Come to My Show: Dreams, Art Making and Politics

I have been working on a series of sculptural ‘word’ pieces created with marbles embedded in resin on a wood surface.  It took me almost a year to perfect the process, but still, sometimes things go askew. After pouring the resin and placing the marbles in it, it takes a couple hours of fidgeting to align the marbles just right and make sure that they stay in place.

Once I am satisfied that the resin has jelled or hardened sufficiently and that the marbles won’t move, I usually take on another task or leave the studio.

Last night, when I left, all the marbles were aligned perfectly. This morning, when I returned, I found that resin had dripped over the sides (this is after I removed the protective tape on the sides of the letter) and a bunch of marbles fell out of place. 

Because the resin had hardened, I had to pry the affected marbles off; sand down the wooden letter. Because I have a limited supply of these marbles, I had to grind off the resin from each marble and then polish it.

A tedious and unanticipated task can be demoralizing. Grinding resin off 50 marbles would qualify under that category.  But, it is also an opportunity to clear my mind and let my thoughts wander. 

As I polished away, I started thinking about three works of art: The Gleaners (Des Glaneuses) is an oil painting by Jean-François Millet completed in 1857; Guernica by Picasso was  completed 70 years later in 1937; and James Kerry Marshall’s Better Homes, Better Gardens completed in 1994.

I have no idea how ‘political’ Millet intended the painting to be. Perhaps, as a farm boy growing up, this was just a painting of a prosaic scene of the downtrodden gathering the final bits of the harvest.  Regardless, the painting (which he sold for a miniscule price) was and is subsequently interpreted as a political commentary on the plight of the poor (who had to obtain a ‘license’ to be gleaners). Apparently, the ‘have-nots’ were not popular subjects for up and coming painters.

Guernica, on the other hand, was an overtly political and historically important painting not only because of its composition but because it depicted a novel act of war, the bombing of civilians from aircraft.  As a precursor to Picasso, Goya painted the mundane but horrific acts of war in his Capricho series. But Picasso’s painting both in its size and focus tried to slap the viewer in the face with to the evil forces brewing in Europe.

But the painting did not change the course of history or save one life and did not burn long enough in our minds to stop the horrific war that was just beginning to gather steam.

I have to admit that I never heard of James Kerry Marshall until about 2016 and never saw a painting of his until the 2017 MOCA Los Angeles show. The fact that black painters have been underrepresented in the art world requires no further comment.

Because he is black, and maybe he intends it so, every painting he creates is interpreted (by art critics at least) through his racial identity. I have heard him interviewed and he is very focused on the art/gallery/museum/collector narrative and the (lack of) place of black artists in that slice of art cake.

But I love Better Homes, Better Gardens as a painting in and of itself. It is hand wrought, painterly, colourful, exuberant, optimistic, domestic and celebratory. It settles us and lets us know that we all want to be in a ‘place’ where we are welcome and belong. 

The place were we belong though is going through turbulence. The world has not strayed from its orbit for the last 4.5 billion years. Donald Trump is not going to cause it to wobble away. But he has taken a sledgehammer to the American dream and infected others around the world with his racist ideology and perversion of ‘truth’.  The pandemic, a malevolent eclipse, is looming over the world.

The kernel of my work is seeded from my dreams. I intend to make art which knowingly or unknowingly addresses my fears and aspirations. I am riding the storm along with everyone else. Each art work I produce has countless layers of feeling and observation. James Kerry Marshall’s Better Homes, Better Gardens inspired me because it represented such a deep and touching sense of oneself without loosing what I find beautiful in art.