There ended my story in art for decades. Except for occasional sketching and knitting, I put down the visual and wrote a very great deal of text. Eventually my books returned me to art, and once back in images, I concluded, Yes, I think I could stay in the world of pictures. Let me test this out.
During my last year teaching at Princeton I took two introductory painting classes. Introductory painting came after my regular teaching and kept me in Princeton to 10 p.m. After that, I’d get home to Newark in the middle of the night. My generous Princeton colleague Valerie Smith2 often let me stay over at her house and sweetly bought one of my first drawings. At first I didn’t know to photograph my work, so Valerie’s drawing has disappeared from my files. The office of another Princeton colleague, Edmund White, was next to my painting studio. He bought my very first painting, my attempt to depict a set-up in various surfaces and shades of red and yellow, shiny, matte, opaque and translucent, saturated and toned down. The reflective red hat contrasted with two drapes, one also reflective but mixed with blue, the other with a pattern that fractured in the folds of the cloth. The bright yellow shopping bag in front combined a shiny surface and a broken pattern.
Red Hat, 2003, oil on canvas, approx. 12" × 16"
In the first Princeton class I painted gray scales and figures and landscapes and learned light sources and perspective, as displayed in these two other early paintings. The gray scale began simply as that, a gray scale, where you alter hue and saturation between black and white. I liked that exercise and added mountains in the distance. It still looks like a gray scale, but with something else going on. The blue painting came from an exercise in creating depth through perspective, shadow, and luminosity. I made both these paintings on manufactured 24" × 18" canvases. I still have a whole pile of these canvases, which I consider beneath me now. My second Princeton painting class taught me how to make my own stretcher bars and to stretch and gesso my canvases, thoroughly enjoyable manual labor.
LEFT: Gray Scale, 2003, oil on canvas, approx. 24" × 18"
RIGHT: Blue Boxes, 2003, oil on canvas, approx. 24" × 18"
My Princeton painting classes took me to museums, to Philip Guston’s cadmium red, ivory black, and titanium white cigar-smoking Klansmen and John Currin’s skinny, huge-breasted naked white women the color of supermarket peach flesh. I joined the throng of Guston admirers but never acquired a taste for Currin’s virtuoso painting. I still stumble over his skinny, big-breasted women and wonder why his famously rendered Thanksgiving turkey is raw.
EVEN BEFORE ART school and with what I look back on as incredible hubris, I toyed with the idea of myself as a professional artist, not a Sunday painter, no mere Sunday painter. I might want to go to art school, not just to undergraduate art school, but to graduate art school as well. I might want to work professionally. I might want to be as professional a painter as I was a historian. Well, within reason. What could be the problem?
As I poke into the crevices of memory, I touch another motive for leaving history, a motive that wants to stay beneath the surface, shrinking into its obscurity like a darkness-dwelling troglobite, eyeless and colorless, in the subterranean habitat of my shame. I’m dragging my troglobite into the light, for candor demands acknowledgment of another reason I did not remain in the grooves of academe. Although there was, as always, much more history yet for me to write, there was also a certain sourness I had no right to taste. It is my shame, for any sentiment other than gratitude strikes me as most unbecoming in one whose achievements have been honored with a Princeton professorship, honorary doctorates from the Ivy League and beyond, and the presidencies of the Organization of American Historians (which historians call the OAH) and the Southern Historical Association (a.k.a. the Southern). What could be more annoying (a word I learned to deploy in art school) than a person of privilege whining about what hasn’t been bestowed? Nonetheless. Nonetheless, let me whine a little. There was the feeling of limits reached, of disappointment over book prizes not won and books not reviewed. It was as though I had assumed I’d be exempt from the rules of the world, where people who looked like me or who didn’t fit an image of how they were supposed to be were never fully seen or acknowledged. For all my lovely recognition, I seemed not properly to fit in.
