How Painting Holds Me on the Earth: Writings from a Maverick Artist and Teacher
(Book published November 2008 and will be available via Amazon.com)Leigh’s new book speaks to serious working artists, would-be artists, art teachers, collectors and anyone interested in a deeper understanding of the interior process of making art. It releases and validates the creative spirit in all of us.
1. This Incredible Fact of Being Alive (an interview with Leigh conducted by Richard Whittaker)
2. Attitudes
3. Art Materials
4. Guide to a Good Drawing and Painting CritiqueAdditionally, there are two essays linked at La Serrania Odysseys, as well as a video, below.
• • • • • • • • •
This Incredible Fact of Being Alive—An interview with Leigh Hyams
San Francisco CA, November 21, 2005
By Richard Whittaker
Published in Works & Conversations #12It’s easy to miss the door at 545 Sutter Street. It opens into a narrow foyer where one suddenly feels transported back into the San Francisco of fifty years ago. Lingering there for a minute, I couldn’t help imagining the sound of cool jazz behind a door and maybe the faint odor of reefer. Deciding not to trust the tiny elevator, I walked down the dimly lit space to a stairway at the back (the steps covered with faded linoleum tiles) and climbed up to the second floor. It was early on a Monday afternoon and I’d arrived at Meridian Gallery early. On Monday galleries in SF generally are closed, but not in this case. From my very first visit to Meridian Gallery I’d been charmed by it, by a feeling of having gone back decades. In a way, the essence of the place still feels located in that era, too, when the air itself seemed full of spiritual possibility. No one can mistake Meridian as a place committed to art in terms of fashionable commodity. Here there’s a different alignment, one in keeping with an interior side of art. Yet director Anne Brodzky and her husband Tony Williams manage to keep the gallery afloat. At Meridian a wide variety of creative activities is nurtured; it’s something of a hidden refuge and was a refreshing discovery.
Although my introduction to the gallery was relatively recent, a special connection formed quickly. Before arriving in San Francisco, Brodzky, I discovered, had been the editor of Arts Canada for fifteen years. She was generous in her encouragement about my own efforts with works & conversations; there were certain artists she was sure I’d want to meet, Leigh Hyams among them, and a big exhibit of Leigh’s recent paintings was soon to be featured there. Having seen the exhibit and also having heard a talk Hyams gave at the gallery, I asked if she’d be willing to talk with me. Hyams agreed, but couldn’t meet with me until she returned from a workshop she was giving at Esalen.
So there I was, a bit early in fact, for the meeting we’d agreed to. It was quiet and no one was in sight. Peeking around a corner I saw Howard Munson, a book artist. He was waiting for Leigh also. He was on his way to Mexico the next day, he told me, and had offered to carry some of Leigh’s work with him down to San Miguel de Allende where Hyams now lives. We were talking when suddenly Leigh’s head appeared as she climbed the stairs up to the gallery. Soon Anne appeared. Smiles and greetings all around. Hyam’s hair showed signs of the gusty breezes which play through the corridors of buildings surrounding Union Square.
While everyone took a few minutes to relax, I went looking for the best place to set up some chairs for the interview. The light in the north gallery looked good where a bank of windows takes up almost an entire wall flooding the room with a soft even light.
A few minutes later Anne came in with two glasses of water. “The light’s really good in here,” she remarked. As Leigh and I sat down, I knew talking with her was going to be a real pleasure.—RW
• • • • • • • • •
Richard Whittaker: As a start, I thought I’d ask you about Esalen, since you’ve just returned from there. Tell me a little about that.
Leigh Hyams: I’ve been teaching there for eleven years, painting workshops, at least once a year, usually twice a year. I’m good at teaching, and participants come from all over the states and all over the world, people with a mix of experience. I’ve gradually built up a following over the years and it keeps getting better and better. The last two years I’ve been able to start teaching master classes, and that pleases me.
RW: How did you get connected with Esalen?
LH: Someone recommended me who knew me and the type of teaching I do, so they tried me out and I’ve been going ever since.
RW: I didn’t know they had an art program down there.
LH: It’s more of an arts and crafts program, sort of a community center approach, which is not mine. I’m very serious about teaching, so I attract a different kind of student, a different kind of participant.
RW: Tell me a little more about that, that you’re serious about teaching.
