Make More Art!

Posted on May 13, 2017 by Elizabeth Cook

Lyme Academy Commencement
May 12, 2017

Thank you all very much for asking me to speak at great length and in excruciating detail about my experiences at Lyme Academy and in the greater art world.

Congratulations, Graduates! Artists!

Let me make it clear: it isn’t graduating that makes you artists, it is everything you have done your whole lives, and everything you did to reach THIS POINT in your lives, that makes you artists.

I’m sure you know that people who are NOT artists think artists were born that way. Innately talented, but also knowing how to handle a brush, or a chisel. You know that’s not true. YOU know it has taken you years of study and practice to become “natural” talents. And it’s been worth it. You have excelled at one of the best art colleges in the country. You have learned from the best teachers.

Now you are going to remember everything they taught you, at exactly the same moment that you forget it. It’s time to create your own path.

Other people think artists are magicians. On this I don’t disagree. We ARE magicians. We take mud and rags and create happiness and sorrow. We make thoughts and emotions manifest. We sway public opinion. We create joy out of thin air. We have power. We work hard. We are blessed with work. And sometimes, as we are creating, the magic is in us.

As my father used to say, “we are up to our asses in ice cream.”

So – live an artist’s life. By which I mean, get a day job, plus a night job, and maybe some babysitting on the side – all so that you can make your art. A successful artist is one who makes art. That’s it. A successful artist is one who makes art. Selling art is nice. Public acclamation is probably lovely. I don’t know. But when you get discouraged, think of Vincent van Gogh who made over 900 paintings and sold only one while he was alive. Or think of Emily Dickinson who never published a poem in her lifetime. A successful artist is one who makes art. So make art. Don’t stop. Ever.

Surround yourself with an artists’ community wherever you are. You need to create a world in which you can discuss art, and critique art, look at art, think about art, and make art. Stay in touch with your friends. Praise their work. Tip them well if they’re waiting tables. Then go to galleries and museums and cooperatives and grad school and make MORE friends. Steal their ideas and share your own. Collaborate and keep learning. Don’t worry, only YOU can make YOUR art.

You will be afraid. Notice what you’re afraid of and then do that. Sometimes you will stop making art. Notice what you’re thinking and feeling and don’t dismiss it. Use it. Try it. Incorporate it. Don’t just make what you’re already good at. FAIL UPWARD. Make more art. The world needs it, AND your opinions. Don’t be stingy. Make more art!

And one more thing. Debt is the enemy of art. Pay cash.

But most importantly, make art. And as you do that, you will make and remake yourself and those around you.

Congratulations, Class of 2017.

Did I Ever Tell You…

Posted on August 12, 2016 by Elizabeth Cook

Did I ever tell you about the time I stole a Franz Kline?

Was this it?

Long ago, I was told by my then-husband that there was a whole closet full of stuff at his graduate school that the students had been warned would be thrown out soon. It was all free to be taken. He thought he’d seen a painting.

I said, “Great, let’s go look.”

So we drove to school, he showed me the way to the closet, and we opened it. There were a lot of junk-like objects. Boxes, cleaning supplies, I think a bucket and mop? It’s hard to remember. It wasn’t even really a big closet, just a janitor’s closet, and it was dark.

Or maybe this one?

But he was right, there was a large painting leaning against one wall. We pulled it out and saw that it was mostly white, with black stripes and shapes on it. Kind of looked like calligraphy. I loved it, so we took it home.

Right past other students and the guards at the front entrance. It was big. And no one cared.

I was barely art-educated at that time, but I knew that it was beautiful.

It might have been this.

My ex was excited. And the painting did look stunning in our secondhand-furnished dump of a grad-school house. But I started to worry. I am a worrier.

Within a couple of weeks, I had discovered an inventory tag nailed to the painting’s supports. More excitement. More worrying. It clearly belonged to someone.

I eventually made him return it. He said he walked it into school and put it back in the unlocked closet and no one cared. I felt better. Kinda. But I missed it. A lot.

And kept missing it, until a few years later when I saw a Franz Kline in a museum and I knew. It was unmistakeable. Mine had been a Kline, too.

Sigh.

Why had I consigned it to a nasty closet where it might be thrown out? How sure was I that eventually the Cincinnati Art Museum would realize what they had lost, and then decide to look in a closet at the medical school?

I could have kept it. I wouldn’t have sold it, but I could have lived with it my whole life. And then donated it. Who was going to find out? Or find me?

Did I do the right thing? Or the wrong thing?

I didn’t know at the time that it was valuable, just that it had once belonged to an institution with inventory number tags.

