Old In Art School

by Nell Irvin Painter

  MY NEIGHBOR ARTIST Friend Frank Owen looked at the work I tacked to my studio walls. In an afternoon of long looking and talking, Frank glimpsed my ambition as well as my shortfall. Noting my interest in the world, he lent me R. B. Kitaj’s Second Diasporist Manifesto. On my first look, its untamed monomania blew me back. On second look, I settled into its omnidirectional nuttiness. Kitaj knew his book was all mixed up, and he dove deeply into piebald obsession. Kitaj’s weirdness, even though it cost him his reputation as a painter for many years, inspirited me. Intellectually—though not in my heart’s gut—I had known all along I wasn’t the only one juggling history, group identity, individual proclivities, and visual art. For heaven’s sake, that’s what much of black and feminist art is all about—and has been for decades. Yet here was a visceral painter of pungent, acid palette, of people twisting through Chinese perspectives of his life’s history in colors weird and bold. I lapped up the painting, but Kitaj’s gift to me was writing.

  Kitaj wrote a book—a combination of image and text. For now, though, I couldn’t relate what I used to do, writing history, to what R. B. Kitaj had done, and what I was doing now in art.

  I rested a little longer.

  Before mind and body had fully recovered, my reptilian brain connected to my hand and recommenced pushing me around and back into painting. It sent me, with my two tabby cats, down the hill from the house a little ways to a long, narrow burnt-umber wooden outbuilding that had been a rabbit hutch and now entered service as the Rabbit Hutch Studio. About ten feet wide and thirty feet long, the Rabbit Hutch Studio has windows along one long side, low rafters—no ceiling—and a softly uneven faded linoleum floor directly on the ground. Insect life, flying and crawling and abundant, stayed right at home. No reason to vacate just because I was tacking up unfinished work.

  Insects were a nuisance, especially the spiders that from me elicit a mixed reaction. I’m not good with spiders. Even middling ones bring back the terror of a gigantic spider-monster in its chain-link web blocking my garage door in Ghana. How did I ever get to my car? But ever since Ghana, spiders have been more than monsters. I’ve half regarded them as Ananse, my ancestors. I cannot kill a spider, repulsive though they be. Hero Glenn came to expel—not to kill—the Rabbit Hutch Studio’s spiders.

  On the long wall facing the windows of the Rabbit Hutch Studio, I put up my 60" × 60" acrylic paintings on unstretched canvas of Michael Jackson and Apollo Belvedere, the ones that had been alternately disparaged and ignored. I continued working on them in thinned-down paint and ink, each one with more than one figure.

  LEFT: Beauty + the Sublime: Jackson, 2010, acrylic on unstretched canvas, 60" × 60"

  RIGHT: Sublime: Apollo, 2010, acrylic on unstretched canvas, 60" × 60"

  Painting standing up, except for the lower sections requiring me to sit on the floor or on a chair, I quit, hot and weary, only after five. Many excellent studio sessions turned my problem paintings’ corner. They were finally looking like real paintings. With no crit looming, I just followed my hand, painting, looking and painting until the paintings said, Okay, we’re done.

  Once other work left over from the spring semester declared itself finished, I started new work inspired by Maira Kalman.

  Maira Kalman is not usually considered a painter. She’s called an illustrator, because her paintings accompany narratives, and she publishes in books. Books. There I was again, cozying up to an artist writing and making books. Even though art school told me real artists do not make books, I kept coming back to artists writing and making books. Bookmaking, with its everlasting pull. My teachers would talk me out of using text, maybe to break me of a bad old habit, maybe to teach me new tricks. Maybe I wasn’t good enough to use text the right way (as though there were a right way). If one of their favorite artists, like Patricia Cronin, used research and narrative and text, that was allowed, even admired. But she was good enough to do it right. Research and narrative were only admitted on a one-time, case-by-case basis. Cronin could do it. My RISD peer Anna could do it and garner teachers’ praise. But bookmaking, narrative, and text for me were to be discouraged. This prohibition frustrated me into response. For an art criticism class I wrote a paper entitled “Maira Kalman Is a Painter,” meaning Maira Kalman is so a painter.