LH: Well, I’m a serious painter and I try to teach with honesty; I have to. Anyone has to work from that place in themselves if they’re trying to make really worthy paintings. But the phrase “teaching art” makes me uncomfortable. I teach people how to learn to make art, and I’ve been teaching so long that I’m able to release people, no matter how fearful they are—and adult beginners are always fearful.
RW: That’s a gift. That’s overcoming a lot, that inner concern and anxiety.
LH: It’s a useful gift. I’ve done a lot of university teaching—design, color, drawing, painting, composition, etcetera. But I can pass through all that and, in a week, they’re off and flying. They need to experience the excitement and complication of actually making a painting first, without technique demonstrations or much explanation in words. When they’ve done this (usually to their surprise), they’re eager to start learning what visual language, perception, etc. really mean.
RW: That word “serious” is intriguing. Can you open that up a little more?
LH: Well this week, in the master class, they told me that the mantra for the week was “paint or die!”
RW: Paint or die. Would you say more?
LH: I suppose it comes from this: “Painting is more serious than death.” I say that sometimes just to sober up people. I remember writing somewhere “that art took me over before life did.”
RW: “Painting is more serious than death.” That’s a pretty provocative statement.
LH: For a lot of us, when you get right down to it, it seems that way. Maybe when you’re closer to dying, you won’t think so, but for most of us, not being involved in the whole arena of the creative arts would be a kind of death.
RW: For a minority of people, like you, the need to engage in this is so compelling that it has persisted in their lives, but for most people, that need gets suppressed beneath so many layers of things. Do you feel, from your experience, that this need, even when it’s buried, that this need exists pretty much for everybody?
LH: Absolutely. That’s what’s meant when I say I “release” people. They come to me when they’ve denied it for twenty years and there’s a hole inside themselves they don’t understand, but they know it’s there. They’re desperate enough that they sign up even though they’re terrified. But with their first painting, the creative energy that’s been dammed up for years begins flowing again. I’ve worked with people from Iceland to Greece, from the Arctic to Brazil—with Athabaskan school children, adults in a hospital for the mentally ill, elderly people who’ve never made a drawing—not to mention professional artists. Creativity is there in everyone. We only have to use it, but it’s almost forgotten in our culture as something meaningless.
RW: An artist friend of mine, Jane Rosen, talks about how in grade school a kid draws an apple, let’s say, and the teacher comes over and says, “No, Susie, an apple doesn’t look like that.”
LH: I hear that story constantly. I used to do a lot of work with young children. They have no walls inside themselves. They need only materials to work with and a wholehearted appreciation of whatever it is. One woman told me she was eight years old and did this huge, beautiful drawing of an angel. She said, “I was so proud of it I took it to show my mother and she said, ‘Angels don’t have breasts.’ ” After that the woman didn’t draw for years and years. But she told me, “Now I’m a writer and just published my first book. Guess what the title is?”
RW: “Angels Have Breasts.”
LH: That’s right [laughs]. There are deceptively small points that twist people’s lives.
RW: Yes. What do you think about such things in relation to the art world? I mean does this raise any questions for you?
LH: Only in the sense that you don’t need that kind of validation. Validation by the “art world” can be gratifying, but it’s irrelevant. Exhibiting, marketing, money, fame—they’re fine, but they aren’t art. Validity is in the work, in the process of making art. I mean, I love to paint, obviously.
It’s what the paintings do to you, but the enticements of money and fame certainly have the power to twist artists’ lives. It’s difficult to stay balanced.
RW: I just heard an artist speak at the Oakland Museum, Enrique Martínez Celaya.
LH: Did you really? I’d love to have heard him.
RW: When he speaks about painting, he also talks about ethics. He’s one of the very few artists I’ve heard who put the two together—explicitly anyway.
LH: It seems obvious to me. The ethical part. You have to work from that. If you are working from a clean true need to paint, there’s a kind of focus that forces you to be honest. We think we’re making the paintings, but the paintings are also making us.
RW: I find it encouraging when I hear this spoken of, which I don’t very often. That seems not to be easily found in the art world today.
LH: Well, look at the art. The paintings don’t lie. It’s all there, if you can read it, and it’s not very interesting.
RW: Here’s a word I bring up very cautiously: metaphysics. I only mean to indicate matters of depth. Can we talk about such things in art today? Something universal? The hidden life of being, say? Such things seem to be off-limits in today’s discourse.
LH: How long is this going to last? It’s ridiculous.
