A friend and I visited the Nan Tull exhibit at the Danforth Museum, and, as usual, witnessing another artist's journey gave me insight into some specific concerns of my own.  One thing I was struck by in Tull's work, was the difference between the pieces that relied on a strong sense of design and those that had a looser, more raw feel.  Some pieces had more overall balance and fluidity and were, at first glance, very beautiful.  But the pieces that I especially responded to, that had a voice that I was drawn to, were the ones with a little less perfection.  I felt that the beauty of Tull's craft occasionally drowned out the expressive voice in some of her more "perfected" pieces.

For me, this is a continuous challenge: how to enable the voice of the artwork to speak with pure grace and power (without the artist getting in the way).  Sometimes the craft of artmaking helps and sometimes it gets in the way.  ...sorry to bring up Diebenkorn again, but he has a nice quote about this... "I seem to have to do it elaborately wrong and with many conceits first. Then maybe I can attack and deflate my pomposity and arrive at something straight and simple."

I think I am also, at times, suspicious of extreme balance and beauty in art.  So much of contemporary art is meant to hide or repress the humanness of the artist and the humanness of the viewer, as well.  There's so much perfection, so much gloss.  I love fragile lines or a raw surface or an awkward element that reveals vulnerability and humility.

Going in to the exhibit, I knew very little about Nan Tull's work (except that she made encaustic paintings).  What I liked most about her work was the presence of what I can only describe as a kind of spiritual narrative.   I felt it most in three of the "inheritence" pieces (the ones with an overall darker palette).  I also especially loved her very simple amaryllis drawings in pencil.  The thin lines of the amaryllis reminded me of Giacometti's thin standing figures...and the thin presence of a spirit.

My daughter and I made a date to work on the same topic for a blog entry.  (She's been working on her own blog about writing).  We were talking about the creative process, and how it is a very individual experience.  To write this entry I made a list of steps that I tend to go through each time I paint.  Here they are:

1.  Inspiration:  often in the form of some narrative element (a poem, a concept)

2.  Gesture:  like Francis Bacon, I tend to paint first, and find the gesture, the skeleton of the painting, while experiencing the visceral quality of the materials.

3.  Storm:  the usually inefficient, at times unpleasant step that takes the form of a manic swinging to and fro, between two disparate parts of myself, back and forth between graphic clarity and complete obliteration.  And excessive scraping of paint.

4.  AHA:  a clear minded self remembers one of Diebenkorn's notes about painting: tolerate chaos.  Making a drawing from the painting can sometimes help me find the skeleton within the chaos.  Drawing clarifies the editing process.  More scraping, but this time I might smile while scraping.

5.  Magic:  when the composition feels like it has become itself fully and the brush strokes sing to each other, and there's a unified song that I recognize and love.

I've tried to tweak the process, to change that challenging third step.  When I was at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, a visiting artist, Frank Bowling, asked, "why do you need to create a tornado every time you make something? (and why don't you clean up this studio?!)"  To some extent, the tornado is still with me.  There's less destruction and more intention, but there's still stormy weather.  But...I've always loved storms.