Old In Art School

by Nell Irvin Painter

  Back Man 1 was 1 because I expected to paint others inspired by the motif. In my studio I addressed it familiarly as My Last RISD Painting, or MLRP: my emblem of survival. It was, in fact, the last painting I made at RISD, and I showed it in the MFA Thesis Show.

  Back Man 1, 2011, acrylic, oil stick, and collage on canvas, 40" × 40"

  In the event, the painting side of my MFA thesis unrolled straightforwardly, even though initially it was the more intimidating. The written thesis was another thing. The concept came easily as the elaboration of my transit from historian to painter by comparing how I used archives as historian and as visual artist. I titled it “Archive to Brush.” Surely a snap for me, the author of seven books. I wasn’t afraid of words. I knew I could write. I loved to write. The only problem I envisioned would be stanching a flood of words.

  A Skype with Teacher Roger in charge of our written theses envisioned fifteen hundred to two thousand words. Fifteen hundred to two thousand words! I could write that in a weekend! I had written more words than that for Teacher Debra’s term paper. I made a start on my thesis, quickly up to 525 words, and I was only warming up.

  Please, Roger, give me at least twenty-five hundred words.

  Was word limit my major obstacle?

  NO NO NO NO NO

  Two huge boulders, one discursive, one emotional. The discursive seemed easier to overcome, a matter of approach, of style. I had to write at length about how things looked, not what they meant. What they were made of—medium, composition, palette—and how they were made, meaning process. This entailed a refocusing, and that I could manage.

  The emotional obstacle was much bigger and harder to finagle, for I began by expressing my conviction, which I still hold today, that the art world—rather, The Art World—had no firm criteria beyond the market for deciding what is good art. Scholarship isn’t innocent of bias, but it has peer review and the expectation of respect for the archive. The market, in contrast, relates to social constructs of race and gender and to who can be an interesting artist according to society’s values. I knew from Critic Rob and Artist Stanley that social exchange—who wants to spend time with whom, who feels comfortable in the studio with whom, which studios curators visit, which artist is young and cute enough to create buzz—all that influenced gallery representation, sales, and collecting. Yes, yes, there is definitely such a thing as the quality of the work. But there’s too much good work in the world to explain in terms of quality alone who counts as an artist worth noting and who gets ignored. I could see that who counted had to do with race and gender and class and place (New York, yes; New Jersey, no). What I considered discrimination pissed me off, still pisses me off, this art-historical-canon-making a reflection of fashion, not some free-floating quality of intrinsic worth or artistic genius, all the while pretending that objective criteria exist.

  I knew from my own book Creating Black Americans that there existed entire bodies of work, entire worlds of interesting art that were not visible in the art history I studied at Rutgers and that RISD took for granted. My Artist Mentors Mildred Howard and Camille Billops said it plainly and right out loud:

  The Art World is racist as hell and unashamed of it.

  This was why Romare Bearden, the avatar of collage, did not even appear in a book on collage and why Robert Colescott, my patron saint of painting, only came up if I mentioned him.

  Experienced women painters I knew, Pat Steir and Faith Ringgold, told me stories of disregard, of keeping on with their work out of “sheer spite.” Howardena Pindell stated much the same thing. I knew the visual art world I was writing about and entering was rigged and rigged against me, even before factoring in my own personal fatal flaw of age. These things pissed me off, and I wrote as with ten tiny penises pissing through my fingers.

  There was piss all over the draft I read to my colleagues, the part about art’s lack of standards. They were aghast. How could I be so self-righteous about scholarship and dismissive of visual art?

  NO NO NO NO NO

  How could I be so sanctimonious about scholarship’s weighing of evidence and application of professional standards? Whose side was I on, anyway? What was I? Princeton historian or RISD painter? I had to choose.