I’ve never been a black person easily captured in the idea of a black person—come to think of it, no one is. No person, no black or otherwise person, fits a racial mold. The idea of a black person is a stereotype that shifts its shape in order never to fit anyone real. I’ve hardly suffered or overcome hardship, can’t talk ghetto, won’t don a mask of black authenticity or speak for black people as a whole. Too many disparate themes reside in me for coherent recognition: images, phrases, people, and things from the multiple worlds I live in and have lived in over many years of life. The freedom I treasure in art reminds me of walking in Bordeaux in the 1960s and inclining toward the study of history. My mother’s dismay at the appearance of aging triggers scattered associations, from the biography of a French theorist to older women artists. Driving down I-95 from Providence calls up a memory of skidding my VW Beetle across a snow-covered bridge over the Connecticut River when I was a graduate student at Harvard. This jumble is not smooth, but its disorderliness is what makes me me. I can’t corral my thoughts and feelings within a fence of race.
When I sniveled to friends that I had never received a book prize of import, they pulled me up short, and not just by recalling my honors. They reminded me of the world we live in and the off-kilter nature of my writing. What on earth did I expect? I had enough, I really did have enough in many meanings of the word. Okay, straighten up. Enough in hand, I left history, in the sense of no longer writing scholarly history books as I used to, with honor and fulfillment. History remains a part of me, naturally, and it remains in me even though my relation to history became uneasy in art school.
AFTER MY TWO toe-dipping Princeton painting classes, I took the summer drawing and painting marathon at the New York Studio School on 8th Street in Manhattan. The Studio School started at 9:00 a.m., ended at 6:00, with crits stretching past 9:00 p.m. For me that meant get up at 6:00 a.m., walk across the park, take Newark light rail to Newark Penn Station. New Jersey Transit to New York Penn Station, that hell of thank-you-for-your-patience dysfunction. The 2 or 3 subway downtown, get off at 4th Street, walk to 8th Street, and arrive before everyone else.
Then the payoff. Stand up and draw and paint for eight hours. I loved it.
I L O V E D I T.
The paper, the charcoal, the canvas, the set-ups, the model, the space, the perspective, the shadows, the colors, the smell. Concentrating hard, I did it wrong, and I did it right. I painted a still life in red and blue that taught me that you can’t mix cerulean blue from ultramarine and white oil paints as they come from a tube. A figure painting asked for warm but light browns for skin and an indefinite darker shade for light skin in shadow. This shade has no name, so you mix it out of the leavings on your palette.
Here’s the best lesson of all from the Studio School marathon: Staple a 5' × 4' piece of tough watercolor paper to the wall; cover it with a charcoal drawing of the model in the set-up, the very best drawing you can make. Cover the entire paper. This takes hours standing up, drawing in the heat. Sweating. Now rub out your drawing with a chamois. Owwww!! All that work for nothing! Draw it again, only ten inches to the right. Okay. Concentrate. Draw. Sweat. Fill up the paper. Rub it out. Erase it again? Yes. Rub it out. Draw the model and set-up one-third smaller. Draw draw draw. Rub it out. Again.
Lesson learned? Essential lesson learned! You can erase what you draw, even what you’ve spent a long time drawing and sweating over it. You can throw away what you paint and, as I learned to do later, cut it up and incorporate it into a new painting. A lesson to take straight to heart, and not only in art making.
I loved it. Even though I was the oldest by far, I stood up and painted right up until six. Some of the kids came late, farted around, took two-hour l
unch breaks, and left before dinner without washing their brushes. Crit came after dinner break. To accommodate Newark light rail’s evening schedule, I would leave crit around 9:00 p.m. Start all over the next morning, five days a week. Okay, I could do it! Let’s go!
Still Life with Red Pot, 2004, oil on canvas, 9" × 12"
Figure with Shadow, 2004, oil on canvas, 12" × 9"
I applied to Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers with a portfolio of drawings and paintings from Princeton and the Studio School marathon. Rutgers admitted me. What a thrill! What an accomplishment! Admission puffed me up like a kid off to college. My knowing Friend Bill hinted later that undergraduate art school isn’t all that hard to get into. Be that as it may, my admission felt like a worthy achievement. I affiliated with Douglass College, the (sort-of formerly) all-women’s college, for its feminist tradition, of course, and also for its quiet.