RW: You’re aware of this issue, so to speak?
LH: Oh, of course! I was in Manhattan last summer and walked through the much-touted galleries in Chelsea and I couldn’t feel anything except market and hype, and there’s not a lot of nutrition in art magazines either these days. It’s not fashionable.
RW: Some friends were talking with me last night. They’d gone to the Kiki Smith and Chuck Close exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art here. The artists had been interviewed. My friends told me that the interviews never got below the surface. No nutrition, as you say.
LH: It’s a loss. Not long ago there was a Philip Guston retrospective here. It was a really interesting show and I went to a talk the curator gave. He said, “I put this show together for painters, for artists.” And I said from the back row, “We THANK you!” There’s not much in museums today to feed a working painter either.
RW: Yes. I have trouble understanding this. But I want to go back to the question of how art is taught to kids. It seems that the popular idea is that there has to be a likeness, or it isn’t any good. So, in other words, there’s a lot that’s being missed.
LH: Yes. You can do paintings that have a likeness, that are realistic. Take Vermeer. There’s a lot of wonderful realistic painting out there that also has soul and some spiritual content, some connection with human life and feelings. But most of this stuff, it’s either clever or fashionable or interesting in other ways, or just plain skill, period.
I have a lot of skill, too, but it’s not enough. With any artist who has worked many, many years, you build up it up whether you planned to or not. It goes with the territory, and there are a lot of artists, it seems to me, who stop there. Many of them are acclaimed. But there are many people, like me, for whom that isn’t enough. It’s a waste of my life if I use only my skill.
RW: So let’s take a particular painting. Say, the painting that’s behind you right now. Okay. There’s a certain degree of likeness of the blossom, but you could have painted something with far more of a likeness.
LH: Easily!
RW: So what happens in there? In that search between the blossom in front of you and this inner process of painting?
LH: Well, these are flower images. I’m at the point where they’re just a vehicle for this almost untranslatable thing I’m trying to find. I could make them very realistic flowers, but that would be meaningless to me, and to any sensitive viewer; they’d just be flowers. So I have to watch my own facility. I have to make that painting say something. But it isn’t that articulated as I’m painting. So I keep at it, keep at it, keep at it.
It’s got to be a little odd or strange, an opening to some kind of recognition of the incredible fact of being alive. I use the words “life force” a lot. For me, that’s what these paintings are really about. I hope they’re challenging to some viewers, maybe bringing them back to the fact that it’s a miracle to breathe, to be here.
RW: Words don’t take us too far down that road.
LH: No. That’s why some of us have to paint.
RW: I was thinking about the particular, the specific thing. There’s the word “flower”—that stands for any flower. Take “blue flower”—that rules out lots of flowers, but you still have any blue flower. A “blue flower with four petals.” Well, you’re getting closer, but the specific flower itself is uniquely, exactly, specifically what it is. It stands in a non-language reality, I’d say. Does this make sense?
LH: Completely.
RW: So when you get to that, you begin to realize there’s something which lies outside of these words.
LH: That’s what I’m trying to touch in these paintings.
RW: Art can show us something sometimes there, that words can’t. Words, I’d say, are often a vehicle for a kind of sleepwalking.
LH: Tell some hot writer that. [laughs]
RW: But they have the same problem in a way, don’t they? How to find the words that help me wake up for a moment. It’s so difficult.
LH: And that’s the challenge. Artists’ lives revolve around this search. Plus, it’s so interesting. You learn this and then you think “My God, look what’s over there now!” It’s endless.
RW: Well, I thought I’d ask you about color. Could you talk a little about color?
LH: I was a guest artist for two summers at sculptor George Rickey’s Hand Hollow Foundation in upper New York State. He invited six artists from Germany and six from U.S. to live and work together there. He came into my studio one day, looked at my paintings and said, “Oh, you’re a colorist!”—a startling remark, as it had never occurred to me before. After that, of course, my interest in color deepened and it’s now a major part of my thinking as an artist. And living in Mexico with their fearless attitude toward using color certainly influences me. I live in a house that’s blue with a yellow wall and next door there’s a rich red one with a lavender door. One’s perception of color is constantly challenged and delighted down there.
RW: What is it when you go into color?
