(See how my pointy chin matches those trees???) heh hehA couple of years ago I was invited to be a juror on a panel to award the Ohio State Arts Council grants to painters. This was an arduous two day process, during which I learned more than I could have imagined – not only about the grant process from the other side of the fence (which in itself was a real eye opener) – but also about looking at art and the assumptions we make when doing so. Once we finally agreed on eight painters (out of an initial 200) to receive the awards, only then were we told their names. There were three of us on the panel, and we discovered that we had subliminally assumed the gender of each of the eight – and we were wrong about five of them. It made me think about the question: do you look like your work?
This question of course leads to other, deeper questions about how and why we as artists develop our particular voices. Can we pinpoint the time when we began to truly “own” our work? When the basic skills we learned in art school began to serve us in developing our own language? When a distinctive shape, line, color or composition that we still use today first appeared?
Some of my painter friends look exactly like their work, but most do not. Of course it is more than looks, it’s personality and world view. And of course these judgments are quite subjective, too.
Do I look like my work? Despite my quip at the beginning of this post, my first answer would be “no” – because in my personal life I tend to be quite moderate. I have a secret fantasy of being a minimalist sculptor. Not likely to happen, but interesting to note. I call myself a “Maximalist”. Everything at once all the time, in a way. An onslaught of color and imagery and a chopped up composition……but my work is about all that: the random interaction of objects, trying to make sense of our own stream of consciousness thinking, extracting the essence, feeling the Gestalt of the moment without necessarily understanding each individual part.
So, do I look like my work? I certainly feel like it.
1 comment:
So isn't all of our work autobiograhpical? Whether it is literally so or not? We work about what we care about, and what we care about is who we are...soooooo? It is autobiographical and we look like it and it looks like us! OK...I dont look like a dog or a bear, but that is my value system and it comes out in my work, like it or not. And how others interpret the work is also how they choose (note the word "choose") to see the work is how they choose to see the me. Or the artist. I choose to see you as a solitary floating figure, balancing over sharp points of trees, waiting for the next page to unfold. xoM
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