More About Me: Who Are My Other Favorite Artists You May Wonder

Actually, I'm hard pressed to name more than one. I'm really into photography, but I can't think of a lot of artists whose work I would just die to see.

As a kid living in Europe, I was a huge admirer of Hieronymus Bosch and continue to really like his work. My dad's girlfriend says his work is psychadelic. Another good P-word would be phantasmagoric. What I liked about it so much as a kid was the incredible detail in his paintings, something I still like today. Similar to Kathryn DeMarco's work, you can look at one painting for a long, long time and not even be close to seeing all the people and things in it. I like that kind of complexity, and as a kid my own artwork was very detailed so I appreciated even more how much Bosch was able to fit into a painting.

Many art historians have speculated on the motivations for Bosch's paintings, but as a kid I didn't have any fancy interpretation of his work, I took them at face value as visual representations of the religious doctrine of his time, which is now once again the more accepted view among art historians.

As for other artists, an exhibit that I saw as an adult in Milwaukee called The Quilts of Gee's Bend made a lasting impression on me. (To see images of some of the quilts go here.) This is what Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times had to say about the exhibit in his article "Jazzy Geometry, Cool Quilters":

The most ebullient exhibition of the New York art season has arrived at the Whitney Museum in the unlikely guise of a show of hand-stitched quilts from Gee's Bend, Ala[bama]. Gee's Bend is a remote, historically black community occupying a bulb of bottom land, a U-shaped peninsula five miles across and seven miles long, hemmed in on three sides by the Alabama River.

The results, not incidentally, turn out to be some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced. Imagine Matisse and Klee (if you think I'm wildly exaggerating, see the show) arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South in the form of women, descendants of slaves when Gee's Bend was a plantation. These women, closely bound by family and custom (many Bender's bear the slaveowner's name, Pettway), spent their precious spare time-- while not rearing children, chopping wood, hauling water and plowing fields-- splicing scraps of old cloth to make robust objects of amazingly refined, eccentric abstract designs. The best of these designs, unusually minimalist and spare, are so eye-poppingly gorgeous that it's hard to know how to begin to account for them. But then, good art can never be fully accounted for, just described.

I didn't remember this quotation in its entirety, but I do remember clearly being shocked when I picked up the brochure for the exhibit and read the words, "so eye-poppingly gorgeous that it's hard to know how to begin to account for them." This phrase seemed so incredibly condescending and racist to me that I couldn't believe the museum had chosen to voluntarily reprint it as part of its literature. It's as if Kimmelman is stunned that a poor African-American community could produce such beautiful artwork. Moreover, the quilts are not only made by indigent African-American descendants of slaves, but women nonetheless! But seriously, what is so astonishing about that? The fact that none of these women had (presumably) any formal training or exposure to European art? Why should Kimmelman be so surprised that this kind of groundbreaking exhibit would come from a poor black community in the deep South and not elsewhere? His surprise speaks volumes about the assumptions we make as a culture about who will produce great art-- those who are privileged and educated. Of course, as the quilts of Gee's Bend show so powerfully, these assumptions are misleading.

At any rate, aside from the quilts' intrinsic beauty, I was moved by the fact that they were made of worn out clothing, mainly jeans, that most affluent people in modern society would simply throw away. These jeans were too threadbare to donate, yet these women found a use for them, since they had a need for quilts to keep warm in winter. I actually bought the materials to try to make a quilt out of my own used jeans, but never found time to get started. Still, it made me think about how one does not need money or fancy materials to create both an incredibly aesthetically pleasing and functional object, and it made me even more committed to recycling everything I use rather than simply throwing things away.