ten feet of crazy energy
writings about art, studios, and creativity.
Saturday, July 1, 2017
Monday, June 1, 2015
Unique Creative Process
On May 31st, I gave an artist
talk at the Seymour Art Gallery on finding your unique creative process. Everyone
there was extremely supportive and interested, and nobody fell asleep as my
cats did when I was practising. I promised to post an outline of the talk and
more importantly,links to the fantastic artists I mentioned. Anyone who
attended the talk may notice a few differences, as I have added information I
had written down but didn’t get a chance to mention.
When I was offered the chance to do
this talk, I thought it would be a great opportunity for me to explore the
topic of unique processes and how artists come upon them. I am very much a
process-based artist and my theory was that your medium and your practice can
stem naturally from your personality, background, and work habits.
For this talk, I interviewed four
artists who are doing interesting and unique work. I had a theory that there
would be a strong link between an artist’s personality or background and the
art. And I hunched that each artist would have had an "aha moment "or
there was a common element to them finding themselves in their work.
But I was completely wrong.
Every artist turned out to be as
individual as their work.
So, what I’ve done is split up the
artists into different sections and created a nifty acronym: C.R.A.F.T.
I will talk about my art and
inspiration as an introduction to each letter and each artist.
C is for Continuous
Okay, I lied. There was one thing
that every artist I spoke to had in common: they all work extremely hard. They
manage multiple art practices, other jobs, travel, and long hours to create
their art. They have been working for years on their art.
When I was at art school, I was
intrigued by the different work habits of students. Some had great ideas, but
no follow through. Some worked very hard, but lacked talent. But in the many
years I went to Emily Carr (part-time studies towards my BFA) I only met a couple
of people who were very talented and worked really hard.
You have to set up a routine of
hard work. For advice on this I would recommend the book, The Creative
Habit by Twyla Tharp. Early in my art career, I was lucky enough to share
a studio with painter, Cheryl
Fortier. By her example, I got to see how an artist has to treat
painting as a real business. She came to the studio from 9-5 each weekday. She
maintained career goals, a teaching practice, good colleague & client
relationships, and she prioritized her art. Art was not based on flaky genius
but on hard work. And she helped me to establish good studio habits, which I
have maintained ever since.
So achieving good art takes
continuous hard work. Not always producing good work, but producing something
and trying new things. In addition, continuing education is important: visiting
galleries and museums, artist studio visits, attending art talks, and even
taking courses. I had a recent studio visit with Jill Pilon. Not only did I get
inspired by her work, but she explained how she uses screen-printing in her
work—something I’ve been wanting to try and will now incorporate.
Your practice needs to be
continually evolving and refining, and the only way that can happen is from
hard work.
R is for research
For my Secret series paintings at
the gallery, I did a lot of research into the idea of keeping secrets, codes,
spies. I used motifs like the enigma machine, lemon juice writing, codes, as
well as layering in some of my own personal secrets and fears. My process of
layering and revealing is perfect for the idea of secrets kept and revealed.
The idea of research was inspired
by the interview I did with Katherine Soucie. She is an artist who is creative,
dynamic, and socially-conscious. You can see her art practice here and her fashion
line here. The founding
principle of Katherine’s practice is Zero Waste. When she was attending the
textile program at Cap College, she was wandering the dollar store looking for
materials to work with for her grad project. Nylons caught her eye: they were
cheap and could be dyed. Taking the idea one step further, she contacted nylon
manufacturers in Montreal and arranged to purchase the rejected nylons that
they would normally throw out. They all begin white and she dyes and
screen-prints them. They become the raw materials for her art and her clothing.
One new offshoot is that textile artist Michelle Sirois Silver is
now buying the colourful scraps too small for Katherine to use, and creating
new art with them. So the cycle of recycling continues.
When I spoke to Katherine in the
fall, she told me she was spending a lot of time in the Vancouver public
library. Her inspiration was gypsies and she developed this year’s Gypsy
Aristocrat line. Research is a necessity for fashion designers who must produce
several new collections each year. And doing research can benefit any artist
who is looking for inspiration for their work.
A is for Authentic
If you are a person like me, who
has a tendency towards perfectionism and self-criticism, you may worry about
whether you personally can succeed as an artist. I began painting when I was
40, so I wonder if my art would be more successful if I had started earlier.
