Bonnie Sklarski
April 25, 2008 by Chris
Bonnie Sklarski
********************************************************************
Also, Matt pointed me toward (and maybe he’s already pointed you there, too) an interview with Sangram Majumdar at neotericart.com: “What I seek in the work is a sense of time and the range of human awareness and interest, from the sustained to the superficial. We never care or see something twice the same way. So, each time I look at my surface I try to take into account these tendencies. I don’t do studies anymore, partly because I don’t want to split up the ‘thinking’ and the ‘making.’”
why?
Why not split up the thinking and making, you mean?
bonnie is a difficult. for me, her personality was always a more salient force than anything i could gather from her work. i think she nearly qualifies as an enigma. but, that being said, i always had a good functional
student–>teacher relationship with her, in part, because i think i found most of her eccentricity really charming on some level.
what i always felt was really strange though, was the glaring discrepency between some of the things she would teach and then some of things she would do in her own work. like, during our grad seminar we all had to do these paintings that visually took the same subject matter but presented it in two spatially different ways: one which activated the space in a ‘dynamic’ way and one in a ’static’ way.
we were warned…maybe even berated…against falling into the trap of ‘composing with subject matter’.
at the same time we were all working on our paintings bonnie was working on her’s as well. and we all presented them together. and she had taken this motif of some sort of floral profusion and organized it within the picture plane in two different ways. and to my eye at least, out of everyone, she was the person who composed the most via her subject matter. strange.
but, i always loved the way she would talk about ideas…like the time thing and time being ‘real’ or ‘mythological’…and the more metaphysical aspects of painting…
the ‘why’ was more in reference to the bonnie image. it kind of baffles me on some level.
but, i say that keeping in mind that i actually really like some of her paintings. she did do a Persephone painting that i thought was really formally beautiful.
this one jen? http://s253.photobucket.com/albums/hh50/eikonktizo/?action=view¤t=sklarski-persephone.jpg
i like that one, too.
i transcribed pages and pages of notes from her and still refer to them from time to time… the time stuff was interesting, but also the logic of positions and the sort of color theory stuff she’d relate to the time, etc.
yeah.
i didn’t take notes, but what i really liked was the part when she did show and tell, which was kind of like a glimpse into ‘bonnie as painter’…and she dressed up in the gigantic carhart jumpsuit that she uses for painting outside in the dead of winter…very ‘abominable snowman(person)’. and then, she pulled out all the dead animals from her carcass freezer and asked us if we ever passed by any interested roadkill, to bring it to her pronto.
that was an enlightening day.
anyways…
maybe sam’s question is a good one.
why or why not seperate out the thinking from the making?
I spent one miserable semester at IU…I remember Bonnie coming in and stretching string across the painting I was working on to show that the composition was symmetrical, to which I had no response one way or the other…It wasn’t long after that that I realized that grad school wasn’t for me…The teachers there did seem eccentric, as noted in an earlier response, though I believe that was from being big fish in a very small pond, maybe even a puddle…It was a closed system that was stifling and uninspiring, it was a relief to go back to the city…I suppose some painters need to be surrounded by like-minded or supportive colleagues, but at a certain point it becomes incestuous and inward looking in an unhealthy way…A painter can know every trick in the book and still have nothing to say.
i think bonnie has plenty to say. i think it takes a bit of time to figure her out, but some things are worth sifting through.
to be honest, i don’t respond to many of her paintings, but, she does have ideas that she is trying to express.
and she did that string thing to me too (i think she does it with most of her students) and at first i wasn’t sure where she was going with it…
but, she did it with all of my paintings, and what she showed me was that i was making the same compositional choices over and over again (along the major axis’ of the paintings / golden sections and all o’ that) without even being aware of it. and it made me realize was that i was getting really dumb and blind to some things in my work. it also made me realize that intuitively i had some sort of state of organization that i was working toward. and that’s pretty cool to have someone else show you about yourself.
-another enlightening day-
I haven’t posted here before, but really appreciate what Sam and Chris have done here, and had to chime in on the “Bonnie question”.
