Good and bad news, May 29 2005
I heard yesterday that RACC purchased one of my paintings for their portable works project. With this project, RACC provides art for city offices and other public spaces. It’s a permanent collection which moves around.
They took Beam, a piece that wasn’t even in the exhibition. It arrived with the rest but stayed stashed away upstairs on its own. That didn’t bother me – I made the amount of work I made so that there could be choice -- I do not like overhung shows at all. Curatorial decisions I left with the gallery.
Beam was a challenge. It was hard to make an all-yellow painting do what I wanted it to do. There are more layers of paint on it than is typical with my work, because I just had to paint it, I had to sweat it out with this one. So I'm really happy that it found this public type of home. Thank you RACC!
Yesterday I heard a dove and looked for it at their usual hang-out spot: that dead tree I told you about. It’s gone, chopped down to stump which I can sadly still see. My neighbors took their habitat while manufacturing kittens, which are right now very much on my invasive species list. I’m bummed.
That scrawny, leafless tree was the hangout, a lookout and even a lover’s lane for birds. At any given time, all throughout the day, I could look to the highest branch and see a certain male rufous hummingbird, protecting his turf. Many females zoom and share my backyard (his harem, no doubt) but only one king of a male was there. He is gone now.
Passion, May 28 2005
Tomorrow is my last radio show for awhile. I am not only looking forward to talking to Jacqueline Ehlis about her work (who shows at Savage next month), but also her philosophy. In a land often known for its encaustic grays and misty approach and Pacific Northwest Whatever, her commitment to color and speed makes me happy. And feeling not alone.
She’s articulate and knows what she wants, what she’s about. It’s not just that though – she does it in a fresh, non-scripted way. She’s got passion.
Artists tend to focus on certain concerns. For some, this may be a style or theme you feel forced to arrive at, as the art world surely loves them. But even so, artists are an obsessive lot and often they go back to the same things and the same words, over and over again.
This became obvious to me over time as I got to know them on the radio. It was actually a fellow DJ, the Raggle Taggle Gypsy, who brought this to my notice. She’d listen to my show as she’s right before me at KPSU and she sometimes met the artists. One time she observed to me how a particular artist had used the word ‘toxic’ many times within the hour. ‘We live in a toxic culture. …I’m responding to these toxic times.’
I’ve heard various slogans used so consistently, such as how the artist was ‘seduced by the materials’ -- in such a way that it hardly sounds like a spontaneous fling.
That’s OK though. They can really help me with my job. Some younger, more unexposed artists are still so unsure on those things that I’ve got to yank it out of them.
I’ve noticed that the less urgent guests, the smoother talkers, are the ones who have had a chance to say it all before. It may not exactly be scripted, but the words they are giving me are not being spoken for the first time. And I’m not the first one to ever ask them those questions. They are in no hurry to make a point – it’s already been made. In fact maybe they’ve been singing the same song since the MFA.
-- It’s all laid out for me, but personally I don’t mind an artist with a bit of an axe to grind, some urgency, and some blanks still not filled in.
David Inkpen, May 27 2005
Tonight is a reception for David Inkpen at V-Gun. I’ve been at every party at V-Gun since it opened, as I like the curators Marne Lucas and Bruce Conkle very much. But tonight is a bit different – I’ve known Inkpen since about 1981.
In fact I recall the first time we met. In a past post here, I described to you what Goose Hollow was once like: a neighborhood filled with old Victorians and gorgeous gardens and freaks, most of them artists. There was an old shed-house close to my house and it was here that I first met David. That shed was his studio.
His style was more angular than not, riding, in some way, that constructivist edge “New Wave” brought to many things. He changed quickly though and was a full blown Expressionist before long.
I just had to post this photograph, which dates to a show he had in San Francisco around 1984. I date it by the fashions most of all – I’m in a Betsy Johnson sweater and yellow leggings. (I’d say most of my outfits hurt your eyes, color-wise, during the 80s) Inkpen sports an almost Constructivist style sweater. The girl next to him is Emily Spray, then his girlfriend, who now lives in New York.
Eunice Parsons, May 25 2005
Last year I saw Matriarchs of Modernism at Marylhurst. Some of the artists I was familiar with and already liked a lot, like Mary Henry. But it was a real treat to see the work of Eunice Parsons for the first time. And so I had her on the radio. A short, edited version of that interview is available here.
