"Painting Continued" [by Anna Cypra Oliver]

(Ed note: This is the fourth in a series by Anna Cypra Oliver. Find yesterday's post here. sdh)

PAINTING CONTINUED

I keep at it, after the first course ends, and a second, as Stephan drifts back to pens and watercolor. For years, a few hours a day, I keep on. I slow down, become more meticulous, more willing to set up properly and to take the time needed to prep a canvas. I set up a studio with a proper exhaust fan and dress carefully each time before starting.
I get better, acquiring the competence that comes with simple slogging on. At first, I obsessively paint flowers in 12x12 squares. Then the canvases start to get bigger: 30x30, 36x48, and the subjects more complex: a ketchup bottle on a NYC diner table, interiors bisected by light and shadow. I love it, in a way that I once loved words, which I have essentially stopped trying to set down.

I don’t have a philosophy of painting, no grand vision of art in the twenty-first century. As a painter I’m exactly what I was as a writer: a documentarian, a literalist. In writing the actual attracts me—overheard dialogue, found details, people’s life stories—though not in any kind of whole cloth way; my interest is in framing and selecting, seeing the resonances between one element and another. My approach to art is even simpler: something attracts my notice, and I paint it. I’m drawn to bright colors, the curvy organic shapes of things like chairs and bowls and flowers, the splash of light on a wall. Nothing that would win space in a gallery in Chelsea. I paint what I see, or try to, though I have gotten better at leaving things out; I also try hard to see light and shadow, something most neophyte painters fail to capture.  Like most people of my class and background I’ve been trained to feel a little disdain for any representational art, no matter how masterful, but I can’t for the life of me seem to abstract anything on canvas myself, something about which I always feel defensive. My inspirations are Vuillard, Bonnard, Fairfield Porter and Jane Freilicher, but I can rarely achieve even their softness of focus. I draw lines
as straight as I can. I’m fixated on accuracy. Maybe that’s just the learning curve. A handful of classes and sketching with Stephan constitutes the whole of my art education. Because I have little formal training I’m still just trying to get my hand to obey my eye. People with backgrounds in art are always telling me that perspective is not important, that formal training can be deadening, but I want to gain enough command to be able to break a line by intention rather than pure amateurishness. A deep knowledge of grammar seems to me a prerequisite for being a writer—when I fracture a sentence, I usually know I’m doing it. Why should painting be any different? Picasso could render a plaster bust so precisely that it seemed three dimensional. De Kooning once said of his wildly fragmented women, “A classical educationfreed me to do this.”

My mind when I paint seems strangely blank, attentive to color and light and shape, but otherwise—empty. It’s an emptiness akin to meditation. I’m a restive person, always needing a project or in a stew about something I’ve heard on the news, unable to sit still for five minutes at a time or nap because the moment I lie down I start to fret about the ten other things I need to be doing. But painting gives me sanctuary from my own restlessness. Often, it takes time to get to that place, to let my usual agitation and anxiety drift to the bottom of consciousness, allowing the sensual squish of paint to take over. Once achieved, two to three hours can pass without a worry except whether I’ve mixed a color correctly.

Maybe “empty” is not quite apt. Shape fills my mind. What is the shape of that shadow? I hear my instructor Sonya saying. Don’t paint an elbow: paint the shape of an elbow. Carve the spaces between things. And songs often pipe themselves through my head, which is strange because I have only the most modest interest in music and rarely play any. “How does it feel,” Bob Dylan suddenly demands to know, “to be on your own?” Or Burl Ives croons, “Fare thee well, O honey…” and then, out of nowhere: “She’ll have fun fun fun till her daddy takes the T-Bird away…”

  Color, too, occupies my thoughts. Ochre mixed with cadmium orange mixed with Naples yellow light creates a lovely Caucasian flesh tone. Add a bit of umber to darken it down or a dash of burnt sienna to warm it. That blue—almost cornflower! How in the world do I mix that precise shade of blue?

I used to have words in my head this way, a running loop of sentences that I would memorize if I couldn’t immediately write them down, but for the moment the images crowd out other forms of mental dialogue. Even when I sit down with a book, the letters on the page develop shadows and halos, as if they are objects to be painted, rather than words to be read. The demands of image, for the moment, seem to be exerting greater force on me than the demands of text.

CRITICISM

The question of being good inevitably enters: am I any good? As I paint, I find myself wondering if I have talent, if I could “be a painter.” A great painter? To that I already know the answer: no. I don’t have the drive, the imagination or the kind of passion required. Were it my calling and I brilliant at it, I would have been hard at work long ago. But how about a good one? At the moment, my main goal is still to capture the world realistically, to learn, essentially, to see. It’s all about craft and the building blocks—a grammar that needs to be mastered before any rules are broken—not any decision I’ve made about whether I want to paint figuratively or otherwise. But still, to immerse myself in the medium, to keep going at the pace I’ve recently set, it seems necessary to have the potential to be more than a Sunday painter. The challenge of that possibility motivates me, though, at the same time, I wonder at the recurrence of the question in my mind.  

