Commencement Address

 

This is a real honor for me, to have the opportunity to speak to you all today. 

 

When I was thinking about how I felt sitting there at my own graduation a million years ago, what appeared in my mind was a Rubens’ painting: Abduction of the Daughters of Leucippus- - gorgeous painting!   Picture in your heads: two large, vibrantly powerful women in the foreground, naked and struggling, being pulled and carried up by two muscular, armored soldiers, nostrils wide and biceps bulging. The women’s hair is shining and ropy like a lariat, their skin glows, and their calf muscles are tremendous, and they are you. They are caught up by an overwhelming force and they feel vulnerable and off-balance, true; but-- and this is what makes it a great painting-- they don’t look like victims at all; they look like they are ready for a wild ride, and might ultimately be more than those guys bargained for! And that reminds me of you all today!! The art world might feel like a force of nature you’re barely prepared for. But it’s your job as artists to be canny, to be nimble in body and mind, and with that great toolkit of preparedness that you’ve pulled together from everywhere and everything, to take wild rides with your art. And I can see, just from looking out at all of you, that YOU ARE PREPARED!   

 

Think, for a second, about where you started in this art journey, and how far you’ve come. I grew up in a dingy suburb of San Francisco, where nothing much ever happened, but I remember being about age 9 and going with my friend Kim into the local Woolworths. We would take plastic grapes off their stems, and suction-cup them to our faces, then walk around the aisles and talk about our skin diseases.   In our little 9-year old ways we were trying to make something happen out of nothing. You have brilliant skills and you can make things happen that could really make a difference in life! Your eyes are open and you can see what forces are acting on you—whether those forces be the burden of too much art history, or the overweaning need to be hip and included in the Whitney Biennial—and you can choose what works for YOU, take charge of your own journey. 

 

You have the skills you need now to figure out what you want the world to look like. Those skills are akin to magic; I have no doubt about that. Some of you create illusions with that magic, some of you re-define form; but all of you have the capacity to change how the rest of us think about the world. Remember, the most powerful images you make will argue for something that matters to you, and we use the magic of our skills to make that argument; and make it persuasive as hell! 

 

We all come from some set of values and beliefs, which exist for us as touchstones, for calibrating what matters to us. It’s a testament to our maturing vision when we can see that the edgiest art is no longer the kind that is predicated on rejection alone, but the kind that synthesizes. My parents’ were good Catholics, and I don’t think they ever quite approved of my work, but I know that some of their beliefs are woven into the subtext of my wildest imagination: belief in the power of the invisible; and for that alone I’m grateful to them. 

 

When my father was 86, dying of Alzheimers, he turned to a catalogue of my work, not even recognizing my name on the cover, and, looking at the paintings of women in animal skirts and bare bosoms, he became totally engrossed for much longer than his impaired brain usually allowed. He then announced, “Why these are quite good! These figures are nude but they are not indecent! You must be talented!”

 

On the subject of talent, this reminds me of something I just heard on National Public Radio: A researcher named Carol Jweck did an experiment with 2 groups of college students. Each had to take a test, but in one group the kids were praised for their talent while the other group was praised for its effort. Then each group took another test, this time harder. And guess what? The group that was praised for its effort did much better than the one praised for its talent.   Being labeled as hard workers, they identified with trying harder. On the other hand the group that was told they were talented performed less effectively, because they took their success as a given and relied on that sense of entitlement that words like “talented” confer on a person.   So, as your fairy godmother today, I would like to bestow upon you the life-long gift of hard work, and with this gift everything in your life will actually go a bit better for you, because, along with hard work comes the joy of absorption, in which the whole world falls away. Ten hours in your studio can feel like 15 minutes. Work casts a spell.

 

I recently gave a lecture at the San Francisco Art Institute, which was a thrill for me since I come from there. But on the day of my lecture I started to get a little nervous, so I took a walk up Bernal Hill in the Mission District, which is one of those gigantic hills in San Francisco piled up with houses almost all the way to the top. And there at the top was a view where the incredible vista of the Bay opens out to the horizon and there I was, still full of nerves, huffing and puffing from the climb. But, when my gaze swept over the pattern of crazy orthagonals in the streets below—blending the infinite and the intimate together-- my compositional mind took over from my nervous mind. I felt a calm come over me as my eye delighted in the design of all those intricate patterns below. My frayed nerves felt literally smoothed out by looking at pattern.

 

That‘s what happens every day when we go into the studio: we literally improve our brains! We’re obliged, as our life’s work, to corral chaos with unifying structure, to bring intentionality to formlessness. We go into our studios everyday to manifest in crude matter our most cherished beliefs and our finest sensibilities, ones that we may not even know we have yet until they reveal themselves in the work. And we do this with the utter conviction that this mud might actually become something great! The rewards for art making are so peculiar and intermittent that the immediate reward has to be, simply, the act of throwing ourselves onto that muddy pile of crude matter and reveling in the possibility of transformation.   And that is intoxicating! I remember hearing somewhere that brains of artists, while they are making art, have levels of serotonin equal to that of someone on heroin. 

