Category Archives: painting

Day by Day in the Studio 4: July 16

July 16, 1974

After I had lived at my loft on Lispenard Street for about 15 years I finally unpacked the last two boxes I had brought with me when I moved back to New York from Halifax, Nova Scotia where I had been teaching at NSCAD. I needed the room in my closet and I couldn’t remember what was in the boxes. Whatever it was, clearly I hadn’t missed it. Inside one box was a wrapped package and inside that package was an album of page size (about 12 x 9 inches) gouache paintings on paper, combining images of birds and flowers taken from bird books and flower catalogues annotated with poetic language, by which I think I mean, a few words, personal but not specific enough to be political. The ubiquity of this type of imagery as a trope is one that I have written about in my essay “Trite Tropes, Clichés, and the Persistence of Styles,” where I admit my own early contributions to the genre. This was the work to which I devoted my first winter out of graduate school and I had completely forgotten its existence. Lesson #1: we are increasingly so concerned with producing a recognizable, stable, packaged product by the last semester of graduate school that the model of search as part of artistic development seems ridiculous, impractical, dangerous even. But people are still people and what an artist deeply cares about and may devote a year of life to may end up being not that important, may end up not amounting to much, although what can seem a failure at one moment at a different time can appear important.

At the end of my first year out of graduate school my favorite teacher, Stephan Von Huene, had come to New York and visited my studio. He had been extremely supportive of my work in graduate school while encouraging experimentation and the embrace of accident. Now he was clearly upset with the direction I had taken, he felt I had gone off track. Thinking back on it today I think he felt I had lost some of the charm of a personal and feminist narrative and gotten mired down in a gloomy subject statically presented. The strange thing is that I almost immediately forgot what exactly he had said to me, partly because as he spoke I was already converting his comments into a plan to change my work based on my interpretation of what he had said, and, Lesson #2, that pretty much describes the imperfect art of teaching, where as long as some transaction occurs that moves the game forward it doesn’t really matter if you understand each other exactly.

In the weeks after his visit I decided to bring into my work the image of the empty dress. My reasoning as far as I can recall was very simple: I had always been interested in clothing, I had a few beautiful books on the history of costume, which due to the fortuitous importance of painting and drawing as the only means of recording visual appearances for centuries meant that I was looking at dresses and costume in great paintings from art history which was one among many factors and influences that kept me looking at painting when I was in my early teens even when I thought I was doing something else. I learned through imitation of New York Times fashion illustrations how to draw quick fashion sketches in pen and ink which kept me drawing, and I had come out the other end of my teens doing gently satirical, autobiographical small gouaches in which female figures were often elegantly dressed in a 1920s style of clothing in a Rajput and Sassetta influenced, Hairy Who inspired style and scale with a feminist impulse which became more focused at CalArts. So I returned to the image of the dress, now empty of the extra narrative element of the figure, and quickly decided to tear away the ground–I’m pretty sure that had something to do with something Stephan said, maybe that I wasn’t doing much with the ground so I got rid of some of it.

The dress is long since a trope of feminist-inspired art but at the time it was not that prevalent, and there was not so much of a leader/follower situation as that it was a moment when a range of subjects and materials from women’s daily lives and personal experience were newly available to women artists of a range of age and experience. That summer I worked on small paintings of empty dresses as representative of the curious phenomenon of femininity as a role that women put on and take off. Although elements of the earlier work have remained and recur in my work–landscape, figure, the book of pages, the use of language–at the time these empty dresses felt like the first work I did out of graduate school that I could call my own.

*I’m going to cheat a little here: this work led to Dress Books in 1977 where person-sized rice paper dress shapes had pages covered with language, so that a viewer could stand, gonad to gonad as it were, and try to read the figure of the woman:

Mira Schor, Dress Book (back), 1977. Ink, dry pigment, Japan Gold Size on rice paper, c. 63 x 24 in.

And the dresses from the summer of 1974 led also to works from the summer 1978, more abstracted, and also more decorative and flirtatious dresses:

July 16, 1984

Mira Schor, The Odd Pod, 1984. Gouache, dry pigment and medium on rice paper, 72 x 36 in.

In 1984 I worked on gouaches on very large sheets of rice paper: some were part of a series of calendar pieces for the momentous year 1984–here was the one made during July here in Provincetown,

Mira Schor, 1984 Calendar, July, 1984. Dry pigment, gouache, and medium on rice paper, 72 x 36 in.

