Horror Vacui

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

Graduate school rewards exploration. That is, until it doesn’t.

Snakes and Ladders

Last week I handed in my thesis proposal, and during the process of writing, rewriting, rethinking, rewriting, self-doubt, and more rewriting, I realized that it is called a thesis project because it is meant to be a connected body of work.

What’s For Dinner?

Which rules out the explorations I’ve been making: gouache paintings, suicidal paper dolls, murdered rag dolls, self-portraits, drawings of pill bottles, board games with snakes, and woodcuts. In the past year I’ve been all over the place, and it’s been fun, in a wholly stressful way, but now I need to focus.

Murder Crib

Step One: clean my studio. This was either a desperately needed activity or an excellent form of procrastination. I gave away rolls and rolls of colored paper (the raw material for future failed giant origami), several excellent pieces of studio furniture, including my favorite pink chair, primed panels, boxes of still-life props, and a gorgeous ten-foot slab of half-inch glass. The Barbies I kept.

Step Two: hang cream-colored drawing paper, 42″ wide and 30 feet long, around three bare walls of my now empty-ish studio.

Terrifyingly Blank Paper

I’m going back to drawing. Not on pads of paper, but all over my walls. In public. I’m terrified about the mistakes that I’ll make, but I know it’s time that I face my art, my skill, and my talent and see if it’s enough.

And it just keeps going

I have one and a half semesters to go. In no time, SVA is going to throw me out into a brutal art world (some people call this graduation) and I’d better be ready. I have to replace my teachers’ evaluations with my own. I have to stand up for my art.

And I have to start now. It’s that simple, and that difficult.

Making Paintings

Posted on September 28, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

Stuart Davis
The Mellow Pad

I’ve always had trouble making abstract art. I admire the ability, but it’s difficult for me to overcome the delight I feel when I capture a likeness or represent what I see. For me, abstraction isn’t easier than representation (the “my kid coulda done that” school of thought), it’s harder.

I love creating the illusion of space and depth on a two-dimensional plane. Some abstract artists embrace the same challenge, and some work hard to avoid making any allusions to the natural world.

Jackson Pollock
Number 8

In my second-year seminar class last week we read articles about Alfred Stieglitz, the ground-breaking New York Armory Show of 1913, and several of the artists working then. Not all artists are good writers (of course, not all writers are good painters), but Stuart Davis, a painter from that period explained abstraction in a way that makes the most sense to me.

Stuart Davis
Swing Landscape

In his article, “Autobiography” (included in Diane Kelder’s collection Stuart Davis – Praeger Press, 1971), Davis discussed why he hated when viewers asked what his paintings were “about”.

“There is no simple answer to these pesky questions because in reality they are not questions about art at all. They are in fact demands that what the artist feels and explicitly expresses in his work be translated into ideas that omit the very quality of emotion that is the sole reason for its being.”

He goes on, “In the first place let me say that the purpose of so-called “abstract” art is basically the same as all other art, and that it always has a subject matter. In fact the difference between ‘abstract’ and ‘realistic’ art is precisely one of subject matter. It would be more accurate to say that it is a difference of aspects of the same subject matter. The ‘abstract’ artist lives in the same world as everybody else and the subject matter available to him is the same.”

“…But the development of ‘abstract’ art has not been merely a matter of temperaments. It is the reflection in art of that attitude of mind manifested in scientific materialism by which the world lives today. Through science the whole concept of what reality is has been changed…. why should the artist be questioned for finding new realities in his subject matter?”

Stephen Maine
HP12 – 0301

Or perhaps in Hamlet’s words,

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your Philosophy.”

My seminar class is taught by the wonderful abstract painter (and writer) Stephen Maine (www.stephenmaine.com). Here he is in an interview with Gorky’s Granddaughter discussing his paintings and his process. If I could paint like he does, I might give up reality, too.

http://www.gorkysgranddaughter.com/2013/09/stephen-maine-august-2013.html

The Ubiquitous Celebrity of Lenin

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

The Propeller Group
Monumental Bling

In a lovely example of synchronicity, I am suddenly surrounded by Vladimir Ilich Lenin. When he was alive, being surrounded by him was rarely lovely, I believe.

First there are the readings for this week’s Seminar – about the Russian Constructivists, Kasimir Malevich, and the government-directed art produced in Russia after the Revolution and World War I.