I’ve seen a lot of bad collage work but I’ve seen a lot of great work too. I’m spoiled, you might say, because I saw an incredible show of Kurt Schwitters at Modernism in the 80s, plus a great Dada and Surrealism show in London years before that.
But I can still appreciate what Eunice has created and especially can appreciate the fact that she’s been at it, that she never stopped and mostly, that she carried on in an age that was even less encouraging than my own. She has what I think of as a classic style, if there is such a thing in collage.
Recently I visited her studio, which is in an attic, like the romantic early version of an artist’s garret. It’s covered with paper from floor to ceiling and loads of posters from all over the world. She’s got to be having a fun time.
Here’s a collection of irons she uses to hold down works in progress.
The Pander Brothers, May 24 2005
I had a fun time on the radio with the Pander Brothers. They have done so much separately that I was a bit torn to interview them as a duo. Many things I just couldn’t cover and we could have chatted at least another hour more.
But they are definitely known as a duo and right now sort of reunited, after taking the time to pursue all those individual projects: like Jacob’s documentary film on his father Henk and his digital photomontages. Arnold has quite the painting and drawing career, and will be showing this next month at Backspace. The show is called Line/ Forms and he will do a performance on line at 8pm the next First Thursday.
Disjecta, May 24 2005
Disjecta has their website up. You might want to check it out, as they have a lot going on, in hopes of creating a mega art center.
They are hoping to create a space which will have many levels of exhibitions (local and not, grand and not, traditional and not) plus a bevy of studio spaces. There will be theatre and performance, music and installation. They have had their sights set on the Templeton on Burnside for some time and I hope they get it.
I had a painting, small and yellow, which was never successful to my eye. So I’ve been revamping it as a way to get me back down to the basement studio, back to painting. I’ve sort of been wandering with it, using colors I just happen to have as opposed to some grand plan...something I don’t do a lot of in my current way of painting.
I’m not saying it is bad to wander. You should do it for years. But you really can’t get anywhere without a plan in my line of work. This painting is so thick with wet paint, it may never dry, but hopefully I will give it to Disjecta’s auction.
Last year, May 23 2005
Around this time last year I was madly planning for a trip to South of France. At least now I can bask in the memories. That’s what I love about travel. It’s a possession which always stays with you, can’t be taken away. It changes you forever.
And it’s good to get out of this place. I mean really out, like away from the language and the food and all of it. It’s good to get a bit confused and away from the comfort zone.
Plus PDX sort of swallows you up. You get all hinged on whether some paper will write about your show or not. I couldn’t believe, when I first arrived here, how galleries proudly displayed all that press. Because once you get out of here, you see how little impact it really has on the rest of the world.
Whatever pushing of the comfort zone, France tastes and smells good: the herbs and the flowers, bougainvillea and jasmine and grand cacti.
Even the dank of ancient houses I enjoy. We stayed in one from the 17th century, but it was actually new for the town, which was mostly a couple of centuries older. Below is a view from my terrace.
I woke up very early and walked the village, aware of every intrusive sound of my step, while aerodynamic swifts whirled by me, the fastest birds in the world. I miss those birds.
Below is our final morning and we're getting ready to leave. It's early and bittersweet for me and you can read it in my face. I don't mind that. There are so many places to explore in this world, but I have a hard time getting past Italy and France.
The Driver, May 22 2005
One time someone described a mutual friend as one who ‘had a light touch on the planet.’ She had one child. She wore only recycled clothes (but with plenty of style) and the same went for her furniture, books, records. She took home food from cafes and ate all her leftovers. And she never drove a car. Though someone did give her a used one once --- a Rambler – and various boyfriends chauffeured her around in that.
I liked the description, an idea of a person who made few marks on the planet, and felt like I was one. I did not have children. I also liked old clothes and old books. My collages came from recycled materials. And if I were to have a car, I’d like an old one. But just like my friend, I never drove.
You’d think I would be driving, having grown up in the country. But circumstances were not conducive to that kind of hands-on care. I got out ASAP and lived in the center of cities thereafter. Never thought about it at all till I was back in Oregon years later.
As I was a lifelong pedestrian, I never trusted drivers any farther than I could throw them, and was sort of a radical pro-human, anti-car type. Learning to drive at my age has been occasionally a living hell. I’m not going to dress up the story.
