Saturday, May 4, 2019

Entry - 5.4.19


I looked up “showing” in the on-line Cambridge Dictionary, and one of its definitions was “an opportunity for the public to see something”.

That seems pretty simple and straightforward, deceptively so for an activity that inspires many conflicting emotions in me.  You see I’m someone who abhors having myself or any of my creations become the object of public attention.  I am a middle child, having been preceded in the birth order by both a boy and a girl, and discovered very early on that attention would be lavished on my older siblings, who were achieving great things in the big world, while I could stand idly by, slack-jawed and silent.  I learned that I could disappear in the mob if I kept quiet and pursued my devilry outside the compass of adult scrutiny.  I never felt that being ignored was being neglected.  Instead, I grew up running wild in our suburban community, fleeing the house whenever the opportunity presented itself and returning exhausted and dirt-covered in the evening.  When restricted to the house, I would retreat to the basement to construct models of antique cars, WWII fighter planes and historic ships, perform experiments with my kids’ chemistry set or fry up some zoofie goofies.


Never enough Plastigoop!

Later on, I found that solitary pursuits suited me perfectly.  I would spend hours in my room reading books or in the basement honing my rudimentary painting skills at my rickety easel or writing short stories on an old manual typewriter with an extremely parched ribbon.  I did not feel myself an outcast.  No.  Though I was never the center of attention (nor did I desire to be such for that matter), I thought of myself, perhaps delusionally so, as somewhat popular, enjoying the loose support of a wide network of affable classmates and more significant relations with a smaller, more intimate circle of friends.  Though rather limited in scope, I participated in sports and clubs and even voluntarily acted in two school dramatic productions.  But, all the same, I came to believe that my most valuable achievements and contributions would result from private, solitary exertions, that being a team player was akin to being hobbled and that self-validation could not be attained through the praise of others.

After my schooling was over and I found employment, my interest in group activities, both professionally and personally, diminished further.  At work, I would shoulder almost exclusively the responsibility for tackling a project, only reluctantly relegating small portions of labor to my staff or coworkers – not exactly the ideal employee by today’s standards.  Socially, my significant outlets were my wife and family and a very restricted group of friends.  I’ll relate a characteristic event that occurred after several years on the job.  When requested to dress more formally by our unit head, I purchased five gray suits along with a stack of solid white dress shirts.  I had very little interest in my appearance, my only concerns being making coordinating my outfit each morning a simple matter and a desire that my appearance would be so bland that I could navigate the streets, the subways and the halls of my office virtually unnoticed.  I wasn’t antisocial.  No, I would say asocial is more accurate.  Hey, but everyone can’t be a leader and a star.  If you’re putting on an opera, you still need folk to be in the chorus… or better yet offstage pulling the rope to raise the curtain.

So after subjecting you to that bit of self-analysis, I don’t think you should be too surprised to learn that I became a visual artist.  Art was a solitary pursuit, something I could explore in private without the support, cooperation or interference of my parents or others.  Initially, I worked with standard pencils on lined legal pads, only upgrading to oil and acrylic paints on canvas once I earned a small stipend from my paper route.  As I made progress, becoming more accomplished and facile over time, my satisfaction was personal.  Suffering perhaps from a mild case of tunnel vision, I never thought of art as a public activity or considered displaying my work for others to see.  For me, it was all about developing a skill set while engaging in intellectual exploration.  I admit this was truly shortsighted of me, but, let’s face it, often people initiate a course of action without considering where it will lead.  (Ever hear of the medical student who quits the program after discovering he or she can’t stand the sight of blood?)

In college, art students did have to display their work for public critique, but the discussions were very informal and extemporaneous and did not cause me much discomfit.  I recall actually enjoying examining the work of my classmates and hearing what they had to say about the images we presented for consideration.  In truth, I could have gone through my entire undergraduate schooling without ever having displayed my work in any venue larger than those small classroom critiques.

But, during my last year of undergraduate study, I took a great course with Howardena Pindell in which the students would only paint on large scale canvases that we constructed ourselves.  Also taking that class was Christina Carlson, a talented artist who I had seen around the art department for years but didn’t know very well.  Every now and then, Christina would approach me and suggest that I should have a solo show at the students’ union.  I always responded in the same positive manner: the possibility of showing sounded interesting and I would try to look into it.  Actually, I wasn’t against showing my work, but, between keeping up with my schoolwork, fulfilling my work-study obligations and squeezing in time to see my girlfriend, I wasn’t motivated to seek out additional commitments.  At that time, I felt pretty confidant about my art, having established a personal style of painting that reflected my individual outlook and produced fairly reliable results, but I really wasn’t too sure why I would want to exhibit my work.  Making sales wasn’t a real possibility, and I couldn’t see a show at the students’ union as a stepping stone in my future career.  So whenever Christina encountered me, I would do what I do best: deflect.  Finally, one day she had had enough of my prevaricating.  Christina, who was definitely a force to be reckoned with, informed me that after class that day I was going to the students’ union to schedule my show.  Not only that, but she actually escorted me to the location, introduced me to the individual in charge and observed our interaction.  Thank you, Christina.  I’m still in awe.

