healing

Good for you!
I love it that we are applying to our heart's desires for the things that we want.
I'm very excited to see what becomes of your letter of interest.
What made you write to this specific location?

Be careful, though, about looking at the context too literally.
I'm a little worried about the literal translations of "healing" that make the artist a therapist rather than an instrument of transformation through their work. The movie "Awakenings" comes to mind...
Especially in a hospital context.

But looking at it in another way, your work has tremendous potential to influence and transform the hospital by asking very interesting questions about caring for oneself, caring for others, care of one's culture, society, the world, etc.
Macro to micro possibilities.
I see the egg series being very relevant there,
as well as your interaction with (patients, doctors, family members, etc)...

Brava Tereza!

Harborview Hospital public art comission, with great gratitude for the help of Anitra and Alan

Letter of interest

“KCME”

5813 155th AVE NE
Redmond, WA 98052
June 10, 2008

4Culture, NJB Project
101 Prefontaine Pl S.
Seattle, WA 98104


Dear Madam or Sir:

After reading Fernanda D’Agostino’s art plan for Harborview, I was deeply touched by the important potential a hospital can attain as a space of healing. D’Agostino takes into account all forms of healing with which to surround patients—an extraordinary approach given the condition of many contemporary hospitals. Her inclusion of gardens, light, art, visual- and performance-based science, along with people’s stories—all in order to promote a space for healing—resonated with me and is the reason for my application. I would like to participate as an artist in this powerful task.

Since the birth of my daughter I have been researching color as a healing element, using as a guide D’Herbois’s Light, Darkness and Colour in Painting Therapy. By directly addressing personal wounds and processing them through paint, pain is able to shift. Wounds and trauma can heal if one has the space to process them. (Please see my Wounds Healing Series.) Through a Harborview commission I would be interested in meeting and collaborating with interested patients, family members, and staff. I would like their finished paintings to incorporate the actual hands, either metaphorically or directly, of folks who pass through the hospital. (Please see my Trust Fall.)

I have collaborated in this way on many fronts: team-teaching undergraduate painting students, attending workshops in Italy with a half a dozen artists from all over the world, and participating in a cultural exchange program in South Africa where I was given the space for my healing. My most recent collaboration occurred in Salem, Oregon where I brought a blank canvas to the gallery, and through my encounters with people over a three-day period completed We Meet.


Thank you for doing this important work and for your consideration,
Tereza Swanda

It seems like every day I get to studio, I receive another invitation to an art opening, open studios, or group show announcement.
I love it.
I think my last few posts were affected by the unbearably hot weather here in New York.
Now that I can breathe again, I can think more clearly.
Finishing up framing work today for show on Saturday!

Bushwick Open Studios

Blessings to Ryann's and Anitra's open studio this past weekend

presentation, application comments to follow

presentation

Why is it so difficult sometimes to find simple ways to present one's work?
What am I overlooking?
Am I over-thinking things?
What is the most simple solution?

Sunday list

Remember client appointments for tomorrow
Plumbing inspection tomorrow
Follow up with expeditor
Pick up jacket left at engineer's office
Parasol - remember to take home tonight
Bring purse home and remember to transfer contents to correct wallet in red purse
Frame pieces for show tomorrow at the latest
Mail DVD to Eric
Mail DVD to Sandra
Send great thoughts to Headlands application!
Dinner?
Email drawings
Insurance information
Buy bread
Plants to Berry street Friday?
Check in with builder
Remove all rubbish from site
Follow up with B.F.
Make at least one mirror mirror this week
Plan another Meaning Cleaning with Hayley
Burn all images to CDs in case of computer crash
Work out Tuesday
Clients again Wednesday
Work out Thursday
Make sure clothes are clean for the week
Diane trade
Maya trade
Jessica inquiry
Bring all finished work to gallery Tuesday!
Opening Saturday - remember to invite people
Shipping reimbursement to SF
Amey inquiry
Buy more coffee
One more month of storage unit
Pay all CC bills?
Green roof components

Little Pieces exhibition

Little Pieces
Opening reception: Saturday June 14, 4-7 pm

June 14 - July 11, 2008
Art Spa NYC
241 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11211

heat wave

It's Sunday and the city is melting in the heat.
Yesterday I didn't leave the house at all.
Today I'm in studio getting ready for a group show at the Art Spa in Brooklyn.
Trying to turn the proverbial lemon into lemonade.

