In my studio I’ve been working from this image for the last 5 months:

Since November of last year I have made 3 etchings, 6 watercolors, a small model of the patio area, and a triptych in oil on canvas from this image.

I found this photograph in an antique store in Bellingham, WA last July. I don’t know when the image was taken, who the children are, where the house is located, or who it previously belonged to. I bought it because of the quality of the light (heavy contrast, slight dispersal) and the way in which the photograph was composed (large space in the front, small groupings of shapes and value on the top).

As a painter, I primarily use photographs as my source. I have always been conflicted by this choice and have wondered if it is more honest to work directly from life or if I can achieve this ‘honesty’ (i.e. convey my real experiences, thoughts, humanity) when I use photography as a tool.

In 2001 David Hockney put together a book entitled ‘Secret Knowledge’ that speaks about the history of the use of photography as a tool in art. He reveals visual evidence that optical tools were utilized by master painters, such as Vermeer, Tintoretto, Gericault, and Jan Van Eyck, to achieve naturalistic spaces, figures and light. In this book he points out “that the use of optics does not diminish the immensity of artistic achievement. A tool is just a tool, and it is still the artist’s hand and creative vision that produce a work of art.”

In my own work, I don’t think it is important to make a decision to follow one path (working from life) or another (using photographs as a tool). What I do think is important is to have an understanding of why you are using a source, or tool, or medium.

As I’ve mentioned before my work focuses largely on memory. Photographs, since the advent of photography, or, more precisely, the Kodak Point and Shoot Camera, have become deeply ingrained in the history of my generation as an American. The common place snapshot has become a type of reliquary. These common place images preserve and trigger our memory.

For example, an image of a high school friend begins the recollection of the road trip the two of you took when you moved to a new city. Or a picture of you holding a freshly caught fish with your father could remind you of that one summer when the mosquitoes were so bad that every time you went out onto the lake you could barely breathe.

In the case of the found photograph I have been working with, there are no memories to trigger. Rather an imagined narrative comes into forefront, speculation and curiosity arise, and a collective understanding of all of our slices in time begins. Because of this inherent content and historic weight, these photographs lay a meaningful foundation for me to explore ideas of contemporary reliquary, and the fleeting nature of our memories.

Of course, using photographs as a foundation is not a rule. In the book ‘Proust Was a Neuroscientist‘, author Jonah Lehrer has a lovely chapter dedicated to Cezanne who, along with the Impressionists, was making work during the dawn of photography. In his book, Leher discusses how Cezanne’s paintings reminded a photo-smitten world that our brain does not see the way a photograph looks. Our eyes do not freeze and slice images out from time. It goes without saying, but if Cezanne had utilized photography as a tool to paint his still lifes, even if his work was aesthetically similar, his objective would never have been reached.

If I choose to abandon my interest in memory in my work to explore a different path, it would be my responsibility as an artist to re-examine the means with which I make my work, and ask myself if my process (source, tool, medium) is the best way with which to explore these new ideas.

I am in an art group where we have weekly assignments to spark creativity. Three weeks ago our task was to steal something from someone close to us and create a project. When I failed to complete this task in a timely manner and found myself with a new assignment (body part: tongue) I decided to combine the two into a larger project. The result was a lesson in artistic therapy where I sorted out some personal drama.

I had my first date with C on a Sunday; by Wednesday he had professed his love for me and had given me a key to his house. In conventional dating this would be seen as a red flag, but because I had been loosely acquainted with C for several months, I was able to convince myself that his rash actions weren’t cause for immediate departure. The week continued in this intense manner until that Friday when C boarded a plane and left for ten days in New York.

Now, this is where the trouble began. In digesting each element of this warp-speed relationship, my range of emotions swung from relief at his departure to anger at my sudden loss of freedom to frustration over the fact that C wouldn’t follow the basic rules of dating. Though I liked C, his approach was nearly too much for me to handle.

On the eve of C’s return I created a visual metaphor to better explain my experience of being his love interest.

Eat Your Heart Out is a 3-pound chocolate valentine swathed in mauve and baby-blue velvet housed in a heart-shaped box. I melted chocolate in a double boiler and poured in into the box. Before the surface hardened, I sunk C’s house key into middle of the chocolate. The key didn’t entirely submerge, leaving a heart-shaped divot on the surface, an indicator of it’s presence below. The divot was then filled with brown wax because as buried things go, in order to find them later we need a marking to tell us where to look. The box emulates the gift lovers give each while courting, the twist being the slip of paper also on the chocolate’s surface with the single line reading, “eat your heart out” hinting at my denial of C’s extreme longing for a return of my affection.

The idea is that in order to reach the key quickly, I would have to either I would to gauge the chocolate, destroying the surface, and render the heart broken or I would have to devour the three pounds of chocolate, leaving me physically ill and perhaps off sweets for some time.

A potential solution is to work the chocolate in a gradual manner, each day licking and nibbling in order to arrive at the buried treasure. That is… if I should even desire the treasure at all at that point.

Eat Your Heart Out is a work in progress, a topographical map of this new love interest.

Time will tell whether I:
Lick the chocolate
Hack away at it
Nibble it
Re-melt and re-mold it
Burn and boil it
Scratch at it’s surface
Devour it
Bury it under the floorboards
Or…disregard it completely

It’s a tell-tale heart, really.

In the book, “Mysteries of the Rectangle” by Siri Hustvedt she describes the experience of looking at the Vermeer painting Woman with a Pearl Necklace: “The more I looked at it, the more it overwhelmed me with a feeling of fullness and mystery. I knew what I was looking at, and yet I didn’t know.” I believe what she was enchanted by in this work, and what we all see in a piece of art that captures us, is the quality of search. Or, to rephrase, when looking at a piece of work we can see that the artist has wrestled, grappled, twisted, blotted out, sanded, sawed, scraped, and blasted a piece of work, either in the work itself or in preliminary studies, in order to achieve their objective. This is a visual display of the mind at work. When we see evidence of it in a piece of art, it draws us in and holds us in its gaze.

I recently read the article A Critic At Large, where Morgan Mies speaks about how looking at and/or critiquing art has changed. Previously a critic, patron or voyeur could come to a piece of work equipped with the information they needed in order to fully understand it. This information could be the story of the Annunciation, or how an Emperor or King of a certain era/country wished to be perceived by their public, or how the colors red, blue and yellow harmonize in a rectangle on a two dimensional surface. This article argues that today’s artists are no longer making work from a collective narrative or objective, rather “The artists are often working in their own heads and they don’t feel much compulsion to translate.”

Because of this, it would seem that contemporary work relies heavily on the need for the audience to come to a piece of work with patience and an open mind. It would also seem to be imperative that all contemporary work embody the quality of search in order to elicit some staying power with an impatient public.

Krishnamurti has a lovely quote on the act of observation: “Clarity can exist only when there is freedom to observe, when one is capable of looking, observing watching. That is only possible when there is complete, total freedom, otherwise there is always distortion in our observation.”

It is interesting to think that if one somehow becomes free from the mental constraints of our day to day life, we might have the patience to see art, but would we still have the ability to make it?