At a dinner party not long ago, I proceeded to tell the painter seated next to me how much pleasure I got out of oil painting. She too had enjoyed it once, she loftily replied, but that was before she started waking up every morning with the weight of all of art history on her shoulders. I sat back in my chair. The weight of all of art history? This woman may have been a world-class artist for all I knew, but my hackles rose at the utter pretension of her tone. Oh, I said, I’m not concerned with all of art history—I only aspire to sell to decorators and tourists. If even that, I could have added. If even that. But she had already given me a thin, cold smile and turned to speak to the diner on her other side.

The need to professionalize is in our culture—witness the tendency of little boys now to go to five-day-a-week summer football camps and to play on Little League teams whose games are broadcast on national television—but in my family, where it ran with such a hot current that my mother became a hippie and then an ardent Christian to escape it, it can still be traced to the old first-generation immigrant drive to succeed, as well as the fierce hunger and the equally fierce pride that makes some people crave distinction. Years ago, I shared a selection of travel sketches with my grandmother Rose. She exclaimed over them, thought they showed talent—there was the clear evidence of Juan Oliver in my blood, the highest compliment that could be paid in my family. “Well,” she mused, “maybe you could have a second career as an artist.” This took me completely aback. They were just nice little sketches that I did with Stephan two or three times a year on a trip. Why must the question of career even enter it?

But she was like that. She hated that for years my mother worked as a secretary in the church in which I grew up—menial work, in her mind, demeaning—but was genuinely delighted when my mother became a licensed minister. It could never assuage the hurt she felt at her daughter having become a Christian, but a degree, that at least was something she could understand. Her daughter no longer seemed to be throwing her life away. It was also something she could crow about to other people. She could say, My daughter, the Reverend, just as she had long said, My son, the Ph.D.—or slipped in the “Dr.” in front of her own name, a title of which she was justly proud, having earned a Ph.D. in psychology at the age of sixty-three. Sitting next to me in the car outside my mother’s house in upstate New York, waiting for my mother to come out so we could go somewhere to celebrate the newly conferred degree, my grandmother suddenly said, half to herself, “We’re all full of honors in this family,” and sighed with satisfaction. Astonished that she would actually voice such a sentiment, I recoiled a little, though I loved her. It was one of her least admirable traits, and the most like a stereotypical Jewish mother.

In my family, at least during my grandmother’s lifetime, no one could achieve anything greater than success as an artist. Prospering in business was good, if faintly distasteful, a doctorate was a much-lauded achievement, but we saved our greatest admiration for those with that hidden ore of talent, passing judgments about who had an “eye,” who possessed—or lacked, despite their pretensions to art-making—Juan’s, our standard-bearer’s gifts. Even my great-grandfather Nathan, the entrepreneur/engineer who made the family’s fortune, spent his off-hours and retirement making sculpture. Most of us were hobbyists or connoisseurs, but we believed in the idea of the lone genius, the anointed. The making of art, as well as its appreciation, represented the next step in the evolution of an immigrant family: from shtetl to Central Park West to downtown bohemia, the second generation freed by the hard-scrabbling of the first to acquire the sophisticated accoutrements of true upper middle class gentility.

It’s a rare and wonderful thing to come from a family that loves creative expression as much as ours, but it can also be as demanding and difficult as any that requires members to be top-of-their-class doctors and lawyers. The valuation of art was so high that my mother felt she had to flee her family to escape it, since she, a dancer and potter in her youth, was convinced that she could neither meet the standard nor find sufficient fulfillment in the process to build her life on it. Just recently she had to drop a watercolor class, her first, because the mere thought of trying to make visual art made her so tense and anxious. She just had to give up the idea, she said.

Maybe this history has more than a little to do with why I allowed my literary agent to have so much power over me, why I was so susceptible to her voice. I was ripe for judgment; I was primed to flee.

Fear of failure, my husband said. Sophomore slump. So psychologically simple an explanation that I resisted it, though I see now that it was very likely true. I thought about writing another book, but it made me so tense and anxious, I just had to give up the idea. 

All images Copyright © 2015 Anna Cypra Oliver

(This is the fourth post in a series. Find the final post here. sdh)

Comments

[jim c]

I think you're amazing. That you could achieve all this mostly on your own is stunning. I hope your work brings you at least as much satisfaction as it gives its viewers.

[Kyril Alexander Calsoyas]

"Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely. Light and colour, peace and hope, will keep them company to the end, or almost to the end, of the day."

Winston Churchill