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EMERGENCE OF VOICE IN ORIGINAL IMAGES
of the requirements for the degree
of Bachelor of Arts at Vermont College
Janice M. Stensrude
April 16, 1997
The decision to undertake studio art as a culminating study was as intuitive and synchronistic as the process that followed in the ensuing six months. Creation of original images, accompanied by a study of twentieth-century artists, followed on the heels of two studies that incorporated elements of social science research, psychology, and women's studies. An adventure into visual art was a seemingly vast departure from these earlier academic undertakings.
However, each of my previous studies have been highly personal—first, exploring the physical and emotional changes among hysterectomized women and, second, examining women's lives in the decades following the end of their reproductive years. Despite the very academic approach of these two studies, which included original research, statistical analyses, and examination of scholarly ritings, both projects were born from womewhat esoteric origins—my deeply felt need to explore the meaning of being on both the individual and collective levels.
As this culminating study unfolded, it became clear that it was an extension into visual art of my exploration of the meaning of being. Following a Preface that describes my prior studies in ADP and the process and discovereis of my study of visual art, the body of my document is the artwork that I created.
I studied the basics of color and drawing, exploring a variety of mediums—gouache, tempera, acrylic, graphite pencil, charcoal pencil, color pencil, and lithographic crayon. I learned to draw pictures that looked reasonably like the subjects I was drawing. I learned to splash color across a surface and form a pleasing composition. I learned about value, volume, shade, tone, and tint.
I renewed my love of Georgia O'Keeffe's work, and learned how it evolved over a career of more than seventy years. I discovered a passion for Wassily Kandinsky, who created a language of his own in richly complicated abstract compositions. Kandinsky described a "need" that artists must feel in order to produce meaningful work, and O'Keeffe explored nature, pushing deep into its connection to humanity. I learned that these two artists, as well as a legion of others, created their work for the same reason that I chose my study topics—a neverending search for meaning.
At the end of my study, I can say that I knew more about art than I thought I did, and there is more to learn about art than I thought there was. As a writer who has always painted pictures with words, I now understand why D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, and many other writers have turned to visual art as a deeply personal expression of something within them that has no words.
- The Menil Collection: Visits to an Art Museum
The Happy Art of Frank Stella: Visits to an Art Gallery and Artist's Studio
From the beginning, synchronicity has been integral to my Vermont College experience. I had no sooner expressed a desire to resume my education than I saw a short piece about Vermont College's Adult Degree Program in Modern Maturity, a magazine published by the American Association of Retired Persons.
The hurdles dropped away with amazing ease. My admission application was accepted and my financial aid package was approved, yet I had not fully committed to attending. While checking airfare with my travel agent, the fates gave me the final gentle push. A five-hundred-dollar savings in airfare was available, but the ticket needed to be purchased within twenty-four hours. The decision was forced, and suddenly I was boarding a Norwich University van at the Burlington airport on my way to my first residency.
There were four of us in the van that day, all "women of a certain age." "I don't know what I'm doing here," we each said in turn. Despite such uncertainty, I am the third of our group to graduate.
I entered my first exploratory meeting with a list of thirty-five topics of particular interest to me. By my second meeting, I had tweaked the list to ten topics; by my third, to three; and by my fourth, to two. The enormous interest in one of my topics shown by three of the four advisors with whom I met became a strong motivation for selecting my first ADP study, "In Search of a Lost Menopause: Have women of surgical menopause been deprived of an important rite of passage?" Barbara DuBois became my faculty advisor, barely sixty days older than I and the survivor of both an advanced cancer and the radical hysterectomy that saved her life. Clearly this study, rooted deep in my own personal experience, would be an emotional journey of discovery for us both.
My reading was steeped in feminist history and methodology, and I learned of the history of academic feminism, a subject of which I was totally ignorant as I initiated my study. Paraphrasing an old joke, at the end of my study, I declared, "Six munce ago I didn't know how to spell woemun, now I are one." I felt a great impact at learning that the uterus is a powerful and important female body part intimately involved in the business of being a living being, far more complex in importance than its recognized singular role as the place to hatch new human beings.