The art world is relentless in its focus on aesthetics and youth, and the hype
of finding the next big thing. Or maybe it’s a personality issue, people
capable of spending many hours alone in the studio may find it hard to be
gregarious enough to promote their work. Any artist believes they have some
flaw which prevents them from
But we can only be what we are. I
am Japanese, middle-aged, and shy in groups of strangers. I am the opposite of
a cool emerging artist. But being who I am got me the opportunity to do an
amazing show at the
Japanese Canadian National Museum.
And being my age means that I had friends who could afford to buy my art when I
first started out. I am trying hard to be authentic to who I am, and let my art
reflect that without apology.
One artist I found to be completely
authentic to who he is and what he thinks is Brendan Tang. He is an artist who is
intellectual and political, but with a sense of humour and great self-awareness.
Brendan’s own background is a
cultural mix like many Canadians. He was born in Ireland, but has Trinidadian,
Chinese, and Canadian cultural influences. Despite a non-artistic background,
he excelled at art when he was young, and you can see his drawing skills in his
work. In his Manga Ormulu series, we see a complete cultural mix:
Chinese pottery, European pottery, Japanese manga, speculative fiction, geek
worlds. To me, the work is very accessible, but talking to Brendan he
emphasized the deeper meaning behind the work. It is a re-appropriation of
Chinese pottery stolen by European craftsmen. But to me, the accessibility is
key, you have work that people can appreciate at many levels of meaning from
basic enjoyment to political consciousness.
F is for Forté
If authenticity is about knowing
yourself, forté is knowing what you can do—your strengths and weaknesses. My
strength is colour. I love using bright colour and pure tints, and I think I’m
good at balancing them.
The artist who represents forté for
me is Reece Terris. As an
artist I found him to be determined and modest with an incredible spatial
awareness. As a child, he enjoyed taking things apart and putting them back
together. His father was around to help if there was a piece missing
afterwards. He began working in construction at 16, and ended up travelling the
world, supporting himself with construction work in places like Australia.
After 15 years of working, he began attending art school at the Simon Fraser
University downtown campus. The freedom and support of school meant that he
could integrate his construction skills seamlessly into his art practice.
His graduation project was entitled American
Standard. He completely renovated the men’s washroom at SFU to create a wall of
fountains, made from urinals. It was a riff on Duchamp, but also a
spectacularly beautiful feat of engineering. Not shown is all the work he had
to do to put the bathroom back into functioning order.
Reece is perhaps best known in
Vancouver for his Ought Apartment, a tower of rooms from different
decades. His work is not sculptural as much as an intervention on a specific
site. He sees the potential for adding art to places because that is almost in
his DNA.
T is for Tragedy
In 2008, I was preparing for my
first solo show at a commercial gallery when my mother suffered a severe
stroke. As an only child, I was thrust into hospital visits, medical
consultations, and looking after her affairs. I was operating at only
half-awareness that week, and I called the gallery owner to tell her what had
happened. I assumed that she would understand that I couldn’t produce the work.
But after she offered her sympathies, she said, “Mary Anne, you’re not going to
let me down, are you?” “Um, no,” I agreed. I was in a complete daze.
So my routine for the following
weeks was to go to the studio early and paint. Break to go to the hospital and
later to the rehab facility. Back to the studio. All I did was paint and cry.
My heroic husband took over a lot of the household duties. And I did finish a
whole range of bright and surprisingly cheery paintings in time for the
opening. But I think that painting was the best thing I could have done when I
wasn’t with my mother. It was an escape for me and it had become enough of a
routine that I could do without conscious thought.
Peter Combe is
the only artist I didn’t interview directly for this speech. I went to hear him
speak and I chatted with him briefly at his opening in Vancouver. However, I
went to hear his artist talk which was a history of his career. As a boy
growing up in B.C., he was interested in mathematics which later translated
into his work. He travelled and began his art career in Europe. He was doing
surreal collages when he had an accident that injured his wrist so badly that
he was no longer able to use scissors for his collages.
While casting around for some new
artistic expression, he was inspired by the fish scale pattern on the inside of
an envelope to begin painting with paint chips cut into circles. He began with
abstractions, but is known now for his portraits. While the works look almost
computerized and pixelated, they are done by hand. Peter has found a lot of
success with his new works and is represented by galleries internationally.
