Notes

To black folk protesting, organizing, sharing, and surviving:

• Take a moment to pause and take care of yourself both physically and mentally. Address your wounds. You are human and are allowed to not be okay during times like this. This is traumatic and it is okay to take a break and take care of yourself.
• Allow yourself to feel. There is a stigma surrounding black and brown people that says we shouldn’t wear our hearts on our sleeves and our anger in our eyes. It comes from years of being told to “get over the past”. Don’t listen. Your anger is justified. Your frustration is justified. Your pain is justified. Allow yourself to process these emotions in a healthy way.
• Do not isolate yourself. Talk to friends and family. Talk to likeminded people. Surround yourself with as much love and positivity as you can.
• Take a moment of self-care. Take a walk. Drink water. Do your skincare/ hair routine. Watch your favorite movie. Read your favorite book. Create something beautiful.

To non-poc allies:

• Take the time to not only educate yourself but educate those around you. The internet is at your disposal. Use it.
• Be an active ally, even when the protests stop. Continue to volunteer, donate, sign petitions, spread awareness, vote, and protect black lives.
• Listen. Poc are hurting at the moment so listen to their stories.

A list of mental health resources:

• Therapy for Black Girls
• Therapy for Black Men
• Ethel’s Club
• Melanin & Mental Health
• Open Path Collective (lgbtq+ inclusive)
• Young Minds
• The Black, African and Asian Therapy Network (BAATN)
• Inclusive Therapists (lgbtq + inclusive)
• Samaratans
• Dive In Well
• Sista Afya
• Healhaus
• The Nap Ninistry
• Million Mile Secrets: ‘Airbnb while Black: How to avoid racism while traveling’ 

Sincerely,
Laura Morillo

Read our Editors’ Note on the Arts Community for Black Lives.

We at Painters on Paintings believe Black Lives Matter and fully support all those protesting and taking actions to demand a more just society. With all of you, we mourn George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Nina Pop, Tony McDade and the all-too-many black Americans whose lives have been taken at the hands of police who have been perpetrating or ignoring rampant brutality. These recent events are a continuation of systematic racism that has existed in this country since its founding. We believe that serious reform is needed to address the pervasive structural inequalities embedded in our social systems. As artists and editors, we recognize the importance of examining how this bias works in the art world and runs through the art historical canon. We look forward to celebrating, in this journal, the powerful work and writing of POC and other artists lending their voices to this movement.

We wanted to share some excellent resources for organizing, taking healing actions, and amplifying the conversation about racism in America compiled by Black Lives Matter:
https://blacklivesmatter.com/resources/

Please consider signing this open letter from Arts and Cultural Workers of NYC “demanding the defunding of the police and investment in BIPOC communities:” https://artsworkersforblacklives.com/

We are continuing our Alone Together series and look forward to sharing the voices of artists who are participating in this call for radical change and speaking to the role art is playing during this extraordinary time in people’s hearts and on the streets. Let us know if you have something to share.

In Solidarity,
Painters on Paintings

Dear Readers,

Greetings from my separate studio to yours.

A note about what this next chapter will look like for Painters on Paintings: we are starting an Art in Isolation series. We are asking for your thoughts on art that is helping you through this time and also how your own practice is shifting. If you are interested in writing for us, please send an email.

[NB: We renamed this series Alone Together in light of the community building, protests, and actions to support Black Lives that are happening coexistent with quarantine.]

*  *. *

I’ll start with some words about my last few months. I’ve spent them with artist friends upstate. As a single person, I’ve had the rare opportunity to live with three of the closest women in my life and their partners, closed off from the rest of the world, turned in towards each other.

My days have been strung through with gratitude. Not the kind that sits in the drawer collecting dust next to the ball of ennui, but the bright, county-fair-at-night gratitude, that shoots fireworks up my spine and waterworks down my cheeks at the smallest things.

There was an evening not that long ago (March 11^th, says my calendar), when Julie and I (your co-editors) were standing among Kyle Staver’s comic, monumental figures in the Zurcher Gallery in the Lower East Side. I drove us there on empty streets. It was a room full of friends — our particular multigenerational painter community prone to unhip dance parties and general silliness. But the dj was sent home. We knocked elbows timidly and stole glances at each other over small glasses of white wine. Distance had sprouted up between us. We were already on the other side of something.