Many of the figures were taken from forms that I was interested in, found in nature, forms which in themselves had a figurative, anthropomorphic element, primarily skate egg cases and milkweed pods. Odd Pod was a type of seaweed I found on the beach.

I had pushed the media I was working on, rice paper, dry pigment, gouache to the limits of their capabilities in terms of size. At this point I began to work in oil on canvas and linen. It was at this time also that I began to write about art and Susan Bee and I founded M/E/A/N/I/N/G, and in order to write about contemporary art, I also began an immersion in contemporary art and feminist theory and some of the critical disciplines which were of great importance to art discourse. I looked back on the works from the 70s and early ’80s, particularly these landscape-based works but also even the feminist works such as the Dress Books–though I stubbornly continue to feel these are epitomic seventies feminist artworks despite the fact that they have not as yet entered that closed history–as part of a dream world, one that the intellectual and aesthetic politics of the 1980s intentionally undermined, and, though I gained a great deal from the specific kind of coming to consciousness in my encounter with such texts during the contentious and bracing period of the ’80s, I also felt the loss of that dream world.

Reminder: I will return to posting on art, culture, and politics soon enough but I hope my subscribers and readers will allow me a slight summer detour, a project of posting works done on specific summer days from different years, begun July 13. Because the desire to do this arose on the spur of the moment, after I had left New York and most of the records of my work, I’m going by works that I have on my hard drive where the work’s date is specifically included in the file name, making this a fragmentary impression of the work, which for anyone interested in seeing more, is sketched out very schematically but with a more comprehensive and traditional chronology on my website and I may cheat later this winter and add more relevant works which have specific dates.

Day by Day in the Studio 3: July 15

A summer detour, a project of posting works done on specific summer days from different years, begun July 13.

There was a particular happiness, or at least so it seems only in retrospect, to the summer of 2008. It was my second summer after my mother died so my grief and loneliness were not quite as intense as the year before. I had spent almost all my summers since the age of twenty in Provincetown with my mother in the house she bought in late 1969, with my sister Naomi staying for shorter periods, writing upstairs at the table I am writing on now and also using the house to work when we weren’t here. My mother Resia worked at a little jeweler’s table downstairs, in the room with the boiler in it, I worked upstairs in a room partially under the eaves, with seashell wallpaper from the ’50s (installed by the previous owner–as modernist New Yorkers we wouldn’t have been caught dead putting up patterned wall paper but I’m crazy about this pattern and how it interacts with the paintings). We had lunch and dinner together, over the years the task of cooking passing from mother to daughter. A strange arrangement perhaps, by common standards of what a woman’s life is supposed to be–sometimes with some trepidation an image would pass through my mind, of the town librarian during my childhood who had a grown daughter who was always with her, who was not quite right–but the arrangement suited me because it suited my work and I always felt a strong sense of pride at this image of two generations of women engaged in creative work in one dear old house. An adjustment had to be made to the aloneness in that space and painting helped.

The summer of 2008 I continued work where the “object matter” was the empty thought balloon, sometimes a head, sometimes a cloud, but a particularly liberating space to just “paint paint.” This was my studio wall photographed the morning of July 15, 2008.

July 15, 2012

In keeping perhaps with the theme of mother and daughter, and what traditional female roles are as they affect the identity of an artist, this drawing from last summer was spurred by a funny thought that brought the image to my head, of the signifiers of female youth–perky breasts and bleeding cunt– as attachments that could be detached or aimed as weapons: it was part of some scenario I thought would be funny, but once I visualized it the thought vanished. However it is part of a fascination I’ve had since my early twenties with the notion of femininity, which I understood as a role or costume that a woman could put on or take off.

Mira Schor, Tit Doxa, July 15, 2012. Ink on tracing paper, c. 18 x 30 in.

Day by Day in the Studio 2: July 14

Continuing with Day by Day in the Studio, a project of posting works done on the same summer day different years:

July 14, 1976

My principal material in the mid-70s was handmade Japanese rice paper, much of it purchased from a special trove at an art supply store in the Village named for its irascible and eccentric owner David Davis, who, the first time I went into the store, when I was going to college at NYU a block or two up from the store, then on LaGuardia Place, threw me out because I was just looking at sketchbooks and not buying anything. The paper was often extremely delicate and also surprisingly strong, and for both characteristics at the time it seemed like a perfect metaphor for self. I rarely left the paper in its natural state, using medium, mostly Japan Gold Size, to make the paper translucent so that my handwriting could be seen through the back of the paper. It also gave much of the work a parchment-like, ochre tinge that people interpreted often critically as looking deliberately aged, which wasn’t my intention although I may have been partial to the color or, rather, the discoloration. But occasionally I left the paper alone, without using any medium or pigment as in this fan from July 14, 1976, seen from “front” and “back”

Mira Schor, Fan, July 14, 1976. Ink on rice paper, c. 10 3/4 x 7 in.