So I was having a solo show and, naturally, would be hosting an “opening” to kick it off.  For those of you who are not in the know, an opening is a brief event of a couple of hours duration held in an exhibition space at which the artist-on-display lures friends, relatives and even complete strangers to come see his or her work with an offering of free food and drink.  At the university, the approach to these student openings varied greatly, ranging from the very proper to the wildly bohemian.  I envisioned something very informal, maybe stationing myself in the gallery space with a couple of bottles of cheap wine and a sleeve of plastic cups while an odd assortment of student passers-by would stop in to share a drink with me and grunt at my paintings – you know, low-key and kind of hip.

Well, it didn’t go that way.  While I tacked lattice strip frames onto my paintings and wired them for hanging, others were working secretly behind the scenes.  My girlfriend, who was really very sweet, organized a large spread of food and drink, complete with a tremendous sheet cake inscribed in icing with a congratulatory message and the image of a paintbrush and palette, while my mother reached out to relatives both near and far to inform them of the upcoming event.  At the opening, unbeknownst to me, relatives streamed into the gallery space.  Friends from my home neighborhood appeared.  Finally, my parents arrived accompanied by my 85 year old grandmother inching along on her cane.  Friends from school joined the throng, supplemented by a random sampling of students pleased simply to secure a few morsels of free sustenance.  I was a bit overwhelmed by this generous show of support and, I must admit, a little taken aback.  The evening ended with my girlfriend’s sister and her boyfriend engaging in a food fight, handfuls of cake whizzing by amongst the paintings.  The following week a lukewarm and perplexing review of my show appeared in The Statesman, our campus newspaper, but, more importantly, a large blowup of one of my paintings filled the front page of their arts section.  I was unaware that such exposure was unusual, but a few professors from the Art Department stopped me in the days ahead to express their satisfaction.  My first shot at exhibiting my work didn’t go according to my plans, but, all the same, I was grateful to all who had labored to help me put the show together and was satisfied at the reception my work had received.  Looking back now many years later, I see this event as a quintessential rite of passage, one that was shared with the family members and friends who had populated my youth.  I couldn’t imagine a better send off to the transformative experience, both intellectually and emotionally, that my years of undergraduate study had proven to be.



In truth, exhibiting work is absolutely necessary.  I’m sure that curators would assert that exhibitions allow for the selection and organization of artwork in such a manner as to present a conceptual interpretation of the material, and I would agree with that.  In fact, attending a very successful show can be a revelatory experience.

But, more importantly, artwork cannot be fully experienced in reproduction, regardless of the quality of the image.  Detail is lost.  Texture cannot be communicated.  There is no sense of scale; a 10 X 12 inch watercolor occupies the same space on the page as a 10 foot long mural.  The problem with photography is that choices have to be made before a picture is taken.  In what light will the photo be taken?  Will the photo stress warm or cool tones?  How should the image be exposed?  How sharp should the focus be?  If you’ve ever performed a search for a specific painting on the internet and been presented with a screen of multiple images of the work, you will know what I’m talking about.  Every image looks different, sometimes so different that it’s hard to believe they are actually of the same work.  Years ago, the standard method of recording artwork was on tungsten film transparencies, and, strangely enough, I usually felt that in that format the reproductions actually enhanced my own artwork.  I guess that whatever distortion was taking place was working in my favor.  Today, it’s expected that artists will provide high resolution digital photographs of their artwork for examination or publication.  Though digital SLR cameras allow for an almost unlimited array of image settings and photo editors permit users to make substantial adjustments to pictures once downloaded to a computer, I find that current reproductions of my artwork never satisfy me.  Regardless of my own personal travails, trust me when I assert that no reproduction can accurately convey the complexities and nuances of an original artwork.  So I hope we can all agree that it’s essential to view art firsthand.  Otherwise we may as well raze all the world’s museums.

