Painting from Studio Tubes

Recently as I was going through some old Art News, Art Forum and Art in America magazines I’d shelved in my studio and forgotten about, I ran across some especially fine articles and reproductions of Helen Frankenthaler’s work which sent me reeling back to days when I studied art at The University of Oklahoma, ending up with two master’s degrees in art by the mid-seventies. I was a busy little art beaver back then.

One of my art profs at the time—I think it was John Hadley—told us undergrads that some of our paintings looked like they’d come out of a “studio tube mentality.” I had to smile as I looked at the photographs of Frankenthaler stretched out over canvases as big as the floor, brushes as large as those used in house painting with a bucket of paint by her side, whole gallons lined up in the background. Sometimes Frankenthaler used driveway and windshield squeegees to push the paint across areas as large as quarter to half a good-sized room. Hadley’s little quip has stayed with me down through the years which, I could say, I’ve extended into my whole philosophy of life. What I took him to be telling us was that we were playing safe, not willing to open and make the big gestures. And there’s certainly great value in details and focus but when those narrow our vision to the point of losing sight of possibilities, it’s time to step back and take another look.

        But I’m besieged by questions and doubts about what working and living “beyond the tube-sized mentality” really means. It’s has to be more than buying up gallons of paint instead of oil sets in primary colors from Holbein or Rembrandt, Incorporated.

        Sometime during my late graduate studio years at the university, I made a canvas something like three or four feet by ten and worked on it for weeks and weeks. I’m talking about every day, going to work in the studio like one goes to a job, nine to five, sometimes with overtime. John Hadley, as I remember, came into my space, pausing to look at this canvas off and on for those weeks, expressionless most of the time, simply staring at it and then turning and walking off without a word.

On the day of his appointed critique with me, he entered my studio, sat on a stool, and I waited quite some time for his comments or questions. He walked up to a long undulating line on the edge of shapes running somewhat diagonally across the huge canvas. He said, “Isn’t this the profile of President Johnson?” He didn’t look at me, just walked out of the room, and I stared at Johnson’s face as I listen to Hadley’s footsteps recede down the steps and out of earshot. I turned and looked at the buckets of paints on the floor behind me, kick one of them and walk out of the room, with some of the grad students clapping and smiling as I went. They’d had Hadley’s critiques too. They knew his truths when they heard them.

The next morning on my way to my studio work, I noticed from afar a huge stiff banner hanging from the windows of the upper story of the art building. As I got closer, I realized that it was my three by ten foot painting, stamped like a new ten dollar bill with Johnson’s portrait on it against the school’s outside brick wall.  It was an awful painting, no doubt about it. And an awful portrait of the president, despite the likeness. As I walked toward my studio, I realized all the upstairs windows had been left open, the fresh morning air filling the room. The message was clear. Fresh air. Fresh start.

I don’t remember how we got the painting back inside—I did need help— probably by the same method (in reverse) that my fellow students had used to get it out there, by cutting the supporting frame and snapping on braces while some held it aloft before securing it by wires against the outside wall. Hundreds of hours had gone into its creation, and they understood by the end of this venture, as did I, that sheer effort and intention plus large amounts of paint, does not a good work of art make.

Some years after I graduated with my Master’s in Fine Arts, I heard that John Hadley wrote a song recorded by Burt Reynolds about some nail in a shoe and had headed for Nashville, but I never followed whether it was true or not. Then recently I googled his name and discovered that he’d moved back to Norman, had an art exhibition in November, 2011, after having written “almost 1,000 songs” and having “18 million of his songs sold worldwide,” sung over the years by the likes of Garth Brooks, Linda Ronstadt, Dean Martin, well, the list went on and on—buckets and buckets of songs and celebs. So long studio tube mentality!

           

I’ve had a lot of loss in my life these past couple of decades or so—I’ve lost all the members of my original family (four) except my sister who lives on the West Coast (we correspond often and have a great friendship), and I’ve lost a relationship I was in for twenty-one years, married for five. I’ve lost eleven pets over those years, two in one week just before I began living alone. I found myself closing off, withdrawing. My creative work was suffering, and I felt stuck and miserable. I have written several novels, two collections of short stories and read my work publicly, even on the radio and television, locally. Now I have a publisher (Oghma Creative Media) and my first novel was just released September 25th. But I haven’t worked in art to any degree for years.