Now I’m really sorry. If I had known, I would have taken it to a museum, who would have tracked down the real owner. Eventually.

I don’t even have a photo of it. And I miss it.

A lot.

Luckily…

Posted on November 2, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

Luckily, in one of those art miracles that you read about, I’ve had a total breakthrough and my art is on a new track that pleases and surprises me. Ha. Not.

My art is still a struggle every day. And I work on it every day. I go to the studio with my bagel and my iPad and look around to see what fires my imagination. Is it time to draw the polka-dotted mug (again)? Should I use the rubber rat? Is it a charcoal day, or a pastel day, or a Sharpie day?

A Very Timid Beginning

I look at the enormous roll of paper that winds around my studio (and miraculously hasn’t fallen down) and I am at least satisfied that I have filled it up to the first corner. It is harder to put 27 drawings on one piece of paper than to do 27 different drawings. They have to look right together. Sometimes I want them to complement each other, and sometimes I want them to fight. Sometimes I want to make it pretty, but lots of times I’m aiming for “eeew, gross!”.

Real Snakeskin, Fake Me

I realize that I am drawing several narratives, starting at the far left and moving to the right. Besides the polka-dot mug and its various adventures, there are the small blue people who seem to be reacting in horror. What is their story? There are the self-portraits with snakes and rats. Why do I have snakes and rats coming out of my mouth? If I knew, I wouldn’t have to draw it. I draw to find out.

There is a fairy tale starting, and I’m not sure where it’s going, but I like fairy tales (old, original fairy tales) because they so often combine the charming with the shocking.

Once Upon a Time

I got the very good news on Halloween that my first choice thesis advisor, Stephen Maine, selected me back in the double-blind, three and a half twist process that the office uses to match us up. It was while talking to him that I had the idea about the big paper to begin with, although clearly some subconscious giant origami still lingered.

More Pills, Please

Maybe when I’ve drawn all 30 feet of my paper I should fold it into a graceful paper swan. Now THAT would be a thesis project!

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.

Open Season on Art

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Elizabeth Cook

There is enough brilliant and exciting art in New York to fill every gallery from floor to ceiling. Which is not the same thing as saying that all New York galleries are full of brilliant and exciting art. They are not.

Mike Womack
Observer Effect
Installation View

Saturday was a beautiful day, and several friends and I went gallery hopping in Chelsea. We visited five or six galleries and saw bad paintings, bad videos, and bad sculpture.

Mike Womack
Hypnosis Drawing #9 (Earliest Memory of Pain)

But we also saw Mike Womack’s exhibition Observer Effect at Ziehersmith (516 West 20th Street), which was truly stunning. Mr. Womack has cast concrete around his own drawings so that only the edges of the paper remain to be seen by the viewer. This is very provoking in the best possible way. What might the drawings be about? Why are they hidden? Do they relate to the shapes in which they are encased? Why would an artist make work and then make sure no one can see it?

Mike Womack
Hypnosis Drawing #15 (Earliest Memory of Drawing)

The concrete and wood forms remain wholly visible, and are interesting enough on their own to hold our attention. One never forgets, however, that each one is also an art tomb. That makes the crucifix-shaped installation even more poignant. What vision died here?

Mike Womack
Hypnosis Drawing #3 (Earliest Memory of My Mother)

The press release for the show (read it on the way out, NOT the way in) gives a very specific description of the process through which Mr. Womack made his pieces, and why. It’s quite compelling (and you can see it on the gallery website www.ziehersmith.com) but I think I prefer making up my own stories. Go to this show and then let me know what you think.

Sol LeWitt
Untitled (gouache)

The other exhibition that grabbed me on Saturday was Sol LeWitt. He is rapidly becoming one of my favorite dead artists. Perhaps it’s because he’s ubiquitous, although that could work equally against him. Right now there’s a huge LeWitt installation at Paula Cooper Gallery at 534 West 21st, and it’s very worth the walk to see LeWitt’s preliminary gouaches and the final enormous work to which they led (originally completed for the 1988 Venice Biennale). You can admire his mastery of color, as I did, and then wish you lived in an apartment big enough to install his work, as I also did.

Sol LeWitt
Wall Drawing #564: Complex forms with color ink washes superimposed

That would cost you $1.2 million, and rumor has it that’s just for the plans, not including the actual painting.

If the art in the galleries was always bad, I would stop going. It is not. There is always at least one magical piece, or one independently creative new artist who is worth seeing. Just when I think I am out, they pull me back in.

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.

the least untrue / elizabeth cook

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