The Marc Clemens adventures: The secret of the cement floor

Note from the editors. In this post, Mr. Jacobs introduces a new fiction feature that he will publish periodically narrating the imaginary adventures of one Marc Clemens, an emerging visual artist. Written as a blog within his own blog, Mr. Jacobs promises to entertain us with mystery and humor.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Sunday Afternoon at Pepper Mills Lake

Sunday, I was at Pepper Mills Lake with my easel and paints, trying to make an ironic painting. Which never really works, for some reason. But I was trying anyway.

I just think it's funny to see these self-important people with their designer jogging gettups walking their designer dogs, leash in one hand and a bag of poop in the other. It's so fashionable. Makes me think of the woman with the monkey in Seurat's Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jatte.

One person after another came up to look at the painting and ooh and ahh over the dog in the picture.

"Oh look, Susan, it's a Shih Tzu. It looks just like Teresa's Princess."

"You're right, it has the same markings and the same bow. But that's not Teresa!"

"No, that's not Teresa. Who is she?" wondered the first woman.

I explained, "I just make people up."

"I don't recognize her," Susan said.

And one after another in the same way. None was aware that I was making fun of them with the pretentious woman, the pretentious dog.

On deconstruction

—Creativity—

I've been thinking about this word, deconstruct, because it's coming up in reference to my current paintings. In my art, I divide the human figure into shapes of color and value in a way that artists often have in mosaic, stained glass, batik, collage, and quilting not to mention vorticism, futurism, constructivism, cubism, and orphism. It's nothing new, though I am trying to make it fresh.

And the word deconstruct comes up, sometimes, when people describe the work. Ah, deconstruct, the New York Times word of the year from somewhere in the 90s that will not go away. In the spirit of postmodernism, the word is, itself, a construct (we can call this irony heterological, I discovered). In the spirit of human nature, we forget that, or worse, fixate on it. So I thought that I would clarify my understanding of the term and how I use it.

The key, for me, lies in understanding what a construct is. In our work-obsessed culture, we often focus on the verb, "construct," which means to build. We think of building as "construction." In our scientific-method-based way of thinking, we also think of natural things as constructions of nature. Thus, in a positivist, reductionist way, we like the idea of deconstructing things to find out their inner workings. And in our tradition of dissidence, we like the idea of deconstructing things to dismantle them.

But we should remember that the action to construct can also mean to form a construct, which is a psychological or sociological concept or idea. Regardless of its basis in nature or the human-made world, a construct is conceptual and not physically real. In my paintings, the painted figure is not physically real, it is the idea of the human body. It is a sign or symbol that I divide into swatches of color, which some people take as deconstructing the figure.

Now, if we think like deconstruction workers, we might consider that I am pulling nails and unscrewing screws and taking the sacred, visual language of this figure apart, or we might even think of me as doing demolition. The problem is, when we focus on tearing something apart, at best we are reducing it to its smallest constituent parts to study its pieces and see how it works. At worst, we value destroying it. In these senses, when I am deconstructing the figure, either I am taking someone's sacred language, in the first case, and parsing it out, or I am, in the second, sabotaging it or freeing us from it. Neither is without value, but my way of thinking about deconstruction is different.

I think of deconstruction as revealing the construct. In the best sense of deconstruction, I think, we are asking people to hear their own words and see their own images. We are, in a sense, reconstructing.

The best example I can think of is the way Shakespeare changes the order of words so we hear them for the first time. He also places incongruous words together to give us new perspective on meaning. And he is a master of the pun—a nearly lost art form. He is not simply parsing the language. He is doing the same service as breaking our words into their etymological root parts. But he's using our words. He's reconstructing our language so that it is fresh again. He's putting meaning back into our language after it has become, in Mark Twain's words, petrified custom.

I try to do something similar with the language of the figure. It's called poetry, and there are different ways to do it. Warhol repeats a familiar physiognomy with variations until we see it as strange. It is no longer the sociological and psychological construct that it had been. Similarly, Duchamp, in his Nude Descending a Staircase, reveals the figure in its physical action, its place in space and time, its basic geometry and form, and its mechanics. Again, we see it, like a Cezanne apple, for the first time.

These artists shatter our preconceptions—our lazy, stagnant knowledge—and get to root meaning. They reveal the origin. They are not tearing the model apart for the sake of the pieces. After they do their magic, they leave the construction of the figure evident.