For instance, any exam at school was a breeze next to this. At least with French, you memorize and conjugate. If you know it, it’s a done deal. I guess that’s why I like the old fashioned art history of slide ID. Cold, hard facts I can get. But driving is like entering a zone where unpredictable assholes can dominate. As my mate says: “It’s not who’s right, it’s who’s left.” So reassuring!
My first drive test I failed – with a Khruschev type character at my side. Definitely from the pre-glasnost era, Serge never broke his ice cold façade, seemingly fresh from the gulag. He never smiled at me once, save when he said: “You failed” at the end of it all. He really enjoyed that moment!
I passed just the other day and so at 48, I am a driver. I have to admit, I liked my clean conscious as far as the future of the planet goes. But I guess you could put your money where your mouth is and get a Prius. Someday I hope to drive well enough to get an old car with some presence.
Your favorite American painting, May 21 2005
Lately art blogs have been posting their favorite American painting and also, their favorite painting in America.
I’m not so sure I can answer the latter. I have not been to every museum in this country and so I can’t make a very informed choice. But even naming a favorite American painting is not all that easy. I was surprised at how many bloggers said: “This is easy for me.”
Let’s see… I really like Nighthawks by Hopper. I also really love the Electric Chair of Warhol, plus his Gold Marilyn. I could also go into certain works by Albert Pinkham Ryder, who I visited many times at the Met.
But in the end, is it a matter of stating what is 'the greatest painting,' or which painting did you form the most important relationship with? In the end, its very personal and subjective.
So for me, that would be the Figure Five in Gold.
I love the Precisionists like Demuth and Sheeler. For me, that Figure 5 is a great American painting and one that has been hovering over my head since at least the late 70s. It’s not even that big. But it has a monumentality to it, a grandeur-- plus I love the signage. I’ve looked at that painting in the flesh at least a hundred times.
My collage of the painting with an O’Keeffe was my own comment on great American painting in general.
My favorite gig, May 20 2005
Every now and then you read in the paper about Dammasch, the old state mental hospital. I had my own experience there.
It’s a legendary place. That’s where One flew over the cuckoo's nest, a novel by Ken Kesey and a great film, takes place.
When I was in a band 25 years ago, there were very few places to play our kind of music. Most of our gigs didn't happen in conventional venues or bars. They were at Reed and anti-draft rallies and wherever they would take us. I got it into my head to play at Dammasch and it turned out that one of my band members, Jerry A., had a connection and arranged the whole thing.
I mention Jerry A as he started Poison Idea and now he’s pretty famous, though their music is a far cry from what we were doing back then. Odd, too, I’ve never run across him in the years that I’ve been back here.
So we all went down to Wilsonville to play the mental ward. From our arrival we went treated like visiting royalty or better yet, rockstars. We were also hounded for pot and several people told us they would give us anything (valium, various scripts) for a joint. There were different levels of freedom there -- some patients could walk around and some could not. There were probably a lot of people who were not allowed to our concert.
I remember a group in wheelchairs and thinking that other than the chair, these people were probably "normal." It appeared that their family just dumped them off. Same thing with a group of teenagers whose parents just couldn't handle them, but they were far from mental ward material. It was just terrible. Of course they were our big fans.
It's the only gig in which I was given bouquets of flowers like I was some big pop star. And who were we? Just some band. But I got the feeling not many make it down to Dammasch.
A very long emergence, May 19 2005
The other day I visited an artist who has been making work longer than I’ve been alive. As you can imagine, we had lots of things to talk about – how things have changed and how they have not. One thing we found we had in common was a certain kind of collector: warm, nice, interested and always at your studio for a discount.
As the years go by, this kind of collector can depress. At first you are so grateful that someone will come into your studio and take some work off your hands. Sometimes they buy in bundles and the feeling is heady. And you love it when they show up at your openings. Your eyes, ears and hopes perk up at just the sight of their entrance.
But they never buy from anyone else but you. After awhile, you know what’s coming. The show will come down, time will pass. You might run into them somewhere and guess what? They’d like to come to your studio.
It pays the rent that month. Hey, it's all better than not selling, right? I mean, what are you going to do? But years of this kind of collector almost keeps you in a sort of mid-state ghetto. You don’t get established in a gallery that way. You won’t get a show in another city that way. You keep thinking that something else might come of this connection – that it might be larger than just itself.
