Living in NYC, I tend to make flat art, the two-er D the better. We don’t have the room for much to happen in the round—other than all the living which happens in 4D because of time. The only thing left in three dimensions is the couch (she said, eating pizza in front of her flat screen).
Why make anything at all? For me, let’s start real basic, I see things I like, in art, or nature, or the city, and I want to do what it’s doing. Something inside me says, “Lemme try that.” Picture me in the Guggenheim sloping toward the gift shop and I see a Gauguin with heavy black lines and, loving its affect on me, I move in close to see how it’s done. I remember when I was told, in my twenties, to my surprise, that not everyone had such thoughts. Indeed I was introduced to the notion that wanting to go home and make one yourself was hilariously presumptuous even to imagine.
The Texan fellow grad student with whom I’ve gone to the museum, is laughing at me and asking, “You aren’t serious?”
I say, half joking, “No I’m serious. I think you’re the one not taking yourself seriously.”
He shakes his head, pickle faced and says, “People don’t go home and make this kind of art.”
“Someone did,” I say, “but anyway, I was just gathering info.”
“But, but, but why?” he still stammers in my memory, his knees weakening with pleading. “You can’t do it.”
“I can try,” I say, smiling. He looks too sad so I add, “Look at it this way, think about how many jobs people like me give ourselves. Somewhere in our dark little hearts we think we have to fill the museum.”
I still have a lot of jobs. For me, to see beauty is to want to make more of it, to figure it out. I don’t feel that way about music because without help, I can’t figure that out much. With some arts I can see what is going on at times, and I crave to try it.
Also making art is a large part of how I cope with anxiety and depression; I slip out of myself a bit when I’m doing it. I put together the below little video to see how the circles would flow together and to show you some images.
Above is the video I made of a few gel plate prints, with added acrylic paint, pen, and pencil. Below is a video showing how one of the images was made.
Find an appealing image, high contrast is best.
Cover your gel plate with black using a bayer and lay your image down on it, then pull it right up. You get some version of the image, in reverse, on the plate.
Once it’s dry, add your color. Bayer it out to a very thin layer.
Put down a sheet of paper, let it dry, and pull up.
I then added the green circles.
In an earlier post I wondered why artists (painters, writers, etc.) who are not professionals do all the art work that they do. Especially the famously difficult arts (writing, painting, etc.). I soothed my own savage questioning regarding all the visual art I make by starting this Substack, which gives me a need and purpose for imagery, but the query remains.
It’s a distraction and a pleasure, but why does it distract and please? For me, when I find something I like I climb into it for a while—that’s working with the gel plate right now. Also, I love that if you feed an Instagram reel a few pictures and pick a song for it, the app syncs the music with the images. It makes the artwork the whole piece, as one, and I like the layers that this bakes in.
It’s also deep fun for me to watch these music synced compilations. I tried to sync a by hand here and when it works I get the same good feeling. Maybe mostly for the maker but there is the breath of the poetic sacred here. In my book The Wonder Paradox: Awe, Poetry, and the Meaningful Life, I take back words that like sacred have a complex past outside of religion. The poetic sacred is emotional, not supernatural.
It’s not always easy choosing songs for the Instagram reels. Why? Well, my interest in new music didn’t much outlast the Clinton administration. Sometimes I choose my old familiar music (by worn out albums and/or shows attended: Pink Floyd, The Velvet Underground, Al Green, Tom Waits, Nirvana, and Iggy. Also Bowie, P. J. Harvey, Bonnie Raitt, and Biggie) but often I find something among the newer music offered by the app. I’m often choosing for ease of scroll-listening and the needs of an interesting sync.
I like these prints in part for their spooky, ethereal quality — the way faces slowly resolve as if out of a fog. There is a bit of the old scam spiritualist photographs that captured wispy images of the dead. You can work to clarify the image or further spookify it. Mostly though, like many people, I love a city wall with old ads and music posters and I’m often enhancing that look in the prints and their collages.
I started this little essay on the heart of my art mentioning that where the living is tight, if you make art or collect anything, it better be 2D or small. But the living, as I intimated above, is large and is in 4D, not just because a life can be seen time, but because the city can be. Where everyone rents, turnover tumbles and the walls of your kitchen have seen a lot of women; and the bedrooms babies born. Have a parlor? it was the funeral parlor before we invented the latter. Likely so many salt tears, home births, and dead bodies make a building feel all funny inside.
Out of a hundred, hundred-year old houses, how many housed a murder? How many a discovery? How many a love for the ages? Not to force the rhyme but perhaps they rolled their love around the house like planets roll, lost from the dream of time. Or a secret handshake deal that changed the lives of many who never knew. You’re eating an egg-salad sandwich in the room where it happened. You’re watching The Amazing Race in the room where it happened. You’re back here as a ghost yourself, looking around, remembering in the room where it happened. Imagine anything you want about the flow of time; imagining, as I touched on earlier, is not itself a crime.
Okay. Happy Wednesday or at least Hold-It-Together Wednesday! If any of the above gave you time-sickness, remember that compared to a fruit fly, you are nearly permanent. Among said flies, no one has seen you change at all in several generations. Be careful out there, but live a little, don’t kill yourself, and I shall return to encourage you again.
love,
Jennifer
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Yes! Excellent! One thing about art is that is is an anarchic force available to anyone who wants it. No, no, they can't take that away from me