Returning to Reece Terris, for the
Ought Apartment project, he collected materials from job sites for years and
stored them in an old barn in the Fraser Valley. Then snow on the roof of the
barn caused it to collapse with all his materials aside. It was a defining
moment, as to abandon everything would have bankrupted him. But Reece got a
group of friends together and they managed to salvage and store everything in a
new location. The project eventually came together beautifully in the Vancouver
Art Gallery.
Anyone faces tragedies and setbacks
in life. But it’s all too easy for artists to turn away and think that perhaps
things were not to be. The perseverance to continue in art is harder, but for
most artists they have no other option. They want to make art, regardless of
any difficulties.
I would like to thank the Seymour
Art Gallery, specifically Sarah Cavanaugh and Vanessa Black, for the opportunity
to put together this talk and for their help in preparing it. I want to thank Peter
Combe for agreeing to share his images. Most of all, I want to thank Katherine
Soucie, Brendan Tang, and Reece Terris, for being so generous with their time
and experiences. They inspired me to share more of myself than I normally would.
Good luck to everyone in pursuing
their unique creative processes.
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
How To Be Great
Work in progress is progressing |
Recently I went to see a movie about a piano virtuoso: Seymour: An Introduction. It’s a
documentary about Seymour Bernstein, an 85 year-old pianist who gave up
performing and now concentrates on teaching high-level students. Bernstein is truly
fascinating and even after an entire film, I wanted to know more about him
Two qualities of his personality really stood out for me. First,
as a teacher, he was able to make subtle tweaks in his students’ piano
technique that made the music infinitely better and more moving. It’s a level
of knowledge and sensitivity that even someone like me, who knows nothing about
classical music, could appreciate.
Second, he has this huge love for classical piano music—an
obsession so enormous that it blinds him to normal perceptions. For example,
when he was drafted into the army, it was a complete mismatch for a sensitive
boy who had never left home. But he found himself able to march for hours while
others fell away, and he attributed that to the mental concentration he had
learned from music. And when he found that there was a classical strings player in
his troop in Europe, he suggested to his commanding officer that they could do
performances. The C.O. scoffed that nobody would listen to classical music. But
when Bernstein prevailed, the troops loved the concert. “They wouldn’t let us go,” he
remembered happily.
When I saw the movie, about a month ago, I was going through
a slump in my work. I had been painting, but I seemed to be stuck. The
work for my big exhibition in May was well underway, but nowhere near
completion. Therefore, one thing that Bernstein said made an especially big
impact on me. He said that on the days when the music went well he was happy.
Conversely, he was frustrated on those days when the music didn’t go well. His
solution was to practise more, from two hours to three, right up to eight hours
of practising.
This solution seems so logical, yet it’s contrary to the
laziness inherent in many of us. If the painting isn’t going well, it’s easy to
take a break and do something else—check Instagram, have a snack, go for a
walk, cook dinner. Perhaps these distractions are even good or useful, but they
move us away from the main purpose of our lives. If you want to excel at an art,
it will never be easy. An artist will have to put long hours of work into their
craft. Sometimes there will be setbacks and screw-ups, but you will keep moving
forward. And as Bernstein said, on those good days, you will be happy. The best
kind of happy, when you are satisfied with your important life's work.
Thanks, Seymour! The next day, I went into the studio and
began working harder. I locked my smarthphone in the car, stopped puttering, and just got down to painting. And you know what? I was able to push my paintings into
completed stages immediately. And now I’m happy.
Labels:
art,
motivation,
painting process,
Seymour Bernstein,
studio life
Wednesday, September 3, 2014
New Work
I can’t remember the last time I had nine new paintings in
the studio! Generally, it takes me months to complete a painting, but I had a
few deadlines to meet this time. I have a show in Harrison Hot Springs during
September, and I have an ongoing project which needs 12 new pieces, and of course,
the Culture Crawl is coming up in November.