My particular interest in the uterus not only produced a long research paper for my study, but resulted in the publicaton of "Necessary Losses?" in Uptown Express, a local health and wellness magazine. This three-part series on hysterectomy was subsequently edited and published in two parts in A Friend Indeed, an international menopause newsletter published in Canada, where it was noticed by Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights (headquartered in Amsterdam), who has requested permission to publish it in their newsletter.
This first study created perhaps more questions than it answered—and these were questions of a higher magnitude—meaning-of-life questions. Thus, as something of a continuation of my first study, my second was "In Full Flower: Women in the Second Half of Life." Alice Eicholz became my faculty advisor, and, again, she being also a "woman of a certain age" (though somewhat younger than I), there was an added dimension to our student-advisor relationship.
I read of the life-stage theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Karen Horney, and Erik Eriksen. Doris Lessing and Grace Paley blessed me with their wisdom in their fiction—Lessing with her novel, The Summer Before the Dark, and Paley with her poignant, sometimes surrealistic short stories. Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer informed and inspired me with their lengthy reflections on the deepening spirit in aging.
At the end of my second study, I had a personal, clear vision of the meaning of a human lifespan that lasts many years past the years of reproduction. Drawing clues from my reading of both semesters, I came to certain conclusions. The first of these is that human beings are designed to live from 120 to 130 years. Second, in agreement with authors I had read, the forties are the old age of youth. Third, departing from the theories I had been reading, midlife begins between fifty and fifty-five and ends in the mid seventies. And, third, with the seventies being the true youth of old age, it is important to prepare oneself for the important work of old age—a search for goodness. I changed the focus of my study to a philosophical exploration of humanity's search for goodness, with a minor art component to fulfill the aesthetic requirement for graduation.
As I sat in my first meeting with my faculty advisor, Lois Eby, and my new study group, the potential for exploring art as a subject in its own right seized me by the roots of my hair and tossed me into a frightening, exciting darkness. The words that had been my friend through all my reading, thinking, and writing were pushed aside, and I was awash in a world of color, line, and symbol. As I sat in that meeting, I wrote in my notebook:
You took my words away
Struck me silent
Handed me only a brush
Jammed in a color pot.
Soundlessly
I scream in color—
Red, orange, blue, purple.
"The idea of undertaking a studio art study scares me to death," I told Linda Wilson, a member of our group of four, who was to graduate that evening.
"That means that's what you need to do," she replied gently with her characteristic wisdom.
After dinner, I wrestled myself to exhaustion with writing my new study plan till I succumbed to a deep tiredness, turned out the light, and sank into bed. As I began to drift into sleep, D. H. Lawrence's essay, "Making Pictures," crept quietly into my consciousness. In his early forties, after a lifetime of competent copying of old masters, Lawrence discovered that he could make pictures of his own. Quickly, before the vision escaped with me into sleep, I turned on the light and wrote out my study plan. the faculty with whom I had discussed by plan to study the search for goodness were surprised at the twelfth-hour change of direction, but none were more surprised than I.
In An Art of Our Own, Roger Lipsey wrote, "Images, like words, are vehicles of consciousness; they allow us to think silently. They can be regarded as silent words, and words as speaking images" (52). I began my exploration of silent words—haltingly, timidly. My head was full with images, and my hand did not have the skill to pursue them.
Where would I find my answers? The reply was resounding: Everywhere.
To give shape to my work,I followed the exercises in Judith Cornell's Drawing the Light from Within. Cornell led me through the color scale, guided my exercises in mixing color, and taught me to see light in the gradations from white to gray to black. I had a place to start, and the beginning images began to emerge.
Just as each evening ended with the cleaning of my brushes, each morning began with reading—but a reading quite different from that of my other ADP studies. The pages of my books were dense with rich, color reproductions of the work of the twentieth century's greatest artists. At the end of the first month of this study, I thought, What better place to search for goodness than in the lines and colors of great art? I had not abandoned my search for goodness; I had only found another avenue of search.
