Living on the Edges

What Artmaking Taught Me About Life

Art school taught me to think. I am still learning how to apply the lessons I learned there. Sixty years later, on October 30, 2024, I will have a chance to exhibit what I learned, at the Anita Rogers Gallery in New York City.

I attended art school in the mid-sixties, most intensively at The Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture. I also went to classes at several other schools, including studying anatomy at the Art Students League, print making at the Museum of Modern Art, and additional life drawing classes at the School of Visual Arts. In those days, my task was to learn to draw and manage a paintbrush. I was a sponge for every scrap of art knowledge I could scarf up. The basic lesson was simple: connect, eye, hand, tool to perception. Control was a big part of that mastership. I supplemented what I learned in the classroom, with endless sumi exercises, attempting to make lines of perfectly even calligraphic strokes with my brush.

Contour drawing, gesture drawing and scale are 3 formal ideas about making flat visual art I still apply. Contour drawing is the technique of carefully observing and drawing the perception the edge of shape, so slowly that it might take an hour to limn an inch, barely looking at the surface, except to occasionally check for verisimilitude between observation and capture. Gesture is the opposite: capturing the internal dynamic of an object moving in space, the torque of a dancer’s spine in a 30-second-long pose, the drift of a leaf. 

Learning those skills taught me the dispassion and humility that I held in short supply. I still think those qualities are essential to artmaking: how to translate what the human eye can see, mediated by eye hand coordination, to a flat, neutral surface. Honest perception was never what I THOUGHT I saw, it was what emerged when I could become one with and learn what I had ACTUALLY seen.

In those days, I was working out in Joseph Pilates (Joe's) gym, midtown West, a couple times a week. This too was an exercise in achieving perfect control. After each workout, I spent hours making gesture drawings in a 8.5"x5.5" sketchbook, of the dancers and others, practicing precise and continuous movement on his machines. I set myself a rigorous practice of working with a 9H pencil and staying on the same page, till the page was covered in a light grey tangle of fluid lines.

Today, I sit in a rocking chair on the edge of the sea in my studio in Maine and capture the shape and movement of water, mostly with thick oil sticks, the opposite of a 9H pencil, merging both gesture and contour in a calligraphic mark. I apply both skills to capture my perceptions of the moving waves on surfaces barely larger than the notebook I used to take to Joe's. I have never thought of these studies as central to my practice, which has sprawled across biogeographies. But they have been dispatches from the front lines of sea level rise, deeply imbued with and containing the anxiety I feel about that rise.

Since my studio was nearly inundated by winter storms this year, I have a greater respect for these captures. They don't just trap my observations. They also reach to contain the terror I know lives on the edge of the land, as oceans relentlessly rise on every shore across the planet, clawing back land from complacent coastal dwellers. Each stroke I make, marks the surface of my work, attempting to marry contour and gesture, documents the fragment of courage I bring to the task of taking an honest look at the scale of threat from a vengeful sea goddess.

Or maybe, it isn't any kind of willful personae, just the sea is being the sea, responding to what we have done, doing what the sea has always done but the scale of that doing, as we continue to modify climate, just makes the usual, unusual. In geologic history, the scale of collateral damage is barely a minuscule blip.

Scale is one of the ways an artist makes a statement. The width and length of a brushstroke or a surface is its own statement. I have done several paintings and drawings of the view from my studio. Until now, I always felt like the safe observer: painting details of breaking waves, some as large as 76"x86", some much smaller, Scale is important. Observing a breaking wave in a large painting puts you inside the experience. A smaller work safely contains and distances the experience of threat.

Now, in American and international politics, we are forced to observe another kind of view of an edge. The edge between pro-Palestinian protestors and Zionists claiming historical entitlements, people inflamed by visions of dead infants and people outraged by the claims of strangers on their body autonomy (so parallel to any experience of rape); heated arguments about growth v. degrowth Advocates of retribution for grievance and defenders of joy; leaving paradoxes unresolved. And am I any different, stubbornly demanding consequences for ecocide?

The answers aren't just "Blowin' in the Wind"."

There are countless systems for dealing with edges in the real world, between human POV's and claims and counter claims for needful survival of Other species. Theoretically, negotiating the edge is the mandate for any politician. Internationally, the answer to edges is diplomacy. When claims of genocide in Gaza and counter claims over millennia of genocide for Jews clash, it is almost impossible to hold sane boundaries as people seek, like blind moles, for an eternal justice. The scale is simply too big to easily encompass. But like the waves clawing at my shore, threatening my life's work, this is what we must learn to painstakingly see with dispassion, till we can find the core of the dynamic in which we might all survive, perhaps with less than we might each want. Less than what we each want is also a question of scale. As Abraham Lincoln who pointed out, the sheep and the wolf have different ideas about liberty. That's when we may come to an impasse: divorce or death, compromise or death. And maybe that's where it is so difficult to literally or figuratively draw the shape of a line: the scale of who gets less, who gets more., where the line blurs into something else.

In my studio, I breathe in and out with the lines I'm hunting and all the lessons I've learned from internalizing all my exercises. In the gallery, October 30, I will show the scale of my understanding. I hope to see you then.