I currently have work in a show in downtown Chicago called What Those Who Teach Can Do, it is through the Illinois Institute of Art. I went to the reception with my friend and fellow art teacher/artist Kathy Parenti.
 |
| At the reception with "Lyon, France: Birthplace of Antone de Saint-Exupéry." |
 |
| At the reception with "Free to Love" |
 |
At the reception with Kathy, her painting of her grandmother is on the right.
|
At the show, Kathy spoke beautifully about her work, and the way that her grandmother slowly reversed her memory as she passed from Alzheimer's. She became a young Italian girl again, and was fortunate to remain very happy and optimistic throughout.
As I continue to read Proust, my favorite character has emerged as the grandmother. For herself, but also for what she allows others to see and feel. This is one of my favorite moments in the book:
“Alas, this phantom was just what I did see when, entering the drawing-room before my grandmother had been told of my return, I found her there, reading. I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence, and, like a woman whom one surprises at a piece of work which she will lay aside if anyone comes in, she had abandoned herself to a train of thoughts which she had never allowed to be visible by me. Of myself — thanks to that privilege which does not last but which one enjoys during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being a spectator, so to speak, of one’s own absence,— there was present only the witness, the observer, with a hat and travelling coat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that mechanically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us catches them in its vortex, flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. How, since into the forehead, the cheeks of my grandmother I had been accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities of her mind; how, since every casual glance is an act of necromancy, each face that we love a mirror of the past, how could I have failed to overlook what in her had become dulled and changed, seeing that in the most trivial spectacles of our daily life, our eye, charged with thought, neglects, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not assist the action of the play and retains only those that may help to make its purpose intelligible. But if, in place of our eye, it should be a purely material object, a photographic plate, that has watched the action, then what we shall see, in the courtyard of the Institute, for example, will be, instead of the dignified emergence of an Academician who is going to hail a cab, his staggering gait, his precautions to avoid tumbling upon his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he were drunk, or the ground frozen over. So is it when some casual sport of chance prevents our intelligent and pious affection from coming forward in time to hide from our eyes what they ought never to behold, when it is forestalled by our eyes, and they, arising first in the field and having it to themselves, set to work mechanically, like films, and shew us, in place of the loved friend who has long ago ceased to exist but whose death our affection has always hitherto kept concealed from us, the new person whom a hundred times daily that affection has clothed with a dear and cheating likeness. And, as a sick man who for long has not looked at his own reflexion, and has kept his memory of the face that he never sees refreshed from the ideal image of himself that he carries in his mind, recoils on catching sight in the glass, in the midst of an arid waste of cheek, of the sloping red structure of a nose as huge as one of the pyramids of Egypt, I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always at the same place in the past, through the transparent sheets of contiguous, overlapping memories, suddenly in our drawing-room which formed part of a new world, that of time, that in which dwell the strangers of whom we say “He’s begun to age a good deal,” for the first time and for a moment only, since she vanished at once, I saw, sitting on the sofa, beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and common, sick, lost in thought, following the lines of a book with eyes that seemed hardly sane, a dejected old woman whom I did not know.” ~Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, from The Guermantes Way.
I feel that this idea has been very true in my own life. I see people in the way that I feel about them and remember them, far more than I see them objectively. Especially for myself, sometimes I feel I have no idea how I look! (Like the heavyset person who doesn't realize it until they see a photo of themselves) I don't feel this about weight so much, as I sometimes wonder if I appear to be the person that I am. In my art as well: can other people who see it catch the same idea and feeling that I hope to inspire? I will never know what it is like to look at my own art. I will never know that because I slowly watched it being formed. I already know my intentions, and hopes for the viewer. It is an interesting thing to have one's art on display with no explanation, no knowledge of myself- just one work out of a series added to the mix. At the reception each artist took a moment to talk about their art, afterwards several people commented that it was so much more interesting after they heard the explanation. I think that's ok. A virgin read of the art, and then a more considered response.
In March I was a part of 'Writer's Week' at my school. I wrote a 15 minute speech with a powerpoint essentially about becoming a blogger, and how writing has helped me as an artist. Here is an excerpt about my favorite painting, it also needed an explanation before I realized how much I loved it.
" While writing my blog, I was thinking about
the story I had intended to tell for writer’s week. It was about my favorite painting: A painting of a large, orange square, with a
thin yellow rectangle underneath it. Are
you on the edge of your seat with that description??? Exactly.
If my favorite painting needs
a little explaining, my own art would probably benefit from a few words mixed
in as well.
You see, it’s a large orange square, but it is
also so much more. I grew up going to
The Art Institute of Chicago all the time.
My mother took me at least twice a year, and I walked past my favorite
painting, “Untitled,” by Mark Rothko, all 9 feet wide of it, without ever
noticing it at all. By the time I was 19
years old, sitting in the Modern art room of the Art Institute, I don’t think I
exaggerate by saying that I had likely been in the presence of this painting on
at least 40 different occasions. 40
times, I had seen it, without seeing. Eventually,
in 2002 I was a freshman at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I was on an in-museum field trip with my
second semester art history class. Quick
side note, did you know that the school existed first? They built that huge art museum in downtown
Chicago (With a train running though the middle of it) just for the art students.
They built it so that art students could
have the experience I was about to have.
Sitting, for the first time in my life, with my 15 classmates, and our
Teacher’s Assistant, I finally saw Rothko’s untitled painting. I heard about the intention of the
artist. He wanted to create a meditative
space for his viewer. It was not about
the color orange, or about geometric shapes.
The painting was about filling the viewer’s whole eye and only
that. At 9 feet wide I can see the whole
painting, and only the painting.
Throughout my 4 years as an art student, the bench in front of that
painting was my favorite place in the world.
Better than a beach, better than a restaurant, better than the study
trips I took to Florence Italy and Switzerland.
Rothko had tapped into something magical. To this day, I think that it is the best
place in the world to sit and think. It
is not just a square, there are drips, and fades, and transparent areas
everywhere; so many interesting places for my eyes to roam, and rest across it’s
81 square feet. The orange hovers
weightless over the yellow, they both float towards me as the peach background
hugs the wall. For me, it is the perfect
meditative space. One day as a junior, while sitting with my Rothko, a man with
two young children walked past. I
chuckled to myself as I heard him say to them, “Now some people debate if the
paintings in this room are really even art.”
I’ll have to teach those children one day, I thought -they will need to
learn to see too.
It
was only three years ago I began to paint.
When I started painting it was because I thought about my favorite art
to experience, and I wanted to create something that made people feel the way
that the Rothko made me feel.
However,
in the cold world of cyberspace, where viewers click through images a couple
seconds at a time, who would ever give my art the time it needed to be
understood? All paintings are so much
better in person, the scale, the texture; so much is lost when they are
photographed. I needed to find a way to
regain what was being lost, and the way to do that, I realized was with
words!" ~Writer's week speech, Heidi Parkes