Jen, your “why?” is a more pointed and important question than has been acknowledged so far. I had much them same experience you describe, in terms of a seemingly acute sensibility (at least dealing with structure/composition) that Bonnie could bring to looking at an individual painting, that was very hard to square with her resistance to seeing all kinds of forms, approaches to color, and conceptual motivations in paintings that diverged from a set of assumptions about what art can and should be.
The issue is most definitely not that Bonnie has “nothing to say”…the work can be beautiful and obsessive in the best sense of the word. I often found myself waiting for a nod to how much other artists of all stripes have to say as well.
But, still, the “why” remains. There is a sense for me with her work of a hermetic, closed dialog between her and the image. That dialog is something we all recognize in ourselves I think, but it is the closed feeling that troubles me. I hate to start talking about “relevance” or some such illusory idea, but can’t help but wonder about whether she has any desire at all to be involved in a larger conversation of images.
i think all of this comes back (albeit adjacently) to the original sangram quote and chris’ question about it. i mean, we’re talking about perspectives and approaches, and goodness knows we’ve all come to a certain kind of consensus (in a way) regarding what methodologies and conceptual frameworks feel right and seem to make sense. it seems to be that we all play around on that line between a kind of dogmatic adherence to certain ways of doing things, certain ways of thinking about things while at the same time maintaining an openness and generosity about those we see around us who seem to be really investigating and pursuing something intensely necessary for them. question for me is where the line is crossed and my methods and conceptions become doctrinal creeds. for instance i feel like what sangram was saying about not wanting to split up thinking and making is simply a way that works best for him (and usually for me). i highly doubt that’d a litmus test for him. but i can certainly imagine that kind of notion becoming a law of sorts, and a way to find out who’s “in” and who’s “out.” i have to question myself… i’m even more enamored with antonio lopz garcia after spending the time in boston and seeing the show and hearing the talk; am i ok with people not liking the work? not “getting” it? this could go for my appreciation for kitaj or diebenkorn, or, hell, anyone else. where is that line where an approach, or a method, or a idea, or a feeling, or a process becomes something we analyze others’ work in relation to? do we do it all the time without knowing it?
it’s one thing to look at images and to react to the image; it becomes another thing all together when our notion of the image becomes somehow wrapped around our attachment to the person who made the image.
if i had never known bonnie, or been forced to get to know her because she was my teacher, it would be pretty easy for me to write her off as an almost fanatical type of neo-classicist. but, i had to get to know her, and then i found myself wanting to get to know her…even the elements of her that seemed sort of narrow (to my mind and eye). i wanted to know what made her tick.
and of course i’m going to defend these elements of her, because i developed a real respect for them. i really don’t believe that someone would spend the better part of their life devoting themselves to a purpose that they didn’t somehow feel very strongly about. and that’s uncommon, not to mention very difficult in a world where it’s really easy to believe in nothing and to say nothing.
i don’t think that i require that anyone else like her or like her work.
i mean, there are a million aphorisms that i could apply at said juncture…but i’ll leave it at that.
whoa
i just went to link to matt’s image of bonnie’s persephone, to have another look at it, and it’s been removed because it ‘violated the (photobucket) terms of service’
my question is: is this a copyright thing, or do the photobucket people think you’re pushing soft core porn?
how scandalizing…
I haven’t stayed out of this on purpose, just unable to get on the computer much the last few days.
I felt that Bonnie’s insistent hardline is prescriptive. Not that she doesn’t mean what she professes, but that over time she’s had to choose what it is she’d push across even when she’s not feeling it (this happens to everyone at some point), and that it must be exaggerated for it to make a lasting impression on a wide range of people.
Painting is conceptual. Even the in-the-moment, think-action painting Sangram describes is a conceptual standpoint, because it’s a choice.
Bonnie is aware of this. Also, when I was there, I remember her mentioning that over time, she’d reconsidered a lot of ‘abstract’ art against which she’d positioned herself. She acknowledged that those painters had good things to offer. But she’s also most of the way up the mountain she chose. If I were her, I imagine I would keep on going, too.
At my first review (the pre-orals) she told me, “you go out of your way to show us you’re sincere.” Which I took to mean, “you’re affecting sincerity.” This was hurtful but it’s useful to me even now. Making locked-up little parking lot one-shots, over and over, because…why? For whom? In dialogue with what? Her plants are my parking lots, as far as I can tell, even now.
