But what does it mean?!
I debate often, with others and with myself, the benefits
and detriments of artist self representation vs. gallery or dealer
representation. While Genna and I do
both, the plusses of self representation far outweigh the detriments in our
personal equation. No one is more
motivated to represent us than us. Not having a middle man between us and our
collectors helps us keep our prices at a reasonable level. Travel.
The glamour of sweaty, windy, panicky booth assembly. Oh, sorry, that goes on the other side of the
equation. But the biggest benefit by far
is the constant feedback we receive from viewers as we sit for hours, looking
at our paintings, hearing what they have to say, and discussing the work. I
believe I have learned as much about our work from others as I have from
actually participating in making it.
I had a particularly interesting conversation with a young
man recently in The Woodlands, TX. He
was of an age that I now consider ‘a kid’…probably somewhere in his early
twenties…and was intensely chatty. He
was poking me mercilessly to reveal more and more about what our work means,
what our motivations are, what are the themes, why is this this color, why is
that painted like that. He was very
sweet and I was doing my best to answer his questions but was struggling as
most of what he was asking had no verbal answer. Finally I said something to the effect
of “painting is a visual media. If I
could communicate everything I wanted to communicate in words, I’d be a
writer.” I promise I didn’t mean this in
a smart ass way. It’s just true. And more than not having a clear answer in my
own mind to many of his questions, I felt that to manufacture answers would
minimize the work, make it about one thing when thing when truly it’s about
everything and/or anything I think this is why you’ll often
find artists much more interested in discussing their medium and physical
processes than their themes. I can talk
all day about how Genna and I make our work but tend to gloss over the ‘why’
with broad strokes…family, community, nostalgia, the quality of memory, the
beauty of the everyday.
I wound up having a really great conversation with that kid
about art in general and the contrast between visual and verbal art that had me
charged up for the rest of the day. Like
I said, perks of the business. Then last
week I was reading Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Blink’ which is about the power of and
mechanism behind snap decisions. Around
page 119 there’s this:
Let me give you a very simple example. Picture, in your mind, the face of the waiter
who served you the last time you ate at a restaurant, or the person who sat
next to you on the bus today. Any
stranger whom you’ve seen recently will do.
Now, if I were to ask you to pick that person out of a police lineup,
could you do it? I suspect you could.
Recognizing someone’s face is a classic example of unconscious
cognition. We don’t have to think about
it. Faces just pop into our minds. But suppose I were to ask you to take a pen
and paper and write down in as much detail as you can what your person looks like. Describe her face. What color was her hair? What was she wearing? Was she wearing any
jewelry? Believe it or not, you will NOW DO A LOT WORSE AT PICKING THAT FACE
OUT OF A LINEUP. THIS IS BECAUSE THE ACT
OF DESCRIBING A FACE HAS THE EFFECT OF IMAIRING YOUR OTHERWISE EFFORTLESS
ABILITY TO SUBSEQUESNTLY RECOGNIZE THAT FACE.
The
psychologist Jonathan W. Schooler, who pioneered research on this effect, calls
it VERBAL OVERSHADOWING. Your brain has
a part (the left hemisphere) that thinks in words, and a part (the right
hemisphere) that thinks in pictures, and what happened when you described the
face in words was that your actual visual memory WAS DISPLACED. Your thinking was bumped from the right to
the left hemisphere. When you were faced
with the lineup the second time around, what you were drawing on was your
memory of what you said the waitress looked like, not your memory of what you
saw she looked like.”
(I apologize for the shouting…the caps were mine, not Mr.
Gladwell’s). SO…aha. We all have a visual, instinctive, magical
place in our minds that is not only not enhanced by a verbal overlay of an
experience but actually subverted by it.
Does this mean we shouldn’t talk about art? Absolutely not. We should all be pleased to share our experiences
of art. This interaction enriches the
art exponentially. What we should not
do, however, is ask artists to give to us in words what they have already given
us whole heartedly, freely in paint, clay, song, pixels, metal, wool, troll
doll assemblage, photography, peep collage…