IN THE SUMMER before I started at Mason Gross, Dear Husband Glenn and I attended an art exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. You will only hear of Glenn occasionally, when absolutely necessary, because Glenn doesn’t want a role in this story, even though I could not have made it through without him. We were together in Paris, where the Grand Palais had installed a huge show of stirring paintings, abstract and figurative, witty videos ironic and silly, sculpture bright and colorless, and perfectly gorgeous drawings: a feast for the eyes of color and movement and sound. Wait a minute. What in creation was spilling over several folding tables—used ballpoint pens, foil, torn newspaper, doodles, bits of paper, the contents of a wastepaper basket held together with cardboard and brown packing tape. A shapeless mass of faded color and haphazard images. Overabundance splayed out from one section to another without any composition, without coherent color that I could see, as though a drunken do-it-yourselfer had turned over his trash barrel in the lofty Grand Palais. Huh? An art enigma. A mistake, surely. But what did I know? I did not know this was art.
This piece by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn had won the show’s first prize, and Hirschhorn was installation art’s shining international star. I hadn’t yet heard of installation art and didn’t know that in the twenty-first century this was more than any old art; it was good art, excellent art. The best art. With work in the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and the Walker Art Center, Hirschhorn had hit all The Art World’s high notes and strutted off with its prizes.3 Clearly, this was art, and Hirschhorn was a major artist. Hirschhorn’s work raised the oldest questions in the world of art, questions that followed me for a very long time afterward. What counts as art? Who is an artist? Who decides? Over the course of several years, I learned the answers. The hard way. In art school.
3
GETTING THERE
First semester at Mason Gross at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Four 8:10 a.m. classes, commuting from home in Newark. Yes, I live in Newark, Brick City, bad reputation, scary place of children gunned down in a schoolyard and a riot/rebellion no one ever forgets. Even now, visiting New Yorkers expect wisps of smoke to rise from Newark’s rubble. Mine is the Newark of charismatic men: fierce Amiri Baraka and lovable Cory Booker—Newark, where everyone on the street—nearly everyone—is black, brown, or tawny. This scares some people.
My North Newark neighborhood isn’t scary, just nice houses, nice yards, and nice neighbors, families gay, straight, black, white, Latino (Puerto Rican, Dominican), and a few Asian (Southern and Eastern). I know most of my neighbors and chat with them about their dogs and what day the city will be picking up leaves.
My block of my street is a little paradise, interrupted only occasionally by a mugging or a burglary or a house alarm (mine) sounding off by mistake. The biggest news was a neighbor in one of the huge corner houses who was posing as a cosmetic surgeon in Manhattan and killed a patient who came into his hands for a cut-rate nose job. He buried her under the steps of his carriage house and ran off to Costa Rica.
Down the hill a couple of blocks is a commercial street, Mt. Prospect Avenue, with a pharmacy, restaurants, a health center, a couple of liquor stores, and shops where you can send money to Latin America and have documents notarized. At a deli takeout counter, the clerk asked about my origins, first in English. I said I’m from California. He switched to Spanish and lowered his voice: “Dominicana? Cubana?” I do indeed fit right in.
Giddily as if off to summer camp, sprightly in the early light, I would set off to Mason Gross from my quiet block at 6:30 a.m., portfolio under one arm, art box in hand. I walked across Branch Brook Park, still late-summer chromium oxide green, later, burnt-umber bare, then, in the spring, the pale green of kitchens in the 1950s.
To get from my house to Mason Gross, I joined New Jersey’s national pastime of commuting. At first I thought of my commute as simply getting to art school, as traversing the space between Newark and New Brunswick. I thought of it, no, I hardly thought of it at all, beyond calculating the time it would consume. Over time I came to cherish commuting as immersion in my polychromatic state of classes and nations. Soon I was swimming like a little brown anchovy in a school of thousands of little anchovy-commuters, happily unremarkable, yet singular with my portfolio and art box. Don’t ask me to resolve the contradiction.