  Maira Kalman grew up in Israel and New York knowing life to be “un-figure-out-able.” As a student of literature at New York University, she met a self-appointed young revolutionary, Tibor Kalman, whom she married. Before his death at forty-nine in 1999, Tibor Kalman prospered as a designer. Maira taught herself to make art. And her drawing shows it. When I first saw her work in the New York Times, I thought, stiff-neckedly, that she could not draw. I quickly recovered from that conceit.

  Kalman published twelve children’s books in the 1980s and 1990s. In the early 2000s she made poignant adult books. Using line to delineate shape and perspective to define space, she employed an innocent palette of Hansa yellow, pink, and cerulean blue in The Elements of Style. In The Principles of Uncertainty, magenta, earth tones, and many shades of green joined her familiar pink. Though her books contain images of both cake and genocide, she is more likely to speak of the former than the latter.

  Kalman, thank you, refuses to choose sides in the commonplace distinction between art and idea. Asked why she makes art, she replies:

  It is a desire to tell a story.

  Telling a story makes sense to me. It allows for a benevolent relationship to the world.

  For her, the image does not come first, as it’s supposed to in fine art.

  I quoted her, They both come first.

  I identified with Kalman out of my stake in the never-ending distinctions between design and art, between illustration and painting. Maira Kalman helped me place myself on the more prestigious art and painting sides of the judgment. I was, after all, a student of painting, not of graphic design. My imagery still felt constrained, too closely tied to narrative, but Maira Kalman was making me more comfortable telling stories visually.

  WORKING LONG, SWEATY days in the Rabbit Hutch with my little tabby cat Gerda (Ro didn’t like being so far from his house), I inched toward developing my own process. I began by drawing, initially copying, parts of photographs in (un)Fashion, a book by Tibor and Maira Kalman on the ways people around the world adorn themselves. Colorful people in colorful photographs wore a panoply of colorful costumes, for dressing up and for working in even the most wretched work sites. These photographs put me in a warm, 1950s Brotherhood-of-Man frame of mind, a balmy mood after the man’s inhumanity to man I felt in art graduate school.

  TOP LEFT: Unfashion drawing 5, 2010, colored ink and collage on Yupo, 9" × 12"

  TOP RIGHT: Unfashion drawing 8, 2010, colored ink and collage on Yupo, 9" × 12"

  BOTTOM LEFT: Unfashion drawing 9, 2010, colored ink and collage on Yupo, 9" × 12"

  BOTTOM RIGHT: Unfashion drawing 11, 2010, colored ink and collage on Yupo, 9" × 12"

  As I drew and painted, I inserted collage, scanned my handmade drawings, and recomposed them in Adobe Photoshop. The collages incorporated torn strips of the History of White People’s manuscript, still present in my head and whispering my other life. Alternating with other-life-voice, also speaking practically out loud, came commands to “Loosen up! Let go! Stop making sense!” Glenn and I believed in coherence, in making sense of the world. But now I was telling myself—was it my reptilian brain again?—let up on the coherence. Okay.

  To unscrew my attachment to coherence, I discovered my means in the music other RISD students listened to, especially the Black Eyed Peas, those phenomenal, omnipresent musicians I had first encountered during Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. I was probably the last person in the world to discover them, but better late than never. The BEP spelled for me the difference between acoustic music and music made post-recording through mixing in the studio. Their message to me said music need not sound acoustic—like the classical music I used to list
en to. Better not to even try to sound acoustic. You didn’t have to get as close as possible to the sound of live music being played in your living room. Music could be gleefully unnatural, music I was liking.

  My peers’ music moved me from Schubert to techno, from analog to digital, from traces of the artist’s hand to the unabashedly technological. From earth colors of yellow ochre, umber (raw and burnt), and sienna (raw and burnt) to chemical colors of Naphthol red, Phthalo blue, and Diarylide yellow. Digital manipulation had already begun loosening me up during the spring semester. The summer offered unlimited time to wander around in my computer in Photoshop.

