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Faces and Figures
Mothers and Daughters in their Second Half-Century
Artist Statement Mothers and Daughters in their Second Half-Century began in 1999, when I first met a ninety-five year old woman named Dorothy, who lived with her daughter and caregiver, Florance.The pair inspired me to find and paint more women like them -- daughters and mothers aging together. Some were best friends -- linked by love, necessity, habit and history. Some hadn't spoken in decades for those same reasons. Most of the women were strangers to me -- a conscious decision. Their stories and humor, arguments and secrets, remained private, which was my goal. They were filled with suspense to me, as if each woman was about to divulge her deepest thoughts, but never would.
I steadily completed around a dozen small paintings of these women until the summer of 2000. At this time, fate intervened. I was a passenger in two consecutive car accidents and was unable to paint for about six months. When the spinal brace came off and the pain subsided, I returned to my project, only to find that it had changed as much as I had. The paintings grew from their smaller format of 11" x 14" to a larger 32" x 40". I also began using gesso as a rough, textural surface underneath the acrylic. Likewise, my life changed considerably after the accident as I became acutely aware of my own mortality. I found that painting was not enough and felt a great desire to make a real difference. I began working as an activity director at a residential care home for seniors in Portland, Oregon. My work there blossomed into a wonderfully enriching experience. I gained a deep insight and tremendous respect for these women (and men) whom I had previously viewed from the distance of an artist. My subjects became close friends and my work and life merged together as I never expected. I learned a few lessons that I hope are apparent in my art. Among them, that the most fragile people I have met are by far the strongest and that the last stages of a person's life are as valuable and as full-of-life as every stage that came before.
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In Piece: The Women at Pinewood Gardens
Artist Statement
For six years, I worked
daily with the elderly residents of a senior care home in Portland, Oregon. The paintings of this series reflect the faces of many of my dearest friends from that time.
These
paintings are a continuation of my interest in women, family and aging. For �In
Piece: The Women at Pinewood Gardens,� twelve women were painted in acrylic on
the highly textural surface of stretched, patchwork quilts. The fragmentation
of the varied fabrics, together with the expressiveness of every subject, are
intended to help illuminate who these women were to me. Their lives were a mysterious patchwork, hand-stitched unevenly and imperfectly. I knew them
as they were � survivors, individuals, inspirations.
The
process of creating a painting is as important as the final result. For this series, I felt
the surface and materials used should lend something to the overall piece
formally and conceptually. I first selected and salvaged vintage
fabrics. I was especially partial to hand-embroidered pieces that were torn,
stained or practically unusable. I then cut them and pieced them together using
my mother's 1950s Kenmore sewing machine. Next, I
stretched the patchwork over a stretcher frame like one would with a traditional
canvas. This process created stress on the old fabrics, causing tears
and split seams. I then reworked the whole surface by hand, adding patches
and rough embroidery as needed � for structural reinforcement and for visual
interest. Finally, I painted in acrylic. I paid close attention to how each piece of the patchwork responded differently to the paint and I enjoyed the challenge of creating visual cohesion across the varied textures.
My
hope with this series is to compel the viewer to wonder about who these women are and were and to
contemplate the quilted nature of a long life lived. These women, as I knew
them, were both strong and fragile. They were full of life and also leaving it.
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Man of the Boat
Acrylic on Wood and Ballachulish Slate
24"x36"
Artist Statement
Glenelg is in no way frozen in the past, but time does have a way of slowing down there. History is also held much closer to the heart there and emotions run high
when Highlanders talk of tragedies like the Massacre of Glencoe, the Highland Clearances by
the English military, the long, hard exodus to
The Locals is an acrylic series painted on wood and Ballachulish slate � the traditional
roofing material in
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Margaret
Acrylic on Patchwork
24" diameter
Artist Statement
The Ten Children of Margaret is
a series of seventeen paintings in acrylic on two formats. Eleven paintings are
of solitary subjects on stretched, patchwork fabric over a round
format. Six paintings depict groups of people together on square wood panels, incorporating a generously applied copper-gold paint somewhere in their compositions. Each group includes an infant, as if it were being passed
from one painting to the next. The subjects are all descendants of one woman and
are captured as if in the midst of a lively conversation. The quilts, the circular
formats and the enveloping gold paint are all intended as metaphors for the strength of this large
family. The subjects are endlessly bonded to each other � radiating from and
orbiting around the powerful love of their aging mother, Margaret. Humor,
empathy and selflessness are the fabric of this family.
My
subjects and materials often address issues of family, aging and the fragile
bonds between people. In
some ways, The Ten Children of Margaret is a sort of grown-up response to
some of my early work, which had sought to critically examine memories
of my own complicated extended family. As an art student in college, I looked again and
again at the relationships that didn�t make it � the characters who had seemed
unreasonable and unforgiving to me as a child. I tried, through art, to
reconcile what seemed the long-since broken threads in our own family�s
piecemeal quilt. Since that time, I think I have learned the lessons that
everyone learns eventually � that there are two sides to every story, that
judging others can be infectious, and that, generally, people are doing the
best they can.
The
Ten Children of Margaret is both observational and romantic. The perspectives
alternate from that of a newborn child to a sibling to a great-grandparent. For
me, the story of each painting changes as I imagine the perspective of each
descendant of Margaret and of Margaret herself.
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Bright
Acrylic on Wood
3"x3"
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a blind collaboration with Becca Bernstein and Gwenn Seemel
Artist by Gwenn Seemel Artist by Becca Bernstein
Artists' Statement
Portraits are very good at pretending. They convince you that they are human by inviting you to talk to them as you would their subjects. They call out to be named for the people they purport to represent: a portrait of mom naturally becomes “mom’s portrait” or simply “mom” in conversation. Portraits are deft impersonators, but they are not the person themselves—and not just because they are made of pigment and binding instead of flesh and blood.
A portrait is not a painting of a person because it is actually a painting of two people, or, more specifically, the space between those two people: the subject and the artist. When an artist paints an individual, she is actually painting a complex union of who that person presents to her and who the artist perceives the person to be, all filtered through a kaleidoscope of visual, societal, historical and psychological contexts. In that sense, the subject of a portrait is not actually the subject of that portrait. The subject of a portrait is the relationship between the artist and her sitter, whether momentary or lifelong.
Subjective Tour and Catalog
This exhibition launches a year-long tour of Subjective around the Northwest. In March, Bernstein and Seemel will release an accompanying exhibition catalog. Portraiture scholar Dr. Richard Brilliant has written the introductory essay for the catalog entitled “My Subjects Over There, Myself Here, and You Anywhere.” The following is an excerpt:
“On one hand Bernstein and Seemel stand between us viewers and their familiar subjects; on the other hand, without the artists’ performance we would never have encountered these subjects at all, nor would we have been able to discover what they were like without the signal marks of the painters’ personal style as an informative gloss on their picture-making. Altogether, their portrayed subjects, we viewers, and the image-making artists constitute a loosely structured spectating community, where we should not be considered a third-person outsider, so immediately are the portrayed subjects presented to our gaze. Despite the apparent intimacy of Bernstein’s and Seemel’s portraits, it is possible to go beyond the particularities of their knowing relationship and the marks of their personal style to discover individuals, once unknown to us viewers but now, at the very least, strangers no longer.”
Subjective press links:
Order the book: Subjective, by Richard Brilliant
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