In the second month of my study, with Cornell's guidance, I was immersed in color play, learning the basic combinations of primary colors that could create any color, and attempting to use them in compositions.
I had had enough exposure to artists to expect that some proficiency in drawing was helpful, if not a necesity, in creating paintings and other works of art. I enrolled in a short drawing course based on Betty Edwards's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Outside class, I worked my way through the exercises in Edwards's book, learning to engage my right brain by copying a drawing while viewing it upside down. Edwards was teaching me to draw exactly what I saw, freeing me from the biased perception of my left brain.
Simultaneously, I continued working with Cornell's book, and I tackled what was to be my major work in terms of time. The assignment was to create an artistic graphic presentation of the color wheel. For three weeks I painstakingly applied bits of color to the design I had created.
As the French Surrealist René Magritte had done, I painted in the dining room, but unlike Magritte, I did not clear away my brushes and paints when it was time to eat. My coffee table became my dining surface as my dining room was wholly turned over to my art studies. The walls were randomly decorated with images and bits of colored papers held in place with stick pins, and one end of the table held my lamp and the large piece of masonite propped to achieve a slanted work surface.
Each day's labor in my dining-room studio involved five minutes of careful color mixing for every one minute of painting. The smallest brushes were used to fill in the closely spaced lines I had drawn to mark the gradually changing tones and shades of color that filled the designated spaces on my bristol board. As the color slowly brought the design to life, I was in awe of the effect Cornell was teaching me to acheieve. Even my visions of what painting could be began to build increasing layers of depth and beauty as the carefully drawn lines of the color study came alive with the application of bands of colored light.
As I painted, I would clean my brush by first blobbing the remaining paint on my brush onto a clean piece of Bristol or other art paper, creating a random design with tones and shades of each color I used. These blobs of color were to become the color wheel construction that I devised at the completion of my painting.
At the end of each evening's studio session, I would empty my paint tray onto a sheet of watercolor paper, allowing the paint to drip and run across its surface. I began to appreciate artists who threw paint at a canvas in what always had seemed to me a meaningless effort. Standing back, appraising the random streaks, I would assess the effect and decide that tomorrow it would be necessary to see that the darker colors would dribble on one side or the other.
In my morning reading, I was immediately drawn to the work of Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky did for me what Monet's Haystack had done for him when he viewed it at an 1895 Moscow exhibit: My view of art and what I wanted to paint was radically transformed. However, unlike Kandinsky, I am not independently wealthy and will not be leaving behind my paying career to enter art school.
Kandinsky's earliest abstract works contained clearly visible objects (Fig. 2) Kandinsky's own profile, with his characteristic high-collar dress shirt and jacket lapel, his eye symbolized by a black dot circled in red. The checkered squares reminded me of color palettes.
Composition VIII Fig. 3) was, to me, an even more clear depiction of his studio. His easel is indicated by a black-line triangle to the right of center, and an aerial view of a container holding three brushes overlaps its right side. One large, red-handled brush lies diagonal across the right third of the painting. Again, squares of color imply palettes, and the surface of a drawing table appears.
Large circles, such as the black and violet one that appears in Composition VIII, are in most of Kandinsky's works. In his earlier pieces, the circles are clearly the sun over a landscape. The continuation of this circular form with its similar placement suggests that the sun shines in most of Kandinsky's work. The forms of paintbrushes also appear with frequency. It is as if he depicts himself looking out at the world, with his tools at hand to record what he sees. A view of Kandinsky's linear drawings of a dancer (Fig. 4) supports the idea that his paintings frequently, if not always, contained objects and persons translated into an artistic language that he invented.
My ability to read the notations, as art historians call the images in a painting, was apparently emerging. As I read the description of Braque's Woman Reading (Fig. 5), I noted the curved shapes of the woman's profile looking to her right and read with surprise: "The woman's head is marked by a few curls of hair, but no facial features are added" (Cooper 50). I had to examine closely to find the curls of hair to which Cooper referred, and as I found them at center top, I also saw them coming down to meet an ear ornamented with a dangling earring. There was even a face of someone peering over her left shoulder.