Obama wins Democratic nomination

Very important moment in US history yesterday: Democratic nomination of Barack Obama for President.
I'm glad I am here to witness this
(even though I'm not sure we can get out of the mess we are in, regardless of who wins the next election)...

writing

What I love about our writings is that I get the sense they are written with care.
Other blogs that are written as though the author is speaking to the viewer seem careless to me and not well thought out.

I visited the Whitney for the last day of the Biennale, and it was interesting how un-captivated I felt to stand in front of, question, or marvel at any of the pieces in the show.

Similarly, many blogs I visit online repel me in a way that is hard to explain, either with content that I find uninteresting, inappropriate use of grammar and bad spelling, or visual choices in postings that are obvious and jarring. However, many others I visit I find extremely interesting and very helpful (I know there are many on both ends of this spectrum..)

Thank you for sharing the tones of the other blog..I want to re-look at the work you posted and ask questions about it shortly.
A

women's work part II

so this morning I got stirred to posted on a friend's blog, the tone is very different from this one (and usually I just read the events)- I thought I would share it- it just speaks to my mothering at the moment which I need to include in my [art]work

tereza June 3rd, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Oh Boy,Where do I begin to chime in on this one?
What things to say and to what end?
pausing.. a child needs attention- let’s begin where it ended; stealing fifteen minutes. Hmm, with a child (just one in my case) who does not nap anymore but does require help, play, cuddling, tending to, wiping butt, talking to, cooking for, driving here and there… where would I get 15 uninterrupted minutes? Then multiply by three. I would be surprised if SilliGirl found five minutes to herself- for you see the little ones like to check in even on the toilet.
pausing.. to help get the doll out of the stroller, kiss a bonk, and pick up a dress on the floor…the next slide remark- it happened when you became a mom. Your darned right- it sure does, doesn’t it. Wow moms and dads, how do you describe it? It’s quite a shift, you awake (or 20 hours after labor) with a child in arms and the whole perspetive of looking out into the world is completely different. Everything is not in relation to you, as the one, but you as a unit- you’ve branched out.
pausing to help my daughter through our weaning process… the closest thing i can relate it to is splitting yourself- take your leg or better yet your heart take it out of your body- now look out, the perspective completely changes. Do you see? (Again here multiply - or split in this case- by three) Of course you are not the same person- one will never be. You have gone from a twig to being a tree.
and with all the metaphors this means you grow to being more than you have ever been and at the same time you grow in the round- with all the paranoia, lunacy, fears and anger- all the undesirable qualities are there as well.
can’t get into canning for I unfortunately do not have much experience in this process- can only imagine it is no picnic.
pausing.. to give my child more crackers, which were spilled, then to vacuum, set her up with some water colors…Mamma, all I know is that you can and do breathe through the moments. I enjoy reading about it!

Applycations and Woman's Work

Need to write a statement for the above images (they will be viewed in this duet form with two projectors) for a grant due in a couple of weeks. I feel like the applycation process has to become second nature to us although I get weird about the writing before I actualy do it. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Been reading Art Sinnce 1945 and this work reminded me highly of your Through the Eyes of Strangers work- I have had the privelage of seeing this work up front and personal and what a powerful statement- the artist lost ten pound over the course of the documentation to carve her body into the desirable shape (Carving the Traditional Sculpture)- the mug shot element comments on the perspective of the onlooker. Even though the piece is almost 40 years old it still rings true does it not?

application process, continued

Finishing up Headlands application today
working on image selection tomorrow
sending it out on Wednesday to arrive in Northern California by Friday's deadline.

I have to admit I don't dislike this application process -
in the past, I have always been weary about it and have never felt confident about writing about my work or explaining it in a concise and at the same time general way to strangers.

thinking about my work in new ways with help from other artists is incredibly useful.

Art in Odd Places application for Meaning Cleaning

For the upcoming Art In Odd Places slated for October 2008, Hayley Severns and Angela Rose Voulgarelis Illgen propose a collaborative cleaning performance (“Meaning Cleaning”) in the Meatpacking District on 14th street.

Dressed in professional business attire, we would begin sweeping the sidewalks together from one end of the district to the other. Supplied with simple push brooms and a large portable garbage can, our aim would be to push the debris from the street in one continuous pile until it reaches the desired end location, and then cart the debris away. We would not block the sidewalk or street, but rather subtly re-direct foot traffic with our performance as we swept.

As we activate the space, we welcome interaction with the public. We play with some of the expected roles and unsaid rules that come along with the sectioning off of "high brow" and "low brow" sections of public spaces. And, speaking frankly, it is unusual for two white women dressed in suits to be sweeping the streets of New York City.

The performance can exist on one day, or can be repeated over the course of the month. The Meatpacking district is not a strict perimeter; however, we are interested in performing in that area because it has transformed from an actual meat packing district into one of the more expensive neighborhoods in New York. Regardless of how many times Meaning Cleaning is performed, the professional “uniform” will remain the same.

Meaning Cleaning not only brings “women’s work” back into the public sphere, but also plays with notions of acceptable public behavior and social “norms”. In addition, our work maintains the lineage of Feminist and Conceptual artists before us, primarily Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Marina Abronovic, Joseph Beuys, and countless others.

Our performances take responsibility for our shared urban environment, which is why we feel strongly that Meaning Cleaning is pertinent to submit to A.I.O.P. In addition, in light of the upcoming closing of Florent, we feel Meaning Cleaning is especially relevant for this year’s cycle.

To bring to light what we as a community discard is to bring to light the human condition. Our actions provide a fundamentally different approach to the perceived lack of care for the immediate environment; our focus as artists is on the foundation beneath our feet, to be reminded of our interconnection. As independent artists, we began working together in 2005, and have since cleaned public spaces together in Europe and the US.



Our collaborative cleaning performance would be graciously removing the refuse and at the same time taking responsibility for our community. Without breaking any local laws, and dressed in a way that plays with social codes and acceptable public behavior, our performance also hopes to bring some much needed conscientious irony and humor to the streets of New York.

It would be a pleasure to bring our performance to A.I.O.P "Pedestrian" this October 2008.

Headlands residency application

I am working on my application for the Headlands Center for the Arts in northern California.
Inspired by the Art in Odd Places application I finished on Friday, it seemed logical to continue with another application today.
With generous help, here is the updated version:

My work is about discovering new ways to question social “norms” as they relate to marginal positions women have held in society, as well as how women have been depicted in art. Even today, women are referred to and portrayed in ways that are unconsciously inherited from antiquity, and remain largely gender-biased. I question this modern acceptance by peeling back the layers of commonly recognized ideas, words and images, and bring to light the process by which they have been originally accepted.
The use and re-interpretation of iconic female imagery, repetitious performances of actions and ideas, and working with text have been predominant choices in my work. This has been to validate the seemingly mundane actions that are typically associated with “women’s work” and venerate them in a more public way. From cleaning performances where I methodically scrub floors in public spaces, to employing Morse code to translate famous texts into highly ornamental necklaces, I am interested in re-thinking notions of the feminine in an attempt to understand how it exists in relation to the male gaze.
I am part of the collaborative Meaning Cleaning, which performs public cleanings as a way to take responsibility for shared environments; in addition, we play with social codes and notions of acceptable public behavior. Our actions provide a fundamentally different approach to the perceived lack of care for the immediate surroundings; our focus as artists is on the foundation beneath our feet, to be reminded of our interconnection.
Similarly, Conscious Object necklaces are conceptual drawings that are realized in three dimensions. In line with counting and prayer beads, which have existed for centuries in almost every culture, the necklaces are actual Morse code translations of text that can be read with one’s hand and worn around one’s neck. The meaning of each piece is also echoed in the choice of its material; to combine beauty and substance offers an alternative to the historically reinforced divide between the two.
Through experiences of travel, I have been able to process more extensively how my work can comment on and question the inherited stains of the past. Being outside of known structures has afforded me the space to become more open to a greater scope of things. The fundamental elements of Meaning Cleaning were literally laid out on the studio floor at a residency in Tuscany, Italy; in a cultural exchange workshop in Cape Town, South Africa, I was able to recognize my own marginal ways of thinking, and reflect on the choice to transform personal trauma into a more universal compassion against the inequalities of human justice.
I am very interested to work again in a way in an environment that has undergone its own transformation- in the case of the Headlands Center for the Arts, from military base with a destructive past to an Artists’ colony with an innovative future. I would like to examine how that environment and its history could lend itself to the themes of my work by providing a space for self-reflection, inquiry, and dedicated studio time. It would be enriching to work in such a unique location, with its torrid and transformed history, as well as its geographic specificity and beauty.

Greens

from left to right: up to down

peas, radish, potatoes, broccoli or cauliflower (not sure which one was sown where)

spinach, carrots, strawberry, lettuce

broccoli, arugula, roses and our robin eggs (a nest under the porch)

Sounds to record

sweeping
fire engines
washing face
scrubbing the floor
washing dishes
cooking
talking about attack #1
talking about attack #2
scratching
Morse code of 1994 Nelson Mandela speech

Friday morning

It's interesting how fear and acceptance of mediocrity can lend themselves to the slow dissolution of creative thinking.

I apologize for not following through on responding to the conversations about Tapies and Twombly, although both artists move me to thinking in non-linear ways.

I see my current actions as antithetical to my desired art practice.
I know Mercury is in retrograde, but does that really explain how I feel like I'm standing in quicksand with weights on my feet?
I love the prospect of what I am doing, but the reality of the every day is disheartening.
I feel I am engulfed by a city that doesn't care, that lacks accountability, and is mean spirited.
I woke up this morning feeling defeated.
I dreamt about work, about crumbling structures and people disregarding me.

The one thing I did was a Meaning Cleaning in my own new home. It was sad for me to bear witness to such a lack of care of one's surroundings, that when we moved some of our things into the place, I stayed and swept and vacuumed. The floors and slate came to life under me. It was the first time I felt connected to my future home.

We are off track. We're late with our deadlines, which is costing us a ton of money.
I am in the process of applying to residencies in California and upstate New York, but lose motivation and doubt myself when I have mornings like this morning.

And today in New York another crane collapsed uptown, killing at least two people. We are building too fast, too much, and without care. I feel depressed at our choices.

But I have faith that what I am doing is worthwhile. I believe in this communication, writing to you and keeping things current.
I try to follow my own advise.
Send some good thoughts my way; I feel like I'm drowning.

I love green roofs

I love green roofs


Wouldn't it be great if New York City actually looked like this?
The more I think about it, the more obsessed I become with trying to make this happen.
It's relatively easy to do and it could bring down urban temperatures down in the summer and better insulate buildings in the winter.

Green roofs help clean the air
Green roofs are sustainable
Green roofs can help reduce asthma in overly developed areas
Teaching how to maintain green roofs empowers everyone
Green roof vegetation can promote the increase in honeybees, whose numbers are on a world wide decline
Green roofs are a viable answer to a global problem of warming temperatures.

We are in the process of greening our roof, one of the final steps before we move into our new home.
We're SO close!
I hope to install our roof by the end of June.

Books on the table, lying one on top of the other:
Full flat sheet still in plastic wrapping
The Feng Shui House Book
Antoni Tapies
Dada
Herbal Remedy Gardens
The Instant Guide to Successful House Plants
Erotic Art of the Masters

Candles today

thinking of the woman's insides- where various colors of flowers will be as they hold them
word 'stop' has to shift slightly- thinking of adding RUNNING onto center of canvas

victims seem like children next to the slightly larger women- the white semicircle cam in at the end- not sure what I'll do with it - now it looks liek the Czech lag to me.

More Deliberate Play and Cy Twombly

mamma insides

soldier insides, continues...

let's talk about Twombly's work and Tapies. I've always felt a great sense of freedom in front of a Twombly ( I have not stood in front of a Tapies, yet). When teaching, Twombly would bring about the most discussion. The students and I often are so much more conservative- I feel still about a century behind in my artmaking- do you know what I mean? trying to 'represent' (I'm thinking of a comission I am painting- so boring to me and so consuming. What people think of as painting and what is currently happening on canvas are worlds apart. I find myself following the mass stream- thinking of the mass viewer rather than leaping in faith , which is what I feel from folks like Twombly, Tapies, Kiefer. I'm ready to leap and thrilled to start the residency in Vermont this summer. I have to remember these thoughts as I paint onto the cafe wall tomorrow. It is not about necessarily paining the protesters- it is being the protest!

Even in all this confusion, Tapies (and more recently Cy Twombly) makes sense to me.
I understand it. Their work inspires my work.
My tongue gets tied.
I see the outside and inside in the same space, as the same thing.
It is so refreshing.

I am here.
I am here.

I am interested in the direction the work you are posting is going...the idea (at least how it seems to me) about the fragility of the body, its boundary evolving and flowing outward, motherhood, and internal interests literally being able to been seen transparent. Keep on working...a lot! I think you're on to something. Keep on working.

I continue to work on the house project.
Without getting too much into it, we have hit some major delays.
Breakdown in communication has led to us still being homeless, without a move-in date in site.
I've worked on this project for the last three years, and now it's coming down to this moment.
I feel we are still sinking, but remain hopeful and confident about the outcome

I am responsible for much more than I thought I'd ever be responsible for, and am deciding things today that will directly affect my foresee-able future.

We are so close.
But the resolve to complete the job is met with equal resistance and force from the outside.
But is there really an "outside"? I learned in Cape Town that inside = outside.
There is no other.
I also think about the power of thought forms, and question my own...I created this reality and take responsibility for it.
What could I have done differently to prevent our current situation?

I am so happy to see your postings online; I'm painting when I can, and will post the progress shots shortly.
I am here.
I am here.

Rauschenberg

(obit from NYTIMES)

“I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop,” he said in an interview there. “At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.” - Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: May 14, 2008
Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died on Monday night at his home on Captiva Island, Fla. He was 82. The cause was heart failure, said Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein, the Manhattan gallery that represents Mr. Rauschenberg.

Mr. Rauschenberg’ s work gave new meaning to sculpture. “Canyon,” for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. All became icons of postwar modernism.

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he helped obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the
dominant movement when he emerged, during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists
like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.

No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture.

Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” Cage meant that people had come to see, through Mr. Rauschenberg’ s efforts, not just that anything, including junk on the street, could be the stuff of art (this wasn’t itself new), but that it could be the stuff of an art aspiring to be beautiful — that there was a potential poetics even in consumer glut, which Mr. Rauschenberg celebrated.

“I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”

The remark reflected the optimism and generosity of spirit that Mr. Rauschenberg became known for. His work was likened to a St. Bernard: uninhibited and mostly good-natured. He could be the same way in person. When he became rich, he gave millions of dollars to charities for women, children, medical research, other artists and Democratic politicians.

A brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced Southerner, he had a charm and peculiar Delphic felicity with language that masked a complex personality and an equally multilayered emotional approach to art, which evolved as his stature did. Having begun by making quirky, small-scale assemblages out of junk he found on the street in downtown Manhattan, he spent increasing time in his later years, after he had become successful and famous, on vast international, ambassadorial- like projects and collaborations.

Conceived in his immense studio on the island of Captiva, off southwest Florida, these projects were of enormous size and ambition; for many years he worked on one that grew literally to exceed the length of its title, “The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece.” They generally did not live up to his earlier achievements. Even so, he maintained an equanimity toward the results. Protean productivity went along with risk, he felt, and risk sometimes meant failure.

The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”

This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, “to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art.”

He “keeps asking the question — and it’s a terrific question philosophically, whether or not the results are great art,” Mr. Tworkov said, “and his asking it has influenced a whole generation of artists.”