But right now, to the delight of visitors to the studio and
to the horror of my insurance agent, I have a lot of art on hand. In
addition, I’ve started making prints, and some of these paintings are available
as prints as well.
blueberry pie, 48" x 48" |
rhubarb pie, 48" x 48" |
bumbleberry pie, 48" x 48" |
raspberry pie, 48" x 48" |
All the pie paintings are also available as prints.
born again, 48" x 48" |
x-ray, 48" x 36" |
lace memories, 48" x 36" |
And finally, one painting so fresh it hasn't been properly photographed yet!
stripes six, 24" x 72" |
Labels:
abstract art,
art,
colourful,
m.a.tateishi,
new work,
Vancouver
Wednesday, July 9, 2014
Anatomy of a Painting
Recently I created a painting that was my
largest single artwork ever. It was a commission work, so only a few people got
to see it in person, but I thought I’d like to write about the process and
share the painting with you.
Valerie and I met in 2009 when I exhibited at the Toronto
Outdoor Art Exhibition. Since then, I have not returned to the TOAE, but
Valerie and I have been in touch by email and I have done some commission work
for her before. She has also visited my studio while in B.C., but mainly we
work together virtually.
It’s always a joy to work with Valerie as she brings a lot of enthusiasm
and very few restrictions. She determines the size and then we discuss which
existing paintings she likes, and a very general colour scheme. Not
surprisingly, we both love the same colours: brights especially pinks and purply blues.
When I work on a commission, it’s a bit
stressful, because I’m constantly worried about whether the client will like
the final artwork. It’s impossible to put yourself in someone else’s head, and my process is very unpredictable. Since this
panel was 40” x 80”, it was even more daunting. So for the first time, I did an
actual maquette on a tiny scale.
Directionally, Valerie told me she really
liked my new jellyfish paintings, but she was looking for a more abstracted
drawing. I had a vision in my head of a painting that used all the resin
colours I have. I did this trial piece on two 6” x 6” panels, at a time when we
were still deciding whether to do one large piece or diptych. It was a good
starting point, as Valerie decided she preferred a single panel and she didn’t
like all the red.
Next step was prepping the panel. I apply
gesso, let it dry, and then sand. Repeat ten times (at least) until I get a beautifully
smooth surface. It feels so nice to apply ink to a satiny surface.
Here’s the ink drawing. I loved the idea of
a more abstracted jellyfish, and I think I will move into this direction. It’s an idea of movement rather than replicating the actual jellyfish. This
is one way that doing something new, like a commission or a painting for a
themed show, can change your painting direction. I also loved the scale here,
it inspires me to do even bigger panels.
I showed Valerie the ink drawing, and once
I saw it on the computer screen, we agreed it needed more black. I added that
and then the fear set in. Once I added resin, it would be final. I would have
to start all over with a new panel if I screwed up. For three days, I had the panel up on the
wall, eying it as I did other work until I got up the courage to complete it!
And things did go wrong. Mixing large
quantities of coloured resin is actually impossible, since they start to cure
right in the containers as I’m working! I ended up moving a smoking container
of green resin off the table at the beginning of the process. My overactive
imagination had me setting the studio on fire, and becoming the building pariah.
In the end, I managed to mix up proper quantities of non-flaming resin and
achieve the effects I had in my head.
Since resin has toxic fumes, I have to leave the studio before I can see the final result. I returned the next morning to check on the painting and prep it for final curing. When I hung it on the wall, I felt breathless. The painting was so beautiful! I wanted to share it with someone, so I went out in the hall, but at 7:30 am, there aren't a lot of artists even awake. Luckily, Morley, our wonderful building manager, was in and he agreed to come to my studio for a peek. ("Usually people only want me to come in if a pipe is leaking or something," he said happily.) And he was sweetly appreciative. I also took photos so I could show my family. We were leaving that day for Ontario, so I couldn't bring anyone else in.
One unique thing about Valerie is that she
likes a surprise. So I while I keep her informed during the process—especially
the parts I can change—once I do the resin that’s it. I have the painting
packed and shipped and she doesn’t see it until she uncrates it in Toronto. I
don’t know how she feels during the waiting time, but I’m always nervous until
I hear back from her!
The happy ending: she loved it. Here it is
in her home—with the giant bear friend of her two sons. I think they were in
camp when the painting arrived, but I hope they like it too. I miss the
painting! But the good thing about creating amazing new work is that it
inspires us to new heights.
Labels:
art,
colour,
commissions,
painting,
painting process,
studio
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