I had seen what the book's author had not, and in this case, I was absolutely certain. The forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, and chin of the figure were unmistakable. And though the author had been baffled at what the woman may have been reading, I could see clearly a right hand holding the cover of an open book and a left hand turning its pages. The Cubist habit of using a descriptive title from which to discern the subject matter was most certainly my initial key to the painting—I knew what to look for. My confidence in being a viewer of art was bolstered, and I had a longing to create such enigmatic works.
The twentieth century's abstract painters began their progression to abstract form from a background of solid artistic training that included learning to draw and paint realistically. Their work is far from unskilled child's play. Yet abstract art is the friend of the beginning artist. Before skills develop, satisfaction can be attained through random color play, carefully selecting shapes to fill the inviting whiteness of a blank sheet of art paper. My abstract paintings during this period were little vacations from the time-consuming exercises that were training my artist's eye and building my skills. In these paintings, I relaxed totally into the artistic process, losing track of time and sinking into a deep relaxation as my mind lost all sense of linguistic expression. I understood Lipsey's description of images as "silent words" (52).
It was in Lipsey that I discovered the odd art forms that flourished in Paris of the 1920s, the most bizarre among them being chance art and readymades. Chance art was an attempt to remove the self from the creative process. A poet would clip words from a newspaper and allow them to fall randomly into place, the result being declared a poem. There were even musical compositions created by drawing musical notes from a hat and placing them on the music staff in the order in which they were drawn.
I was titillated at the notion of creating a chance painting. How would it be done? Color swatches dropped in a hat? What about the shapes? Drop them in a hat, too? It was in this process of attempting to conceive my own chance art that I understood that the chance artists had set for themselves an impossible task. It was impossible to eliminate choice—the choice of words to clip from a newspaper, the choice of musical notes to drop into a hat, the choice of colors and forms to be included in the random drawing. I abandoned my chance art project. Removing self from the project was impossible, and in the end, there was only Lipsey's wise assessment: "The chance artist's attempts to remove himself result only in using considerably less of his brain than is available to him" (128).
Chance, however, was not to be completely abandoned. As I saw the globs of color slide down my working surface, I delighted in the result. I began to play with direction and color combinations. Clearly I had allowed intention to enter my experiment. Again, Lipsey had predicted my response:
One of the conditions for great art is a delicate, mobile balance
between chance and intention. Intention alone is cold and
schematic; chance alone is irresponsible and vacuous. together,
under the eye of the working artist, they are an immense
resource. (128)
It is a temptation to describe modern art as childish scrawl—something anyone with a paint brush can do. I can testify from my own experience that just anyone can't do it. Even my attempt to copy Marcel Duchamp's readymades, where all I had to do was sign an object and declare it art, became a major search for the suitable object. It was somewhat reminiscent of my search for stockings that exactly matched a hot pink evening dress. Even once acceptable stockings were found after weeks of search, there was a dissatisfaciton that led me to look further. The artistic dissatisfaction results in a lifetime exploration of form and color, searching for the next piece of the puzzle. Even for Duchamp, who would find a rusty cup holder and declare it art, the search was one of the educated eye of the artist.
So why not just paint a picture as true to reality as you can? Twentieth-century artists have replied, "That's been done. There's nowhere to go." This response reminded me of my experience this past summer when I saw, for the first time, a series of reproductions by a photorealist artist. My response to the work was: Why not just take a photograph? I was left empty in viewing the work. There were none of the painterly brush strokes in oil or pools of color in watercolor. There was nothing to distinguish it from the scene that it depicted.
Many of the twentieth-century artists have gone further than simply doing what has not been done. Klee, Kandinsky, Rothko, Noguchi were not attempting to represent the external world that passes through our eyes. It was a vision of an inner reality that they sought to express. Kandinsky called it the "inner need."
Updike had his own views on the success of the great abstract painters:
Pollock painting is the subject of Pollock's paintings. Abstract
Expressionism has the effect of glamorizing the painter, of
making him, rather than the sitter or the landscape or the Virgin,
the star. (115)
In this era of personalities and superstars, it seems but natural that art may be more about the artist than about the artist's subject.