  Here’s how it came down: I wasn’t qualified to write a thesis in visual art. Gotta get expert help. I took my draft to the writing center. Yes, I went for help in writing. I sat down with Teacher Jen; I ate humble pie. I went home. I revised. I consulted with Teacher Jen some more. More humility. I revised. I consulted. I revised. I purged the anger from my written thesis, deleted self-righteousness and wrung out the piss—tried to, at least.

  My thesis as well as my paintings met their deadlines, ready for visits from our two outside readers, Mira and Helen. I met productively with Reader Mira, who noted my citation of her work. She liked Back Man 1 and urged me to paint more like that and not be diverted into books, even artist’s books. But when Reader Helen was scheduled to come to Providence, I could not be there.

  I could not be in Providence when Reader Helen came because the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences was giving me a Centennial Medal at commencement that very day. An honor of a lifetime. What about the scheduling conflict? There was no way in hell or in heaven or purgatory that I would skip Harvard commencement and my Centennial Medal to meet Reader Helen in Providence. Not even a teensy twinge of divided loyalties between my second reader and my Centennial Medal. I would have to see her some other time, and I was willing to come to Boston in order to see her. I emailed Reader Helen to explain my predicament and to ask please please to let me bring JPGs of my paintings to her at her convenience.

  Reader Helen did not reply. I waited another week before resending my message, figuring my email might have gotten buried or accidentally deleted. Making the enormous request for half an hour of her eyes on my painting and my written thesis, now down to only twenty-eight hundred words, I was exceedingly humble in tone. Would she please please let me know when would be convenient for her to let me come to Boston, just not at the same time as Harvard commencement?

  Reader Helen never responded. I don’t know why, can’t even begin to guess what happened on her end, for I know what it’s like to be overwhelmed and to fall behind in my email. In Reader Helen’s unbroken silence, Teacher Duane scolded me for harassment. His accusation spewed out of my email, as though I had mugged Reader Helen and run off with her things. In Reader Helen’s absence, a young visiting artist signed on as my second reader so I could graduate alongside my colleagues.

  NOW THAT WAS a very good day! My Dear Friend Thad came from Philadelphia, and my former Princeton student Crystal and her family came from New Haven. Duhirwe and I graduated. In a mass of black robes, I wore my bright (though faded) crimson Harvard PhD robe, unable to resist that final gesture of personal vanity. I patted myself on the back for perseverance. For survival. For simply getting through.

  Everything was copacetic, even after the program revealed that all seven other MFA painters, including Mike, whose painting had hardly progressed in two years, that all seven of them had graduated with honors. Only one painter of the eight lacked honors.

  20

  AND NOW?

  Now what?

  All done with formal study, MFA in hand, a body of work still groping for its own way of seeing but a body of work nonetheless. That wave of crimson-robe-clad exultation receded, revealing conundrums both familiar and strange. I was a new painter, in the parlance of the day, an “emerging artist,” but in an old body, a body old enough for an emerging artist’s mother or grandmother who would have had more mother’s or grandmother’s skills. Artists who were actually my age—assuming they were still working—many were retired, even already dead—were so much more accomplished than I. My chronological age disqualified me for benefits intended for new painters, and many prizes outright rejected artists over thirty or forty. Other enthusiasms wordlessly discounted artists with more than a few miles on them.
My lying eyes had moved into the twenty-first century, but I still couldn’t make right nowness’s grade.

  I still had to push down that feeling of being superannuated, of suspecting people wanted me to go away, to disappear along with my disproportioned combination of new and old. Was I making this up? Exaggerating, if not inventing my incongruity? Very possibly. No matter how exposed I felt, there was good fortune in my now. In actual fact I was not homeless as an artist. A residency at Aferro Gallery in Newark offered me a studio to work among new colleagues. Thank heaven for Aferro, this new artist’s new home, with its mix of ages and ways of making work.

