_{This is the prepared text of a talk I gave at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown on 18 June 2024, as part of the week-long workshop I’m facilitating. A video of the talk will be available on FAWC’s YouTube channel soon.}

I love being at Fine Arts Work Center and I’m grateful for the opportunity to give an artist talk. My practice has two branches. I did an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts about 24 years ago, and I completed an MFA in Creative Writing about nine years ago. This is one of the wonderful places where those identities come together. 

So I have a few slides of paintings, but mostly a set of provocations. The world is full of art self-help books, but they’re generally about ‘finding your creativity. This is about what happens when you go off the rails but are already identified as an artist.

In 2008, Pluto entered Capricorn for the first time since 1762. As someone whose sun sign is Capricorn, I felt it hard. Pluto destroys in order to rebuild. In many ways my life is unrecognizable to what it was before 2008. As Pluto finally leaves Capricorn this year, I’m trying to make sense of the profound changes of the past 16 years. And take stock of the work that’s yet to come.

Over this period I’ve extricated myself from a surprising number of dysfunctional and toxic relationships. In each case, the other person — or institution — claimed to have no power over me, which is a particularly pernicious kind of gaslighting because it diminishes your confidence without you really seeing it. Indeed, I didn’t recognize the pattern until recently (I’m apparently a very slow learner), and I allowed the repeated discomfort of these relationships to disconnect me from myself. It’s not surprising to me that it took an acute crisis of confidence in my art practice last winter to force me to reckon with the dynamic. 

I was disassociating — which for me is a kind of psychic detachment from what’s happening around me. It’s a retreat from myself, feeling literally like my consciousness has been pulled from my body. In my artwork it manifested as a decline in what I see as ‘poetry’ in my paintings. I want to create paintings that are both ineffable and unparaphrasable — essentially conveying experience that can’t be summed up. But my work had become increasingly literal. While the kind of painting I do involves depiction, I’m not interested in verisimilitude or exactness. I want to convey feeling. 

That’s a tall order. I’m well aware it might be something beyond my ability. It may even be a conceit. But whatever it is, it requires me to be fully in my body. I finally came to see that if I want to find poetry in my work, I need to find my way back to my body.

_{In my process of seeking a return to my body, I began a cycle of self-portraits. They’re retrospective, and attempt to discern ways I’ve felt desired through another’s gaze — something that might be understood as ‘objectification’ but might also be understood more dynamically or reciprocally. There are other paintings in the series that are closer to my current age and situation — but they’re still in process. And who knows if I’ll ever get back to them!}

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I’ve recently started thinking of paintings as talismans. People have told me my paintings allow them to hold onto a place they love — to feel near to it when they cannot be near. That’s one definition of a talisman — the art of imbuing and object with magic so that it can be carried. That would make me a magician rather than a poet. I’m not a magician, but I am interested in enchantment. I’m interested in the Transcendental — in how a sense of divinity can be found in our experience of nature.

A recent article in Smithsonian, titled “What Does It mean to be A Witch Today,” offers me some provocation:

“Indeed, one of the widely accepted definitions of magic within the community, which comes from British occultist Dion Fortune, who lived in the first half of the 20th century, is ‘the art of changing consciousness at will.’ Magic, in that sense, is a lot like meditation, or therapy, or psychedelics. It feels a bit mysterious, maybe even ridiculous, to those who don’t practice it, but for those who do, it’s a tool to change the way they interact with the world… ‘At the end of the day, what is witchcraft? … It’s about finding alternative systems for processing the world around you, for connecting to the Earth, and for healing something in yourself or something in somebody else.’”

This is what I want painting to do.

_{This slide shows a meditation I created for myself, and I shared it with my workshop this week as a prompt. It’s intended to invite one to observe the atmospherics of the day: paint the today’s weather using only three colors.}

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A week or so ago, on this very stage, I heard writer and curator Helen Molesworth talk briefly about the paintings of Lisa Yuskavage. She spoke of her embodied response to what I’d call the erotics of the painting by emphasizing the connection she feels between her vagina and her brain when looking at the work.  I understand what Helen means, and she made me rethink my embrace of the idea of searching for poetry in my work, because I think I really mean erotics.  I chose poetics because it’s a polite word. Or less complicated than erotics, at least. And it’s certainly more serious than ‘magic.’

But erotic is a word that’s been emptied of meaning by sloppy usage. It’s not originally a synonym for sex — although it’s certainly come to be that. Plato conceived it as a fundamental creative impulse having a sensual element. Audre Lorde conceptualized it as power — a power that rises from our deepest and non rational knowledge — a power from the body and a power we’re warned against. And the British artist Maggi Hambling is often quoted as saying: 

“If you’re going to be an artist, you have to make your art your best friend – so whatever you’re feeling, you can go to it.” If you’re tired, bored, happy, randy or sad, you go to your work and have a conversation.

In each of these examples, we’re encouraged to embrace our senses, our embodied responses, and knowledge that arises holistically through our entirety.

As a teacher I’ve long known that becoming an artist has less to do with teaching technique or building skill and more to do with cultivating self-awareness. It’s easy to see that in others, and harder to embrace it myself. For most of my life, self-awareness has been a rational process — even when sorting through emotions. It’s been a process of the mind, not of the body. That habit is why I’ve been so out of balance. What I’m seeking now is what Audre Lorde named our deepest non rational knowledge, and I’m quite certain as I learn to trust it, my work will again begin unfolding in ways that surprise and delight. And perhaps even heal.

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The Fine Arts Work Center has posted a video of this talk: