Post-Committee Meeting Writings

What do I title myself as?

I’m an artist, storyteller, and collector of ideas. I paint, build, or write, depending on the medium which best suits the details I narrate at a given point in telling the story. My process is additive; the details of the story come in pieces. The story begins with a thread when I’m not searching for it. I hear a sentence in a movie, television show, book, or in front of me, and it catches my attention. The constants in the sentences which catch my attention are: peculiarity, specificity in object or declaration, and an immediate mental image of what that sentence may look like if it were carried out visually.

The additive process of ‘writing’ the stories --by painted, made, and written word --comes next. I begin with a drawn sketch of what the scene of the sentence may look like. I find physical objects that might connect to the story. I write, adding my own experiences and threads of stories from other sources. The stories begin to have more depth. The meaning of the threads of sentences and experiences evolve into entirely new narrative accounts.

The evolution of the story during the process of making  is the most interesting part to me.

For Elizabeth

“For Elizabeth” is a short story in the written collections, For Wintonbury. It began with the sentence, “The fourth stage of grief is making piles.” I wondered what the first three stages were, and I immediately began to picture what that sentence would look like in the form of a young woman’s living room. I made drawings and painted sketches. The spatial depth of the living room, color palette, and piles of possessions changed from painting to painting, as I was trying to get a feel for who Elizabeth is. At first, I had written her as a woman sitting on an orange couch that was much too saturated, surrounded by light yellow walls which were much too bright for her current conditions and emotional state. But the warmer color palette didn’t fit the character or the tone of the story. They sounded okay in the writing, but negatively affected the painting, so those details got revised. I trimmed the couch into a less-round form, and made it a blue hue with worn cushions. The scene now felt like less of one you would want to plop yourself into.

I added pieces into the fictional story from my own experiences, beginning with the first quote of the story, “Throw your towels in the washing machine.” I thought about how my body reacts to dejected and stressful situations and the tendencies I have. The development of the painting ran parallel alongside the fictional writing. Personal details began to make their way by form of objects returned in the loss of a relationship or friendship. The choices of pattern, color palette, and composition were based first off of the narrative of the story, but had to work with the painting as a painting, and not solely serving the text. The scale of the object is skewed slightly --the wooden, musical frog not quite making sense. The placement of the top cardboard box makes it appear as if it should be tumbling out of the painting at any time now. As the written story evolves, I add in those details to the painting, For Elizabeth and her smaller, connected paintings.

Being a collector of ideas, I observe and listen to my surroundings and keep a pen handy when consuming television, movies, or books. Sometimes I’ll hear or see something and know that it has to end up in one of the stories, but keep it in a repository until I’m more sure of where the parcel belongs. I knew, for example, that I wanted to share my Greyhound experience, of staying close to the mother with her young son. When the lady I work for pulled a pile of torn papers with written words out of her pockets, and casually explained, “choices.” When my sister got chased by an ostrich or a student brought a broken slinky to class. Taking dominos from Collateral Beauty and a box of chocolates from Forest Gump isn’t enough without all of the other sources and personal experiences.

Framing Devices/Pages

Painted Set

The paintings are not illustrations.

The definition which I place on the term ‘illustration’ is an image to serve the text. In an illustration, the weight and importance is on the text. The book can very well exist without the image. In my work, the weight is skewed differently. I could remove the text much more fittingly than I could remove the paintings. In this scenario, I hold onto the stories in my head, but the written remains unseen by the viewer. For me, a painting expects more time than an illustration, because more time is spent in the making.

The Relationship between a written narrative and a narrative in images

In my art, text and imagery are two parts of a whole. They’re better together because they better fit various purposes. There is a back-and-forth translation that takes place from the writings to paintings to painted set that happens according to the strengths and limitations of the media. My role as storyteller in multiple mediums defines me as a mediator between the different media, similarly to the vision of the author-turned-director. I place image description in the writing, but just enough to give a hint of the scene. Paintings are my primary source of setting details. The purpose in my writing is to give background information and to describe the characters. In the paintings, the characters are not presence. The only description given about the characters is what the scene says about them in description of space and possessions. I use the strengths offered in the different media. When it comes to the visual description of a space, I desire the details in a painting; whereas with a book, I want to get through the description as quickly as I can so that I can find out what happens and how things come to be.

Regarding author-turned-director, cross-reference Jonathan Tropper in This is Where I Leave You. (from wheretowatch.com, “Jonathan Tropper on Adapting his Novel This is Where I Leave You, Bryan Abrams, September 18, 2014) “You try to isolate, thematically and structurally, the story you want to tell,” Tropper says of the adaptation process. “In a novel you can tell a lot of secondary stories, get into a lot of subplots and write whole tangents you can’t do in a film. So you figure out what story you want to tell, then as you refine the draft. . . you start to see the scenes and what they’re adding from a narrative perspective. So you ask yourself, ‘Can I compress these scenes?’ You work out these economies and efficiencies and you find a way to tell the story in fewer scenes.” Didn’t really get into certain aspects because, “more information than the viewer needs.” “The best part of the journey is once you’ve written the last page of the first draft, you now have a work in progress and can start molding and shaping it.” Then, “three acts, going back in and polishing, changing, adjusting and adapting, that feels like a way of organic process that only happens over time after you’ve lived with the script.”

I think the paintings could work as illustrations in a book, but it seems to me that it would severely de-value them and take them away from their original purpose. If I were to have any sort of illustrations with the books, I think that I would have a quick gestural sketch of the character in each  short story. The question here is what that take away from the ability of the viewer to see themselves in the work? I don’t think so. I think if the character were in the painting, it would take more concentration away from the scene of the story and detract from the way the viewer could picture him or herself pacing around the living room in For Elizabeth or sitting on the chair in Chairs from “For Harvey.”

On quietude

There’s a quietude to my paintings. They have a horizontal, calm composition which is not busy. There is a politeness in the framing and cutting off of objects. My goal is to have a suite of paintings that the viewer can be comfortable staying in for a longer amount of time, with no feeling of stress or being overwhelmed. The characters in the stories are pensive, and the paintings should reflect that. As the storyteller of For Wintonbury, I make paintings that give me space to contemplate and breathe, because life is complicated, busy, chaotic, and disorderly.