July 14, 1983

I continued to work with and on rice paper into the early 80s, looking to landscape for forms that were related to the way I had depicted or referred to the figure, and also related to the graphic elements of my handwriting as form. After first doing these nature-based figures freehand I turned to making stencils. This work was part of a series of vertically oriented works which represented the life under the surface of the sea, in a format similar to the kind of posters of the fish in the sea you’d see hung behind the counter in fish markets on Cape Cod. The overall title of the group of six works was Creatures of the Northern Ocean.

MIra-Schor-Creature-of-Northern-Ocean-I-1983-copy

Mira Schor, Creatures of the Northern Ocean I, July 14, 1983. Dry pigment, pastel, medium on rice paper, worked on back as well as front, 36 x 22 in.

July 14, 2012

I started using rolls of tinted tracing paper sometime in the late 90s. The many drawings I do on this very contingent material (much more perishable than rice paper though so far so good with careful handling) are also worked from back and front as I did in the earlier works on rice paper. The paper offers a useful space for thinking out loud for paintings, responding quickly to ideas from readings, and diagramming my emotional or polemic position at any given moment.

Mira Schor, Antithesis, July 14, 2012. Ink on tracing paper with gesso on reverse side, c. 18 x 30 in.

Day by day in the studio 1: July 13

I will return to posting on art, culture, and politics soon enough but I hope my subscribers and readers allow me a slight summer detour, as I trace my work from different years through specific days in July and August.

Learning how one works and how one works around work blocks is an essential skill for an artist. Every artist has her own habits and devises her own solutions.

Since I began to work as an artist, that is, thinking of it as my work in the most profound sense, as what made life bearable and meaningful, various patterns and approaches have asserted themselves, but their familiarity in no way makes them rote or comfortably reliable.

I understand more and more how incredibly privileged I’ve been to even be able to make art at all, as economic conditions make the kind of time and intellectual independence necessary to make art more and more difficult to come by. I’m doubly fortunate that, since the age of twenty, I’ve had the incredible luck of being able to spend two months a year in a beautiful place away from the city with relatively unobstructed time to confront my work and to work. A strangely agrarian rhythm established the summer as a particularly intense laboratory in studio struggle, beginning as if from zero.

So almost before I had made the “official” decision to be an artist by pursuing graduate studies in visual art, the beginning of the summer marked a moment of renewal and reassessment that has always been paired with a momentary but seemingly eternal sense of impasse. Even a short gap of time between studios and periods of concentrated work will have created enough of a critical break to put the whole enterprise in crisis. It is likely by now that this is a necessary element of my work process that I should recognize as such but it always feels awful. The road back to my work, that is to say to the part of myself I value most and need so that the rest of me won’t crack under the pressure of the daily, at first appears blocked. As my friends can attest through forty years of listening to me wail over the phone about how I’m not working, the work isn’t going well, that I know I always say that but this time it’s really bad, no amount of experience and of tricks I’ve successfully played on myself in the past mitigates the sense of despair that overwhelms me, even as, as it turns out a few weeks later, I was and am in fact “working.” I’m despondent until a moment when I feel a sense of access to the work, where I both feel that I am working and that I can see the work I am doing without its already being historicized within my own process.

Each calendar day carries enormous weight, has a specific identity. Studio set up by June 24, canvases stretched and rabbit skin glued by July 1 or earlier if possible, drawings begun end June, day and late night spent sketching anything that comes to my mind, summer readings begun with sketchbook at hand, sketches immediately scanned for use in developing paintings, first efforts to put paint to linen by July 4, assessment of drawings mid-July, July 11 often “the day” when the sense of working clicks in, slow down beginning August as social life interrupts pure isolation, return for another round of taking the summer’s visual metaphor as far as I can, before I am forced to stop so the paintings can dry to be taken back to New York and teaching and city life and winter rhythms.