These collectors are very effective for themselves for sure. The can accumulate a lot of work from emerging artists and help them when they really need it.
-- But the longer I look at that sentence I just wrote, the more circumspect it becomes. When do you stop ‘needing’ it? When does the artist become less needy, less vulnerable? It seems to me that an artist who has worked 20-30-40 years deserves support as much as any bright new model and is just as needy if not more.
The artist who must rely on collectors visiting the studio as opposed to collectors who pay galleries can sort of stay ‘emerging.’ It’s like a weird time warp. That artist can grow, evolve, change and change history, but still stay in this grey area: sort of known but not represented. Works are out there but they are not commodities.
‘Commodities’ is a term to bother many artists; it seems so unromantic. All I mean is that the product is on the radar and part of a broader market than the one that takes place in their cold studio.
Coco Chanel, May 16 2005
I’ve been going through my very small library of feminist books – all ones from the 90s like Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi – looking for a piece of writing which compared two fashion giants: Christian Dior and Coco Chanel. This writing really hit me when I first read it. I was working for Chanel at the time on 57th street and perhaps, without even knowing why, I was trying to figure out why women lined up to get Chanel.
They were in a trance. But was it just due to advertising? I didn’t think so but I still didn’t know why.
Anything – handbags, scarves, suits, parfum. And if all they could afford was a lipstick, so be it. After awhile I began to see that the lipstick was really a handbag or suit for many women. It carried that kind of status, plastered with the double Cs. But I’m also convinced that any Chanel product is a metaphor for a certain freedom and the kind of elegant black and white setting where the individual then shines through. Like a gem.
I was especially interested in a comparison between these two designers in particular, for while I worked at Chanel, I grew up with the legend of Dior. My mom was a wartime teenager, came of age in the 50s – only too happy to jump into corseted waistlines and padded bras. Her prize find at a thrift store years later was a New Look coat by Dior in an aubergine color. I discovered this coat in the 70s as a teen and took it over.
So when it came time for me to sell makeup in New York over a decade later, it was easy to decide on the make. To this day, I still think Dior is some of the best makeup around but that is almost beside the point. Chanel rules like nobody’s business.
So much so, that an exhibition at any museum of her work seems circumspect. The monolithic business which exists today seems to overshadow the fact that Coco Chanel was a genius and well deserves a major retrospective. Whether she got it at the Met, I don’t know. I’m not there.
Michael Kimmelman, along with other journalists, in an attempt to be PC and cover all fronts, has noted that Coco Chanel translates into Big Business and that might be not quite the thing for a museum. Also, she shacked up with a German SS officer during the war and tried to get laws changed so she could get her company back from her Jewish partners.
This has been way too simplified of a story and the one I give here still is: Mr. Wertheimer, a man who loved her and wanted to control her, had controlling interest of the company (she got 10%). As she advanced and changed history – and this, she did – he never gave Chanel an advantage or edge. Today’s constant blare of double Cs in advertising, all in the name of Coco but for the profit of someone else, has got to have the woman screaming from her grave.
As to how much of her anger was directed at one family or man (to this day, there is no Chanel heir or trust to receive all the billions generated by those double Cs) or at an entire ethnic group, we’ll never know. She wrote no memoirs. But in the meantime, I could not sit still and see her story told through only one kind of lens while her monumental achievements were low-balled. Chanel had as great a mind and instincts as any Mr. Kimmelman has written about, and her influence has a tremendous reach.
And so, without further ado, let's list just a few ways this woman changed the 20th century:
Wear T-shirts? Sweats? Leggings, knits, sportswear? Chanel made her first collection taking the knit fabric used for men’s underwear and dressed women in it. No one had ever been so comfortable in their lives. She changed the way we look cover our bodies, for better or worse.
If you are female, have any desire to go back to the bustle and the corset? Coco Chanel is the one who took you out of that.
Like the little black dress? Chanel is the one who put you in it.
How about the suit? Men only wore them till she came around. She saw that women would need that kind of uniform-type power too.
Women held clutches till she came along. She said that we need to be free with our hands, that we do things, we are active. And so the shoulder-bag was born, inspired by the bag of the French Foreign Legion.