Jacques Derrida tried to replace the word deconstruction with the word desedimentation. But the first word had already gone the way of language and become part of the sediment of our social minds. You can see the word in use all through our collective chatter and we take it for granted that we all know and agree upon what we are talking about. I wonder, however, when I hear it used in reference to my work, how accurate it is. How accurate is our understanding of the process when we label it with a fifty-cent buzzword that, heterologically, is probably in sore need itself of being deconstructed?

AbEx v. Pop, 2013

—Creativity—

Working on one of my paintings this evening, it strikes me that my work is not primarily about balancing abstraction with realism. My work is now, and always has been, about melding my subjective reality with an objective reality that we all, more or less, share. It's the old dichotomy between Abstract Expressionism and Pop. The language of Abstract Expressionism was personal and subjective. Pop presented a communal language. Pop tried to be even more objective than our shared values by removing the familiar color from our flag, for instance. Or making a taken-for-granted object so large we have to consider it for the first time. Or repeating a representation of an icon so many times it becomes as strange and new as Hobbes' mantra of the word "smock."

The best Abstract Expression has always utilized universal qualities in shape, color, and rhythm. And the best Pop art has always relied upon the artist's stylistic choices. In my work, I reconfigure a dead-pan representation of people and places using techniques that make them new and strange. In this way, I accept the job the poet is licensed to perform, taking the liberty of imposing my own colors and textures onto the renderings, rearranging them as I see fit. In doing so, I believe my work is trending with changes in the art world that seek to bring some consensus to the AbEx versus Pop dichotomy.

Abstraction sequence II

—Lesson plan—

About this time last year, I wrote about an abstraction sequence I have my students create based on work by several famous artists. Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian—like many other artists—took a subject and abstracted it over a number of pieces to see how far they could go making it more and more abstract. I was reminded of the lesson plan, yesterday, when I got to see a similar series of paintings by Georgia O'Keefe.  In these paintings, O'Keefe starts out getting more graphic, but then she also crops in closer and closer to the subject until she eliminates most of the context for the shapes and colors.

Georgia O'Keefe, Jack-in-the-pulpit

Her progression reminded me of a similar project I did as a first-year art student. There are three parts to it:

1. Over five steps, move closer in to the subject.
2. With each step, as you crop in, also simplify the shapes.
3. With each step, use a relatively darker set of values so that the five steps reflect a full value range from high key to low key.

Abstraction Sequence by Brian Jacobs, 1985

This is a great project for students because it gives them a very concrete objective. It's easier to be creative when we are constrained by a certain number of panels and a distinct set of directions. Beyond the constraints, we can come up with our own ideas. But the constraints force us to focus.

The assignment also gives us context; it's easier to understand your final color scheme when you've started with a light set of values and worked darker. The same is true of the simplification of the shapes: it's easier to abstract in smaller steps. By the time we get to the last panel, we are organizing the painting in terms of design, not realistic representation.

O'Keefe's series is similar. We do not have the first painting in her series.  But if we compare Jack-in-Pulpit – No. 2 to Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3, we can see that she is simplifying and hardening the edges. By No. IV, some of the previously rounded forms have become more square. But also, at this point, she starts cropping in closer to the inside of the flower. When she gets to No. VI, we sense that it references life, and from the context of the rest of the series, we know it is the spadix of the flower. But now our focus is on pure form. Using O'Keefe as a model, students can create their own progression to learn about abstraction as well as color and value.

CR 716 Jack-in-Pulpit – No. 2, 1930

CR 717 Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3, 1930

CR 718 Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV, 1930

CR 719 Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 5, 1930

CR 720 Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. VI, 1930

One of my mentors always used to say, make small changes. He meant that we should advance our style and work through our ideas by making a number of works that are each slightly more developed toward the goal than the one before. This assignment is good preparation for that kind of practice. In addition, the relatively arbitrary combining of objectives makes it easier to make connections and discoveries.

The day job

—Creativity—

In Europe, centuries ago, an artist may have spent free time on his or her own projects and a lot more time building sets for Easter pageants or altars for churches. Back then, as it may still be in some cultures, art was a trade like any other profession. But we now live in a world where artists often have two separate occupations: a day job and their craft.