A few days later, an email informed me that Pratt classes would not resume in person this semester. I thought about this for a minute and then called Julie. “Mind if I move in with you?” I took the next day to pack my Subaru with a month’s worth of groceries and the essential art supplies – the ones that make the cut for residencies. I left the sculpey, the fish tanks, the half-renovated dollhouse and drove north.

I took the familiar route to Woodstock, to Julie’s home, which she has opened to me more times than I can count. Woodstock was a welcome sight – familiar from my time with her as well as a long stint at the Byrdcliffe Artist Colony. So, although the sidewalks were empty, each turn in the road was populated by a lively memory – teetering cones of Nancy’s vegan ice-cream, a surreptitious kiss behind Byrdcliffe’s pottery barn, the flailing bodies of the full moon drum circle, the bright bell of the door at Catskill Art and Office Supply. I paid the latter a visit on one of its last days and bought their entire stock of primed and unprimed canvas.

Even though I had oils and those endless virgin scrolls, I found myself working small. I gravitated to my friend’s 3-inch watercolor kit and a couple of half-dried gouache tubes and began making little drawings and washy sketch-paintings of the people I was with and the spaces I was in. What I didn’t sketch, I wrote down, in long fractured Word documents, documents which spawned other, longer, more fractured Word documents. I noticed I was collecting intimate moments and the memories of intimacy they recalled. I was an old lady collecting sea glass. If it was shiny, I picked it up.

My paintings are usually fanciful. They deal, not in flights of fancy, but in amalgams, imagined futures, chimera structures, and spliced landscapes. Some are warnings, some contingency plans. Most are spaces that have undergone some trauma and are in the process of rebuilding. I teach a class on world building at Pratt, with unit on utopian/dystopian literature and art as well as the apocalyptic and what comes after. I’ve been a devout reader of speculative fiction since before it was cool and dream about natural or manmade earth-altering disasters weekly. It’s in my bones, a child of ecologists who heard the canary call early. I shuffle and reorder destruction as a way of bearing witness to the real ills of the world and how they are doled out constantly and unjustly.

But now my hyperactive “what if” asking has slowed and my hand is gravitating more to the here and now. Julie too, who I consider a master of the imaginary, has been working on a longform piece of non-fiction. I won’t say more because that is her story to tell. But it makes me wonder, who else has turned to record keeping?

After a chapter at Julie’s, I drove to an artist friend’s house perched in the chilly foothills of the Catskills. As soon as I had set my last of fourteen grocery bags down, she announced that she was pregnant. We spent the next few weeks charting the changes in her body with awe. I sketched her napping, which she did quite often, and taking baths, which she did when she wasn’t napping. I liked mapping the swell of her body. I liked the finite time and energy exchanged over the course of a sketch. I talk about this in my drawing classes but had somehow forgotten its power. I also drew all kinds of other things: a friend’s Instagram livestream, my dream about the mermaid from Splash, goldfinch feathers I found by the pond, and the novel The Goldfinch.

Zaria Sleeping, 2020, Pencil on paper

At the same time, I’ve been drawn to other people’s non-fiction, confessional works. I’m listening to Perfume Genius on repeat and devouring Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Here is Ocean writing about Perfume Genius:

“Can disruption be beautiful? Can it, through new ways of embodying joy and power, become a way of thinking and living in a world burning at the edges? Hearing Perfume Genius, one realizes that the answer is not only yes — but that it arrived years ago, when Mike Hadreas, at age 26, decided to take his life and art in to his own hands, his own mouth. In doing so, he recast what we understand as music into a weather of feeling and thinking, one where the body (queer, healing, troubled, wounded, possible and gorgeous) sings itself into its future.”

I suppose I am looking both for advice on how to live through something hard, and how to spin art from it. I’m also weaning myself on Sugar Calling, a podcast where author and advice columnist Cheryl Strayed turns the tables and asks her Elders in the literary arts, including George Saunders and Margaret Atwood, for advice on processing and making work during this time. Saunders reads an email he wrote to his MFA students:

“This is when the world needs our eyes and ears and minds… We are, and especially you are, the generation that is going to have to make sense of this and recover afterwards… Are you keeping records of the emails and texts you’re getting, the thoughts you’re having, the way your hearts and minds are reacting to this strange new way of living? It’s all important… What you are able to write about it will depend on how much sharp attention you are paying now and what records you keep. Also, I think, with how open you can keep your heart.”