A Wry, Respectful Departure

That generation was the one that broke from Pollock and company. Mr. Rauschenberg maintained a deep but mischievous respect for Abstract Expressionist heroes like de Kooning and Barnett Newman. Famously, he once painstakingly erased a drawing by de Kooning, an act both of destruction and devotion. Critics regarded the all-black paintings and all-red paintings he made in the early 1950s as spoofs of de Kooning and Pollock. The paintings had roiling, bubbled surfaces made from
scraps of newspapers embedded in paint.

But these were just as much homages as they were parodies. De Kooning, himself a parodist, had incorporated bits of newspapers in pictures, and Pollock stuck cigarette butts to canvases.

Mr. Rauschenberg’ s “Automobile Tire Print,” from the early 1950s — resulting from Cage’s driving an inked tire of a Model A Ford over 20 sheets of white paper — poked fun at Newman’s famous “zip” paintings.

At the same time, Mr. Rauschenberg was expanding on Newman’s art. The tire print transformed Newman’s zip — an abstract line against a monochrome backdrop with spiritual pretensions — into an artifact of everyday culture, which for Mr. Rauschenberg had its own transcendent dimension.

Mr. Rauschenberg frequently alluded to cars and spaceships, even incorporating real tires and bicycles into his art. This partly reflected his own restless, peripatetic imagination. The idea of movement was logically extended when he took up dance and performance.

There was, beneath this, a darkness to many of his works, notwithstanding their irreverence. “Bed” (1955) was gothic. The all-black paintings were solemn and shuttered. The red paintings looked charred, with strips of fabric akin to bandages, from which paint dripped like blood. “Interview” (1955), which resembled a cabinet or closet with a door, enclosing photos of bullfighters, a pinup, a Michelangelo nude, a fork and a softball, suggested some black-humored encoded erotic message.

There were many other images of downtrodden and lonely people, rapt in thought; pictures of ancient frescoes, out of focus as if half remembered; photographs of forlorn, neglected sites; bits and pieces of faraway places conveying a kind of nostalgia or remoteness. In bringing these things together, the art implied consolation.

Mr. Rauschenberg, who knew that not everybody found it easy to grasp the open-endedness of his work, once described to the writer Calvin Tomkins an encounter with a woman who had reacted skeptically to “Monogram” (1955-59) and “Bed” in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, one of the events that secured Mr. Rauschenberg’ s reputation: “To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly.

“So I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed, it might sound very much like what she’d been saying. For instance, she had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture of ‘The Blue Boy’ on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning to understand.”

Growing Up With Scraps

Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born on Oct. 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Tex., a small refinery town where “it was very easy to grow up without ever seeing a painting,” he said. (In adulthood he renamed himself Robert.) His grandfather, a doctor who emigrated from Germany, had settled in Texas and married a Cherokee. His father, Ernest, worked for a local utility company. The family lived so frugally that his mother, Dora, made him shirts out of scraps of fabric. Once she made herself a skirt out of the back of the suit that her younger brother was buried in. She didn’t want the material to go to waste.

For his high school graduation present, Mr. Rauschenberg wanted a ready-made shirt, his first. All this shaped his art eventually. A decade or so later he made history with his own assemblages of scraps and ready-mades: sculptures and music boxes made of packing crates, rocks and rope; and paintings like “Yoicks,” sewn from fabric strips. He loved making something out of nothing.

Mr. Rauschenberg studied pharmacology briefly at the University of Texas at Austin before he was drafted during World War II. He saw his first paintings at the Huntington Art Gallery in California while he was stationed in San Diego as a medical technician in the Navy Hospital Corps. It occurred to him that it was possible to become a painter.

He attended the Kansas City Art Institute on the G.I. Bill, traveled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he met Susan Weil, a young painter from New York who was to enter Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Having read about and come to admire Josef Albers, then the head of fine arts at Black Mountain, Mr. Rauschenberg saved enough money to join
her.

Mr. Albers was a disciplinarian and strict modernist who, shocked by his student, later disavowed ever even knowing Mr. Rauschenberg. He was, on the other hand, recalled by Mr. Rauschenberg as “a beautiful teacher and an impossible person.”

“He wasn’t easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it,” Mr. Rauschenberg added. “Years later, though, I’m still learning what he taught me.”

