Yesterday I posted a ‘first take’ on a talk I was invited to give an Arts & Business workshop at The 204 and co-sponsored by The Cape CDP. I ended up writing two talks. This is the talk I actually gave. There’s some obvious overlap, but I ultimately gave this talk because it was a little less self-referential, a bit more spacious, and perhaps a tiny bit vulnerable. 

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was offered as I graduated from art school. I’d asked my philosophy professor for some career advice. He said, “Don’t get fixated on any specific goal or destination. Stay aware of the terrain as it opens in front of you. Trust your intuition to know the next step, to know what’s right for you.” Years later, although he wasn’t a Buddhist and I’m not a Buddhist, I’d come to understand that this is, in a way, the definition of a Buddha — one who is awake. And through my reading of the wonderful book Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, I’ve come to understand that my underlying goal as an artist is to ‘create satisfying aesthetic experience catalyzed by a curious, open and aware mind.’

I want to take a moment to define my terms. I use the term ‘art’ broadly, but I’m not interested in hierarchical definitions or red herrings like the difference between art and craft. I believe that what we call ‘art’ in the Western tradition is part of a broader human impulse than what’s emerged in Western culture. I draw my definition from the work of anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake — who studied aesthetic practices across global cultures. To my mind, art is the human impulse to make meaning through the aesthetic manipulation of our environment. To further draw on Dissanayake’s work, it’s the process of bringing attention to those things we believe to be important through an aesthetic experience. This is true when, like me, you’re a painter. But it’s also true when you organize a special meal to celebrate the accomplishment of someone you love. Or when you make someone a sweater. Or you write an opera. It’s the same impulse: point to the specialness of that which you find important. (During the talk I extemporaneously mentioned Dissanayake’s book, Homo Aestheticus.)

As an artist I sometimes chug right along at full speed. But I also get stuck, and the cultivation of a curious, open and aware mind is more challenging than I want to admit. My obstacles can be internal — a lack of faith in the value of what I’m doing. The can come as a consequence of previous success — freighted by the thought that I need to repeat what I already do well. Or they can be material — that I haven’t fully embodied the technique or craft of a particular way of making what I want to make. I’m sure we could generate a much longer list amongst us. But rather than focus on the obstacles I want to unpack some ways we can learn to become curious, open and aware.

When I worked as a professor of art, I frequently had to help students escape preconceived ideas about their work — especially when those preconceptions were hindering their growth. Sometimes this involved encouraging material explorations. Sometimes it involved engaging absurdity. Often it meant asking the unexpected question. 

Almost twenty years ago I was asked to take over a course for a colleague who’d had a heart attack a week before the semester began. The course was “Interdisciplinary Studio Critique.” Because my graduate work was interdisciplinary, I was thought to be a good fit. There was no syllabus for the course and I was encouraged to ‘wing it.’ Walking to campus the next day, I ticked off in my head all of the disciplines represented in the graduate school, and judged my ability to engage them with reasonable intelligence. Painting, sculpture, graphic design, glass, ceramics, architecture, industrial design — all good. Then I thought about jewelry. I shrugged, thinking ‘it’s a small department.’ Of course, in a group of eleven, three were jewelers. And the evening after the first class, I had emails from four more jewelers who wanted to join the class. 

I did a little reading, but honestly I couldn’t really find my way into the discipline. But something strange happened. As the semester progressed, the jewelers started inviting me to their department critiques, and eventually started asking me to be on their thesis committees. I wasn’t sure why, but I liked the students and I figured I’d learn something from working with them.

One thing I learned was that in the world of jewelry spends a lot of time talking about brooches. I don’t wear brooches or come from a brooch culture, so it was mystifying to me. Brooches are often made with precious materials and have a clientele that’s ‘high end’ and almost entirely made up of women. It seemed to me that these factors were sometimes an obstacle for students — that assumptions about their clients were limiting their creativity. So I gave them an assignment: walk the city and find discarded materials on the ground. Use those materials to make brooches for the teenage boys riding skateboards in the park — also people who are not part of ‘brooch culture.’ You could hear a pin drop. The assignment didn’t result in ‘fine art jewelry.’ But it did crack open assumptions about aesthetic decisions, materials, and form. It significantly changed the trajectory of at least one student’s practice. 

I later admitted my sense of ‘imposter syndrome’ to the jewelers I worked with, and asked why they’d invited me to work with them. They told me that I always talked about embodied experience — that is how we experience art with our whole body, not just our intellect. And jewelry, they reminded me was all about adorning the body. Their professors talked about the objects they were making;  they needed me to remind them of the bodies that would hold those objects.  I hadn’t realized how focused I was on embodied experience, and their insight into my preoccupation opened my work to new possibility.