Angular bottles, Deco before Deco and still the number one fragrance in the world: that No. 5 bottle came out when everything else was swirly ornate. That bottle still looks like it was made today and very few things look as good. Even Andy used it (see above).
As to the scent, it smells like nothing. Not like a rose or a lilac or any other flower, as were all scents in those times. Made of aldahydes, No. 5 was gloriously synthetic and not a copy of anything.
I have a friend who stated that the great designer Schiaperelli, a contemporary of Chanel, was the more inventive. This designer was indeed wild and in fact surreal in her approach. But most women don’t really want to be surreal while they are taking over the world. What many women want is just a sleek black sweater and maybe a string of pearls.
Interviews, May 14 2005
While I am figuring out where I might publish (in paper) an interview here and there, as sort of a drum roll leading up to a book, I thought I might as well post them on my website from time to time. And so you will find an edited version of my interview with James Lavadour here.
I’ve written here enough about it. He says some wise things and I think it’s special.
Authenticity, May 12 2005
Recently I saw a woman in a shop who looked very familiar – I recognized the voice, the rather sad sack expression. It turned out that the last time I had seen her was about 1982 in San Francisco. I remember faces, not names, even when they have aged a lot. People rarely figure out who I am though and that’s OK.
For this reason I especially looked forward to the Filth and the Fury, that Pistols film. I figured I would see some people I haven't seen in well over twenty years -- and just how I remember them. I've been in the same room with Steve Jones and Paul Cook, Poly Styrene and Siouxsie, Sue Catwoman, Jordan, Adam Ant, Paul Weller and Billy Idol and I'm just giving you a few names you might recognize....
I was just as interested in seeing the kids, the fans -- some of pals and some just familiar faces in a crowd. It was a rather small world then. I lived not far from the Kings Road in 78, not far from the Sex shop of Malcolm and Vivienne at World's End.
Around 1985 I visited New York and Nick Hill (DJ of the Music Faucet at WFMU and ex-Portlander) whisked me off to an memorable birthday party for Joey Ramone at Area. This club made as big an impression on me as any, always some wild statement going on. But what I remember most about this particular night was all the faces that looked familiar – I think I had seen them in London in the previous decade.
In the film, John Lydon and Steve Jones function as the tour guide, counterpoints in the story, one an instigator, and one just a bloke getting by. And Jones might be the more typical of the two, sort of an everyman who just wanted something else.
My heart raced through some of the film, at memories of that newness and the roar of the music. I don't get as excited easily now and it's not just because it is more difficult to excite those who have been around the block. It was the authenticity of that movement. Not so different from the roar roar roar of Tristan Tzara or the Howl of Ginsberg.
My first visit to the UK was in 1975, when the story starts. After living in snooze-a-rama Eugene, Oregon, it was not boring to me at all. But it was kind of a Bay City Roller affair. I tend to recall more positive influences though, even for 75 -- like 10cc's I’m not in love, which followed you everywhere then. I still love that song.
The Practice, May 11 2005
Michael Kimmelman had a piece in the New York Times about the routine of artists, using Chris Ofili in particular.
The whole introduction about how artists have their small routines in making work makes so much sense to me. I remember 20 years ago I read a great quote by Bill Ball in the Chronicle, who directed for years ACT in San Francisco -- something to the effect that artists must work everyday. That way, when you make the great works, they just sort of spill out like everything else. You don’t wait for the masterpiece because you are just working all of the time.
I immediately saw the truth of this in terms of my own practice in photomontage. I’ve had eras when I made one almost everyday. Those productive times (and they are spread out throughout the decades) are where all my best pieces are. Even now, even when I stash away special bits and parts, it is not the first collage coming out of me which is the ‘hit.’ It is the build-up of working everyday which produces good things.
Perhaps this was another reason I took issue with the one artist who said that art making had to be exciting for him. I was sort of like, good luck. It’s almost like the same kind of unrealistic demands we can make on love -- they are the kind which can determine its short lifespan. I resign myself to all kinds of levels in the art life, just so that I make sure I have one.
That’s why it was so difficult to stop painting for awhile and take this break. I had visions, I had other ideas, that window was open. I have a hard time trusting that the window will stay open, that the moment will last.
And actually, it doesn’t. Change happens. A lot of information is coming at you all of the time. I’m getting back into the studio as soon as I can wrap my head around it.
James Lavadour said we must make work in many ways and that being an artist is more than just making ‘the work.’ I agree and think of my writing as part of that mission.
More Risk, May 9 2005
I’ve written about risk a lot here. It’s also a popular subject with Jeff Jahn and I like that about him.
It was at one time sort of a theme of mine – via a postcard. A designer friend, Tom Bonauro, sent me a card with just the word RISK on it. I used to meditate on the card, had it pinned on the wall for years. Sent it to a lover. In the end, he was not up for the complete risk. This panned out in his life in many ways, not just with me.
By why I needed to concentrate on this word, lord knows, because I think I've had a lot of it in my life. That gallerist in Seattle who wanted 1700 for a show implied in a subsequent phone conversation that artists don't really get anywhere without it and that I should be risking more for all the supposed success coming my way (if I gave him the cash, basically) (what a hustler!).
Postponing surgeries to make money for them, not having the proper insurance because you are an artist---I'd call that a risk. Banking time and time again on art for a life, moving from city to city, job to job, I'd call that a risk. Dumping well-placed acquaintances who are unsupportive of one's raison d'être, that could be a risk. Turning your studio into gallery, no guarantees of money coming in, that might be a risk. Showing terribly politically incorrect artists (who are still great artists) -- that is worth the risk.
Creating something which some will love and some will hate but which is finally you is worth the risk.
BTW, I have some pictures from Seattle and Richard Speer’s party up now.
Wisteria, May 7 10 2005
This house in NW Portland I have marveled over every year. I just had to take a polaroid for the display of wisteria alone. You can smell it from the street, just amazing. And so short lived.
I never noticed the blossoms as a child and have no idea if it grows in southern Oregon. It was only after I read the Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu that I started to pay attention. That book inspired a series of collages and an exhibition.
I wrote of Murasaki before here so I won't get too much into it now. In the Japanese language of that time, Murasaki also means purple, as well as being the name for wisteria. She spoofs on the word a lot, likening a major character to wisteria and describing her as having beautiful purple hair. This interested me for at the time, I had purple hair too (about 1980).
Shiseido came out with a fragrance called Murasaki right around this time. It was beautiful -- I still remember that smell and I wore it. Purple bottle too of course.
In 1981 I moved into a Victorian in Goose Hollow. This area is now mostly made up of condos, but it used to have nothing but old houses, taken over by the hippies in the 60s. The houses were falling apart, but what was really lost in gentrification were the incredible gardens these people created way back when. You would walk through a tunnel under a bridge (homeless kids live in this tunnel now) and when you got to the other side, you were bombarded by fragrance...incredible roses and blooms of all kinds. All kinds of artists lived in this area then, including Henk Pander and David Inkpen.
The house I lived in was wrapped by a wisteria tree and bloomed right outside my window. I lived in the attic with a skylight and these blooms. This coincided with an internal transition from punk to New Romanticism (and what people call post punk now I guess).
Even in New York City, my connection to wisteria did not end. There is a lovely trellis in Central Park and I visited it every year at exactly this time, the first week of May. It is reassuring to know something like this always comes back for you.
One more bit of NYC wisteria is the Tiffany window in the Metropolitan. So lush, and he did lampshades too of course. But that window at the Met I visited often.
The Red One
Strap it On, May 6 2005
Last night as we were driving up to Seattle (more on that fun trip later), I was telling TJ Norris my story of why I made a bunch of big paintings.
You can get caught in between a rock and a hard place. I had made paintings for ages but believe it or not, had never been reviewed for them.
Two shows up simultaneously in 2002 really spelled it out for me: One was a group show which had a really big painting in it. It got a lot of attention, that painting. Then down the hall in the same building, I had a show of photomontages, ranging from 1982 to 2002.
One curator I had on the air sometime after those shows referred to the big painting and so I asked him: “Now tell me why you like it.” “OH!” he exclaimed, “It showed so much commitment!”
And that’s when I realized I had better strap it on and paint it big baby.
In my case, it turned out that size did matter. Maybe I needed to overwhelm. The paintings commanded in a way the smaller works did not. The smaller works were more like gems and there is nothing wrong with that, but the tendency, unfortunately, is to pet women anyway, and the art they make.