Among other things, he learned to maintain an open mind toward materials and new mediums, which Mr. Albers endorsed. Mr. Rauschenberg also gained a respect for the grid as an essential compositional organizing tool.

For a while, he moved between New York, where he studied at the Art Students League with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor, and Black Mountain. During the spring of 1950 he and Ms. Weil married. The marriage lasted two years, during which they had a son, Christopher, who survives him, along with Mr. Rauschenberg’ s companion, Darryl Pottorf.

Being John Cage’s Guest

Mr. Rauschenberg experimented at the time with blueprint paper to produce silhouette negatives. The pictures were published in Life magazine in 1951; after that Mr. Rauschenberg was given his first solo show, at the influential Betty Parsons Gallery.

“Everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics,” he recalled, meaning Picasso, the Surrealists and Matisse. “That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”

Cage acquired a painting from the Betty Parsons show. Aside from that, Mr. Rauschenberg sold absolutely nothing. Grateful, he agreed to host Cage at his loft. As Mr. Rauschenberg liked to tell the story, the only place to sit was on a mattress. Cage started to itch. He called Mr. Rauschenberg afterward to tell him that his mattress must have bedbugs and that, since Cage
was going away for a while, Mr. Rauschenberg could stay at his place. Mr. Rauschenberg accepted the offer. In return, he decided he would touch up the painting Cage had acquired, as a kind of thank you, painting it all black, being in the midst of his new, all-black period. When Cage returned, he was not amused.

“We both thought, ‘Here was somebody crazier than I am,’ ” Mr. Rauschenberg recalled. In 1952 Mr. Rauschenberg switched to all-white paintings which were, in retrospect, spiritually akin to Cage’s famous silent piece of music, during which a pianist sits for 4 minutes and 33 seconds at the keyboard without making a sound. Mr. Rauschenberg’ s paintings, like the music, in a sense became both Rorschachs and backdrops for ambient, random events, like passing shadows.

“I always thought of the white paintings as being not passive but very — well — hypersensitive,” he told an interviewer in 1963. “So that people could look at them and almost see how many people were in the room by the shadows cast, or what time of day it was.”

Kicking around Europe and North Africa with the artist Cy Twombly for a few months after that, Mr. Rauschenberg began to collect and assemble objects —bits of rope, stones, sticks, bones — which he showed to a dealer in Rome who exhibited them under the title “scatole contemplative,” or thought boxes. They were shown in Florence, where an outraged critic suggested
that Mr. Rauschenberg toss them in the river. He thought that sounded like a good idea. So, saving a few scatole for himself and friends, he found a secluded spot on the Arno. “‘I took your advice,” he wrote to the critic.

Yet the scatole were crucial to his development, setting the stage for bigger, more elaborate assemblages, like ‘“Monogram.” Back in New York, Mr. Rauschenberg showed his all-black and all-white paintings, then his erased de Kooning, which de Kooning had given to him to erase, a gesture that Mr. Rauschenberg found astonishingly generous, all of which enhanced his reputation as the new enfant terrible of the art world.

Around that time he also met Mr. Johns, then unknown, who had a studio in the same building on Pearl Street where Mr. Rauschenberg had a loft. The intimacy of their relationship over the next years, a consuming subject for later biographers and historians, coincided with the production by the two of them of some of the most groundbreaking works of postwar art.

In Mr. Rauschenberg’ s famous words, they gave each other “permission to do what we wanted.” Living together in a series of lofts in Lower Manhattan until the 1960s, they exchanged ideas and supported themselves designing window displays for Tiffany & Company and Bonwit Teller under the collaborative pseudonym Matson Jones.

Along with the combines like “Monogram” and “Canyon” (1959), Mr. Rauschenberg in that period developed a transfer drawing technique, dissolving printed images from newspapers and magazines with a solvent and then rubbing them onto paper with a pencil. The process, used for works like “34 Drawings for Dante’s Inferno,” created the impression of something fugitive, exquisite and secret. Perhaps there was an autobiographical and sensual aspect to this. It let him blend images on a surface to a kind of surreal effect, which became the basis for works he made throughout his later career, when he adapted the transfer method to canvas.