The unexpected question. The unanticipated discovery. For both students and teacher. 

While this example is from an educational context, we don’t have to go back to school to encounter the unexpected question. Several years ago, when I invited an independent curator into one of my graduate seminars, I learned that there’s no noun form of the term ‘curate.’ ‘Curation’ is a modern, made-up word — more often used in advertising than in art. Curate should always always a verb. It’s active. It comes from religious tradition, where the Curate is the clergy member who provides pastoral care for the congregation. In art terms, a curator is someone who cares for objects and, more importantly, who cares for artists.

Caring for artists involves witnessing them, looking closely at what they do and what they make. It means asking questions to discover, not questions that assume. It means helping them to articulate their intentions, not to lay intentions on them. And when invited, it’s an opportunity to reflect back and be a ‘second set of eyes’ for the artist. 

Artists need curators. But artists can also be curators. I try to stay focused on being the curator that I need. We can all be the curator we need.

…

The theme of this workshop is especially relevant to me. I’m entering into a period of significant transition in my career. I’ve left the gallery at which I showed for the past twelve years and worked for the past seven. My decision has inspired a lot of reflection, and it’s uncovered some things I’d previously pushed into the cobwebs of my mind. Stepping away from conflict has allowed me to recognize the ways I’d closed myself off emotionally, and this recognition is allowing me to again move toward the vulnerablity that’s critical to art making. Living in conflict and in proximity to conflict for a protracted period of time doesn’t allow one to be curious, open and aware. Indeed, it fosters the opposite.

I think I’m a good painter, but I know I can be a better painter. Selling paintings is one barometer of success, but it’s not the only barometer of success. I need to unpack what this means for me. I Have to ask: what is growth? What do I need to learn? How can I reconnect with the poetry in my work? I need to listen to what I discover. 

My work has been rooted in Cape Cod’s landscape, and it will, at least in part, continue to live there. But I need to spend more time in the landscape than I have the last few years — and I need to allow the landscape to inform me again. I need to find ways to see it afresh. 

My work has been rooted in landscape in general, but that’s not the only thing I want to paint. I have a small body of figurative work that cycles in and out of my studio. I need to explore that work with intention and focus. That requires time. (And it requires feedback, so I’ll be showing one or two of those painting in this very room in June.)

I’m as much a teacher as I am a painter. I draw inspiration from teaching — and learn from the process and from the learners with whom I work. But I need to be a student again, too. I know how to learn, and I’m trying to commit to a learning process that’s like being back at school.

I know transformational learning is painful, and the transition I’m making has its share of sharp edges. I’m trying to not only accept, but also embrace, the radical disorientation I’m feeling. I don’t want to return to the equilibrium of the past, I want a better future. That means looking squarely at the things that are disorienting me, dealing with them, and moving forward. It means embracing vulnerability and not allowing myself to again become defended.

I don’t always like the unanticipated question, but I know that the ‘assignments’ that sometimes emerge from such questions have often opened new terrain for me.  I need to seek out people who will look seriously at what I do and as questions that will catalyze change.  

I want to end with an elaboration of this final point. Artists think they’re in the object business or the process business but we’re not. We’re in the relationship business. The things we make, the stories we tell and the images we conjure are attempts to connect, to tell the news of what we’ve seen and imagined, to share the wisdom we’ve acquired. And at the very foundational level, to make special — through a shared aesthetic experience — the things we believe to be important. .

Art making can feel solitary. But artists need people who will care for our development as creators and who care about our work. I’ve often told a story that sounds like a ‘three people walk into a bar joke,’ but it illustrates this point. In graduate school I became frustrated when other painters did studios visits with me. Within ten minutes we’d stop looking at the work and engage in ‘shop talk’ — materials, technique, etc. The easy stuff. The best feedback I ever got in graduate school came from a poet, a rabbi, and an ancient Greek historian. They’re all trained in unpacking images. They cared for the work and for me by looking deeply at what I was doing — both process and product — and reflecting back what they saw. 

Find the people — and communities — who will care for you and who are interested in listening to what your art is working to convey. It’s great to find a professional curator who shares my philosophy, but it’s also great to find people in daily life who will engage your practice seriously. And I don’t mean to imply you need to find a rabbi. There certainly are painters I’ve come to rely on, but also don’t fall into the trap of believing that only people who do what you do can be part of your support network. Having other eyes looking at your work — eyes that aren’t laden with the rules of what you do — will help you see where your work is stuck, where new opportunities are peeking through, and where you’re expressing genius. And they may occasionally ‘give you an assignment’ that will change your life.