LH: It’s such a turn-on when you’re actually applying the paint. See that painting behind you, the large red one? It made my mouth water when I was doing it. Imagine the sensual pleasure of sloshing around six feet of red paint with a big wet brush! Then there’s the surprise of watching it change by itself when adding that tiny blue flower shape next to it, then deciding one section had to be wiped and a shot of orange added in the corner to see what would happen next.
RW: The color itself, how does it enter me?
LH: It can be a total body response, depending on your sensitivity and openness. Color can enter through the eyes, through touch, through your skin; sometimes you can hear color in a painting and, for some people, colors have fragrance. But your preconceptions can block your full experience of the color.
RW: Sometimes I have a moment where I think: “Color. Isn’t it mysterious that it does this!” It does this red, or “the yellow does this yellowing” as Nathan Oliveira said when I was asking him the same question. It’s mysterious.
LH: Endlessly mysterious.
RW: There are conditions in color that affect one…
LH: …Our perception of color constantly expands and contracts.
RW: You can say, “red” or “blue,” but for each word, there are entire worlds of almost infinite variations. You could have a blue, but you could have another blue that’s just something else!
LH: I feel that all of the time. There’s also the excitement of how color moves in space, on a canvas. I’m really interested in manipulation of space through color, through value. How can I pull this dark area forward? Make this area stay flat next to that big gushy one with all the texture? Sometimes it feels like I’m working with moist clay—physically pushing one area back and pulling another one up. It’s very tactile, almost a sculptural thing for me. And it changes so much. A dot can be right in your face, or it can be fifty miles back, depending on the relationships in the painting. If you can use visual language sensitively and well and then go beyond it—that’s a very rich thing to do with your life.
RW: There are so many people out there calling themselves artists, who have hopes and ambitions and who will never get anywhere in “the art world.” So are there other ways for artists to keep this art process alive, their own relationship with it, without that imprimatur?
LH: I work with people like that all of the time. These are adults who, most of them, have successful professional lives in other areas, but they’re completely serious about painting. In my workshops and critiques they re-validate themselves and others in the group—not in any competitive sense—because they’re concerned with making art, not “making it” in the art world. Some of them have galleries, but it’s not emphasized. They’ve gotten beyond measuring themselves as artists by the market, and that’s a big thing.
RW: Very big!
LH: And that’s why a large percentage of their paintings are real. It’s getting your head adjusted. Why are you painting? What does the market mean in the large scheme of things? It can be fine as far as it goes, unless it infects you and you lose your reason for painting in the first place—which can happen.
RW: Now you said something in your gallery talk about “artists are people keeping the world alive.”
LH: I believe that. Actively using the creative parts of ourselves in any of the arts affects our value structures, our attitudes towards living a life of integrity. Even with all our tics and wrong choices we’re still, in a sense, spots of purity in the world and we affect people and situations around us. I can’t imagine a genuine artist dropping a bomb anywhere.
RW: So those who are able to engage in this authentic search in art sometimes find these moments of meaning; and those moments of meaning, they’re like moments of health in the world.
LH: That’s the right way to say it.
RW: If you have a real moment of meaning, you don’t have to get extra thousands of dollars or twist someone’s arm or do these other things which one often is persuaded are necessary in order to feel good about oneself.
LH: You can see through those things. They don’t have power over you anymore.
RW: It’s hard to get to a moment of that kind of meaning, wouldn’t you agree?
LH: Yes, because those attitudes aren’t recognized or validated by our culture nor addressed by our faulty educational system.
RW: You travel a lot and meet people. What do you find in different cultures about this relationship to art making?
LH: Mexico, especially in the Bahio where I live, the tradition of making things is very much alive though it’s not spoken of as Art. Embroidery, wrought iron, weaving, painting, making books and puppets and fireworks, ceramics, stone carving, furniture, tinwork—a large percentage of people make things with their hands every day. In the markets, papayas, mangos, watermelons are carved into interesting shapes by the vendors, and cheeses, vegetables, toys, plastic buckets etc. are always inventively arranged. It’s part of everyday life. For Brazilians, music, dance and the many arts that go into Carnival are a focus for art making. Both countries, of course, also have rich histories in architecture and the “fine arts” and have excellent contemporary artists. Brazil, particularly.
These days, when I teach in any country or culture, the work is usually with adults who are on some inarticulate level searching for something beyond words that has meaning in their lives. Experienced artists want help from an outside person in deepening their work.
RW: How do you find these people?
LH: They find me now. It’s very nice. [laughs] I get wonderful invitations from all over the world. I’m in that enviable situation where art is part of the lives of most everyone I know.