Lenin as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby

Secondly, as I was hopping the galleries this afternoon I ran into Lombard Freid Gallery at 518 West 19th Street (lombard-freid.com). Their new show by The Propeller Group is titled Lived, Lives, Will Live! which is based on a quotation from Kim Il Sung (founding dictator of North Korea) who said, “Lenin lived. Lenin lives. Lenin Will Live.”

The exhibition shows Lenin as he might be viewed today – wearing bling, trying on new hairdos a la Leonardo diCaprio, and riding high on the global spin machine. Everything old is new again.

Lenin as Jack Dawson in Titanic

Which leads me to synchronicity part 3: the fact that I am just finishing rereading one of my favorite books: Lenin’s Embalmers by Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson. This is the fascinating story of the decades-long job of the Zbarsky family to preserve Lenin’s body so that it could remain on display to the public. Their own lives were dependent upon pleasing Stalin for years, and then ironically they had to preserve Stalin (and Mao) as well. Lenin is still on view in the former Red Square in the former Leningrad, but Kruschev had Stalin removed in disgrace and buried in 1961.

Lenin’s body on display almost 90 years after his death.

Imagine going to Graceland and being able to see Elvis displayed in a glass coffin. After the creepy frisson down your spine, it might be kind of cool, in a Walking Dead kind of way.

I recommend The Propeller Group exhibition. It is a very clever take on publicity, fame, and the kind of celebrity that lives on after death. (Think Marilyn, or Ho Chi Minh – whose body is also preserved).

If you can afford a team of scientists working around the clock, year after year, just think of the wonderful legacy you too can leave.

Still Crazy After All These Years

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

Low Tide – Old Saybrook

I spent a large part of last week and the Labor Day weekend back in my Connecticut home town, relaxing a little before the start of the new school year. It was wonderful to catch up with my family, to turn off my work email, and to do almost nothing productive. But I did stop in at my undergraduate art school, Lyme Academy, to view the current alumni and student exhibits, and I was struck both by the quality of the art and how different it is from what I see in New York.

Jack Broderick’s
La Boca

Lyme Academy teaches the skills needed to produce representational and figurative art. At the School of Visual Arts where I’m getting my M.F.A., skills are rarely discussed, and aside from a few of us diehards the students are not producing representational work. It’s all abstract, and conceptual, and performance, and video.

Alex Cox
Untitled

When I’m in Old Lyme, my heart sings to see blue shadows cross nude figures and then climb up the wall. When I’m in New York, I respond to pain and ugliness in art. In Connecticut I will spend two or three hours drawing the random still life on the coffee table – emphasizing light and dark, perfecting the ovals that represent circles in perspective, and working very hard to achieve a likeness of my subject matter. There is no such thing as too much time spent drawing the label on a Poland Springs bottle.

Andrea Anderson’s
Max Thompson Chevy

But in New York I draw with my left hand to achieve an unattractive immediacy. Everything is faster and uglier.

One of my New York pieces with an unquotable title. At 8 months old, it is due for urban renewal.

One of my New York pieces with an unprintable title. At 8 months old, it is due for urban renewal.

So after this weekend, I finally get it. Rural coastal Connecticut is full of the seascapes and portraits that are made by artists who know in their bones that life hasn’t changed much in fifty years, and is unlikely to change much in the next fifty. The tide will always take six hours to go out and another six to come in. It is possible to paint on the beach for hours and not see more than a dozen people, at least once school starts.

Still low tide in Old Saybrook

But in New York, a 20-year-old building is considered old and ripe for tear-down. Walking people regularly race cabs at intersections because they’re in such a hurry. There are beggars on half of the corners I pass. My realizations aren’t new or profound. You have just to look at Andrew Wyeth versus the Abstract Expressionists, or Edward Hopper lighthouses versus Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. Where we live and work greatly affects what we make.

I guess my question now is whether it’s possible to go beyond back-and-forth and actually integrate what’s happening in the various art worlds. There is pain in small-town New England, just as there is great beauty in the city. But am I a good enough artist to show you?

Machines

Posted on August 16, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

The thing about machines versus technology is that machines are tools. With technology, I’m the tool. (Still, when you need to hook up your new t.v. to your cable, satellite dish, game system, surround sound, AppleTV, and photo album, I’m the one to call. Trust me, your old cables won’t work.)

Blog in Progress

I spent the summer playing with machines. I took a letterpress class, in which I learned to typeset and use printing presses. I made little books and lots of stationery. It was SO fun. I got a knitting loom (good for afghans), and when that palled, I got a knitting machine (good for sweaters!).