Then I discovered Frankenthaler again, was reminded of Hadley’s pithy little saying, and I’ve decided to get back into the larger picture of my life. I’m in studio after a lot of years of absence, making gestures as clean and clear as I can right now. Kind of a risky, on-the-edge venture but, hey, you gotta start somewhere, right? Who knows what might turn up on my bucket list.

The Borrowing of Random Things

Robert Motherwell, the great Abstract Expressionist painter, once said that an artist  is a person who is hypersensitive to materials. But Donald Lipski, my sculpture teacher and thesis show co-chairman at The University of Oklahoma in the mid-seventies (whom I liked and trusted as a person much more than Robert Motherwell about statements of this kind and who is himself in the big time national and international art scene now making public sculptures) sat in my apartment on the floor back then, picking away at my carpet, telling me—taking Motherwell's statement a step further—"An artist is somebody who is obsessive about things." He meant the word literally, that is, things as objects— hard, concrete, tangible phenomenon. Don's pastime was to gather—he claimed without conscious intent or at least much thought—bits and pieces of string, slivers of wood, small grass roots and carpet threads and the like, and twist these in his fingers while he talked with friends, watched TV or argued with his colleagues (though Don was a charmer and never argued very much) and when that activity or event he was engaged in was over, he would throw the piece of string or root he had played with, ultimately into a cigar box and go to the next thing in his life, often where he would sit or stand and talk while he played with another string or sliver of wood which would end up in the same box. He had been doing this for years and years when I met him, he said, and had thousands of these objects in boxes he kept stashed away. Sometimes I would stand with him while he chewed on a toothpick, knowing I was watching great art in the making.

            I got pretty much into that process of his because at some level when he met me, I was doing some of the same procedures he was, only a little differently, and we had this real liking for each other, at least I took it that we did. I put up an installation of one-time carbon strips I collected from Bell Telephone Company, those flimsy carbon inserts on the print-outs of telephone bills of customers all over Oklahoma City and its environs, in what was known then as the Lightwell at the art school, Fred Jones Hall, that spanned a space about fifty by seventy feet, and he put up an installation of plastic strips similar to those used to partition off a worker or a crime scene, except his strips were clear with just a hint of color. He did this just off the I-35 Oklahoma City bypass, spanning an even greater space than mine, over a huge gully so that we all could walk under it, not unlike walking into the inside of an enormous guitar or dulcimer. It brought people off the road for miles to see it, listen to it from underneath, including the police whom he charmed into talking about it with him and not the flow of traffic he was disrupting.

He and I did these pieces simultaneously, truly simultaneously, and he deferred to me on that day as he always did on every other occasion I ever had with him in which a mention of our art was brought up together. When I complimented him on his work,  walking under the tremendous sound the vibrating plastic generated, coming out the other end and looking into his sparkling eyes, he said very gently, "Oh yours is the greatest." My piece was still hanging in the Lightwell, with the magnanimous title of "The Great Southwestern Carbon Systems," but everybody looking at art was out there off I-35 looking at his. I swelled anyway.

            Later I got downright territorial and paranoid about what I was doing which was drawing and blowing graphite onto the wall at an eye level line making these tiny obsessive scribbles about four by six inches apart like a mental path one would be following with one’s eyes. Although they were 2-d, drawn on a wall, they weren’t too terrible different in nature from the 3-d hand-twisted sculptures Don was making and throwing in his cigar box. I tried to hang sheets across the front of my space at the North Campus studio as though by doing this nobody could see what I was playing around with. I finally took the sheets down because nobody cared, and they were getting in my way.

Don would come out to my space and look at these little drawings of mine with a grin, chew on his toothpick, and walk over to a chair across the great expanse of space in those old Navy barracks on North Campus turned into graduate art studios, and sit down. He wouldn't move the chair. He'd just sit down half a room away and wait for me to begin work again, leaning his chair against the wall, head tilted to the side and stare as I worked. He eventually claimed that wall upon which his chair was leaning and began aligning his pieces that he brought in his cigar boxes, his chewed and twisted pieces, putting them up one following the other, along an invisible eye-level line on the wall. I'd seen him do this before, on the floor, while talking to people, pulling one piece out of a box at a time and spacing them evenly apart, staring at them as though he was having some great insight.

