I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Marketing, I research, plan, and evaluate my marketing and promotion activities.
Last week, in my Monday Marketing post, I shared my responses to two questions from Alyson Stanfield’s 28 Prompts to Shape Your Art Marketing Message. I’m going to share two more in today’s post, as I prepare for an early sharing of some of my latest work. Both of these address challenges: the first, the challenges from life that inform my art and second, the challenges I’m facing in my current art and writing project.
What’s a challenge from your life that made its way into your art?
After my divorce in 2012, I spent ten years working my way through tumultuous relationship after tumultuous relationship, searching for happiness, stability, and a sense of worthiness.
During this time, I received many gifts from the men I was involved with, gifts like a cruise to Alaska, an aquamarine ring from Tiffany, a speed poem, fresh Alaskan salmon, alpine touring gear, and a baby grand piano.
My sister the anthropologist once told me, “the biography of the giver is in the gift.” I decided I would write a memoir called Things Men Gave Me. Over years, I’ve written a draft of it.
Now I decided to take that work and turn it into a conceptual painting-and-writing project. I’m taking each chapter (which focuses on one man, and one gift) and turning them into personal essays. I’m creating a painting to go with each essay. This year, I’ve taken a more narrative turn with some of my paintings, somewhat inspired by Cy Twombly’s work, which combines writing, representational elements, and abstraction to produce works that are unique and, to me, stunning in their power.
I am particularly inspired by Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam, completed in 1978. This is a “painting in ten parts” (so, ten paintings) that present incidents from Homer’s epic poem The Iliad.
Of course, the point of the essays isn’t to describe the tangible gifts I received but rather the lessons I learned through the interactions I had with each man. And, I want to interlink the essays, so that they do form a sort of memoir telling the story of how I went from unhappy divorcee searching for stability and a sense of worth via romance and love to a happy singleton, living on her own and feeling fulfilled via her art.
When I was divorced after having been married for eighteen years, and after having been partnered for virtually all of my adult life, I thought that what I needed to be a success was to get remarried. The essays in Things Men Gave Me will chart the path I took in remaking those beliefs.
What’s something you’ve learned the hard way about your materials, process, or energy?
In the past, I have painted intuitively and instinctively without solid plans as to where a painting is heading and what it will look like when complete.
I’ve found that if a painting reaches a point where I really like it, it is usually a mistake to try to improve upon it. Often when I do, I take away the special spark I detected in the painting.
However, I suspect as I move forward with the Things Men Gave Me paintings, I may learn to iterate and improve upon paintings better.
The TMGM paintings cannot be entirely instinctively painted, as they each have a specific narrative job to do. In fact, the TMGM paintings lean more towards conceptual art than anything I’ve done before.
What is conceptual art? Art where the idea or concept behind the work takes precedence over its aesthetic or material form. Emerging in the 1960s, it often involved text, instructions, performance, or ready-made objects (like a teacup). In conceptual art, the emphasis is on the idea and intellectual engagement rather than visual appeal.
It may be that what I need to do with the TMGM paintings is dispense with my judgments of whether a painting is aesthetically pleasing and instead focus on the narrative. That is, after all, what I’m doing when I say to myself, “This painting pleases me now!”
But I want to create aesthetically pleasing paintings that people would be excited to hang in their houses, not just go full conceptual and privilege the narrative and intellectual message of the painting over the beauty of it.
So perhaps I need to be willing to iterate more extensively on a painting (maybe even across several canvases) to produce work at a higher level than I have before. I may also need to work on developing my painting mastery further so that I don’t clumsily ruin a painting as I progress it towards the narrative effect I want to achieve.