I See It There, It Comes Out Here

One major reason I started this project is because I want to learn how the fiber dyers I admire do what they do. I'll never make work like theirs, because I am a different person than each of them, and that materially impacts on what work can come out of me, but when I look at yarn by MadelineTosh and I literally can not deconstruct how the yarn gets its multiple layers of color, I am just dying (heh heh heh) to know how they do it.

When I was a working artist after I got out of college, I had an experience that really gave me a lot of insight into how I, at least, learn a new technique. I had been working as a sculptor since my junior year in college, but in the extremely messy medium of plaster. Without a dedicated space where you can confine the plaster dust and mess, when you live in a small apartment in New York City, there's just no way to work in that medium and not destroy the rest of your possessions - records (yeah, records, at that time), clothing (90% of it black back then), bedding, food - so I began trying to find an alternate artistic medium. I was fascinated by wings at the time and I had done some interesting sculptures that I liked of them. I started doing paintings of them, but it just wasn't gelling for me.

Somebody in my family had given me this giant pastel set a little while before and I'd never really been able to do anything with them. I just couldn't get the hang of them for some reason. Then I went over to my friend John Otte's place and watched him use pastels to make these extremely goofy, beautiful drawings. He called his subject matter "clown sex," to sum up the opposition of goofiness and gloss they explored (no actual clowns, as I recall). I would never have been interested in doing work like those drawings, but they were charming and intellectually irritating in a great way. I loved them.

I don't have any pictures of the pastels, but I do have this small ink drawing from Otte from the same time period.

Something happened while I watched him work: I just GOT IT. I saw him draw with the stick and blend with his fingers and I comprehended what to do with my own hands in an instant. I didn't even try it in his studio. I didn't need to. I went home that evening and pulled out my 800 pastel set and started a new "portrait" of one of the wing sculptures.

A week or two later I began using black pastel paper (where that idea came from, I'll never remember, but it was the other half, for me, of the perfect recipe), and one of my truest artistic metiers arrived in my life. Other than when I was in college doing the plaster sculptures, I've practically never had a medium that suited me so well before that or since. And it really came out of watching my buddy use a few pastel sticks, and the light bulb in my head came on.

[Soon after that I stopped doing portraits of actual sculpture and began doing portraits of imaginary objects, and then I also found a way to use color photocopies of the pastel drawings to render large pieces on stretched canvas. I spent a few years refining my work. Eventually I had a meeting with Bill Arning of the NYC gallery White Columns. I brought slides, a few drawings and a wall piece. (I was terrified.) Bill looked carefully through the work I had brought and eventually asked me, "Have you ever heard of an artist named ... John Otte?" Now, in my opinion, my work was really different from John's, both in its subject matter and its appearance, and yet Bill was able to see something in it that told him there was a familial relationship with Otte's work. I've always really admired Arning for being able to spot that.]

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There's more to my story, as must be obvious. How I got from there - a reasonably promising initial meeting with a very well known and highly respected gallery director - to my present career as a software developer will remain an undocumented mystery for the time being.

But I share the above to illustrate what I think can happen for artists when they see other artists engaged in their craft. That light bulb can snap on. And what results is sometimes the discovery of a metier perfectly suited to an artist.

One final note. I never worry about "copying" or "stealing" for two reasons. One, it's a ridiculous waste of valuable energy, and two, each artist brings their own self to the process, and that simply can't be copied.

Even if I were to show you the exact methods I used to create some piece, and even if you were to imitate my methodology exactly, once you integrated it into your own mode of working and infused it with your own style, your work would be completely different from mine. I never worry about sharing methods, because I know that the results are always going to be unique to the artist who has done the work. There's just some magic that happens between the artist's mind, hands, and the physical materials she works on, that is different for each person.