thinking I should explain some-through old other-journal entries

New eyes 5/22/2001
The tale of a weird, abstract artist (me) and how she got that way.
Once upon a time I did not like abstract art. It was Useless and irritating to me. My father is an artist and he painted in both realistic and abstract styles according to his mood. Growing up, I watched him paint or draw the most amazingly perfect and magically detailed renderings of nature, of the birds and animals I loved so much. I aspired to that magic with all my heart. Then he would go and make some strange rainbow shaped thing with texture and lines and set it up above the fireplace all happy and I would think, "Oh, daddy... You've lost your magic again...let's get back to birds and won't you show me how."

I practiced hard and I absolutely LIVED on the praise I would get in school when I wowed the elementary school art teacher (who I idolized of course) with my drawings and she would say those prized words: "Oh my gosh, Did you trace this from something?!" And I would shake my head, looking down, smiling so hard I thought I would burst.

In high school, I changed my focus from animals to people. I loved drawing portraits. And the amount of praise you got from capturing someone's likeness on paper was unparalleled! And if you made them look a little better than life? Instant friend. Imagine how I took to that, being myself so desperate to please and be liked. And there Is beauty in the pursuit to capture the essence of someone on paper. But I could not SEE anything else. By the end of high school, my portfolio consisted mostly of faces, many copied and modified from magazines, and some self-portraits. Looking for colleges I was considering one for fashion illustration and one for fine art.

But when I was offered a full scholarship to a small private college close to home I hardly hesitated. And never bothered to even apply anywhere else. I had been pretty sheltered and this seemed the perfect in between. My parents agreed to pay for room and board there since the tuition was covered. So I was away from home but close enough if MY GOD there was a FIRE or something!!!;)

At this college I was in for a bit of a shock. The art program was run by local artists who were definitely into their own styles. And it was all abstract. I was very frustrated because I wanted to hone my realism. I had pictured art school as being an intense TRAINING where you learned from the Old Masters and such. This was too loose and chaotic for me. The teachers were not interested in my hard-worked realism. They praised the guy next to me who seemed to carelessly throw paint around. I retreated into my own world, thinking, well fine, this is FREE but I'll teach myself, thank you.

continued next entry...

please read previous entry first-this is a continuation:)

New eyes, continued... 5/22/2001
.... So I decided to try to reproduce old master paintings in order to train myself. I still went to class, but I tried not to care what others thought of what I was doing. Secretly, I felt superior in both my new dedication and my Mission. And in class, I did try to understand what made these people tick, what they SAW in abstraction (the poor, misguided fools). It was a slow process for me.
Art history class was a boring exercise in the memorization of dry facts and dates.....until I suddenly came awake in the 20th Century Art History Class! I learned how each movement in art came to be...and how it was refuted uncomprehended by the masses at first...but then somehow carved itself into history. How each movement was showing a new perspective on Visualizing Life and Existence....teaching an awareness of how we SEE and relate to things as humans. Impressionism was 'pretty', but wow, to start to think about how our eyes READ our environment, processing all those different points of color which are really different wavelengths of light reflecting off an otherwise unreadable environment? My mind was blown. Cubism looked strange but was telling us that we also register what we don't see but KNOW about an object when we gaze at it....and that is built IN to our seeing...as in, from this perspective I see a square but I know that I am looking at a box and therefore I am UNABLE to look purely at a square. My mind and eyes are inseparable. Artists were trying to convey IDEAS through painting... Wake up call to little missy me. And I was suddenly very interested in these ideas because they were bringing a new depth to my everyday exerience.

With a new determination I went to the Museum of Modern Art. To the wing that always gave me the most trouble. MODERN MINIMALISM.....Ack! Previously I would walk so quickly though those rooms, with the question always screaming in my head: WHY on earth are these people famous? After all, there was nothing THERE! um, right?

This time I sat in front of a big white piece with a hazy vertical stripe running through it about 3/4 the way across, I think it was called Sound or at least that's what I remember. Anyway, I sat there and stared. I had seen people do this before and I presumed insanity. But I sat there thinking 'Sound' and looking....and looking...until suddenly everything went away and I was IN that painting...walking around in a milky white fog silence.....and I felt something palpable...over there...like a disturbance...a different vibration Presence over there...breaking through the space. It was Sound. It was that vertical band cutting through the space, cutting through the silence, cutting through my own daydream...

I don't know how much time passed before I was aware again of being in a museum with other people around me. But it didn't matter. I had just experienced something that gave me new eyes. As if there had always been a color that I was blind to and suddenly I saw it and saw how everything was tinged with it and had more depth,and how SOME things were ABSOLUTELY that color so I never even saw them before.

And then I thought about how incredible it was that someone had shown me something I thought was invisible: sound. Well, that would mean that it was possible to Show things like FEAR or Joy or confusion.....? That would mean that I could try to express the shape of what was INSIDE me, the color of my thoughts, and if everyone didn't get it, it was okay because one person might, and I got so much out of the process anyway- I was learning about myself, I was opening up. I started using found objects that I related to...This piece of rusted metal...this shape was me hiding...this color was how I remember it felt...I started doing what I did in my Diary in another way...expressing what I had trouble finding the words for...And it all steamrolled from there. When I graduated college I was absolutely in love with making art. It was pouring out of me, all that I had kept inside, all that I wanted to say to the world, I worked it out in wood and metal and paint and words and this object next to this object. And I started showing in galleries. And a lot of people would say, "Um, what the heck is THAT?" and then a woman or even a child sometimes would come up and say, " I feel like that sometimes. That painting over there. I feel inspired now." Or they'd ask me about it and the whole story would come tumbling forth as if a key was turned and something in the moment made me suddenly find the words. And I knew I had stumbled something true to myself and that would lead me forward into unchartered territory.