Random thoughts on: sunshine, Talya Baharal, and Dirty Hara

found metal that I plan to use as jewelry

Today was a good day, and it seems that I’m not the only one who thought so. Everywhere I looked people were smiling and talking to strangers. I could have sworn I’d been transported to another city because Seattleites are famously introverted, which is a culture shock coming from the neighborly south. I blame it on the sun.

My own spirits were cheered by the sun and by viewing the inspiring art jewelry on the Velvet da Vinci website. I was particularly drawn to the work of Talya Baharal, whose Urban Landscape work seems similar to my own investigations into the corrosive beauty of rusted steel. This rusted metal form, for example, continues to vex me as I try to reimagine it as a component in a piece of jewelry. In short, I found this interesting object, and now I’m trying to create jewelry around it.

Today was also interesting because I wore my Dirty Hara bracelet, and it did exactly as what it was intended to do. Hara, in the Japanese tradition, is the place that physically exists in the middle of your abdomen, approximately eight centimeters below your navel. Spiritual speaking, the hara is the source of your energy, and Zen Buddhists focus on hara breathing to assist them in zazen, a seated form of meditation. I always found the rules for sitting zazen too restrictive. Or maybe my unruly mind resists the discipline involved in sitting zazen, but I remain intrigued by

Clarity, Sweet Clarity and Ford/Forlano!

Root Doctor ring, copyright ⓒ 2008, Alexis Pierre-Louis, all rights reserved

Yesterday I decided to take a walk during my lunch break. My head was swirling from indecision. For weeks I’ve been trying to decide which artistic discipline I should make primary so that I can produce enough similarly themed work to present to a gallery. I wrestled for a long time between figurative and abstract painting but neither choice resonated with me. As I walked yesterday, it suddenly occurred to me that the discourse I am engaging in through my painting is a private discourse and that is why I struggled with the notion of presenting my paintings to the public. My paintings represent my private thoughts and questions about race, class, and gender and it’s a conversation that I mean to have with myself.

My jewelry, on the other hand, has always been meant to be received by the public. My inquiry into notions of preciousness, value, status, cultural identity, and gender are questions I want to present to the public, and I am interested in the viewer’s gaze and feedback. Suddenly, it became clear to me, after nearly two years of exploring and experimenting with painting, sound, and writing, that I have an art practice that is centered in jewelry. I am a jewelry artist. I rushed to share this news with family and friends, but no one seemed surprised but me. One friend told me,

Looking Back/Looking Forward: Meditating on my Direction

ABCD by Raoul Hausmann, 1923*

I started painting in the mid 90s when I got out of the Air Force. Military life was all I knew. My father was in the Army so I grew up around military families and the military way of life. Transitioning from military to civilian life was difficult. One day, on instinct, I started painting. The act of painting was very calming for me. I could focus all of my attention on the painting in front of me instead of the problems in my mind. I couldn’t afford to take classes, so I went to the library and educated myself. I studied art history. I studied specific painters like Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn, and Alice Neel. I studied movements in art like Impressionism, Constructivism, and Dada.

I went back to school and earned my college degree in 2004. At first I refused to take art classes because by that time I had been a self-taught artist for nearly a decade, and I didn’t want some professor telling me I was doing it all wrong. But then I took a life drawing class and it wasn’t so bad, so I took a metalsmithing class and fell in love with the idea of making jewelry. I stopped making art for several years while working as an Office Manager in corporations and government agencies. I was miserable but couldn’t figure out why.

It took several years of trying to fill the void with everything but art for me to realize my unhappiness stemmed from the fact that I didn’t have a creative outlet. I tried crafts but that wasn’t it. I remembered how I felt when I was painting, and in 2008 I started painting again. I also reluctantly accepted the fact that I was an artist. (I was reluctant because, like most artists, I had a tendency to underestimate my own worth especially when compared to the masters of art.) But slowly I began to see that I was born to make art.