From the deeply personal work of twentieth-century abstractionists, I moved into the art of social commentary and social protest—Goya's Spanish wars (Fig. 6) and Biggers's urban wars (Fig. 7). In his seventies, John Biggers lives today in Houston, Texas, where he moved in the 1950s to head the art department of the newly created Texas State University (now Texas Southern University). It was because I anticipated an opportunity to visit Biggers's Houston Studio that I particularly included a study of his work.
A Los Angeles art critic compared Biggers's work to Goya's, and so I preceded my study of Biggers with a study of Goya, the Spanish master who died many years before the birth of the other artists I studied. I explored Goya's art to see what in it may have inspired a comparison with the dramatic and moving work of a contemporary African-American artist, a master in his own right.
The art of protest, which they share, is executed by both artists with the skill of a master, but not pretty in its subject matter. Speaking of the overt, sometimes violent segregationist policies of the U.S. armed services during World War II, Biggers stated, "I did some things that Pieter Bruegel and them hadn't done. I showed that whorin' den. I drew everything . . . I drew the whole damn mess" (qtd. in Wardlaw 33).
Both artists used distortion to evoke the emotion of their subjects, and both created a vast body of drawings, sharing a love of drawing. Goya's social commentaries were drawn and painted in his later years, his youth being devoted to promoting his ambitions as a court painter to the Spanish king. Biggers's most dramatic social commentaries were painted in his youth, beginning while he was a student of famous art educator Viktor Lowenfeld at Hampton Institute (and later at Penn State, where Biggers received his B.A., M.A., and Ed.D.) and continuing throughout his tenure in the U.S. Navy during World War II.
Goya bemoaned the abuses of royalty and the church and the destruction of war. Biggers mourned the loss of African-American lives in lynchings and their degradation in urban slums when they left their rural subsistence to find a better life in the city. Neither artist avoided depicting the ugliness of reality.
Another interesting similarity between the Spaniard from a background of minor nobility and the American black man from an educated, working class, rural Southern family is that they each came to artistic maturity far from the important recognized art centers of their times. Biggers avoided the art centers of New York, and Goya matured in a Spain that offered him no mentor and no followers.
It is Biggers's earlier art (Fig. 8) that most resembles Goya's later art (Fig. 9). It is the content and the passion for their subjects conveyed by these artists that evoke a similarity. Both artists took major new directions in their art after serious illnesses, Goya at forty-seven, Biggers in his fifties. Following illness, Goya turned to his art of social protest, Biggers to his art of spiritality. There is tremendous contrast in their mature art. Biggers's is one of hope and enlightenment, Goya's one of continuing dark satirical comment on life. Biggers says today that his goal is "the triumph of the human spirit over the mundane and the material" (qtd. in Wardlaw 106).
The theme of creation is found throughout Biggers's work of the last twenty-five years (Fig. 10). "The African woman in her divine creative capacity, motivated within me a desire to paint murals on creation from a matriarchal point of view," he states (Wardlaw 103). As I read Biggers's thoughts on creation, I remembered Kandinsky writing that the apex of a triangle meeting a circle is symbolic of the finger of God. I could see Michelangelo's finger of God sparking Adam's creation (Fig. 11), and I pictured the wavy blue lines of my graphic color wheel. When I painted them, I envisioned those lines as water moving into the center of a sun figure. Now I could see the universal symbolism. In my mind I saw the films of nature photographer Lennart Nilsson, showing the wriggling, tiny sperm swimming into the gigantic ovum, sacrificing its form to the act of creation as it was swallowed into the void.
From Goya and Biggers I entered the world of self-taught artists, looking at the works of Mary Anna "Grandma" Moses and eighty Southern artists featured in an exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1994. Roofing tin, old doors, and grocery sacks are but a few of the found supports that these self-taught artists used to produce works of striking originality and interest. There are a number of common threads among most of these artists: interrupted education and undertaking their art during retirement. I felt an affinity for these artists who found little time for their artistic pursuits while they were in their working years.