"Fidgeting," he called his twisting and chewing. So seeing these fidgeted sculptures  go up on the wall, mounted with little straight pins, like intimate aesthetic specimens, seemed like a natural progression of ideas. It wasn't one-upmanship with Don, ever. He didn't have to do that. He was the greatest. I knew this and turned my attention to making black on black paintings instead, larger objects with white marks on them, not too far removed from those Agnes Martin made on her canvases that she entitled after the birds, the trees and the sky. Those little obsessive sculptures of Don’s, though, eventually went all over the world. They reached their height when they were shown, I think, at Marborough in London, after he left The University of Oklahoma and went back, I heard, to Chicago and then New York, finally to Philadelphia. I know they were at O.K. Harris in New York City because I saw them there.

            Once when Lipski was in my apartment, he took his hand and scooped it down into a large wooden bowl I had filled with thousands of pennies. He loved that. All those pennies in that bowl. This was over a decade before Ann Hamilton’s now famous privation and excesses installation in 1989 of 750,000 pennies drowning in honey at the Capp Street Project in San Francisco. My fascination with my pennies was with the series and systems of objects in frameworks devised to contain or sequester them, in my case by random—simply because I, as artist, stated so (as Marcel Duchamp had done with his urinal and such). Don’s fascination was with the idea that these little copper things of monetary value had been brought from the world where they were scattered out doing something totally different than art and were placed by human attention in such a way to force an intrusion on those out-there boundaries, so that these round money-meaning things became something else, which wasn’t too far from Hamilton’s notion sometime later. (These notions are always in the air until they wear themselves out or are transformed into something else. The current parlance is to call these in the air notions, “memes.”)

Anyway, on this day, the day of my critique with Don in my apartment, he reached down before he left and put a whole handful of my pennies in his pocket. I got the message and thought it was cool. He was going to spend them (or randomly drop them on the street) and get them back out there again. Open and Closed Systems, I called this idea and did several shows with photographs (including my Senior Thesis show) based on it. I didn't realize until I saw the front cover of Art in America some years later and opened it to the article inside how prophetic this little gesture of his was way back then. Not only had he expanded his plastic strip series, he was binding string and twine and sisal around ordinary objects like pitchforks and scissors turning them into something else while never losing their sense of ordinariness. And with such notions, he was on his way to several renowned museums.

When I first met Don, I brought him my portfolio of slides from my work on Long  Island. These were found objects I integrated into various backgrounds of linen, stained paper or Turkish towels. These sculptures all had binding in them and looked like non-functional musical instruments, I thought. Others of these looked like small pieces of furniture stripped of purpose. "Beautiful stuff," he said thoughtfully, his head bobbing around the screen, in the art history room where I projected them. Don loved lots of stuff, especially everyday stuff made into conglomerates tied together literally or figuratively through proximity that entered The Temple of Art as ordinary objects to be contemplated upon. "But I'm having a hard time getting past the materials you are finding and using. They are entities, things-in-themselves, you know. I'm not sure anything needs to be done with them. What can you do with objects that already have a life such that nothing you do to them can change that? Picasso's bicycle seat changed into a bull is still a bicycle seat and that's the charm, but do you want to make charming art?" I stared down at a vintage hub cap I was going to smash into an element in a painting, like Rauschenberg.

I guess Don changed his mind. His art certainly has charm, and his bound- by-twine  pitchfork is still definitely a pitchfork. Of course he posed this question to me, not himself, really. But that's the other thing about artists, they usually talk a lot and while they do, they're looking to steal each other's things. "Steal" is definitely too strong a word. There isn't a deliberate con game going on, anyway not with us at the university back then, not like the one at the cash register where you get the checker talking and then with sleight of hand, lift something from the drawer. Though, I must tell you, that I practiced that, turning it into an art with my brothers and cousins with the offering plate that passed at church. I know loads about how to do it. Heavy borrowing is part of the taking-in process for object worshippers. I know I took that chair Don sat on across from me in the North Campus studio when I graduated and left for my next thing in life, although I haven't decided as of yet to twist string around it and turn it into art. But keep your eyes open and keep a look out on the art magazine racks. You never know.