Influenzes

“If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you've got to realize that influence is not influence. It's simply someone's idea going through my new mind."

                                                                          Jean-Michel Basquiat

                               

During these first weeks of the New Year, I’ve been flat on my back.  What started out as a year filled with promise, ambitious resolutions and over-achieving to-do lists, quickly devolved into two weeks of Influenza.  You know, the kind where you’re too sick to read, watch TV or even sleep.  You just lay there, staring out the window or locking onto objects in your immediate visual periphery.

In my state of torpor, I have been studying a painting of mine that hangs on the wall facing the bed that has sheltered me while I recover.  This painting is one of the first I ever made using encaustic paints, a medium made of beeswax, damar resin and rich pigments of color.

Linda Povey - Lemon Song
encaustic on panel
6x6 inches
2012

As I reflected on it, I began to ask myself, where did this painting come from?  What influences came into my brain, travelled through my consciousness and then somehow came out through my fingertips?  As the great American designer, Charles Eames, once said, “To be realistic one must always admit the influence of those who have gone before.”

On the surface of it, I can say that this painting was made from a place of exuberance.  I was ecstatic to discover the delicious, tactile sensuality of the encaustic paint.  The smooth way it came off the brush and onto the substrate.  Furthermore, I was delighted to be back on my beloved Cape Cod once again, painting with my artistic partner in crime, Sharon Hayes.  Having just turned 50, I felt confident and optimistic about my life, and I think the painting reflects the joy I felt in making it.

But as I reflected on the painting more deeply, I began to consider other artistic influences.  I have always been drawn to Mark Rothko, even as a child visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  Rothko, an Abstract Expressionist painter, believed in color as "merely an instrument" to get to the "basic human emotions."  He was an early pioneer of the Color Field school of painting, which is defined as painting "large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane."  Something about these strongly emotional, unapologetic paintings has always captivated me.

Mark Rothko - Untitled
Oil on canvas
8'8" x 11' 9"
1968

Visiting my favorite Rothko at MOMA, 2011
Untitled - Blue and Yellow
7'4" x 5'10"
Oil on canvas
1969

Another influence in my artistic journey was the wonderful experience I had working with Stephen Haller at Stephen Haller Fine Art in the 1980’s, when it was still on West Broadway.  Steve had a singular vision for his gallery; to cultivate and nurture artist's whose work was “emotional, gestural and dedicated to driving the image to its minimal essence.”  

One of the gallery's shining stars, and represented by Stephen Haller for over thirty years, is Ronnie Landfield.   A next-generation Color Field painter emerging in the 1960’s, Landfield sums up the essence of his work beautifully, “Spirituality and feeling are the basic subjects of my work.  They are depictions of intuitive expressions using color as language, and the landscape (God’s earth) as a metaphor for the arena of life.”

Ronnie Landfield - Rite of Spring
acrylic on canvas
79 x 112 inches
1985

Ronnie Landfield - New Day Dawning
acrylic on canvas
112 x 132 inches
2001

One of the most interesting elements in his work is the linkage between Color Field and Chinese Landscape painting, with their distinctive, hard-edged borders.  Ronnie once shared with me that this provided a context, or a way to frame the complexity of emotions within the borders.  I realized how many of my own works over the years have incorporated the borders inspired by Ronnie Landfield and the Chinese Landscape painters before him.

Linda Povey
The Hi-Lo Mix is Very Now
water color and mixed media on paper
5 x 7 inches
2007

Linda Povey
Copper Pennies
collage and mixed media on paper
4 x 6 inches
2012

I am grateful for Ronnie's inspiration and still proudly own a drawing he did for me in appreciation of my contribution to his successful solo show in 1987.

The artist whose work I am most inspired by currently is among the latest generation of Color Field painters, Joanne Mattera.  A talented painter and journalist, she has written the seminal book, The Art of Encaustic Painting, as well as a highly engaging blog on the global art scene, JoanneMattera ArtBlog.

Mattera's Silk Road series alternates thin, vertical and horizontal layers of encaustic paint, creating a subtle grid, like a weave, or a piece of raw silk.  

Joanne Mattera - Silk Road 146
encaustic on panel
16 x 16 inches
2010

Joanne Mattera - Silk Road 107
encaustic on panel
12 x 12 inches
2010

Beyond the technical achievement of these paintings, which is significant, is a luminosity which must be seen in person to be fully appreciated.  Mattera describes her work as “lush minimalism,” using a grid pattern "the way classical poets used rigorous rhyme schemes to impose elegant order onto an otherwise messy outpouring of emotion.”  Again, the structure of a grid, or a border, provides the necessary framework to express complex emotions.

It occurred to me that ultimately I had come full circle, right back to the initial joy I had experienced in painting Lemon Song.  Rothko reflected in his final years that his interest was in "expressing human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.  The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”  Maybe it's just as simple as that.