 

Which reminds me of my youngest son’s favorite joke: A skeleton goes into a bar, and he orders a beer and a mop…. The reason I like that joke is because my son likes it, but also because it’s actually about taking responsibility. The skeleton wants to have a good time, but it also knows it has a responsibility too, to clean up its mess. And so do we.

 

I’ve made many messes on my art journey, believe me. But I also learned to clean up after them.   I remember all too clearly how I felt when I walked into my first solo show in 1988 and I knew instantly that the paintings I had worked so hard on were all wrong. It wasn’t that the paintings were painted badly or anything relatively easy to fix like that; they just didn’t look to me like me! That was the beginning of a bad chapter, when I started to let my fears overwhelm me. 

 

I’m telling you all of this not because I think I’m on Oprah, but because I want you to know what it feels like. What I’m trying to say is: don’t anesthetize yourself to the fear of failure. You have everything inside you right now that you need to figure out all the obstacles you’re likely to encounter on your path. The solution can sometimes be as simple as being willing to throw out bad work and start again! It doesn’t mean you’re a failure! Matthew Syed, in his book Bounce, describes two characteristics of top performers: One is that failure, for high achievers, is not an indictment, but rather an opportunity to advance.   When Mark Morris, the choreographer, was 32, he moved his dance troupe to Brussels. The Belgians had no tradition of modern dance and they hated him. They literally booed him off the stage at his curtain calls, but he would just smile and bow. When he’d get a bad review he would again smile and say “it’s just a review, it’s not a gun.” During those years he improved a huge amount and at the end of his stay in Belgium he got a MacArthur genius grant! 

 

Another characteristic of high achievers according to Syed is that they seek out informed feedback from a variety of sources. Remember this, especially as you get older because it’s harder to hear criticism the older and more seasoned you get as an artist. Find new teachers for yourself as you progress, and listen to them. Court them like royalty! But above all, nurture that tiny voice in your head that is barely audible to your conscious mind but has all the answers you’ll ever need. 

 

Another thing: never delude yourself that your work is doing something that it’s not, just because your artist statement says it is. It is always the case that the best art does not come out of a preconceived idea, which we simply follow around like sheep. The real art piece will emerge after the first idea is worn away by visual messages stemming from the deeper, richer space of the imagination. That’s the thing that keeps me running to the studio every day, that unexpected something that breaks with the logic of the work and surprises me. In the last painting I made for my show that is up right now at PPOW Gallery, there was a point when I just couldn’t figure out one of the main elements. I had been tearing my hair out, and re-painting, but I couldn’t figure it out. Finally, in despair I passed out on my couch, as I’ve learned to do when I hit a wall, knowing that my conscious mind doesn’t have the answer. Then, the song, Do You Wanna Dance? by the Beach Boys, came on my Ipod and I got up and started to dance, and some weird joy came over me. Right after that I realized what the painting needed—some of that energy of letting go the dancing had let loose in me.   In a few hours I changed the whole center of the painting that I’d worked on for months and the painting suddenly came alive! 

 

Baryshnikov was once asked why he danced and he answered that he finds onstage what people seek in religion—some approximation to exaltation. Carl Jung had incredible dreams because he had studied and seen so much that he literally had a broader frame of reference to create fancier dream food with. Seraphine de Senlis, the 19th century French scullery maid who looked like Edith Bunker and was poor as a churchmouse, would pick weeds in the swamps at night and grind them into strange pulps and make the most beautiful visions of riotous nature out of them. That is your capacity as a creator. Learn from everything you do even if it is painting houses like John Currin did after graduate school, or painting on dumpsters like Ellen Harvey!

 

 I have one more life suggestion for you: Make yourself confront great art that you don’t like—be it in the form of poetry or opera or Jackson Pollock. Stand in front of an art work you don’t understand until you do, because those art works have in them something that your own imagination doesn’t right now. When you open yourself to another person’s imaginative realm, your own will get richer. And your ability to connect with others will get stronger.  Remember, imagination and empathy are linked. When you can imagine someone else’s feelings you can delve into a whole new realm of experience. I remember standing in front of a still life of Cezanne’s when I was an au pair girl in Paris at 18 and wondering what was wrong with me that I didn’t like it. Then a survey of his work came here to Philly in the 90s and I went, and I looked and looked and then, after many hours of looking, I found myself in front of one of his small landscapes with those wonderful quivering cedar trees and I suddenly felt something happen inside my eyes. They felt like they were kind of fibrillating like the trees themselves, and at that moment I felt my eyes and Cezanne’s eyes conjoin, like I was inside his head. 

 

I’ll end with one of my favorite tidbits, which is the ancient Greek theory of vision. The theory goes like this: when we open our eyes, out of our retinas flows an effluvium, a jelly-like substance with little fingers at the end, called psychopodia- mind fingers. These psychopodia literally reach out and touch the object of vision. Vision and touch, you see, are directly linked according to the ancient Greeks. I love that!   I do believe that when we look at an artwork we are using that idea of tactile vision, which is why the delight in hand-made things will never die. Our eye/minds have the ability to caress an object, which we artists exploit everyday in our studios. This is our great love affair. 

 

 

 

Photo: Linda Johnson