Especially in my earliest years as an artist I felt the importance of leaving a daily trace of my existence, and I have dated many of my works over the years to the day. In recent years I document the studio every day to keep a record of the stages of paintings and, always driven by a diaristic narrative of the work itself, to keep track of the order of things as they develop in the studio, and sometime to realize that I painted over something I should have let be. This summer I’ve decided to begin to research what work I did on each particular and precious day of summer, over the years. I will post as I can through the summer, limited only (and it’s a big only) by the fact that I can only go by what I have on my hard drive, with most of the documentation of my work in New York, so this is a project I may return to. This particular way of presenting the work, focusing on the production from July and August, gives a very incomplete idea of the progression of the work, which is sketched out very schematically but with a more comprehensive and traditional chronology on my website. And, in general, I am aware of that my work appears to have undergone many changes in appearance over the years, but I see the work as an ongoing narrative where the apparent differences in what is represented and addressed and how this address is materialized visually are in conversation, with large periods of time where figure, language, and landscape may dominate, but, I hope to establish, a hand and a politics remains constant.

I begin with this day, July 13.

July 13, 1976

Mira Schor, Fan: Dreams (front and back), ink, dry pigment, metallic powder, Japan Gold Size on rice paper, c. 8 1/2 x 11 in.

In the summer of 1976 I was working with a V shape which had emerged from a formal analysis of earlier work whose subject or, using Barnett Newman’s distinction, taken from Meyer Schapiro, between the object matter of the work–be it an apple or a figure–and the subject matter, the formal and material language of art itself, whose object matter was the female figure and then the figure of an empty dress. I also was beginning to use my handwriting as a visual element, used in order to represent the idea that women were filled with language and because my handwriting could “read” all too easily as abstract form. The writing was personal, often I recorded dreams and added commentary, or worked in a linguistic and diagrammatic manner, from an image I had read about that was resonant, as in this rice paper fan from July 13, 1976.

July 13, 1977

The summer of ’77 I made a series of masks, always two sided, using the same materials and visual elements as in ’76.

Here they are again, this time front and back in one image:

July 13, 2009

I had set aside the masks for many years, but began to look at them again as from 2007 onwards I began to work with the shape of an empty thought balloon that gradually turned into a head wearing glasses.

Mira Schor, Three States, July 13, 2009. Ink on paper, Muji Time notebook, c. 5 ¾ x8 ½ in. 2009

I began to think about doing this day by day in the studio exercise yesterday and went through the image archive I have with me to look for works that I had scanned or photographed and that were specifically dated. This morning I hesitated: the impulse to do this might be a concession to this year’s work block, but I decided to take it as a spur for today’s work.

July 13, 2013

It’s a bit of a crazy risk to post works that are not finished, but as part of this exploration of daily practice here are two of the work process images I take every day, here is what is on the floor and on the work table today, as I try to remind myself that what I’m trying to get to is what is true to the process of the work and where I am in my life and in the world, right this minute.

What does a man see when he looks at his own image?

Towards the end of the opening of Susanna Heller’s exhibition at MagnanMetz Gallery of recent paintings, “Phantom Pain,” as the gallery emptied, I happened to witness a profound moment: Heller’s husband, sociologist Bill DiFazio, wheelchair-bound since loosing his left leg three years ago to a terrible illness, rolled his chair up first to gaze deeply and long at a painting by Heller of him sitting in his chair, Lost in Thought. Then he moved purposefully to contemplate the second painting of him in his wheelchair, Phantom Pain. I wondered, what was he thinking when he looked at these portraits, which so exactly mirrored his present self.

Susanna Heller, Lost in Thought, 2013. Oil on canvas, 50″x33″

Heller is best known as a painter of New York cityscapes, the site of her epic walks through the city, through the complex linearity and rough materiality of her Brooklyn neighborhood, of subway tracks and bridges, of the patterns of the city streets and island outline seen from the bird’s eye view of her studio in the World Trade Center Tower One in the ‘90s and the patterns of disintegrated metal in the paintings from after 9/11. In the current exhibition this aspect of her work is represented in the first, main room of the gallery by several paintings, including Rolling Thunder (Night for Day), a tour de force nineteen foot wide painting in which she represents the thin, vulnerable, nervous skyline of post-Hurricane Sandy New York City, dwarfed and threatened by the vast and turbulent sky and sea swirling around it.

Susanna Heller, Rolling Thunder (Night for Day), 2013. Oil on canvas. 69″ x 238″

Artist and writer Bradley Rubenstein has an interesting appreciation of this painting in his review of the show, “Spirits in the Material World,” looking at Heller’s views of the city through the “post-apocalyptic” lens of Cormac McCarthy‘s “ruined landscape in The Road,” and Heller speaks of her approach to landscape in a February 2013 video interview on Gorki’s Granddaughter filmed in her studio shortly before the exhibition opened . Her discourse on painting is refreshingly unstrategic and utterly haptic, as she speaks about trying to convey as directly as possible the most intimate and almost primitive aspects of perception, of points of view in relation to up and down, gravity, and scale.

