Lessons From The Dancing Master

Untitled Sketch from The Dancing Master Series

The question of Influence and Inspiration.


Three weeks after the intensity of New York, the false cheer of several fundraisers to aid the flood relief after Hurricane Irene, and the complications of multiple family birthday celebrations, I am back in my studio, facing my own work. There is no avoiding the issue of why I am an artist when all the introspective thought I allow here in this space comes galloping at me as I settle in at my work table.

I come from a very artistic family, with professional artists of many generations on both sides, cousins, siblings,nephews. Nearly exclusively they were or are working at the representational end of the realism/abstraction spectrum.
I have always known I was an artist, but I didn't really start painting until I was in my twenties, in my last semester of college, and after many drawing and printmaking classes. It took a while, and many frustrating classes before I realized I was most influenced by landscape, longer still to give up trying to paint en plein aire. 

I try to walk and hike in nature often. Only recently I have been bringing along the small camera I bought last year to take photos of work I saw in New York. The idea of recording things visually in photographs is very new and foreign to me. I have very few until recently, and there is a swath of nearly 2 decades of my life were there are virtually no photographs of me or my life at all. The  idea of actively seeking out and capturing the inspiration for my work seems even more foreign. For most of my career I have only known what I was interested in by looking at my paintings. 

Hunting The Muse

Vertigo, 1982

I've been thinking about writing a blog for a while now. I used to write daily but fell out of the habit when life got so busy and time so elusive.... after I entered the world decisively, as a wife, step-mother, woman with a steady, emotionally and physically demanding, worldly job. When I lived alone and often went on retreat, my writing seemed a lifeline both to the physical world I did not inhabit comfortably, and a delicate tether to the otherworldly. Finding painting was a turning inward for me, finally with a purpose, though one I could not articulate. Prompted once in critique with a very famous painter to explain what it was I was after I could only say, hopelessly, "to make a better painting". I couldn't blame him for giving up and turning to someone more interesting.

Hedge, 1985

I dropped out of grad school in tears of frustration. I am sorry now that I saw it as a defeat, a retreat from something too difficult for me, a lack of fitness. I was wordless for so long, my journals taking to describing the weather, simple activities of my day, random fleeting thoughts, simply to record something, anything, of the amorphous, shape-shifting inner life I seemed destined to live. Ten years, twenty, now thirty since I started mixing paint, scraping palettes, wrestling with canvas, frustration and hope in equal measures. I felt lost when I could not record, just as I felt lost when I couldn't mess around with paint.

What was I doing? It felt as if I was building something completely from scratch in those days. Yes there were guideposts, other artists, writers that I could look to. But my own voice was as distant and faint to me as a radio signal in the jungle.

So I begin again, without really any idea of where I'm going with this. But I have a lexicon now, of sorts... words and symbols and wide swaths of colour that I hoist up like sails to see what breeze catches on them.