VanderCook Printing Press in the SVA Print Shop

My letterpress stationery says, “Words are for people who cannot draw.” It’s meant to be ironic (stationery!), not insulting.

This knitting machine is completely manual. And fast!

I played with a manual typewriter and am still considering using it to type my Master’s thesis next year. Why? Because it requires skill, and typewritten documents show the weight of the hands that typed them. Basically, they emboss the letters. I love all of my Apple products, but they can’t emboss. Why isn’t that in the commercials?

Manual typewriter from the 70s. Courier font. It does not get better than this.

If a love of machines can be genetic, I’m pretty sure it runs in my family of engineers, wannabe engineers, shouldabeen engineers (like me), and teachers. We all love tools. I have an electric drill of which I’m particularly fond (doubles as a screwdriver) and a glue gun that comes in handy a little more often than one would expect.

I love all kinds of paper cutters – from scissors and hand-held die cuts to rolling blade cutters, mat cutters, cleaver cutters, and guillotine cutters. I miss my power miter and table saws which still live in Connecticut because somehow they don’t quite fit into my apartment. But I brought my sewing machine, which makes buttonholes!

The guillotine paper cutter can take hundreds of sheets at once and won’t skew.

The first computer that my high school ever bought had its own room and was the size of a small bear. A bear cub. In order to program it, we had to write our code then type-punch it into paper tape which could be fed into the computer. Some of those programs were pretty long, and one mistake ruined the tape. Luckily I love to type. And play the piano. And do almost anything creative with my hands.

Maybe the reason I love machines better than current computers is because I understand how they work. I mean, I can convert numbers into binary code, but I really have no idea how the computer reads binary or makes sense of it. But give me an old-fashioned internal combustion engine and I can change the spark plugs, the air filter, the oil filter, and the brake fluid. How do I know? Because I used to do it all the time. Nowadays I’m not sure that cars have any of those parts. Fan belts? I don’t know. Everything is electronic.

What fun is that? (aside from power windows, power seats, and butt warmers). I like to know how things work inside. Except people. Too gooey!

Take that, laser level!

Art is full of tools – especially arcane hand tools. Artists get to make stretcher bars, and weld sculptures, and cut glass. We use staple guns and lost-wax casting and linen book-binding thread. I don’t know why everyone isn’t an artist, but it’s okay if you’re not. That just means more art (and more tools) for me.

Picasso Quiz

Posted on August 4, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

I was at MoMA yesterday with some out-of-town guests and every other New Yorker with his out-of town guests, when suddenly I found myself on a Picasso hunt. It was right after I enjoyed a wonderful cheese-based lunch in the 5th floor cafe, which came right after I visited Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World and Balthus’ The Street while waiting for our table to be called.

I may have mentioned before that I get lost in museums. You can hand me a map, but unless I walk around with my nose in it, using a highlighter, I’m still going to get lost. So it was that at last I found myself facing Picasso’s Three Musicians on one side of a doorway, and his Three Women at the Spring on the other side.

Three Musicians

Three Women at the Spring

Most artists are lucky and talented if they can do one thing well. My best thing is actually traditional sculpture, but it exacerbates arthritis in my right thumb to work in clay, so I mostly do my second best thing, which is draw. Looking at Picasso’s two works I was stunned by his range and his bravery at trying new forms of expression. The important thing to remember is that no matter how arrogant he seemed, he couldn’t know that these paintings would work while he was making them. That’s the bravery part. And his limitless imagination encouraged him to start new phases over and over again during his long life.

Girl Before a Mirror

The next Picasso I found is one of my favorites (because of the color): Girl Before a Mirror. Then quickly I ran into Seated Bather, one of the scariest. I started to hunt Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, perhaps his most famous painting, but never did find it. Remember: lost!

Seated Bather

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

I used to say that I admired Picasso but wouldn’t want to live with most of his paintings. After yesterday I think I would like to live with all of his paintings. I could admire the genius and forget the misogyny. And I haven’t even mentioned Guernica. It is one of my mantras that no one can make anyone else’s art. It is too personal. There will never be another Picasso.

Here’s the quiz. Can you look at the five paintings shown here and tell in which order they were painted? Answers are below, but don’t peek yet.

Don’t peek.

Okay:

1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

1921 Three Musicians and Three Women at the Spring (the same year!)

1930 Seated Bather

1932 Girl Before a Mirror

Unless you already memorized these facts for a test, I bet you got them wrong. I know I did. What an amazing brain Picasso must have had to not only paint these pictures, but in this order. He was ahead of his own time, and I think must still be ahead of mine as well.