  Aferro Gallery, a nonprofit, artist-run institution, sits in an enormous former furniture store on Market Street in downtown Newark in a block of stores between the former Bamberger department store, Essex County College, and the Essex County courthouse, with its statue of seated Abraham Lincoln. Some of the stores are still selling furniture to other people’s taste, but most of them are empty, one recently re-darkened after the closing of a new business, a trendy fluorescent-lit clothing store selling tight, short, low-cut dresses for the club, pointy-toed shoes for men, and accessories for giggly women who called themselves girls. Another newly re-darkened furniture store had previously reopened as an art gallery featuring up-to-date installations, huge paintings on unstretched canvas, and iconic sculptures of men’s manly parts. Glenn and I had attended this gallery’s openings before it closed for lack of sales on Market Street and moved to an even bigger space in Paterson.

  At one of the old-time furniture stores still operating, the salesman stood in the doorway, regular and friendly, greeting me with his one lazy eye looking the other way. Artists coming and going to Aferro diversified a crowd of Newarkers waiting for the bus. On the other side of Aferro and beyond the huge former art gallery, a mannequin of President Obama sat smiling at passersby, sufficiently lifelike to demand a second look the first time you saw him. Here’s still there now, sitting on his bench, his paint nicked and peeling, a smile still on his face.

  Aferro’s space is so long you can’t see the back from the front. The ground and second floors are exhibition space, with bathrooms and water on the second floor. Studios on the third and fourth floors. From my third-floor studio, I had to come down to the second floor to pee or wash my brushes. Dahlia, an experienced artist whose work I admired, was installed in apparent permanence on the fourth floor. Her ironic paintings used text and many shades of blue, making her, in her settled studio, my role model.

  The third floor’s five studios connected, so that to reach mine in the windowless front of the building, I walked through two other artists’ spaces. If I turned toward the back as I came up the stairs, I would walk through two other studios. This configuration kept me abreast of my comrades’ work, but not in a New-York-y spirit of competition. We talked. We attended one another’s openings at Aferro and elsewhere. We organized artists’ talks and the most attentive of crits, going down the line of the third-floor studios: Katrina’s charcoal drawings. Ken’s dismembered stretcher bars. Vikki’s prints and drawings. Marcy’s tiny figures made of dryer lint. My paintings.

  Aferro crits and conversations felt good, like belonging to a community of artists, something I missed at RISD despite the declaration that our MFA painting classmates would stay community now and forever. Maybe for them. It was actually happening for me at Aferro, in daily exchanges on the third floor, in artists’ talks, in shows where the public came to see our work and talk with us, and, in one instance, to ask me how old I was. Former Aferro residents like Artist Jerry Gant, dean of Newark street artists, showed work there and met me as a comrade.

  After Glenn built me a closet for my valuables—this was still the city, after all—I made my first post-RISD paintings, eight 12" × 15" works, acrylic ink on unstretched canvas, inspired by text text text!, such as a poem by my Poet Friend Meena, “When Asked What Sort of Book I Wish I Could Make,” perfect for me still with books in my blood and in my eyes. These were painterly little paintings, lush in subtle color and sweetness. Maybe too much sweetness.

  Meena’s Book, Grandmother’s, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 12 ¼" × 15 ¼"

  After my art-school slaps on the hand for bookishness, my fondness for words broke free. And ran all over my studio. Call it abandon. Call it belated defiance. Felt good at Aferro. Felt very very good, even a little naughty-child-beyond-teachers’-oversight.

  Rolling around in text felt great for a month, then the Brooklyn paintings tugged back at me, calling me back to my digital + manual process and to larger formats. I sketched out a couple of 40" × 70" drawings on heavy watercolor paper repurposed from amateurish drawings I had made years earlier at the Studio School Drawing and Painting Marathon, then four canvases on stretcher bars. After the sketches, I went as a short-term Fulbright scholar to the United Kingdom, where I lectured in Edinburgh and Newcastle. I intended to complete these pieces in color on my return.

  While I was in Britain, my paintings absorbed the spirit of Aferro’s third floor, where Katrina and Vikki were working in charcoal, no color. By the time I got back to Newark, my sketches were full of themselves in the palette they had learned from the other artists on my floor. My drawings had joined the third-floor club and wanted to belong in the company they were keeping. They said they did not want color. While I was away they had been plotting with other Aferro artists’ work in charcoal and gray dryer lint to get me in line in grisaille.