I have no conclusions to draw. I will keep drawing what I see. And we will use this platform to archive other voices during this time. Thank you for helping grow this collection.

In gratitude,
Virginia

Elizabeth Thompson, Calling the Roll After An Engagement, Crimea, 1874, Oil on canvas, 36.7 × 72.2 inches, Queen Victoria’s Royal Collection

Readers,
I wanted to draw your attention to the first episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History, in which he looks at the career of painter Elizabeth Thompson as a way to think about tokenism, moral licensing, and being the first outsider to enter a closed world. Thompson painted the masterpiece The Roll Call in 1874, and it was hung in a coveted position in the front gallery of the Royal Academy of Art – an honor unheard of for a female artist. At the time when paintings were equivalent to blockbuster Marvel movies, The Roll Call traveled the continent drawing hundreds of thousands of eyes. With that much popularity, she should have been a shoe-in for membership in the Academy. But she lost by two votes and her next masterpiece was hidden in the Academy’s rafters. She then disappeared from the art world stage and it would be 60 years before a female member was elected. Gladwell’s interpretation of why is worth a listen. Link HERE.
Your Editor,
Virginia

Hey Folks,

Shifting the focus of Painters on Paintings temporarily, I wanted to share with you this episode from the podcast The Ezra Klein Show where he interviews Jaron Lanier. For those of you who might not be aware of him Lanier was a pioneer in virtual reality and coined the term.  He was part of the contingent of thought leaders emerging from the ashes of the 60s who rejected psychedelics as a mechanism for broadening and deepening human consciousness, championing instead the then incipient fields of cybernetics and electronic technology.  Since then he has remained on the frontier of electronic technology, defining, and lately redefining, the radical and revolutionary role it plays in human evolution.

Lanier is very critical of how social media has been engineered to optimize traffic for profit through appealing to our lesser natures, i.e., our brain’s penchant for favoring negative emotions over positive ones.  He contributes some important ideas about social engineering, using examples from the Arab Spring, women within video game culture, and Black Lives Matter, describing how what starts out as very positive social movements by individuals rallying to improve the lives of a subset of the larger culture quickly gets subverted by groups who are against such change, through their negative social media posts.  Due to our greater attraction to negative emotions those posts ultimately eclipse the initial positive ones as they gain traction in the social media swamp. Because the design of social media maximizes those posts that get more hits and retweets, any positive social gains from the original movement get quickly transformed through the algorithms of social media into a negative backlash. And Twitter and Facebook thereby profit. “You engage people by ruining society and that is the current business model,” says Lanier.

Episode Link

— Julie Heffernan

Please join Painters on Paintings Co-Founder Julie Heffernan for a panel with Eric Fischl, Dana Schutz, and Peter Saul at the National Academy of Design on Sept 25th. These celebrated artists will discuss the work of other artists they admire.

Tickets HERE

In David Humphrey’s first post with Painters on Paintings in 2014 on James Ensor’s Protrait of Augusta Boogaerts, he talks about misreading as a way into insight. Mistaking Nietzsche’s thoughts on revelation as “flesh of light,” (instead of the correct but much less interesting “flash of light”) Humphrey sees into Ensor’s work in a new way, with that epiphanic flesh of Augusta Boogaerts igniting ideas for both him and Humphrey about Ensor’s deeper relationship to his partner.

Similarly Sarah Slappey, in her post about James Ensor’s Tribulation of St. Anthony from 2016, sees the paint-made-flesh of Ensor’s demons and monsters as distinctly different from those of Bosch and Breughel in paintings of the same subject. Ensor’s are more the stuff of psychic horror, nightmares of the mind, than graphic representations of the horrors of hell. In Ensor’s world, the “flesh of light” turns something potentially prosaic into the stuff of the visionary.

Barry Nemett, in his 2016 post on Gwen John’s A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, explores how the light dissolves form and allows us to see even the most humble and utilitarian of objects — a chair or parasol –as revelatory and transcendent.   All the various objects in John’s room lose their individuality and materiality, as they leave the world of solid form and become themselves a kind of flesh of light, reminding Nemett of lullabies wafting in from the open window of his childhood.