In 2009, I decided that I wanted to have a career as an artist. I had shunned the gallery system for so long, but now I wanted to be a part of it. My challenge is that I work in several artistic disciplines (painting, jewelry, collage, sound art) so my work is not exactly cohesive, which is just the thing that galleries are looking for. So I’ve decided to focus on one of my disciplines, which I narrowed down to

The impossibility of beauty

La Bourgeoise, copyright ©2004 Alexis Pierre-Louis, all rights reserved

I am actually glad that I’m not painting right now because it gives me the opportunity to think about what I want to say. I’m looking at my painting of La Bourgeoise and thinking about the ideas behind that painting.  I got the idea for the painting from a magazine. I had been a long time reader of Vogue before I went to Evergreen and began to see the ways that consumerism affected people, particularly in communities of color where folks who can barely afford to meet their basic needs find the money to spend hundreds of dollars on corporate branded (logo) goods. The magazine ad was for Prada, and it featured a white model. I thought about how white beauty standards pervade the media, and how women of color around the world try to lighten their skin and straighten their hair to conform to those standards of beauty. I reimagined the woman in the ad as a black woman and began to think about the increased incidents of bulimia and anorexia in women of color as they become upwardly mobile and face the same issues with weight and appearance as their white sisters.

I want to spend a little more time

Kara Walker, Adrian Piper, Thelma Golden, and Me

Sodom and Gomorrah by Henry O. Tanner

As I am waiting for the answer about whether to take my painting practice in the direction of figurative work or abstract work, I thought it would be a good idea to consider the work of three art world figures who have had a lasting impact on my development as an artist. When I say that I want to do figurative work, what I mean is that I’m interested in painting portraits of upper class women of color, especially black and Latina women. I’m interested in the impact of consumerism and upper class, white, Anglo-Saxon ethos on women of color, how it shapes their identities and aesthetic choices.

Black women as subject matter, is a topic that I find endlessly fascinating. But before I decide to devote my painting practice to them, I have to consider Adrian Piper’s argument, Critical Hegemony and Aesthetic Acculturation in Nous. In the article, Piper says that the art world rewards white artists and artists whose subject matter reflects European aesthetic values. Piper is not the first artist to make this claim. We have only to look to our art history to see that most of our celebrated artists were/are white males. So I have to consider what the implications of creating black identity art will mean for my career–where it situates my work in the ongoing, contemporary discourse on art, where it limits and liberates my artistic voice and my opportunities.

Thinking of the liberties and limitations of creating black identity art makes me think of  Holland Carter’s response to Thelma Golden’s discussions on post-black art–the notion of black artists creating art that is not particularly about their black identity. When I think of Golden’s post-black artists two things come to mind. First,

Still Pondering my Direction in Art

Seven Days in the Art World

I’ve just finished looking at all the art on the Allan Stone Gallery website. I feel refreshed, like I’ve just awakened from a good nap. I’ve been thinking lately about whether I should abandon my figurative work. Earlier, I was leaning towards abandoning it. Now, I’m not so sure. Part of my willingness to abandon my figurative work stems from the difficulty I had with the Rosario painting. But should I give up just because I’ve had a bad week in the studio?

I remember a few years ago when I was thinking about pursuing a PhD. I read somewhere that if you want a doctorate, you should be prepared to study something obsessively for the next 4-6 years. The same obsessive focus applies to success as an artist. I’m reading Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton. In the book, the artist Rebecca Warren alludes to experimentation in the early stages of your art career. Warren says

Standing Still Yet Moving Forward in my Art Practice

My inspiration has momentarily left me, so I am not working in the studio because I find it impossible to make art without inspiration. I am using the down time to think about whether I want to take my art practice in a new direction. Lately I’ve been thinking about abandoning my figurative work to focus solely on abstraction. And with this consideration, I must consider all the discourses on abstract art that currently exist. I must decide whether I want to continue the discourse or shift the discourse.

In my down time and in my thinking about what I have to say through my art, sometimes it seems that everything significant has already been said by the artists that have come before me. But then I realize that art is always reinventing itself by examining the opposing viewpoint on the current discourse of art. In this way post-Impressionism was birthed by Impressionism, postmodernism was birth by Modern Art, and lyrical abstraction was birthed by abstract expression, for example. So for as long as art continues to examine everything we perceive to be reality, there will always be something to say.

This encourages me as much as knowing that at the right time, my inspiration will return and I’ll be back in the studio producing art.