver patterns wandering around the design stores looking at the Danish modern
furniture, picking out the silverware that I would want when I got married –
the most futuristic one they had.
And we came home on the QE2 where my mother did meet someone. He was
probably married. I did a lot of jigsaw puzzles out on the deck on that trip.
At one point Jeanne and Mom were both a little sea sick, even though we were a
family of sailors, but the waves were so high. So incredibly high. Mom also met
a guy who drove us around Austria. And in Rome men followed us all around the
place, all around Italy they followed her…she was very blond and attractive. But she didn't find her rich
husband.
Many years later an old friend's wife died and George took to
driving past our house hoping to see Mom. One day he saw her in the front yard
raking leaves. And stopped to chat. They started dating. She wore a silver bikini on George's boat. And that's how she
found her third husband. They married when I was about 13 or 14. George was a nice
guy. I didn’t entirely respect him because she bossed him around pretty bad, later made him sell his boat. But they played golf together and were pretty happy. He
somehow made her afraid to drive (enough though she drove us out West and
back.)
When I was in high school, the women's movement started. Coming from
a family with such a strong woman, it had a big impact on me. I remember a
family holiday party where I was struck with the fact that I didn’t want to
grow up to be a woman because women were silly and had no power in the world.
I decided I would be independent. Women artists at the time talked
about using their initials so no one would know they were a woman and thereby
maybe be able to have a career as an artist. I never wanted to be accused of
painting like a woman.
When I went to college I didn't know what I was going to do since Mom
thought studying art was a career (although she was open to architecture and
sculpture). I studied psychology, which I decided was lacking in any real
knowledge. Anthropology, religion, philosophy, philosophy of religion: I was
looking for answers. I wanted to know the meaning of life. None of these
sciences seem to know what I needed.
When I was at college (SUNY at New Paltz), they had their first
“Feminist Art Show”. I went with a friend and was blown away.
I said, out loud, “I wish I could be an artist.”
An older woman, a photographer, overheard me and said “Well, then, why
don’t you be an artist?”
I said, “My mother doesn’t want me to.”
And she replied, “It’s your life.”
That statement reverberated throughout my body. I never realized it
was my life and I could do what I wanted.
So then I decided I was going to do art. I saw an art show of
enameled jewelry and realized I could sell that kind of art. I made a good
portfolio and met with the dean of the well-respected art department there. He
told me that they didn’t like to let many women into the department, as they
just leave and get married. I sat there promising this a-hole that I would
never get married. I was admitted to the program but then I dropped out of
school. I know I wasn’t wanted there.
I wanted to go work on a subsistence farm as this was the era of
back-to-the-land for the hippies. Mom said “No way”. I asked her if there was
anything I could do that would ever make her happy and she said “Finish
College.” So, I decided to go to the
University of Colorado since they had mountains and it was really far away, and
study art.
I took a lot of art history classes as a way to fill up on credits since studio art classes take up a lot of hours but don't have a lot of credits. In art history
classes, I encountered many of the works of art that I had already seen and I
think that's a great way to experience art. My first experience of the artwork
was from the original not the copy. I already knew these works of art. They
were my friends. I had had an experience with them.
Everyone at college was making different sorts of art. Action
painting was big, abstracts were big, figure painting or realism was not. But I
just wanted to make important paintings and paint like Ingres or Rembrandt, but
in a modern way.
I took my jewelry class – but I wasn’t that good with details –
soldering is not easy. I took photography (everything inside out and upside
down in photography), sculpture (got my lowest grade ever for making a feminist
sculpture which I worked really hard on, and an F for “Wife” that I could not
get out of it’s plaster cast), and lots of drawing and paintings classes. I
spent hours in the art library writing papers for art history classes. I talked my way into a sold-out geology class by saying that geology is anatomy for landscape painters.
Based on my experience, I think it takes artists a long time to
figure out that they want to be artists. Since I did a lot of partying in high
school and in at New Paltz, I was serious about my studies in Colorado. I
didn’t have any friends in the beginning anyhow. I ran a low fever for a year
and a half. I think the art program had a physiological effect on my body.
Labels: art history, art school, Charles Addams, Eloise, Ingres, KTEH, Mad magazine, Mort Drucker, Negresco, New Paltz, QE2, Rembrandt, University of Colorado, Victory of Samothrace