Jack the Ripper: Artist?

Posted on July 28, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

Walter Sickert,
The Camden Town Murder

One of my favorite British painters is Walter Sickert, whose life spanned the period from the Impressionists to World War II. The son and grandson of artists, as a young man he studied with James McNeill Whistler and learned to paint alla prima. For the rest of his life he painted only what he could look at, or see in photos. Later, one of his students was Lucian Freud.

Study for The Camden Town Affair

I was a little surprised, ten years ago, when mystery writer Patricia Cornwell accused Sickert in her book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed. After years of admiring his work in the British Art Center at Yale, it took me awhile to get my head around the idea. Then out of the blue Steven Sheehan, one of my painting teachers, said that “artists have always known” that Sickert was the Ripper.

Rose Shoe

The evidence is circumstantial. Sickert was one of the Camden Town Painters – Camden Town being the location of the Ripper’s murders. As he travelled back and forth to France, murders seemed to follow in his wake. And most importantly, he established a strong connection to the police so that he was often the first person they called when a Ripper victim was found. He was allowed into the crime scenes to draw the victims before the scenes were examined or cleaned.

La Hollandaise

Whether or not Sickert was the actual Ripper or just obsessed with his crimes, he spent most of his life outside of conventional norms. Would his paintings still be so well-known without the added frisson of murderous possibilities? They are wonderful paintings, but most wonderful paintings are lost or forgotten 100 years later.

I have to admit that, based on nothing, I now think of Sickert as a murderer. But does that indict all of us who are addicted to criminal trials, detective movies, and violent video games? We may not be killers, but we enjoy the results of violent crime – perhaps too much.

Walter Sickert in 1911

I also have to admit that, when pushed, I try to access the blackest side of myself to put into my work. We need light in order to see the dark, but it is the dark that fascinates us. So maybe Walter Sickert wasn’t a killer. Maybe he was. The possibility creates an edge of evil in paintings that might otherwise seem innocent. Did having the soul of a killer improve his art? If so, count me in.

I like happy books and happy music. But I like brutal art. And I’m working my way toward making my own art more sinister.

R.I.P. Big Blue Box

Posted on June 29, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

Say goodbye.

I remember visiting the Rhode Island School of Design when I applied to graduate school there (may they forever rue their shortsightedness). The Chairman of the Fine Arts program said that they taught their students to fail, and try again, and fail, and try again. And Milton Glaser, famous graphic designer and founder of my school, SVA, has said, “You must embrace failure. You must admit what is. You must find out what you’re capable of doing, and what you’re not capable of doing.” I would add to this that sometimes the failure is in the idea, not the execution. Each failure teaches us something, so that if we continue to take risks, we fail up.

Airless unworkable studio. Can’t breathe!

Hence the end of the big blue box. I got it to work, my concept was sound, I could imagine the stack of ever-smaller boxes reaching to the ceiling. But then I realized that I was avoiding my studio. I couldn’t make work. That damn blue box was sucking all the air out of my space. Aaah. Space. That was the problem. That studio wasn’t big enough for the both of us. And it wasn’t fun anymore. It was a chore. Art made without passion cannot communicate passion to the viewer. Even giant origami.

Rachel and Nadia ignore the elephant in the room while I destroy it.

I tentatively approached my friend Rachel, who had toiled so hard with me to make the enormous albatross, and told her I was thinking of getting rid of it. She laughed and said she had wondered how long it would take me to figure out that it had to go. She generously helped me lift the lid, fold it carefully and take it to HER studio. She will no doubt find something incredibly meaningful to do with it. Then I cut all the supports out of the bottom of the box and crumpled the 225 square feet of heavy ocean-blue paper into the world’s largest paperweight. It now sits in an empty studio around the corner. One of my classmates will want it. There is very little waste in communal studio space.

Free to good home.

I feel much lighter now, and ready to go back to work. How about some teeny-tiny origami?

Big Blue Box, Part 2

Posted on June 21, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

Big Blue Box Bottom with no will to live

When we last left our big blue box, it had slumped over like a murder victim on a park bench. It was crushed and so was I.

But hope springs eternal in the human breast (thank you Alexander Pope) and the minute I stopped thinking about how to solve my problem, the answer came to me. I built an infrastructure for the box, using foam-core and mat boards, and then folded the beautiful ocean-blue paper around the cardboard playpen. No tape required – I had already cheated enough.