RW: You must feel very fortunate.
LH: I do, all of the time.
RW: Somehow I got this new thought about scale in relation to art. Like for some new building projects there’s a requirement that two percent of the budget be allocated for art. That would be a 2% art scale, sort of like near beer. But I just interviewed the Berkeley artist and gardener Marcia Donahue at the Berkeley Art Center, and if you go to Marcia’s house and garden you’ll have the experience of the other end of that art scale, pretty much a 100% ratio.
LH: How terrific.
RW: So I was wondering about what would be good? What’s better? Marcia says that sometimes she literally has to give people a wet towel. That 100% ratio is pretty hard for some people, newcomers. But mostly everyone goes away from Marcia’s garden just inspired. They feel, “Now I have permission.”
LH: Yes! Permission. That’s a good word. That’s the way I teach. I remove the fear, and the permission comes.
RW: You told a story of how at about the age of seven you knew you were going to be an artist. And you had this friend. Would you tell that story again?
LH: You know how you have small snapshots in your mind that you remember all your life? This is one of my early ones. I was sitting on the steps in grandmother’s house with my cousin Virginia. I still see the sunlight on the wooden floor. We were talking about what we’d do when we grew up. I said I was going to be an artist and she said she’d be a nurse to the lepers in Africa. The year I had my first solo museum show I discovered she had just opened a hospital for lepers in the Belgian Congo.
RW: This is quite interesting, this knowing. I hear this same story now and again.
LH: I can’t explain it. As a child I was always drawing. I can remember when my girlfriends were playing paper dolls, I was the dress designer with an imaginary studio on the floor in the corner of the room. Sitting through church services I drew the choir as singing rabbits. Drawing, drawing. My parents weren’t artists, but they were always supportive and interested.
RW: You taught for years, I think you mentioned at San Jose State.
LH: San Jose State, San Francisco State, University of California, Berkeley extension and John F. Kennedy University. And I’ve done a lot of teaching in museums. I was a single parent much of my life and supported myself and children with jobs always involved in art, much of it teaching which, fortunately, I’ve always enjoyed.
RW: How did you meet Anne Brodzky?
LH: I set up the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California and was its first director. Carl Djerassi gave me a credit card and said “Make me an artists’ colony.” I was there for three years and look on it now as my “Djerassi Piece.” During that period I was able to choose the visiting artists and invited Anne to come. She had been editor of Arts Canada magazine for sixteen years.
RW: I’m very impressed with what she’s doing at Meridian Gallery.
LH: That’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed here with the gallery for so long. I really like the idea of their intern program. Some of these young people will be qualified for careers in the art world eventually, but all of them are getting a good education in the arts here and they’ll be different human beings.
RW: How long have you been living in Mexico now?
LH: I moved there permanently three years ago. I had a loft in inner-city San Francisco for twenty years, overlooking a traffic intersection in the Mission. Now I live in a quiet neighborhood with a fountain and a walled garden full of bougainvillea in a town where there’s no continual feeling of the possibility of violence, which I think we have in most cities in our country. It’s not there. Then there’s not the constant commercialness you’re hit with here: buy, buy, buy. We don’t realize how much we’re being assaulted in our culture. In Mexico there’s more time, more beauty and I find more space inside myself to work and to enjoy the richness of everyday life. We have a lot to learn from the Mexicans.
RW: I just remembered the wonderful little port-folio of drawings you did of the Goddess figures, so-called. It reminds me how there are carvings and sculptures and paintings, which over the centuries and even millennia still speak to us. These must have been an example of that.
LH: I had a Fulbright in the mid-Eighties and spent it drawing in museums in the Mediterranean. Tiny stone and ceramic figures of women in obscure regional museums were always labeled Goddesses or Fertility figures, as if women themselves didn’t exist in those days. But the carvings themselves still speak through the years; you are right.
I think of myself and other artists as the current growing edge of a 30,000-year body of people who made those carvings, the drawings in the caves, the Benin bronzes, Pompeii murals, sumi paintings, Rembrandt, Picasso, Grandma Moses. The artists before us were helping to keep the world alive as working artists are today. We just happen to be occupying the universe at this moment. It’s humbling. It gives me courage and pleasure, and some perspective.