The everydayness of my fellow commuters left little impression. Invariably someone waiting around the light rail station was complaining into a phone that it’s “muy caliente” or “muy frio” or other observations as banal in Spanish as in English. But there were always sparklers, people I’d never see elsewhere or never see again anywhere—the jewels of my commute.
Sitting in front of me on Newark light rail one afternoon were a couple of kids—early twenties or so—listening to music, bumping around in their seats, and talking loud, just exuberant. She was beautiful and spirited, he kind of ordinary to look at. He had the music, but he shared an earbud with her, two heads on one iPod.
As she danced in her seat, he did something amazing. He played the subway car partition like a conga drum:
DeepDEEP slap stop DeepDEEP slap stop
DeepDEEP slap Deep DEEP slap stop
DeepDEEP slap stop DeepDEEP slap stop
DeepDEEP slap stop DeepDEEP slap stop
DeepDEEP slap stop
DeepDEEP slap stop DeepDEEP slap stop
DeepDEEP slap stop
DeepDEEP slap stop DeepDEEP slap stop
DeepDEEP slap stop
DeepDEEP slap stop DeepDEEP slap stop
DeepDEEP slap stop
He pulsated a salsa rhythm on a vertical plastic divider. Totally awesome! I was ready for all of us passengers to jump up and boogie down the aisle. I wouldn’t have led off dancing, but I definitely would have joined in. What joy in our white and black metal tube of light rail beside Branch Brook Park, a carnival parade on a workday, an outbreak of brotherly love to a salsa beat. Strangers waving their arms and shaking their booties to the music, grinning and singing and looking straight in the eyes of their comrades in commute. But when the pretty girl started clapping her hands to the music, he of the beat shushed her. No dancing in the Newark light rail that afternoon.
The couple had a third-wheel friend across the aisle, a heavyset young woman their age without the couple’s brio. No music, no style. To my eye, the trio was dressed like everyday Newark kids, the women in kind of tight, fashionable clothes, the fellow in the ordinary baggy stuff of the streets. Nothing distinguished or classy, or so I thought. I misjudged them. At one point they staked their place in the cultural terrain, agreeing they wouldn’t be caught dead in Newark’s “ghetto bars.” No. They go to Irvington. The fellow imitated Irvington’s middle-class (?) white (?) talk, all “dude” this and “dude” that, with “bro” mispronounced in that way of dudes who don’t know it’s short for “brother” and ought to sound like “bruh.” Much to see and hear on public transportation.
IN NEWARK PENN Station in the morning, we’d bolt up escalators (they nearly always work), many heading to track 1 to New York City
, others, like me, to track 4 for the Northeast Corridor train going west (meaning south) toward New Brunswick and Trenton. In the track 4 waiting room my fellow commuters massed shoulder to shoulder on long, facing benches, a few traditionalists reading newspapers and books, many, many more bending their heads into their iPods and cell phones. At first I couldn’t figure out where the droning came from. Other travelers knew better. They kept to their phones and ignored the evangelist, a Jamaican according to his accent, insinuating Revelation at us captives.
With time my irritation subsided and the evangelist became just another character, just another star in the drama of New Jersey Transit. He did eventually depart, and after he had departed, I missed him as this jewel of my New Jersey commute, with its rainbow of voices from the islands of the Caribbean Sea, English and Haitian Creole and Spanish, and Hindi from the East.
I passed through Newark Penn Station almost every day. It has moving sky above the open girders, clouds, and, if you stand aside, the windows of Newark’s skyscrapers reflecting clouds and sun. An overload of information on trains and things you can buy and Broadway shows and insurance and travel to other, sunnier places, even Massachusetts. Newark Penn Station has its own perspective, its own light and shadow, its own movement in a rainbow of gray, yet within its overall colorlessness, a beguiling combination of a million yellow-grays that have no name. People all nearby and down the track. I made piece after piece of art on the theme of Newark Penn Station.
Old In Art School Page 3