This is the norm, though we often feel badly about it. Day jobs, we tell ourselves, are necessary evils while we are getting started but real artists don't have day jobs. And yet, a quick internet search reveals many, many famous artists who worked non-art jobs their entire careers. Most of the dual-profession creatives I learned about are writers, only because they tend to write about themselves. But visual artists also have to work side jobs. Sometimes we work jobs that simply help us survive. Paul Gauguin claimed to have emptied bed pans in an insane asylum to support his art. Been there, done that. Jobs like this are only short-term solutions to desperate situations. But there are advantages to getting a good, permanent day job.

A secure, sustainable, livable salary can only make it easier to be an artist. When one has enough money (and that doesn't have to be a fortune for the starving artist), free time is unencumbered by the stresses of survival. These stresses can seem to dominate every hour of every day when we are in survival mode. But when the bills are paid and the refrigerator stocked, we can come home and get a couple hours of good, solid work accomplished. Most artists create better when they are able to get into a healthy flow with the work. Time helps but money, in many ways, helps more.

When your time for art is limited by your day job (time is always limited), you will hopefully find yourself using your time more aggressively for your art. This is where a good day job and a bad day job differ. Coming home from a job that doesn't even pay the bills does not inspire hard work at home. After all, you just worked your tail off for not very much at the office. But when the hard work at the office pays dividends, then you will want to keep reaping benefits at the easel as the day dissolves. Having limited time to make art forces us to focus more, cut straight to the essentials, and get our work done. Having money in the bank gives us permission to indulge in our craft instead of poring over bills and making emergency runs to recycle bottles and move cash around from one ATM to another.

Having financial security means that it is easier to carve out regular time for the art without interruptions. But there are other ways that a good day job can introduce routine to an artist's life. The regularity and responsibility of a day job means that your routines are set. Most successful artists structure their studio time in the same way as a regular job. Roy Lichtenstein went to work in his studio every day as though it were a nine-to-five job so that his family got used to the idea that his time there was essential. Having a regular job forces you to have a routine and hopefully teaches you how to maintain a routine after making it big and quitting the day job. Until then, your studio routine follows your day job routine.

We might see the day job as a distraction—and if it pays less than we need to live, it really is, as it would be for anyone. But a good day job gives us security and makes it easier to maintain discipline in our craft. A meaningful, healthy day job provides social interaction outside the studio. It gives us skills we can use in our art business: bookkeeping, marketing, construction, Web design, billing, accounting, and more. The seeming incongruity of some day jobs and art making also offers perspective that we otherwise wouldn't get if we saturated ourselves with non-stop creativity. Anyway, there's only so many hours a day we can create. I find that I can work a day job more hours than I can paint, because making art takes more energy than most other occupations. And art requires contemplation or at least stepping away.

Having a day job means something else that Oscar Wilde acknowledged when he wrote, "the best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread." Financial independence from the art world means that one doesn't have to compromise vision for salability. Often, our best work has financial value only later. Financial independence from art trends means one can challenge the trends and do something different, something that doesn't yet have currency.

"Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you."—Oscar Wilde

These days, however, everything takes more energy and time and money than it did a century or even decades ago. Most professions demand 110% from employees (a mathematical impossibility). Most professions demand that instead of going home and writing the novel at the kitchen table, we go home and continue working on the laptop, doing research and professional development, or catching up on unfinished office work. Many famous creatives admit to stealing time at the day job and working on their art on the sly if they had to. One way or the other, there's no room for both the day job and the art career to occupy ALL of our time.

But the two occupations are not inherently incompatible.  Being an artist is more of a cultural and social role than a financial occupation. This is not to say that artists should not make money or want to be compensated. We know that the calling to be an artist is outside our economy—just as a minister's or doctor's calling is outside our economy. But that doesn't mean that it is wrong to make money off the art. The art economy is largely distinct from our regular economy. So we don't need to experience conflict between a day job and a profession as an artist. They are two separate things. One  provides a secure cash flow to invest in the other, but that investment is intended to pay off at some point, to some degree. Selling art in the art economy is more like receiving patronage, even in today's art marketplace. When we let art slip into the regular marketplace, we risk corrupting it more.

So getting that day job and using it well is a challenge. But if we can use it as a financial resource, it can benefit our art making, as long as we can safeguard the time we have left after the work day is done.

Building cardboard flat files

—News from the studio—

A pile of my prints.

Often, when I find a need for some resource in the studio, I will build it myself. This week, while in the process of organizing and documenting all my artwork, I found that I needed some flat files to separate and store my prints, drawings, and small paintings. Here's the story of how I found a cheap solution.

