OCA drawing 1.1

 SHOW UP DRINK COFFEE AND WORK

Thank goodness for Amy Sillman.  She should be piped in as the icon and spokesperson for abstract artists.  I imagine you come away from conversing with her bursting with education and history and stories.  All sorts of interesting thoughts about being human.

Recently Ive been researching a lot of artists.  And a great majority of modern artists are super super eclectic on their influences, genres, techniques, and styles.

They are not adhering to one school of thought. In fact they are positively pushing against it.  Constantly challenging theories and boundaries.

Amy is no exception.  In the early days she was told to chose between figuration and abstraction.  But she didn’t.  She boldly carried on a quest to explore the places in-between the choices.  Wading through the murky waters of disorientation and finding inspiration, and then originality.

Who are these Orwellian 1984 figures who try to convince potential artists to chose a painting lane and stay in it?  A topic for another time……

At first in the interview, Amy revealed things I can relate to, and then things Id never suspected, about my own art and others.  Things that blew my mind a little……That her paintings shift back and forth, it’s complicated (Yes).  You start, you fight with it, you get in trouble (Yes, Yes).  Something needs solving (Yep).  And in the last moment, you have to go over the cliff.  It’s violent.  If you succeed it’s magical, if you fail, there’s grief.  You’re in for a terrible night.  (Oh my giddy Aunts, Yes!).

It’s nice of her to share.  That makes me feel better about spending evenings completely on mute and as white as a sheet as I grieve over the artwork stuffed in a black bin sack on the driveway.

Protocols help.  Like a daily schedule.   Do a few things a certain way to get some traction. Amy’s are…..

Leave some negative space

End the painting on a question

Not too correct

(Sillman 2023)

I feel this.  ‘Negative space’ helps with depth and not overwhelming the piece.  Also the grain of the support is often a great addition/contrast to the medium.

Im learning to recognise the point when the mark Ive made should be the last.  And it does feel like ending on a question.  Because you do have a notion that you could just keep going, but I think that’s inexperience.  By stopping at that point, it feels like there’s a dialogue between the painting and the viewer, the paintings not calcified.  It’s alive and it’s asking questions of you……

And ‘Not too correct’ Well, that’s kind of the same principle.  If you keep going and going, 1) you paint over everything.  Disaster.  2) You’re painting with fear to obtain perfection, probably to palpate those Orwellian folk that told you to stay in your lane.  And 3) A week later, if you’ve been taking photos on your iPhone, you realise that amazing lost and found line that was sitting perfectly between two layers of acrylic has gone, and You’ll.  Never.  Get.  It.  Back! (Sob).

CANT DO DEEP SPACE

So they were the points that consolidated many personal thoughts Ive had about making art recently.  But then a new thing.  Flatness.

Matisse used it.  Medieval painters used it.  Renaissance artists did not. 

It’s building the composition out of successive layers of flatness.  And it’s wonderful.  I do it, and until Amy pointed it out I didn’t know that’s what I do.

COMMUNITY

I like to read about artists who placed themselves within a community of creatives.  Not just other artists, but writers, play writes, musicians, actors.  It seems so noble to immerse oneself in that for the ‘cause’.  And it makes a better film if you get really famous.

Amy’s was 1960’s/70’s New York, which was a heady time for creativity.  Much of the creative outputs of that time were void of logic, and Amy used non conformity as a vehicle for questioning and exploration. It enforced her theories of taking the recognisable and ‘undoing it’.  Studying the acceptable, and ‘undoing it’.  Looking at the elegant and ‘undoing it’.  But she didn’t want to use the questioning nature to make frivolous art.  She could back up her processes and theories with educated statements.  

CHATTING LEADS TO REVOLUTIONS

As I research the backstories of artists, I quite commonly find a period of working with limited materials within their history.  Some is circumstance, periods of time where the artist has no choice but to work with what is available to them, like it or not.  And this challenge seems to draw out unprocessed results, that give fresh direction to their work from there on.

Some artists chose to keep their style moving by continually practicing with limited materials, Picasso comes to mind with his drawings on napkins, and now I know a little more, I see this as a very relevant part of their evolving skill, and less as the passing of time doodling.

Early on Amy had a period of studying Japanese calligraphy, before she became a painter, and later a stay in India where she did not have easy access to artistic materials so she focused on drawing, and the result is surely evident in her brushwork as a painter.

“Art is for perplexing you, so that everything is maybe something else”

(Sillman 2023)

Amy knows a lot about a lot.  She is not all about referencing history and applying past knowledge.  This is inspiring, it encourages you to look at the life around you, and not be paralysed creatively.                                     

Dissect it

Unravel it

Put it back together

AND FINALLY, THE BACK STORY JUICE

I am finding an increasing enthusiasm for backstories.  It’s becoming a common theme that many artists experience a failure of communication in their background, or maybe it is a right of passage we all experience but artists get to channel it more readily?!?

Amy (American) was taken to Germany as a child.  She didn’t speak German, this was frustrating.  Then her parents split up and she was all kinds of uncomfortable.  She initially wanted to be an interpreter, and I can’t help raising an eyebrow to how the psychological history manifests in work choices.  But not just the interpreter part, but the fascination she developed with something being something else.  Living between two poles.  Joining them.  Seeking logic and structure without fossilising them.  

Live fully even when the dots don’t connect

Take the dots

And reconnect them your own way

Make a new picture

Orchestrate your own life

(Sillman 2023)

These are my main takeaways from listening to her speak.  That it is important to not tranquillise yourself with fact and history.  Keep everything moving.  I most like her work after 2016, when her paintings look like moments of time, never to be repeated.  Glorious, suspended, baffling and delighting all at the same time.

“Painting is a physical thinking process”

(Sillman 2023)

Cover Image

Sillman, A. (2020) XL19, XL18, XL12. [Mixed media on canvas, photo edited with Hipstamatic] At: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/arts/design/amy-sillman-art-gladstone-gallery.html (Accessed 03/03/2024).

Bibliography

A Brush With Amy Sillman (2023) [Podcast] The Art Newspaper 23/02/2023. At: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/02/22/a-brush-with-amy-sillman-podcast (Accessed 04/03/22024).