Reinforcing the base

Yay! Box standing up! My invaluable friend Rachel helped me move it into my studio after I cleaned and swept and pushed everything to the side, leaving enough free room only for the box and two admirers to enter the space at a time.

Yay! Box standing up!

Then we made the lid – which is exactly the same process as making the bottom, except the folds are made slightly further from the center point so that the ensuing box (which turns over to become lid) has dimensions just a little bigger than the base. We were so much better at doing this the second time that I really feel we should hire ourselves out as a gigantic origami team. Surely demand is peaking right now!

Rachel after the big move into the studio

Carefully carrying our lid to my studio, we placed it over our now sturdy base and then stood back to watch what disaster would befall us next. Hold our breath… don’t move… and nothing happened. That was the best nothing I had seen in a long time. The lid sat firmly on the reinforced side panels of our big blue box. Perfect. Long periods of appreciating our handiwork ensued.

Big Blue Box complete!

So you’re thinking: okay, great job, amazing artists. But don’t forget that this is just the first box of a stack that is intended to reach the ceiling. Total of 8 or 10 or 12 – just high enough not to hit the duct work that we ARE ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN to touch. The next box is supposed to be about 4 feet across. That means a piece of paper 12 feet square for the base and another for the lid. The piecing and creasing continue.

A 2-inch box. No construction issues here! Could this be our pinnacle?

And will we need to reinforce our next creation? Or will that extra weight crush the fragile base box? Will the blue lid we just installed sag under the weight? If we were engineers we would know that in advance. After all, engineers don’t build bridges and then wait to see if cars will fall through them. But we are not engineers, we are dreamers.

Stay tuned!

Big Blue Box, Part 1

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

After one of our Magical-Return-to-Childhood Craft Nights at school I got a little hooked on origami. We were making paper cranes, which I continued to do on my own, even though I pretty much suck at them. I also learned to make little lidded boxes. Adorable! And if you make them in descending sizes, they stack like ziggurat temples. Even more adorable!

Origami (which I made for Rachel) behaving as it should

Origami behaving as it should

And then I got the idea, which because it is summer vacation no one discouraged me from pursuing, of making stacking origami boxes bigger. Much much bigger. How cool would that be? I wondered. I did a little math on my $5 Staples calculator (do not tell me my phone has a calculator. I know this. I prefer the bigger buttons). If I wanted to make an origami box that was six feet across, I would need to start with paper about eighteen feet square. Okay. That sounded pretty doable.

Where were the critical voices then? Where were the professors telling me that it was a stupid idea? That it was meaningless art? That I am not Japanese and therefore cannot use origami to express myself and my culture? Well, they were on summer vacation, too. And I was left with my studio mates who also thought it was a pretty cool idea. Tunnel vision. Groupthink!

Big Blue Box Bottom (in process) (Photo by Wei Xiaoguang.)

The biggest floor in our studios is in the crit space where we have our workshop classes. I carved out a large empty area and swept up the dirt. I ordered a roll of paper nine feet wide by 36 feet long. It was the biggest paper I could find. Then I measured the crit space, only to discover that it was 12 feet wide. Did this discourage me? No. But I adjusted my project to start with a five-foot box, which would require paper only 15 feet square. I know. I know. 15 is still larger than 12. I could have started with a four-foot box, which would have needed a sheet of paper 11.5 feet square, but NO. That was not big enough for me. I decided to go with the 15 x 15, which I already KNEW wouldn’t fit in my workspace.

As I STAND under the paper I have my first inklings of disaster. (Photo by Wei Xiaoguang.)

My friend Rachel announced that I couldn’t possibly handle this project all by myself. She was completely right and generously volunteered to help me wrangle paper. It took all afternoon to make the box bottom, during which process the paper got crinkled and torn as we pieced it, taped parts of it to the wall, folded it back and forth, and had to check the directions on making boxes. When it was finally folded perfectly, it looked gorgeous – WHILE WE HELD IT UP.

Success! (Photo by Wei Xiaoguang.)

As soon as we let go, it completely collapsed: an ocean-blue origami soufflé. Not sure what to do next, we dragged it through the hallways (more damage) and deposited it in an empty studio, as I tried to convince myself and Rachel that putting a lid on it was going to give it structure. Neither of us believed me.

Big Blue Box Bottom shows its true colors

So much hard work. Not sure what to do next. Warning: a five-foot origami box does not behave like a five-inch origami box. Just saying.

Buying time

Coming soon: Big Blue Box Part 2.

the least untrue / elizabeth cook

"Of all lies, art is the least untrue." -Gustave Flaubert

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