I began with a bunch of free boxes. I cut them in half and shortened the width of the side flaps so I could reassemble them only as deep as a strip of 1x2. This meant that the front and back flaps also had to be cut down to the same size.

Cutting down the box using my mat cutter.

Measuring the height of a 1x2.

Side cut to fit 1x2. The end flap isn't cut down yet.

For the 1x2 strips, I found eight foot sticks made of recycled wood fiber for $2.24 each. They come coated with white primer, so they were a perfect choice. I cut two pieces from each stick for the sides of the flat file and stapled the cardboard to the wood. Now, I had two parts for the flat file: a top and a bottom.

Stapling the cardboard sides to the wood

I stacked the top and bottom pieces and stapled the loose cardboard to the tops of the 1x2s on each side, leaving the staples off about 1/3 of the length from the top so I could make a larger top flap. I only had to staple down one half of the top and bottom since the cardboard wraps around and is stapled on the sides. To make the flap, I very, very lightly scored across the top with a utility blade. When making boxes, I always score the side that bends in.

A flap cut in the top for easy access.

I taped the flaps down in the back; they never need to be opened.

The back flaps are permanently taped.
The front ones can be taped closed with less tape as needed.

And here are my six finished flat files. I've already got one in use. They are light, sturdy, and easy to stack. And they each cost me only $2.24 in materials.

The flat files completed.

The first one with paintings stored and the flap labelled.

Persistence and perseverance

—Creativity—

Early one Manhattan morning, I saw several men drag a big food cart from the parking space where it was hitched behind their vehicle. They pushed it into the intersection, stopped it from rolling, turned it around, and pushed it back onto the sidewalk at the crosswalk. This took some time; the cart was very heavy and I could see they were struggling at every step. They seemed to be fighting against the nature of the thing, and the physics of the planet that the wheels and the weight wanted to obey. But once the process had started, it had to be completed. Trying to put it in place, they knocked down the pedestrian crossing light, but they got the cart onto the sidewalk where they could sell food for the rest of the day.

"This is the highest wisdom that I own: freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew."
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every morning, these men do the same thing, with the same struggle. All over the city, in the summer heat, they push these miniature restaurants through the streets, some of them with hot coals already smoking. And it's not easy. To begin with, they must find two legal parking spaces beside each other to pull the vehicle and the trailer into. Then they have to unhitch the cart and push it where it needs to go. Sometimes they park close to that location. Sometimes, they can't.

The streets in Manhattan are not level. Particularly running east and west, there are hills that you barely notice until you are inside a building and have to take stairs between avenues. Pushing a food cart, or pushing anything, is work.

When I saw these men struggling, so physically, to make a living, I thought, this is what an artist must do. An artist has to persevere in the same way. We have to work extraordinarily hard like the vendors. For someone living in the suburbs or in the country, this might seem crazy. Why work so hard? In the city, however, this is life. Someone living like this might very well think, this is unbearable and I'm a fool for doing it. But this is what we do. In the suburbs and the country, we have different ordeals.

"I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen."
— Frank Lloyd Wright

Not long after watching the food vendors, I saw a woman load her children, baby carriage, and luggage onto the bus. She required the driver and a half-dozen passengers to help her and all her charges. Everyone seemed invested in her mission. She made several trips back and forth between six bus seats and the sidewalk getting everything in and out.

This is nothing unusual. You might see her determinedly leading her pack down the sidewalk with parcels on the roof of the carriage. She will take the children forty blocks, their little feet traveling twice as many steps as hers. When they arrive at their walk-up, it's just another episode in their daily adventure. On and off the subway, one sees people like her on an epic quest to get things from here to there and get things done.

This spirit of struggle, of perseverance, of persistence, of can-do-no-matter-what—this is the spirit of the artist. It's not workaholism or idle occupation. We are not bored. We are surviving.

The last I saw, the city still hadn't put up a new crossing light. The one the vendors damaged is gone. I would have felt very bad about breaking city property, and I would have been very uncomfortable parking my business under the damage. Maybe they felt this way, too. But in New York City, maybe not! The woman on the bus didn't express any discomfort at inconveniencing all the other passengers. She was assertive about the seats she wanted for her kids. She didn't try to carry too much at one time. Without any apparent damage to her pride, she let the others help her. She may have said I'm sorry and thank you, but she was in no hurry. She took her time and did what she needed to do.

And this is another part of the deal, I suppose.  We must accept that we are going to be a little nuisance from time to time, and that's part of being the artist too.