  The great thing—one of many great things—about Photoshop is its lack of brain. It thinks it has memory, but not like people. Pixels don’t have any narrative sense; they don’t care what’s next to them or whether proximity makes meaning. What Photoshop calls “history” is so drastically foreshortened that it relates solely to what you did before you turned off your computer. Rather than use Photoshop to improve the appearance of photographs—to take away pimples or brighten a sunset—I could just go crazy. I could work purely according to my eye and my hand on my mouse or tablet. Photoshop was my post-production studio, my move from analog to digital. Perfect for me, in such dire need of haphazard.

  In Photoshop I chopped up my drawings that I had scanned in a process of repetition, recomposing, and recoloring that went on for days. Photoshopped layers and fractured, meaningless images transported me into purer visuality. I projected my Photoshopped images onto canvas and painted by hand. Taking further steps, I photographed my paintings and played with them again in Photoshop, to project and paint—again—by hand. In this way, in this endless toggling back and forth between my computer and my hand, I found my own manual + digital way to make art.

  Yes, my own manual + digital process.

  Halfway through the summer, coherence was softening up; anxiety’s grip was loosening. That trap that held wild-animal me was opening, freeing up the paw, the hand I used for art making. I could still make out the trap’s saw-teeth marks. But I was able to move my hand. I still beat myself up for lack of confidence, for my self-confidence hung back until someone I thought knew something about art (e.g., Critic Friend Sarah, Artist Friend Frank) corroborated my feeling that a thing I’d made and liked was really any good. I still didn’t fully trust my own eye, though I knew what I liked and didn’t like in my work. What a dumb way to be an artist! I knew that. Could I get past that? Really get past that?

  Not yet.

  Make more work.

  MY DAYS DOWN in the Rabbit Hutch Studio were returning me to art-sanity, when came bodeful calls and emails from my father’s friends.

  My poor father.

  There in Oakland, moldering in his bed of sorrows, he needed me.

  Still depressed, still self-pitying. Inertness had sagged him back after a burst of outgoing pleasure several months after Dona’s death.

  Depression clawed him back. Wretchedness ruled. Again. How could I, in good conscience, devote day after day to joyous visual discovery, to the freedom of incoherent pursuit, when my poor father rotted in his bed, moaning, I’m all alone.

  My poor father.

  I can’t make it by myself.

  My poor, dear father.

  Depression is the cruelest disease, as cruel as cancer, crueler than dementia, drilling its pain deep within soul, brain, and body. And, for my father, depression overruled medication. Depression sucked his energy, nailing him to his bed with railroad spikes of mean, rusty iron. Emptied of his good humor, my father could not smile, for pleasure exceeded the reach of his heart and his memory. The jaunty man in a beret who used to stride from Oakland to Albany and grin as he came up your walk could barely take himself to the bathroom. Immobilized physically and mentally, he felt nothing but sorry for himself.

  On the phone, I’d counter that he wasn’t by himself, he was hardly alone, that he had so many friends who loved him and that Salem’s conscientious caregivers looked in on him regularly to make sure he was safe. At Kaiser Permanente he had the best possible health care. I reassured myself, tried to, that he really wasn’t alone.

  No good, my line of argument. No use whatever. My father allowed no salvation. His sight, he cried, was worsening. Everything was closing down. Darkness. What would he do when he could no longer see? His life would be naught. He and Dona had been married for seventy years; they had become one person; without her he was ruined; he was “alone,” completely, devastatingly alone, because neither Dona nor I was there with him. I had to come to Oakland. Now.

  I went to Oakland.

  I took my art supplies.

  I stayed a week, sitting beside my father weeping in his bed because I would be leaving. I read him Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention and my positive review of it in the Boston Globe. When my father was not even able to abide Malcolm, I pulled out my art supplies and made a series of small abstract drawings on paper in colored ink and collage from art magazines. Most were smaller than 8" × 12". I called them Bedside Collages.

  My anguished father draped his pain and his suffering over me. How could I mitigate his agony? My helplessness before his helplessness thwarted my impulse to comfort him.