• • • • • • • • •
Painter Philip Guston used to say “Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.” That’s true, but not quite true, because satisfaction can be downright dangerous to a working artist. Glorious moments of ecstatic joy are permissable from time to time. Momentary relief comes in flashes of ‘knowing’ that this time your painting ‘works’—flashes that come with anxious pride and quiet joy but strands of doubt always linger under the surface. The pleasure seldom lasts overnight and by the next morning Dissatisfaction is operational again.
It’s really what keeps us going all our working lives, though. Each painting we make teaches us more about painting and more about what we DON’T know about painting. And this is lucky because facility for artists is a trap. Unless we take chances we die in art. Facility comes with the territory, whether we want it or not if we work hard enough and long enough, but it can get in the way of being truly creative.
Attitude is everything. We have to put away our half-baked ideas about what is acceptable, forget our previous experience or lack of it. Curiosity and fearlessness are the essential ingredients, plus a willingness to Do The Work—not just study it or talk about it. We must give ourselves permission to fly with paint, to work freely, openly, dangerously, to follow our hunches, act on irrational thoughts. And also to take time for quiet critical study of what we are doing. We become more adventurous and, at the same time, more discriminating, able to discern areas in our paintings that need clarification, color or shape changes in sections (usually background areas) where our attention wavered, where we were not wholly present.
Occasionally we paint beyond our understanding and work comes out of us that’s different from anything we’ve done before. It may or may not be opening a door to a new way of working, but we must not automatically ‘judge’ it with the same set of parameters we’ve been using until then. Note its strangeness, its unfamiliarity and see what’s there to learn from it. We have to trust the creative process, knowing that with each drawing or painting we make with our whole hearts, our understanding of the richness and profundity of visual languge—non verbal language—will deepen.
Enrique Martinez Celaya says “The meaning of art is embodied in the way it is made. It must pass your test of authenticity, of being real. There must be nothing that looks false in a painting. The difference between a good painting and a bad painting is that level of conviction which a painter can bring to a canvas.” It’s easy to drip or scribble or get a painting of a watermelon to look like a watermelon, but it’s really hard to do it in a way that means anything.
It’s impossible, of course, to make a drawing or a painting without using visual language—space, color, line, texture and value—but it is the rightess of their relationships on the canvas that makes a work of art in any era, any style or media successful, that gives the images involved the strength to move us.
Many people, however, while studying a painting are only decoding the symbolism of the images, experiencing nostalgia, or personal memories and associations, unaware of the passion and complexity of the visual language which forms the painting. There are museum visitors who look for ten seconds at Rembrandt’s portrait of himself as an old man and think “That looks like my grandfather”, and then pass on to the next painting on the wall. They are telling themselves stories, experiencing memories, nostalgia, not experiencing art—non language reality.
If you genuinely, deeply look at a real flower the reality of it is a non-language reality. It is simply, uniquely what it is, and can’t be described in any language. When a botanist tells us the species it belongs to that’s not the flower, it’s only information.
The large flower images in my paintings are not flowers. They are paintings. They exist as works of art but they are also a vehicle that can point beyond art work. It’s true that some of the shapes can be named—that’s the stem, there’s the stamen—but if you are open and keep looking at the images themselves, words stop having any meaning.
A painting of worth is far more than a surface to be seen on a wall. (Think about that Rembrandt.) It deals with another kind of reality. The true experience of a painting can’t be represented. It’s not visible in the painting itself, yet it is there. It’s FELT. The experience itself exists somewhere in the space between the canvas and ourselves. It doesn’t take place on the canvas. It becomes visible only when we understand that it’s not there on the canvas. Once I saw a man staring at one of my paintings on a museum wall. He didn’t move when I came up to him but said, with his eyes still on the canvas, “Will that painting ever let me go?”
Artists make drawings and paintings and they make us. If we are working from a clean true need to paint, not trying to get rich and famous or get into the Museum of Modern Art, there’s a kind of focus in the process that forces us to be honest. Drawing, for instance can sear you, strip away everything that’s not essential to you. The process changes us, affects choices we make in the way we live our lives, makes us try to live with the same excitement, awareness and integrity our work demands.
