July 21 is mid-summer, already tumbling toward fall, winter, and another year. The goal of the day is immersion in the world of the work, to find the sharp edge between intentionality and experimentation, to know the premise then give the work the lead.

July 21, 1974

Mira Schor, Black Flower, July 21, 1974. Gouache on paper c. 8 x 6 in

July 21-24, 1979

Mira Schor, Figures (#33 front and back), July 21-24, 1979. Pastel, dry pigment, medium on paper bought in a stationery store in Chinatown, New York City, c. 10 x 22 in

July 21, 2003

Mira Schor, “Drawing” (front and back), July 21, 2003. Ink and gesso on tracing paper, 18 x 24 in.

July 21, 2013

The goal is productive anonymity.

Mira Schor, Productive Anonymity, July 21, 2013. Ink, oil on gesso on linen, 18 x 30 in.

It is too hot to write much today, but day by day practice in the studio continued/continues.

July 17, 1976

Mira Schor, Fan, Dream (front), July 17, 1976. Ink, dry pigment, Japan Gold Size on rice paper, c. 8 1/2 x 11 in.

Mira Schor, Fan, Dream (back), July 17, 1976. Fragments that are legible to me: “July 17, 1976. I feel better. A Dream: A man…..he felt it….the human race. Explosion of lightning–the only one–woke me up. A hard rain followed. It was terrifying and easily the most exciting event of the summer.”

One’s dreams are not that interesting but that single bolt of lightning out of nowhere which was experienced as explosive sound not light followed by intensely heavy straight down rain really happened early one morning, maybe that morning in 1976, striking the top peak of the roof of the building in Provincetown on the beach very nearby, of the restaurant then called Pucci’s. It remains a vivid memory.

Summer 2002

The summer of 2002 I painted language, words that represented what I did: painting, drawing, writing. I don’t know the exact day these works were done so I’m cheating, again, but let’s say it was sometime in July and I feel I need to include these today.

Mira Schor, Painting, 2002. Ink and Rabbit skin glued over gesso on linen, 24 x 28 in.

Mira Schor, Drawing, 2002. Ink, Rabbit skin glue on gesso on linen, 24 x 28 in.

Mira Schor, Writing, 2002. Oil on linen, 24 x 28 in.

July 17, 2009

Mira Schor, sketchbook, July 17, 2009.

July 17, 2013

Today I lie down to take a mid-afternoon nap in the downstairs bedroom that was my mother’s, where it is slightly cooler. Even here away from the city the heat is something that must be dealt with every minute and the past few days I’ve been getting up much earlier than usual to take advantage of the early cool and calm. This would be enough to make a nap a reasonable activity. But beneath seaside bliss is the stress of having to produce work not only because you want to and this is finally the longed for time to do it but for a show. It is a strange thing to work for a show. Many artists do it, in fact you can only hope that’s part of why you are doing it, but the result of that external pressure may also be part of why so many shows are filled with what my mother contemptuously referred to as “merchandise.” The more I have to simply turn out an adequate number of Mira Schors, whatever that means, the less I feel involved in the sense of an internal search that can sometimes be excruciating but has its own time and its own rewards.

The idea of just painting a “Mira Schor” is an inside joke for me. Each summer battling the sense that I am not working, that I can’t find my work, I try various tricks. I call them tricks, they could be described as mantras or passwords: this all started with a summer in my mid-20s, the decade when I was year by year setting in place elements of all the work I have done since—language as image, figuration and autobiography, narrative and narrativity, nature as an unlikely source for images of text and body, the critique of painting as a source for painting. That summer, after days of despair (that is, the period between June 20 and July 4), I said to myself, Oh just paint a Mira Schor. Now, understand, this was totally absurd, more so then when I was setting in place the elements of my work even than now when maybe I can claim that there is something called a Mira Schor. A Mira Schor, what the hell was that? But, amazingly, it worked, I started to work.

It was just an abstract permission, a release, it just meant, just do something, do something you did before, do anything. The distinction between two paintings may be negligible to anyone else, but I need to feel an engagement that refreshes the familiar. The room is the same, the door is the same, the lock is the same but a new key is required.

I lie down, I close my eyes, and my nap turns out to truly be a power nap because within a minute of lying down, perhaps from the implicit permission to self to not have to do anything for a minute, I suddenly have a vivid vision of something I might do in trying to situate a figure in relation to ground. I get up, grab a notebook and scribble a rough sketch.

After lying down again, the idea begins to seem more difficult to work out. I look at a work I did on July 10, 1983, hung on the robin’s egg blue wall. Something is there about how to depict ground with very little figure.

Mira Schor, First Swim (to the breakwater), July 10, 1983. Pastel, dry pigment, medium on rice paper, 24 x 25 in.

This work was included in a small show of Provincetown drawings from 1982-82 at artSTRAND Gallery in Provincetown in 2007. I wrote some notes on each one when I saw them on the wall.

First Swim (to the breakwater) gives me great pleasure to look at. There is a lightness to this piece that I am particularly struck by. In general, these drawings don’t seem dated to me although I did them 24 years ago, but the sheer frothy radiant joy of this work marks it as belonging to a different time in my life: I knew less and thought I was more depressed and uncertain, but I was young and engaged with nature and with my art in a particularly unguarded way that I am not sure I could replicate now. A spidery white figure reaches for the rock of the breakwater. The rock is the only heavily pigmented element in the work, a burnt sienna dry pigment monument in a shimmering field of reflections of light green, grey, white, sienna waves and lines that go in all directions. There is a grey patch on the horizon, it is the water but it looks like land because like all the horizon lines in these pieces, it is curved like a grey gentle mound. There is a little bit of blue in the sky. If you didn’t know this represented a swimmer in water, it might seem particularly mysterious: a figure reaches for a phallic stele, a rock, an obelisk in a field of unstable matter. Because some of the reflections are lines of algae, they are green so it could be a field of grass. A friend asked if this work had religious content: perhaps yes, swimming in the bay is one of my religions and the swim to the rock is a daily quest, but it is towards a goal that is, for once, attainable.

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.

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.