Openings are another matter altogether.  Having given this subject some thought of late, I recognize that some art forms are necessarily public.  Dance, music and theater, for instance, are about performance and customarily require an audience.  The dancer, musician or actor receives an immediate reaction to his or her efforts, hopefully enjoying a moment of enthusiastic applause – maybe even a standing ovation.  The inherent communion between artist and spectator is unavoidable.  For other disciplines, the relationship between artist and audience is more tenuous.  Authors, poets, painters and sculptors perform their “magic” offstage, often devoting many hours of solitary labor to their creations, and the appreciation of their art is not dependent on their presence.  Imagine if, to truly experience The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky had to be present, sitting perhaps at our bedsides while we read in the dim glow of a nightstand light.  We’d nod gratefully at him from time to time.  “Nice touch there, Fyodor.  Nice touch.”  No.  Obviously, the presence of the non-performing artist is completely unnecessary to the comprehension and enjoyment of his or her work.

But I suppose that many a non-performing artist felt a bit jealous of his or her more demonstrative brethren and desired a platform at which to experience immersion in the soothing balm of public admiration.  So writers do public readings and artists have openings.  And I would have to be a complete innocent not to recognize that these events also have the very commercial purpose of gathering a large number of receptive supporters to encourage sales.  I guess, if you’re looking for a little attention, you’re going to have to provide a bit of fanfare.

So why would I, a retiring man who withers under the scrutiny of the public gaze and enjoys no commercial potential, pack up the accumulated creations of years of solitary labor in a truck, transport them to a location for public display and invite a community of family, friends and associates to join me in celebrating them?  Even I would have to question my motives.  It comes down to this.  For many, many years I have persisted without interruption in the pursuit of my artistic vision.  My own exertions and the cost of materials and other incidentals could be dismissed (though the hours I’ve spent cloistered in my studio away from my family do represent a more substantial sacrifice).  But, I suppose, I have no choice but to file all of that away under the general heading: “Water under the Bridge”.  No, there’s something else.  I don’t know how to state this without sounding very egotistical, so I’ll just blurt it out.  The work itself asserts its own mandate.  I can’t say that my paintings are groundbreaking masterpieces that will change the course of art history, but, whatever the small victories I’ve accomplished on canvas, I feel a responsibility to the work to let it be seen.  I’ve never talked to any fellow artist about this feeling, but I suspect it may be a fairly common consideration.

I see “exhibiting” as a sort of necessary repercussion of creation.  In grad school, studio art majors were actually required to participate in three semester-end reviews at which students presented recent work to the department’s professors and student body for public consideration. There you were, standing before a large assembly of people, attempting to defend your work against observations and criticism – that, I must admit, were often quite eccentric.  That was certainly a baptism by fire.  Since then, intermittently over the years, I’ve felt compelled to submit images of my work for inclusion in publications, participate in group shows and on rare occasion put my paintings on display in a solo show – regardless of my personal reservations.  The last time I exhibited my work alone I opted to forego an opening - much to the chagrin of the show’s organizers. I just didn’t feel up to it.

So, all of this talk about showing must be leading somewhere.  And, yes, for the first time in seven years, I will be having a solo exhibition of my work.  This time, my show will be at the Unison Arts Center and Sculpture Garden, a location at which I’ve been attending life drawing sessions for about a year.  The friendly and nurturing atmosphere that the Unison organization fosters encouraged me to take the dive once again.  I feel that this present show and my first at the students’ union could be “bookends” to my artistic career.  A major difference now is that it is I who am using word of mouth and every available form of social media to promote, rather shamelessly, the exhibition.  (I had visions of myself, standing alone in the exhibition space filled with my paintings, sheepishly explaining to the Unison organizers that I’ve only lived in the Hudson Valley for a quarter century, not nearly enough time to establish extensive roots.)  This time, the Arts Center is providing and readying the provisions for the opening.  The sheet cake may be missing, but we do expect to offer up some palatable wines and cheeses to show our gratitude to attendees.  And instead of a write-up in The Statesman, Chronogram, a local magazine dedicated to stimulating and supporting the arts in the Hudson Valley, will be featuring my work in the “parting shot” section of their May edition.  Seems like I’ve come full circle.  Only wish that my parents and grandmother, now long gone, could attend the opening; however, this time, my wife and children are ushering me through the event and, owing to the truly astounding efforts of family and friends, a new cast of kindly supporters will be there.

Oh and by the way, I'm pretty sure, perhaps a tinge regretfully so, that this opening will not conclude in a food fight.


Just to whet your appetite...
Unison Arts Center and Sculpture Garden is located at 68 Mountain Rest Road, New Paltz, NY 12561.  The opening is on Sunday, May 5, 2019 from 4 to 6 pm, and all are invited to attend.  Viewing hours are from 10 am to 2 pm, Mon., Tues., Thurs., and Fri. or by appointment.  The show will run through May 29th.

As always, I encourage readers to comment here.  If you would prefer to comment privately, you can email me at gerardwickham@gmail.com.




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