But week after week, year after year, many of the images on canvas or paper which carried our passion, skill and sensitivity when we made them, eventually lose much of their personal significance for us. The power they held during the making has transferred itself into us, has become part of who we are as artists and human beings. But the power itself remains intact in the paintings, the good ones, and can enter and affect attentive viewers for centuries after they are made. Consider the frescoes at Pompei, the cave paintings at Lescaux, Mayan murals at Bonampak, canvasses by Agnes Martin, Anselm Keifer, Picasso—not to mention the Benin bronzes, the Elgin Marbles, Mancha Pichu, the Unicorn tapestries, and centuries of vital art-making from the entire continent of Africa.
The Celtic people in northern Scotland and Ireland believed, and probably still believe, that there is an exact moment each day when twilight ends and night begins when there is an opening between the worlds for a split second that one can slip through and enter the “other” world. Many artists search for a way to create this kind of opening in their work—an entrance that viewers can slip through into a non-verbal private internal experience, a jolt of awareness that wakes them up, takes them out of an everyday state of being, a reminder, perhaps, that right now they are actually breathing and alive and part of an immense mysterious universe.
It takes courage, fiece honesty and a little madness for artists to make paintings that are alive and meaningful irrespective of subject matter, style or media. And irrespective of the commercial art world—the lure of money and fame. A life in art is a journey not a destination, and painting, far from being a commodity, is a necessity of life.
• • • • • • • • •
Sometimes brushes get between me and the painting. In a frustrated moment I abandon them and swoop into the work with bare hands and arms and elbows in order to get closer, to be physically connected with the canvas. In less desperate moments the paint gets applied with Q-Tips, popsicle sticks, toilet paper, mops, towels, rags, bones, sticks, brooms, shoes—it doesn’t matter. What matters is painting.
The same wild attitude is essential while drawing. All of the above are useful plus stick-and-ink and flower petals. Red hibiscus blossoms rubbed on canvas immediately turn blue.
“Paint” can be any kind of color from an art store, paint shop, hardware store, a kitchen, cosmetic bag or first aid kit. There is turmeric, mercurochrome, canned beets and tar. Coffee, tea, cranberry sauce, wine, catsup, iodine, ink from squids. Not to mention goat pellets and llama dung. In Africa I drew with giraffe shit. And there are all those shades of dirt, ashes, and burnt firewood.
Once while teaching a drawing workshop on Mallorca I gave each class member a large enticing piece of white rag paper, a stick of charcoal, a ripe fig and no instruction. They sat there puzzled for only a moment. The drawings were fabulous. Imagine the turn-on and the fun of smashing a ripe fig onto virgin white paper with your fist. No artist could resist picking up the charcoal after starting with the mark of a smashed fig.
When solvent, I buy and use top quality art supplies, but never assume they are essential for making meaningful art. I educate myself on the quality range of materials available—get free catalogues from art suppliers or study them on line—and then buy a lot of whatever I can afford. If there are fifty sheets of paper in the studio any artist will work with more freedom than if there are three.
Occasionally using inexpensive and possibly ephemeral art material frees my creative spirit and prevents the wall of preciousness from developing around my work. Drawings and paintings of great quality can come from this. They can also come while using top quality materials. Mediocre work can be made with anything. The point is simply to ‘go into the studio and make stuff’ no matter what.
• • • • • • • • •
GUIDE TO A GOOD DRAWING and PAINTING CRITIQUE
Leigh HyamsThe group understands and agrees that you are there to learn from each other and each other’s work. You do not learn from a“Show and Tell” attitude, nor do you hesitate to give your honest opinion because you might hurt someone’s feelings. Don’t “take care” of each other. You are serious working artists trying to become better artists, period.
Any number of artists can be in a crit group though 8 or 10 are usually the maximum because of time and space constraints. A leader is not essential.
MECHANICS
Choose a definite time and place to meet regularly—twice a month? Once a month make an agreement to stick to the arrangement for a six-month trial period to start. If your house burns down and you can’t come to a meeting, you are responsible for finding a (suitable) substitute artist to take your place for that session. Keep the group together and firmly committed for the six months, no matter what.
Always start on time and skip the coffee and cookies. Think like serious artists right from the start. It’s friendly and informal but it is a working session and you are there to learn from each other and each other’s work.
A two-hour session is usually best. Divide the number of members into 120 minutes so people are assured equal time for discussion of their work. (i.e. ten members= twelve minutes each). Appoint a timekeeper or use a simple kitchen timer as a reminder.
Use as much of your personal time period as you choose—showing and discussing with the group your old or new work, unfinished work, and/or discuss studio, galleries, museums or art material problems. If you feel you have no work to bring in, come anyway. NO excuses. You will be nourished and validated as an artist just by being there.
