 |
|
 |
"Stone Blind Love" (Bristlecone Pine) Watercolor, 30" x 22" |
Not
Making it Look How it Looks: A Conversation with Valerie Cohen |
"Rage of Light" (Bristlecone Pine) Watercolor, 30" x 22" |
| On October 2, 2002, I met with Valerie Cohen at her home in Reno. We talked about her career as an artist and her show at the Patagonia Service Center. Susan Lucas: Tell me briefly about how you began painting. Valerie Cohen: Well, a couple of things happened all at once. One was, I quit my law enforcement job and had a young child, and I was a housewife, and I knew I had to have something important to do right away. So I innocently thought: Oh I always wanted to be an artist because I always used to draw. I launched into being an artist and, thank heavens, I had no idea how hard it was going to be. How much work and how intellectually difficult, and the fact that you can never get there, actually, you know? SL: So you had a background in drawing of some kind before? VC: Well, yeah, but I had never taken any art courses. My parents sent me to UCLA and wouldn’t let me be an art major—which I actually wanted to do in my innocence back in the 60s—because it wasn’t a real job. I always liked to do things with my hands and, indeed, I sort of had a life-long history of always having some artsy thing to do. . . . I studied music all the way through college, and I did a stint writing fiction and publishing magazine articles in the late 70s early 80s. So I sort of always had this art thing in my mind but I didn’t know anything. So the first thing I did was go on a painting workshop with Milford Zornes, who is one of the original California School of Watercolor Painters, but he was in Southern California; he’s 94 now and this was in 1985 or 6. I went on a workshop to Mexico with him, and I knew a little bit. I had taken an introductory watercolor class, so I vaguely knew what I was doing, but not really. He’s my friend to this day and has been my major teacher, really. He taught me two things: he taught me, you have to work like a dog from sunrise to sunset, day-after-day; and he taught me how to design a page and how to start thinking abstractly. He refused to teach me technique. He said you’ll figure it out, you do it by trial and error; I’m not going to tell you what colors; I’m not going to tell you what brush. Although, he did help me. He did give me brushes and stuff, but he was quite right. There’s no point in teaching technique because then it’s not your technique anyway. But you do need somebody to teach you how hard it is, and how to work hard, and how to be really, really stubborn. So that’s what got me going, and by the time I realized—it took a few years to realize how intellectually difficult this was—by that time it was too late because I was already addicted. Once a year, I’ve gone on a painting workshop, which has taught me a fair amount, with various teachers that I’ve studied with, but the main reason to do that is to meet other artists. . . . You need to find other artists because they can talk about it the way climbers can talk about carabiners and never get bored. SL: What drew you to paint landscapes instead of other subjects? Was it Milford that encouraged you to focus on landscapes? VC: I was drawn to landscapes for various reasons. One is because for my entire life, I’ve been out and around in the woods, and I’ve always thought it important to know natural history and geology and stuff. And also, I was raised to look at very traditional paintings and I didn’t understand abstract art at all—ever—until much later, until after I’d been painting for awhile. I began to realize that landscape painting and abstract art, really those are not separate categories. They do blend and they blend in my work. But to go back to your original question, the way I picked Zornes for a teacher was once in the early 70s when I first moved to Utah, I saw a show of his. It was quite a large show and I walked into this room and there were a hundred paintings there. I thought this person thinks like I do, and I remember that show very clearly. There were a lot of Utah landscapes because he had a studio at Mt. Carmel, which is just east of Zion. He has always been a landscape painter. He also had all of this Mexico stuff—beaches—and I just thought if I were a painter, this is how I would think. And I had no intention, you know. It was fifteen years later that I decided to become a painter, but I always remembered that. So, I did start as a landscape painter and I don’t think I’m one anymore. SL: You’ve painted Bristlecones and various landscapes of the Great Basin. Does the Great Basin pose particular challenges for you as a painter? VC: One time I was sitting in a workshop in New Mexico and the instructors raised a question. They were talking about what had influenced them visually. Their lists were Cézanne and Picasso and, you know, they all had the same lists. Then they opened it to the students, and I got up and I said: Here are the visual influences in my life, Los Angeles freeways, because my father was an engineer and he was really into freeways in the 50s, you know, when they were new. And I love freeway interchanges. And snow and rock and anything above timberline and deserts and oceans and Navajo weaving and paintings on pots. And so when I put together this list, I realized that for my whole life I had been personally attracted to very stark, very simple designs, and designs with function in them. And so that makes me perfect as a landscape painter who likes deserts because there is just nothing there. That’s what is so extremely challenging about the Great Basin. And apart from my Bristlecone paintings I have never painted the Great Basin until I moved to Reno two years ago. So when I started doing that I thought I couldn’t do it. Because what is there? You have a horizontal line right in the middle, and if you look at a lot of bad landscape photography of the desert you’ll see the same thing. There’s a hard horizontal line right across the middle. Above it there are some far away mountains with some big clouds on top of that, and below it there’s some sagebrush. Well, there’s not a whole lot to work with. There’s no palm trees and VW bugs and crowds of people to help you fill up your space, so it’s very difficult because you have to fill up your space and design this thing so people can understand it and read it. But on the other hand, I personally want to keep it as empty as possible and that’s very difficult. So, I’ve done this long series of paintings of Hungry Valley north of Reno, which I’m only up to number 11 now. I thought I was done but I realized I’m not, but that has been a step-by-step process, taking out the stuff I don’t need and seeing how much I can take out and still have it be what it is. SL: The paintings of yours that I’ve seen are composed mostly of watercolor. Is that because of Milford as well? VC: Well, both, because he’s really an old school painter, you know. He only works in watercolor and he’ll put in ink and charcoal and stuff like that. I have begun in the last four or five years to start mixing my media. I use gouache a lot now, which is opaque watercolor. White gouache is my friend. It’s like toothpaste. You can paint over anything with it, and in some of them I’m doing acrylics, but I don’t have any pieces that are entirely acrylics, at least of my two-dimensional work. So I do it in order to get certain effects of flatness because I’m playing with a perfectly flat surface maybe against a slightly shadowed surface that has some depth to it. I don’t know how to use acrylics, so I just sort of go for it. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but so what. SL: Do you find that watercolor lends itself to landscape painting in a particular way other kinds of paint do not? VC: Well, the a-number-one thing is it’s so fast. You can get in your car and go out and work for four hours or six hours or whatever it takes you. And at the end, you have a perfectly dry painting. Now, it’s probably screwed up and you got to go home and do it again in the studio because there’s always wind and bugs and dirt and cold and snow and all those things, but for plein-air painting, watercolor beats them all silly because it’s so fast. And I’ve always loved that idea of its transportability, and I’ve painted on river trips, I’ve painted on pack trains, and I have a friend, Jocelyn Wasson, who has traveled all over the world with a kayak and a little notebook that she watercolors in, and she takes this notebook into the jungles and everywhere but she could do it because it’s watercolor. . . . So, it was just really practical. But also, I just love watercolors. . . . so there’s practical things but there’s also aesthetic issues, and then there is the fact that I can do watercolor, so I have this, by now, quite highly developed craft. Sometimes I think I need to step away from that but it’s always there for me because I can do it, you know. I have a handle on my medium now. SL: You said earlier that your paintings blend the abstract and the "real." Would you characterize your paintings this way? How would you characterize your paintings? VC: I have a friend who is a wood engraver who lives back east and her husband is a renowned statistician. . . . She showed him this engraving she did of a tree, like an apple tree or something, and he looked at it and he said, "but why don’t you make it look like it looks!" So that phrase became a wonderful touchstone for me because my biggest challenge that has dogged me this far and will dog me till my grave is don’t make it look like it looks because how we think it looks is very culturally determined. We were taught by our parents, and by our grade-school teachers, and by our culture and by photography that there is just one way—this is real, take a photograph, that is real, you open your eyes and see it and that’s real, but it isn’t. So the trick for the artist, and here’s the hard part, is a painting is just a piece of paper with pigment on it that’s moved around in a way that will be pleasing to other human beings to see. That’s all a painting is. And, in order to make myself believe that, I frequently look at my paintings upside down. That’s how I correct the design flaws is to look at them upside down or in the mirror or throw them on the floor and walk around and look at them from all sorts of views. When I started out, I didn’t know what I was doing as I said and I was very traditional and I thought you needed to "make it look like it looks" and put in the blue sky so people will like it. But that’s not what this is about. But I keep falling back in that. Every time I’m having trouble with a painting, I start trying to make it look like it looks and that is the kiss of death for me. Because I can make it look like it looks. If you held a gun to my head, I could make you the most beautiful, most traditional watercolor landscape. It wouldn’t look like I painted it and there wouldn’t be any Valerie in it, and there wouldn’t be anything of the sound of the wind or the temperature of the day or is this place scary or is this place serene or any of that stuff, which is really what it looks like. So I consider landscape painting to be very difficult. And then, on top of that, is I’m finally becoming a little bit more evolved in my thinking that landscape painting is political, and I am just at the beginning of knowing this and it’s going to take me years to figure it out, but my thought right now is that, you’ll notice that I’m starting to put in roads and trees and cars and phone lines—at least little notations of humanity in a lot of my paintings, not in all. Like when I do a picture of a tree, . . . it fills the whole format . . . the painting is the tree or my dialogue with the tree, but in terms of landscapes. . . . Okay there is no landscape in the United States of America that isn’t touched by human beings one way or the other. . . . I think it’s crucial to start sliding those little things in the paintings; for one thing they help design cause there’s just more stuff to design with . . . but another thing is even out here in the west at the edges of our towns or out in our rural areas, like way out at Pyramid Lake, there’s always the imprint of man. And we’re living at these edges and these edges are what we are trying to protect. And so I think it’s real important to integrate those things into landscape painting and get away from the traditional—what’s called your English picture box, you know a painting that has a foreground, and a middle ground, and a background and a blue sky and it’s pretty and it’s got beautiful green trees and all that stuff—because that’s a lie. That painting is a lie. Now, it is unfortunately true that people want to buy lies cause they want to live with them because it makes them happy, and I’m not saying they’re wrong, I’m just saying I can’t go there in my work because I would bore myself. Because it’s not true for me. SL: Do you want viewers of your paintings, then, to think about political issues explicitly? VC: I just want them to be subliminally aware of them. You know I still have trouble with explicitly political paintings. I knew this woman who lived in Southern Colorado and she was an artist, and she was doing these anti-nuke dump paintings . . . but they had skeletons in them and pictures of what the nuke dump would look like underground—this was when they were going to put it out in Lavender Canyon, in Canyonlands—you know and they had mushroom clouds up in the sky and so they were filled with all this stuff that was like cultural icons. But where was the art? Where was the design? Where was the beauty? There has to be beauty in all of this or nobody’s going to want to look at it for more than one minute. You got to get people to want to stand there and move around inside your painting. . . . Alex Powers, who is a very well known figurative painter and he does a great deal (he lives in Myrtle Beach) he does a great deal of political commentary, civil rights stuff. You know he’s really, really strong on civil rights, and he’ll show people in agony and then there’ll be a lot of text. Well, when I said that my Hungry Valley paintings were political, he said, what are you talking about? Where’s the ruination that humans have brought to nature? And I said, Alex that’s not what it is. I said look at this one painting: there’s the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, there’s a new community building and a gym and some of their houses, and then there’s that playa where this mine might go in right next to them. I said, that’s political enough. It doesn’t have to be explicit. I’m not sure he got it because he’s not a Westerner, you know, but for us out here. I’m not going to sit around and paint acid rain. SL: Now with the series of paintings you did for Hungry Valley, did you know about the issue beforehand or did you paint that landscape first? Which preceded the other? VC: Okay, I knew about the issue first and I got myself involved in the issue. I got myself introduced to the Coalition for Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods, which was assisting the Reno-Sparks Indian tribe. And then I started doing some of their public speaking for them because I’m a pretty good public speaker and I can research pretty quickly, so I spoke at hearings. And I took a field trip out there because I really didn’t know the place. So Michael and I, my husband, went out there and we thought: Wow! What a beautiful place! So I started saying that in some of my public comments. That this is open land; it is managed by the BLM; it needs to be preserved because it is so beautiful. . . . Well, one day I was sitting at one of our Coalition meetings—I always doodle and draw little pictures and I wrote this little note—and this Indian woman I was sitting next to, Diana Crutcher-Smith, she leaned over and said, what did you write there? And I said, I wrote a note to myself and it says: Valerie you have to go try to paint a painting at Hungry Valley. And as soon as I said that, then I had verbalized it, and I was stuck, I had to do it. . . . So, to answer your question, I knew the issue and then I was trying to think of how to bring my own personal craft more to bear on the issue and it’s worked, you know. Because my paintings have helped publicize this issue and I think that’s good. SL: I know you’re working with other media, like found objects. I know several of your assemblages have typewriters in them—what led you to art assemblage and why the typewriter? VC: I had a big show in the town of Ephraim, which is a little town in central Utah. It has a two-year college and I got invited to have this show at this city-owned art facility. . . . So I had this two-story old building to fill. . . . Fortunately, I did have a whole year to get ready for this show, but I made a time-line and I put my head down and I started doing the paintings, but I thought: I need a carrot at the end. Well, I thought up three carrots and I gave myself all three. I had to do all the paintings first so I’d have that squared away. Then they’d asked me to do something for school children, so I made this whole thing about snakes. I made a whole table full of driftwood that was painted to be all the kinds of snakes that occur naturally in Utah. It was beautiful. I had a little handout about how a gopher snake feeds itself, where the different kinds of rattlers live, and so on. So the second part I had done before in another show at Southern Utah University. I wanted to make the show look like my studio, so I did things like save up my empty paint tubes for a whole year. I had fifteen-hundred dollars worth of empty tubes in this big pile, so I made a little set up like I was painting, you know with paint brushes and the paint tubes and sketches and a hair dryer, just all that stuff I work with. And the third part, and I don’t know why I got going on this, I made a typewriter. This is the first typewriter I’d made. And my reward for having made this whole show was that I got to do this typewriter and put it into the show. I had no idea. I had never worked in acrylic or with glue or with any of these found objects before—ever. But I just knew I could do it. So I got this really great Selectric II typewriter, which meant a lot to me because I had had one when I typed Michael’s first book. . . . So I did a lot of typing on this same model, and those typewriters had a lot of flat, clean plains. Well, I made this typewriter and it sort of turned out to be my life story, because I’d put in all of these little things from my life—photographs and memorabilia and my old hippy jewelry and some writing of mine and so on. By the time it was finished, it was about what my life had been like and so I really had fun doing that. But I began to think about portable typewriters because I had seen some here, in the antique malls here in Reno, and they are just beautiful. Some of them are just beautiful works of industrial art. So I got this one last winter and it was real art deco; it was a Remington from the 30s I think; it was just gorgeous, very art deco. . . . I’ve always loved typewriters and loved typing . . .but typing I love for a variety of reasons and I liked the machines that produce typing. And I think the actual act of typing is a real interesting part of the writing process, and as I mentioned at the beginning of this interview, I’ve done a fair amount of writing myself. I don’t do it now because I can’t do art and writing at the same time. I don’t think anybody can. . . . Typewriters as artifacts, as cultural artifacts are important to me and I also love their physical design. And, so the one I did last winter, I don’t know why, but I knew that I wanted to make it about winter and about skiing. As I got into it then, I realized that the typewriter part had to do with my mother and her relationship with skiing and what she wrote about skiing and so I incorporated some of her text. And she, for her whole life, she had this Underwood manual typewriter. She refused—even when she had horrible arthritis, she could hardly move her hands—she refused to have a computer or even an electric typewriter. She had to use this manual typewriter. . . . so the typewriter was important in my family and in the generation of text so that was that one. But then I made one and this is a step, perhaps, out of my field of expertise but you got to start somewhere. So the most recent typewriter I made is about automobile fatalities, and it centers around the newspaper. Now, I began to notice when I was thinking about making this typewriter, I knew it was going to have something to do with cars. . . . I think I realized it might be about the dangers of cars, and then I began to notice that every time I opened up our local paper, there was an article with a good, juicy headline about cars and people dying in them. So I started clipping headlines, and I clipped them for five months, and I ended up with several hundred, which are now part of this typewriter I made. All I could do in this piece was raise the question of: Okay somebody got in their car, they went out and got killed—killed themselves, one way or the other—a newspaper reporter wrote a story about it; it was typed; it went into the newspaper; we all read it the next morning, then we get into our cars and we go out and kill ourselves. So there’s this horrible circularity. Why are we writing, why are we reading? You know. . . still driving. There’s something sick about the whole process, so its this circular thing. So that’s what my piece is about. But again, it was a carrot. . . . So these pieces actually do evolve more under my hands than my paintings do. SL: Where do you see your work headed after this? You had mentioned that you will probably do more Hungry Valley paintings. Do you also think you’ll venture into other kinds of media too? More typewriters? VC: I have no idea. I have been boring myself in the last year or so and I fixed that in several different ways. One is I occasionally paint or at least do the drawing for a painting with my left hand, which is a real mind bender, but it makes a completely different kind of painting. Another thing is new tools and I’m going back to the beginnings of mankind. I’m starting to paint with sticks at least through the foundational drawing in a painting with sticks and finish it as well with sticks rather than with brushes. I also got some brand new paintbrushes from Japan, which really, really helped my painting and broke me out of some old habits, so those are ways to make painting more interesting. I think I need to be thinking more about subject matter. I am interested in what’s at the edges of Reno. I’m very interested in the Tracy power plant, the Sierra Pacific Power Plant, as an artifact, so I go down there and draw it sometimes. Someday I’m going to go down there and do a good painting of it—I haven’t yet, but someday I will. I do want to do more typewriter-type pieces because I probably don’t understand what I’m doing yet. . . . You know everything I know about color and design and how to communicate with other human beings visually goes into my typewriters as much as it does into my paintings. So some people might think that I’m abandoning painting, but I don’t see it that way. I’m just entertaining myself in the void and using everything I know and giving myself a rest.
|
||
Copyright © 2002, Great Basin Publishing