I recently discovered that it was Stephen Haller who gave Joanne Mattera her very first solo exhibition back in 1995.  I thought there was a nice symmetry to that.  Again and again, the threads of our influence overlap and intertwine, artist to artist, generation to generation, producing an ever-evolving tapestry of what Jean-Michel Basquiat called, "someone's idea going through my new mind."

The Inner Critic

“If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.”      

                                                                              –     Vincent van Gogh

I have been thinking a lot about my Inner Critic.  That nasty, paralyzing voice that tells me I cannot paint.  Where does this voice come from??

One school of thought, cultivated from about $20,000 of therapy, is that it is because “my mother was an artist and I somehow internalized that there was only room for one artist in the family and that position had already been taken.” 

Granted, my mom was an exceptionally talented classical pianist, painter and needle pointer, who brought a tremendous amount of creativity to just about everything she did.  And she did a lot.  I can remember as a child playing on the grounds of the Barnes Foundation in Merion, while my mother studied with Violette de Mazia.  Or being forced into Colonial costume as “the little butter churning girl” while my mom curated The Paper Mill House, a historical landmark and museum she helped renovate and build from the ground up.  Or the many hours we scoured the Chesapeake together, looking for Chippendale chairs disguised as trash.

My Mom - Dorothy Elizabeth Povey (Taken in 2006)

But the truth is that my mom completely encouraged me and was always my biggest fan, so I don’t buy into the therapist’s view.  And it’s not as if I haven’t been a highly creative person throughout my own life.  I’ve thrown myself with reckless abandon into sewing, cooking, gardening, pottery, remodeling, flea marketing and a host of other creative pursuits.  Professionally, I’ve spent the last 25 years as a consumer insight and brand strategist, which, when done properly, is an extremely creative line of work.  But whenever it came time to make the Grand Canyon sized leap from “craft” to “fine art,” I would always end up with a lump in my throat the size of a hamster.

I remember taking a screen-printing class in my junior year of college with a professor and artist by the name of David Smyth.  Besides his bold, take-no-prisoners painting style, and the fact that he was already represented in several museum collections, David was notorious in Ithaca for two other things.  The first, was that he bore an uncanny resemblance to Mick Jagger.  And the second, was that he dated a lot of his students.  When I confided my Inner Critic fears to David in class one day, he belly laughed, clapped me on the shoulder and hooted, “Well, you’re just going to have to get over it,” with all the bravado you'd expect from someone who looked just like Mick Jagger.  The little hamster quivered in my throat.

David Smyth - Then and Now

If only I knew then what I am just beginning to realize now - that the Inner Critic is a common and widespread creative problem.  When asked how he managed his Inner Critic, Junot Diaz, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” responded, “You’ve raised one of the thorniest dialectics of working, which is that you need your critical self: without it you can’t write, but in fact the critical self is what’s got both feet on the brakes of your process.”

I completely agree that my critical self has been a highly valuable and useful tool, it has helped me set the bar for standards of excellence in my professional life.  In marketing and advertising, it has been essential in helping me discern the great idea from the merely good, many, many times.  So, my goal isn’t to silence this voice, as Van Gogh suggested, but to learn how to use it effectively and productively.

Malcolm Gladwell’s, “Outliers,” put forth the premise that to be an expert in any field requires a devotion to one’s craft for at least 10,000 hours, which is about 5 years at 40 hours per week.  This challenges the accepted notion that genius or being gifted is simply a matter of innate talent, when in fact, closer analysis of success stories proves out that the element of innate talent plays a lesser role in achieving expert status than one might think.

Gladwell gives examples like the Beatles, who before making it big had logged more than 10,000 hours of playing on stage in four years while similar bands had only a fraction of that experience.  Bill Gates had logged in more than 10,000 hours of programming by the time he dropped out of Harvard his Freshman year, giving him an enormous advantage over other developers at that time.

The art community’s translation of Gladwell’s premise is that to be a good painter, you need to make 100 bad paintings.  Juliette Jeanclaude writes, “Whatever art form you are practicing, making bad work is essential, freeing up the mind and the pressure. Bad work plants the seeds for the good work that will come later on.”  I like this approach.  It doesn’t negate or silence the Inner Critic, who clearly has an important role to play, but no longer allows this voice to paralyze my efforts.  It gives me permission to just do the work, however dreadful, planting seeds for better results in the future.

This year I am committed to rolling up my sleeves and making some bad paintings.  With freedom, expansiveness and a sense of discovery.  I can already feel my little hamster breathing a big sigh of relief.

“Your work is to discover your work and then, with all your heart, to give yourself to it.” – Buddha

Linda Povey - Bodhisattva
Encaustic and metal on panel
6x6"