PROCEDURE
Whomever wants to begin places work in front of the group—on the wall or leaning against it depending on the facility. Pay attention to placement. Leave enough space between each piece, be sure they’re not crooked, etc. so they’re presented respectfully and well for discussion.
It’s important for each group member to verbally express his or her opinion. The learning goes deeper that way. Complete honesty is necessary and everyone’s opinion is valid. An opinion is an opinion, nothing else. If they contradict each other, great! Further conversation about the differences is usually stimulating and informative.
Remind yourselves periodically that you are discussing the specific work itself, not the character of the artist who made it. If there are negative comments about your work, listen to them openly, ask questions of the speaker to clarify things if you want, think about them. You may find the comments helpful or a pain in the neck, or they may give you a wonderful new idea. Comments are opinions to listen to and consider. You are not obliged to act on them.
DISCUSSION PARAMETERS
When an artist places work in front of the group, take a quiet moment to “enter” it. Let your eyes travel around individual paintings and be aware that the rest of your body is also sensing, perceiving and experiencing the work.
One way to start is to say “How does this painting make you feel?” “It makes me feel excited/boredhappyconfused/apprehensive”. Then discuss what it is in the painting itself (excluding any subject matter depicted) that causes you to have that particular feeling. Is it the artist’s choice of color? Turbulent brush strokes? etc.
Don’t “read” a painting like a book, don’t “de-code” the images presented and tell the group what they remind you of. Explanations or stories in words that the subject matter reminds you of may be interesting in themselves but they are irrelevant in a critique. We are only concerned with the actual painting itself, the VISUAL language in which it is speaking—how the artist is handling the relationship of color, line and space, its movement on the 2 dimensional ground, its rhythms, texture, line quality, and how they relate to the expressiveness of the images being painted.
If your attention is drawn to a certain area that doesn’t feel resolved, say to the group “That orange spot in the lower right bothers me”. Ask the person to state WHY it bothers them. “I don’t like the color..” What color would you suggest? Where would you put it?
Pay particular attention to the relationship of shapes, their values (darkness or lightness), to color qualities (intense, dull, transparent, opaque) and to their emotional power. Note how color moves in a painting, and how it has been applied to the paper or canvas. Is the “skin” of the painting interesting or is it all the same? Is it thick? thin layers? applied with the same density and the same brush strokes? same rhythm? Is more texture needed? Did the artist use a single brush for the entire painting? Does it need more variation? Does the canvas breathe?
And always notice how different elements in the painting appear to exist on different spacial planes, how space moves in and out, and across the picture plane. Discuss how the artist made that happen on a flat piece of paper or canvas. Does the painting have deep space, shallow space? Is it flat, dead and unmoving? If so, what could be done about it? And always, is the passion and committment of the artist sustained throughout the painting?
SUMMARY
Whatever comments are made about individual works, positive or negative, try to state your opinion fearlessly and clearly, and then explain what it is in the painting that makes you feel that way. Make suggestions for change if you have some. Comment on what you like as well as dislike about individual works and again, explain WHY. Don’t hesitate to make suggestions for future work an individual artist could pursue but don’t take it personally if the artist doesn’t do it.
Realize that you are learning a new language and know that each critique you take part in is educating you, sharpening your perception, and opening new possibilities to explore in your work. It’s a facinating ongoing process and as your understanding of visual language deepens, you deepen as an artist and so does your work.
• • • • • • • • •
"How Painting Holds Me on the Earth": La Serrania Odysseys
"Some Talk About Making Art": La Serrania Odysseys
"MAKING MARKS - On the Excitement and Importance of Making Art"
This 32-minute video based on the teaching techniques and philosophy of artist Leigh Hyams, gives viewers the confidence to express themselves more freely. Teachers, corporate executives, veterinarians, homemakers, electricians, artists and scientists all speak of discovering new aspects of themselves and the world around them, and the way the process of painting changes, expands and enriches their lives. The video can stand alone as the center of a presentation or be integrated into other events enhancing workshops or supplementing on-going programs. It also acts as companion and support for working artists anywhere.Available in VHS or DVD contact: Jed Handler
DOG RUG PORTRAIT 2003
44" x 43" Drawing by Leigh
handwoven in 100 o/o wool
by Mexican weaver Margarto Jimenez Moncada