But that whole commitment thing rang in my ears. Commitment? I had one show which spanned twenty years, but one big painting made by very young man showed commitment?? Clearly I was doing something wrong.
And so just like Mark Kostabi once advised on his website: a) make it big, b) make it red and c) make it oil on canvas – and you’re sure to be success. (I hope you see that I’m smiling here.) I did just that with The Red One and shitdamn, if it was not the first one to sell.
In fact, when the painting first showed at the Haze Gallery, several painters came up to me and said: “Gee, Eva, I didn’t know you could paint like that.” Uh huh. I know they meant it as a compliment and also it is possible that it just took me a long time to get to my holy grail, but by then it was privately a really loaded matter.
To Seattle, May 5 200
Perhaps a typical reaction to having a show in PDX is to want to take it on the road. You’ve worked hard and long on one body of work but now the party’s over. Plus you’re just sort of isolated here.
This happened the last time I had a big show. I sent some images to a Seattle gallery who said they were interested. We crammed paintings into the back of the car and off we went. I didn’t find out till I got up there that this gallery (may as well tell you – Pitcairn Scott) changes a hefty sum (1700!) to show, offering such advantages as posting your paintings on their website (wow!). And they still take 50%.
I can see why some artists might go for it because we are so desperate to get our work out there -- but by this time I had already opened Lovelake and sort of knew what was what. I figured this guy was making a killing and with funds like that coming in, didn’t need to sell one painting. But I sure would after all of that.
My big mistake was not having some backup plan. I should have shopped many galleries before ever going up there and maybe had a small line-up in my mind of potential places. But I didn’t and it’s really hard to suss it all out on the fly. Is indeed Seattle like Portland, land of the Pacific Northwest? If so, the choices are very slim.
From what I’ve seen online, Bryan Ohno looks like a good gallery. I relate to many of their artists: Mary Henry, Francis Celentano, Rae Mahaffey. Mind, they are all older than me and some are in museums. But what the heck. It’s not like I am a youngster.
Tonight the PDX artist Laura Fritz has an opening for her show at SOIL. A group is going up there to cheer her on and maybe I will be a part of it.
Get Unfuckable, May 3 2005
I don’t know much ‘success’ it would take to let that article in the Times slip by without a comment from me. What makes you feel like you’ve arrived on some level? I’m turning 49 this year so it is no silly question.
Well, yeah – money talks. I think that’s why that article really hit me. It was basically telling me: good luck. You probably won’t arrive. Or rather, like a man.
You can’t blame me for pushing the issue – if not now, when? It all sounds so over and 20th century, but I don’t know how firmly I feel planted in the 21st.
Perhaps the answer lies in the careers of Agnes and Louise. Get ancient. Covered with lines and bags and sags but also finally, authority. Get unfuckable. Then you’re serious.
Of course by that time you are no doubt of no age to appreciate any dollars coming your way, so you won’t mind the paltry sum it turned out to be. They will praise you to the skies though. Oh we always liked her! So strong and influential!
Fortunately you’ll be too deaf to hear that bullshit.
Some News, May 2 2005
The news for the day is that KPSU now archives one week of past programming. So now you can go anytime to the broadcast archive and download my last interview, which of course is Richard Speer.
This is something I have wanted for a long time. Maybe not every week, but most of the time I worked pretty hard at getting to the core of an individual and it all went up in smoke in one hour.
This is why I’m going to start transcribing past interviews over the summer and make a book. I am also hoping to publish a couple independently here and there, but if that can’t happen, they will find a place here. The art publishing world is tight here, as I imagine it is everywhere. I mean there is so little going on. If you have a scoop, good luck. I often dream of having my own mag but you can't do everything.
In Brief, May 1 2005
In an hour or so I’ll be on the air with Richard Speer, who has a book out called Matt Lamb: the Art of Success. Lamb is an artist who is both an Outsider and Insider. One could sort of say the same for Richard Speer.
Richard is the only critic to ever really be a critic towards me – in other words, he has written about my painting (as opposed to other endeavors or how I look). Since I’ve been showing paintings over 25 years, you can imagine how I feel about him.
Actually, Jeff Jahn also had a few kind words for Vive Chrome in his latest piece in NWDrizzle.
What’s really on my mind today is this article in the NYTimes. It says it all and too much and not enough. I am so pissed at the truth of it all.
More recent entries: April 2005
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