In 2016, when I was renting space from my friend Anne in her sprawling beautiful barn studio, I was the recipient one Sunday afternoon of an informal, unsolicited art critique with a five year old. I’ve never forgotten it. Anne’s granddaughter Fiona, who lived at the end of the dirt road at the entrance to their thirteen acres, was a not infrequent visitor. She even had her own space for painting and other craft-related projects to work on during the days when Anne watched her.
Self-confident and fiercely independent, lovely Fiona wandered into my area and began chatting with me. She had a number of questions about what I was working on, so I asked if she knew about abstract art. Of course she did, she told me and then I learned the definition of abstract. It's "when nobody can understand what it is." As I took that in, she went on to inform me that my art was "kind of sad," but also "calm." I was curious to better understand how she understood the notion of calm, but before I could inquire, she asked me if I made the kind of paintings I did because I was looking for ways to calm down.
Pink Shoes (1/27), 8” x 8”, Pigment Sticks, India ink, paper, cold wax, and colored pencil on Arches oil paper, 2020
I said, yes, that was definitely part of it. And this made a lot of sense to her. I made sad, calm art because I had a lot of energy. She was curious. “Did I ever got so excited I started jumping up and down and banged my head on the ceiling?”
I laughed. “No,” I told her, “it's been a long time since I was that excited.”
I was about Fiona’s age when, climbing a slide at my elementary school playground, I spotted another little girl wearing a pair of pale pink sneakers. For some reason, they caught my eye and I became immediately fixated on them. They seemed the prettiest, softest shade of pink. And I wanted them. I really, really wanted them.
It’s hard to explain this, but at the exact moment that I experienced that strong tug of desire, I also recognized that I was separate from that little girl with her pink sneakers, and separate from the rest of the world. It was as if before this moment, I was connected to everything and the advent of desire caused a recognition of my individual solitude.
It was this memory that I revisited for The Memory Project, a collaboration by members of New England Wax that took place this winter. Participants made twenty-seven 8” x 8” works on paper and wrote a statement about the memory or memories they selected to work with, as well as one 12” x 12” painting for a master portfolio. In May, I will receive a portfolio containing one piece from each of the other participants and a copy of their statement. From some of the sneak peeks I’ve seen so far, each of us tackled the project in a different way, some combining thread and collage, others making twenty-seven individual and separate paintings that addressed different memories. I used it as a way to explore mark making with the ladder as the primary and formal element.
I found the exercise generative and fun, so I wanted to share it. You don’t need any other participants to do it. The important thing is to make a lot versions of the same painting. Here’s how I went about it.
First, I considered which memory I might want to work with. I knew right away that I wanted to explore something from childhood. The memory of the playground came to me pretty quickly and from there I isolated the ladder and the pink shoes as the two elements to work with. The ladder provided a great opportunity to experiment with lines of different thicknesses and the shoes gave me a strong color to bring into the design.
Next, I prepared the paper. I knew I wanted to work with cold wax and oil, so I selected Arches Oil Paper. I measured and cut my paper so that it was all the same size and then used blue tape to create a border or frame around the edges of each square. I laid out a variety of drawing materials - charcoal, India ink, and colored pencils, as well as my favorite mark making tool - a potter’s needle. I found some lined paper that reminded me of notebook paper I used when I was in elementary school and cut that up into small squares to collage. I also got out a container of Gamblin Cold Wax Medium and Indigo and Dianthus Pink R&F Pigment Sticks, a palette knife, and a Messermeister silicone bowl scraper for glazing.
I spread all of the squares of paper out on the tables in my studio and began by making the same marks using my drawing materials. With a plastic cup of India ink in my hand, I walked around and drew a ladder on each one. Then I picked up a colored pencil and did the same thing. Sometimes I used my non-dominant hand to draw with.
I didn’t try to make the paintings look the same. The key for me was to step away from judgement. By making the same mark over and over, varying the scale, I created twenty-seven related, but different pieces. Some were definitely more successful than others. I found, to my surprise, that I preferred the pieces that were less controlled, more bold.