  TOP: Bedside Collage 2, 2010, colored ink and collage on paper, 7" × 10"

  MIDDLE: Bedside Collage 5, 2010, colored ink and collage on paper, 7" × 10"

  BOTTOM: Bedside Collage 1, 2010, colored ink and collage on paper, 7" × 10"

  But he did not snuff out my art. He failed to make me quit art school, or to leave my husband, or to move to Oakland to take care of him forever. But, boy, did he ever try.

  BY THE END of the Adirondack summer, I had found myself again, my real, pre-graduate-school me, I mean. I no longer mourned my mother gut-wrenchingly, heart-searingly. I had new confidence in my art and the feeling I had made a decent start in finding my way to make my art. Alternate crits with people liking what I liked and doubting what I doubted had lessened my distrust of my own eyes. I had gained a footing, found a perch, discovered a place where I could stand or hang on to make my work. A toehold in my process. After the pieces inspired by (un)Fashion and the Bedside Collages, I made a series of abstract ink drawings on Yupo with collaged pieces of the History of White People manuscript. In vivid hues and sinuous drawing, they rounded out my break.

  At the end of the summer in a gesture of self-confidence, I opened the Rabbit Hutch Studio to friends and neighbors, some of them painters and art historians. They stayed around and talked about my paintings and took note of my growth, occasionally marveling, as I had heard before, over how far I had come in so short a period. My visitors made it feel like a real art opening by dwelling on my art. There’s nothing like the massage of approval to unclench the gut. Open studio over, gut unclenched, I wrapped up my work to take back to RISD for my second and last year of graduate school.

  I COULD NOT attend the traditional RISD painters’ kick-off barbecue at Teacher David’s house before the start of classes. Instead I traveled to Durham, North Carolina, for the opening of my archive—my archive—in the John Hope Franklin Center in the Duke University Library. In place of meeting the incoming class of RISD painters, the new boys and girls in town, I savored the official unveiling of this archive of my personal and professional papers. Though my archive mainly documents my stature as historian, it holds artwork going back to high school. The Ghana drawings in this book come from my archive at Duke.

  TOP: Lake Clear Drawing Ecclefechan, 2010, colored ink, gouache, and collage on Yupo, 11" × 14"

  MIDDLE: Lake Clear Drawing Lapouge’s Anthroposociology, 2010, colored ink, gouache, and collage on Yupo, 11" × 14"

  BOTTOM: Lake Clear Drawing 1, 2010, colored ink, gouache, and collage on Yupo, 11" × 14"

  Being feted at Duke as a Person of Importance, seeing items from my archive laid out as artifacts, talking about my quarter-century-long correspondence with Nellie McKay, fe
lt awfully good. For the first time, I spoke publicly about my individual singularity, for I was feeling exceedingly singular.

  Singular was me, wallowing, glowing in appreciation of my scholarship. I loved it all, unabashedly. Even so, and for all my scholarly shining, the real high point of my Durham visit was an onstage interview with the Duke art historian Richard Powell. Sitting beside me onstage, Professor Powell gave a close reading of my Apollo painting, one that fell flat in Providence. He recognized the art historical allusions—Apollo Belvedere, Caspar David Friedrich, and the Harriet Tubman figure walking through Harlem on the lower right. Here was the crit from heaven, my painting critiqued according to composition, palette, and art-historical resonance.

  Sharing a stage with Rick Powell gratified me personally, for years earlier, as I began researching art for Creating Black Americans, he had widened my way into the history of black artists. Powell pointed me toward scores of works by black artists, only a few I already knew, and scores of artists I never knew existed. Art historical discovery is what Rick Powell meant to me.

  For the world, Powell was a pioneering art historian specializing in black art. He made known the extraordinary and ultimately tragic artist William H. Johnson, a genius painter in Europe whose art changed—had to change?—when he returned to the United States, where a black artist who painted like a modern artist—not like a black artist—found no audience. It’s as though the few eyes at the time aware of black artists could not see his art as art, or if they did see his work, they didn’t like it. Noting young Jacob Lawrence’s extraordinary success, Johnson figured things out. He switched to a faux-naïf style and recognizably southern black subject matter, turning out work that found its audience. Those faux-naïf paintings are still the work Americans associate with his name. The earlier work is only slowly gaining a following.