Heller turned her unflinchingly curious gaze to the calamitous injuries her husband suffered when he lost his left leg to necrotizing fasciitis, a horror movie illness that most victims do not survive. The doctors who saved his life, caring for him through over twenty operations in three months, probably never had encountered a patient’s family member so driven to confronting painful realities and so able to turn them into art. She sat in the hospital making hundreds of drawings, of her husband lost in a forest of medical machinery, and of the vistas of the East River soaring outside the hospital window. She drew to save her sanity as she tried to help save his life. Some of these harrowing drawings are installed in a corner of the same room as the paintings of Bill in his wheelchair. Unable to paint during many months of caretaking, in her mind she imagined, catalogued, memorized the paint marks that might articulate what she was seeing. When she was finally able to return to the studio she began to work from these drawings and these mental maps.

In my snapshot, Bill’s back was to Waiting for Dawn. The painting is as raw as his body in those early months, the figure lost, disintegrating, supported by another kind of tower,of all the equipment of the most modern interventional medicine. The painting is vertical, a bed, a kind of falling tower, a coffin with its withered occupant a disintegrating effigy. The paint is rough, encrusted, melting. The man looking at his image in a wheelchair is the man who survived that painting, who left that state of in between life and death to return to an altered life, though the trauma can never be made whole.

Detail, Waiting for Dawn

A glorious abstract blob at the top of Waiting for Dawn, maybe the TV monitor for all the medical equipment but maybe also a cloud drifting in from the river is characteristic of the fine line Heller walks between representation and abstraction in her paintings. In her cityscapes, she characteristically fights to achieve a true representation in paint of her experience of urban space: despite her familiarity with the subject, the paintings are worked, sometimes even overworked, paint is scrapped, reworked, erased, painting scraps are glued on.

Heller talked about painting the figure as something for which she had no skills, as foreign as nuclear physics, thus it is interesting that these paintings of immensely difficult painful subject matter are painted with a vigorous simplicity that allows the viewer and the subject to simply be, “lost in thought,” in the turbulent space she is always looking to embody, with all the horror and melancholy of a life transformed by sudden, dramatic, near fatal illness. The human figure and the very particular figure of her husband created a challenge to one of the core aspects of her approach in the studio—that of doubt that haunts every brush stroke, and something new to her work happens in these portraits that is different than the encounter with landscape: in the first portrait of Bill, in the hospital, the overworking or overthinking becomes a powerful expression of the drama of the human body pushed to the limit of survival, where “overworking” is an embodiment of flesh itself in flux. And in the more recent paintings of Bill in his wheelchair every mark seems to have arrived there with a minimum of second guessing and Heller’s line becomes more fluid, her use of outline reminiscent of Alice Neel’s later portraits–each artist is pitiless yet empathetic, though Heller doesn’t veer towards caricature. Abrupt application of painterly paint, impasto outbursts seem open and spontaneous, arriving as thoughts, not as statements or struggles.

In meeting her match in this specific human figure, the haptic approach flows unimpeded.

Susanna Heller, Phantom Pain, 2013. Oil on canvas. 50″ x 33″

These are not easy paintings in their somber subject matter, the phantom pain of mourning and loss but anyone interested in painting, and particularly in seeing a kind of approach to painting that is unsynthetic should go see them.

John Berger writes, in his essay, “Painting and Time,” “Paintings are now prophecies received from the past, prophecies about what the spectator is seeing in front of the canvas at that moment.” He continues, “a visual image, so long as it is not being used as a mask or disguise, is always a comment on an absence. Visual images, based on appearances, always speak of disappearance.” And what was the man seeing when he looked at his portraits that recorded the presence of absence, “phantom pain”? He says he saw in them that his wife loved him and understood him deeply. That is what he says. But the photos suggest something else as well, the ineffable gap between the person and the image: even one’s reflection in the mirror is fundamentally a stranger, a very familiar one perhaps, yet at some level Other.

On the other hand brush marks are indexical traces of the painter in the act of painting, making these paintings, at another level, self-portraits of the artist.

Susanna Heller, studio visit, November 18, 2011, photo: Mira Schor

Phantom Pain runs through April 20

Susanna Heller is represented in Canada by Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto