New York Academy of Art: Notes from Studio Lockdown

Showing posts with label Notes from Studio Lockdown. Show all posts

Does Painting Still Matter?

The best way to make a dramatic leap as an artist is to stop working. After Hilary Harkness' show at Mary Boone Gallery in 2011, she laid down her brushes for a full month and went to southern India. Personal transformation aside, she will never evaluate art the same way again. Here are some ideas for ways to push your practice forward from the subcontinent.

By Hilary Harkness

Not at the Taj Hotel in Kovalam, India. Kovalam is a tropical vacation town at the Southern tip of India. I normally think resorts are jail, but I was feeling good since we had been upgraded to a suite with a private pool. There were paintings throughout the hotel, but the owner or management must not have looked at them.

In contrast to the beautiful décor, there was a watercolor painting of an airplane going down in flames hung on the living room wall. Later, in the restaurant, I noticed a painting with floating, disembodied eyes. What mood was the designer going for? Was he feeling vengeful? Why was no one interested?

Kovalam is also on the Kerala side of the Tamil Nadu border, a state with human inhabitation dating from 500,000 BCE and former stomping grounds of the separatist militant organization Tamil Tigers. This was the first insurgent organization to use concealed explosive belts and vests, and a member assassinated the former Prime Minister of India Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. The FBI has described the Tamil Tigers as amongst the most dangerous and deadly extremist outfits in the world. They were guilty of human trafficking, sea piracy, ethnic cleansing, and credit card fraud.

Later in the trip, vigilante civil war broke out between the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu over an old dam that had never been safety tested, and was now feared to be unsafe. The Keralans wanted it taken down, while 100,000 Tamil Nadu farmers were dependent on the dam for water. Civilians were ripping each other out of cars and the violence was becoming widespread. We flew out shortly before the airport was shut down. The Federal government of India declined to get involved, because what good could they do?

Maybe I was wrong about the paintings at the hotel, maybe they weren’t aggressive but merely apt reflections of reality hidden in a fantasy land.

Escape from Studio Lockdown: An Allegorical Tale of a Backpacker in Alappuzha

From Love is What you Want

Word is that you don’t need to look outside yourself for creative inspiration, and that the more personal a work is, the more universal it is. Think Tracey Emin’s tampon piece. This is great advice for the first decade out of school, and for intermittent periods later in life- even Louise Bourgeois took breaks from showing while she reconnected and reorganized her work in relation to her inner life.

Janus Fleuri 1968

After leaving Yale, I painted for myself for three years with no one looking, and no thoughts of showing at a serious gallery. When I moved to NYC, I had no choice but to work long days, often around the clock, to keep up with deadlines for shows. I believed that if I had no life, I would live through my paintings, making them come alive. And if I put all my care into making paintings, then my paintings would go out into the world and take care of me. (I didn’t realize that my paintings couldn’t take care of networking). My dealer Mary Boone has been a champ in that she is hands-off when it comes to my creative process and doesn’t grouse when I turn away collectors. Outside of casual visits from friends, I’ve done only a handful of studio visits in the past decade, and it’s saved me from having to keep up appearances in my studio, explain anything, or otherwise waste time. I was able to be vulnerable and truthful in my work because I wasn’t bracing myself against dismissive criticism (I was still worn out from surviving Yale).

Since I’m blogging about escaping from my studio, I want to tell you about meeting a lovely blond backpacker in Alappuzha, Kerala after a night on a rice barge cum houseboat. She was 29 and looking for adventure, hanging in bars (I wondered for a minute if she was going to scam me in some way, instead, she gave me a nonfiction book about the state of healthcare in India). She had spent a night on a houseboat with five backpacker guys she hadn’t known previously, and when she pulled out her camera to show us photos of a foggy Taj Mahal she found that unbeknownst to her the guys had taken photos of their pasty asses and equipment for her to discover later.

She told me that she had been in India for three weeks and that it was all the same and boring. She was off to Vietnam where she had heard that there were more backpackers. She was more interested in backpacker monoculture than the culture around her. There’s a time in life for living in your own world, but after a while you’re missing out on much more interesting and important stuff.

Without healthy engagement in reality, I believe artists become unmoored and their creativity shrivels from lack of mental input.


Genitals, Forrest Bess

Only a few of us can be Forrest Best, the penultimate outsider artist, but with genital mutilation on the docket (a belief in sacrificing everything to creativity, including ejaculation), it’s better to “sell out” and join the fray.

Untitled (No. 5), Forrest Bess, 1949

What dogma about creativity has you by the throat?

Escape from Studio Lockdown: In Search of Bhagyanath Chandroth

In Search of Bhagyanath Chandroth

There’s a thriving art scene in Kerala, so I traveled to the color-drenched port of Kochi to connect with the artist Bhagyanath, whose work I feel an affinity to. He originally introduced himself to me via Facebook, and when I checked out his work online I knew I had to meet him in person to talk shop and discover more about his inspiration. Every time I visit a new city I try to meet an artist or do a studio visit because museums and art galleries rip art out of its true context (unless it was made specifically to be seen in a museum, yawn). For me, connecting with artists is the number one reason to travel, so consider trying it yourself, it’s easier and more fulfilling than you might imagine.

Upon arriving at the local airport, I fainted and was delirious for days. I have a blurry memory of some antique fishing boats in the harbor with the pizazz of a Lari Pitman paintings, but I failed in my quest to meet with Bhagyanath. Here are some examples of his work that I feel connected to from 8,000 miles away.