Instrumental in this technical evolution back then was Tatyana Grossman, who encouraged and guided him as he made prints at her workshop, Universal Limited Art Editions, on Long Island; he also began a long relationship with the Gemini G.E.L. workshop in Los Angeles, producing lithographs like the 1970 “Stoned Moon” series, with its references to the moon landing.

His association with theater and dance had already begun by the 1950s, when he began designing sets and costumes for Mr. Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown and for his own productions. In 1963 he choreographed “Pelican,” in which he performed on roller skates while wearing a parachute and helmet of his design to the accompaniment of a taped collage of sound. This fascination with collaboration and with mixing art and technologies dovetailed with yet another endeavor. With Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and others, he started Experiments in Art and Technology, a nonprofit foundation to foster joint projects by artists and scientists.

A World of Praise

In 1964 he toured Europe and Asia with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the same year he exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Venice Biennale as the United States representative. That sealed his international renown. The Sunday Telegraph in London hailed him as “the most important American artist since Jackson Pollock.” He walked off with the international grand prize in Venice, the first modern American to win it. Mr. Rauschenberg had, almost despite himself, become an institution.

Major exhibitions followed every decade after that, including one at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1981, another at the Guggenheim in 1997 and yet another at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art that landed at the Metropolitan Museum in 2005.

When he wasn’t traveling in later years, he was on Captiva, living at first in a modest beach house and working out of a small studio. In time he became that Gulf Coast island’s biggest residential landowner while also maintaining a town house in Greenwich Village in New York. He acquired the land in Captiva by buying adjacent properties from elderly neighbors
whom he let live rent-free in their houses, which he maintained for them. He accumulated 35 acres, 1,000 feet of beach front and nine houses and studios, including a 17,000-square- foot two-story studio overlooking a swimming pool. He owned almost all that remained of tropical jungle on the island.

After a stroke in 2002 that left his right side paralyzed, Mr. Rauschenberg learned to work more with his left hand and, with a troupe of assistants, remained prolific for several years in his giant studio.

“I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop,” he said in an interview there. “At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.”

He added: “Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.”

All right, where are you, dear?

Candles for all

Installation shots of the work at Candles Cafe

Playing with You

Elephants

So a while back you mentioned elephants painting. This morning I was blown away not by the concept but by the quality of the line. This should change our whole perspective of being with other animals. Just watching how the elephant holds the paintbrush, how delicately he applies each line with the trunk shaking. It's a whole other intelligence, or more precisely it is an intelligence which one sensed but it hasn't been as apparent until now.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LHoyB81LnE&eurl=http://www.lovingraw.com/blog/

lovely ( I prefered watching it without sound at first.)

some reflections on last night and today, from studio...

A Room of One's Own.
Ha ha.
Your post made me think of a monoprint series I worked on in 2002.
Below are samples from that series that still influence my work today.

wow!

amazing...thought of this organization after reading your post:
http://www.aroomofherown.org/
this year they are accepting only writers but we should keep our eye on it.worked this morning in the cafe- although i did not have the time to document I will do so in the week and post as soon as possible. having a great response, love the dialogue. some recent drawings: soldier series

the boy is displayed on a window as you walk in- it's counterpart (the drawing right above him) is directly opposite on the adjacent wall.

speaking of progress

We went from this:


To this:


in two years

by ourselves

with no help and no money. only turu knew what he was doing when we started.

and we're moving in after we pass inspection, which will hopefully happen next week.

a room of one's own, built with one's own hand!

I love progress shots

I'm working on getting the laundry line up soon.
This summer I hope to fill the city with them!
Thanks for the tulips
(who is Sean?)

Scroll Down

I start a post only to complete it days later. Check below progress shot and inspiration. Thinking of you Sean, hope you are in a better place.

such uncertainty

It's interesting to make work in such uncertain times.
From the micro (my own problems) to the macro ( the Iraq war, impending doom with Iran, election year, etc) I feel on unsolid ground.
Opportunity to lose one's ego and be present, and at the same time be engulfed in worry, self - doubt, and possible depression.
How does one ride the wave between the two?