  At first I resisted. Who was the painter here, and who the painted? The sketches held firm. I tried bargaining with them to let me use just a little color. Ooooo-kay. The first result was a disaster, an ornery, sullen image of muddied, grudging color that looked like the compromise that had produced it. I pulled it off its stretcher bars, rolled it up, and hid it behind the one ineffectual radiator in the far corner of my studio. Its only title was (and remains) lowercase bad painting, as in bad dog. A couple of others weren’t so awful, just paintings for other people to like. Only when I gave in to grisaille did the work start living. My Aferro neighbors’ charcoal drawings were conspiring with the gray figurative works of Gerhard Richter, the German painter whose work I had been looking at in Providence.

  Richter has been a Very Big Deal as a painter for longer than I’ve been susceptible to art-world enthusiasms. It wasn’t his subject matter of German politicians and the Baader-Meinhof Gang of left-wing German terrorists in the 1970s and 1980s that intrigued me. It was his process and his palette.

  Richter came back to me at Aferro as my paintings demanded grisaille. (Using a squeegee, he also makes colored “abstract pictures” he calls simply Abstraktes Bilder. These do not interest me.) On my way to his process I hardly paused over his subjects, banal scenes and ordinary people. It was his gray paintings’ use of photographs that pulled me into his work. Some digging on my part revealed his route to verisimilitude: he projected photographs onto his canvas, traced the photographs with charcoal, and painted the tracings.

  Voilà! Another drawing technique that was perfectly acceptable when done in German.

  I adjusted Richter’s process so that the images I projected were my own handmade drawings and paintings, hence “manual,” plus images created from them with Photoshop, hence “digital.” I had already named this way of working—my process—manual + digital. But it was really becoming more established as a process of repeated toggling back and forth and back and forth between my hand and my computer, a manual + digital + manual + digital + manual process. Settling into grisaille, I made big drawings, one I called Back Man + Cook 1. I laid down a ground in powdered graphite over a masking-tape grid, erased to create pixelated lines, and went back in with charcoal for volume and texture.

  Back Man + Cook Drawing 1, 2012, graphite and acrylic on paper, 30" × 60"

  “Cook” came from one of Lucille’s photographs that I had not used at RISD, though “back man” survived from my last RISD painting. Some of the paintings were very dark, others
very light. None looked like anything I had made before. I could work this way for a very long time, varying my mediums and tones.

  AS I WAS making a series of Back Man + Cook drawings and welcoming a stream of visitors to my studio, there came another Oakland crisis. Once again, my father was in Kaiser’s ER with elevated blood pressure and confusion, having fallen on his way to the bathroom. After a few hours in the ER, his blood pressure had subsided, and he was sent home. Was there anything else wrong with him? Evidently not. This was turning into a familiar circuit, from Salem to ER with elevated, then normal blood pressure, and home to Salem. Home to his complaints about one thing to the next. For gouging him on price. For aides treating him roughly. I couldn’t know which complaint was merited, the matter of price gouging most certainly not.

  There was more. He was lonely; again, loneliness. No family around him. His eyesight was failing him, and what would he do when there was nothing left? Friends signed him up for low-sight workshops that his depression prevented his attending. They brought him audiobooks he wouldn’t listen to and apparatuses requiring more initiative than he could muster. He lay immobilized in his heartbreak hotel.

  NEWARK WAS ANNOYING me now. I waited for my 27 bus on the crowded corner of Market and Broad Streets, Newark’s fabled “Four Corners” of the olden days when Newark was New Jersey’s booming retail, manufacturing, and distribution hub. That was before Paramus’s malls snatched away retail, before manufacturing went overseas, and before Exit 8A on the New Jersey Turnpike captured warehousing. So many empty offices testifying Newark’s loss.