Sometimes I wish learning things there hadn’t been such trauma. Sigh…
PS, something that might be hard for the academic old garde to believe is that painting structure doesn’t have to be cubism, or altarpieces, or really murky and physical to be articulate and invested.
My dad can’t get into rap music.
when i was first moving into my studio at IU, one of the second-years swung in and during our conversation, bonnie came up. something to the effect of the following was given as a warning: “bonnie will say some of the most terrible things to you…she does it to everyone.”
true to form, bonnie was the one to reduce me to tears on at least two separate occasions. but, i think what makes her remarks so cutting, is that she speaks to and critiques the artist first, and then she speaks to the work secondarily - like an extension of the person. sometimes she seems way off-base, but when she’s on, it’s as though she sees right through you. and it’s always an intimate and personal observation. it’s unnerving.
i could get really used to people taking shots at my work, but bonnie would sometimes take shots at the ‘me’ part of the work. and i think when someone like her is used to consistently operating on this level with people, it’s absurd to assume that she could just as easily pan out and take in the larger context in a more unbiased and open way. i think it might explain some of her tunnel-vision.
when i asked the ‘why’ in the very beginning of the thread, it wasn’t so much: why would she paint a flower painting? hell, i paint flower paintings sometimes…maybe we can call me ‘captain contradiction’ (because i so often do it, and i love to call other people out on it. sorry)
but, why is she painting it this way? it’s not even really a conversation about observation anymore. nothing looks or feels like that in real life. at least, not in the world i live in. this seems to be more a conversation about the act of synthesis itself. i think she seems really into the idea of creating something… the magic of it. i think she’s really in love with that experience.
interesting Bonnie stories and thoughts here, from everyone. I was wondering…Sam, if you could elaborate on some points from above, that I have been thinking about: Painting is conceptual, even in-the-moment painting, because it is a choice. ….my question: painting intuitively is a choice?? One chooses to paint, but are the intuitive choices really choices…how is that still conceptual?
I am thinking of this Jed Perl quote that your comment reminded me of: “What an artist makes of a painting is not so much a matter of freely choosing among a variety of options as it is a matter of making the most of a few intuitions that are absolutely one’s own….To paint is to show your hand.”
Also, Sam, your post number 14 is interesting. What is necessary for the structure of the painting? I want to say, very broadly, that we need to be able to ‘move’ through the painting (etc.). What do you mean by murky and physical?
I see what you mean in terms of relating this to all the comments on Bonnie….I do remember her in my studio and, frankly, confused..by Leland Bell (who does have a website up and running now). The dark lines in Leland Bell that delineate the shapes she saw as possibly locking the figures into an immobile space which was possibly, as she saw it, a psychological statement. The figures are in this ‘frozen’ relationship, something like that…
intuitive work is connected to the conceptual in that the intuition is a learned frame of reference*. it is a construction made up of overt, learned knowledge and innate body knowledge, and in both cases is a product of time and effort and will and interest and direction and guiding, etc, etc, etc.
so i’d say that intuitive processes and response are, in a very fundamental way, connected to a conceptual articulation of an individual. i think we do what it occurs to us to do. but what occurs to us to do is a complex amalgamation of influences and proclivities - it makes a major difference that i was exposed to certain artists and artworks at certain times. my awareness of those people, their works, and the implications of the way they built those works made huge impressions on me and the range of potential that i experienced as “open” to me. was more open? yes. could i have developed differently? sure. but my natural, inherent ways of moving that were developing in me since birth came to bear on the specifics of what i was made aware of intellectually and what i perceived as desirable and permissible. i’d be a very different painter if i’d fallen in love with kitaj and sickert before falling in love with diebenkorn and nerdrum.
hindsight is 20/20: i remember as an early undergrad running around with excitement proclaiming how certain artists were giving me “permission” to work. what i meant is that as i learned more and more about different artists and different ranges of work i was constantly finding more and more possibility for the application of my own hand. so my hand, which is embedded with so much learned and intuitive specificity, was reacting to what my mind experienced as possible. i.e. the intuitive finding resonance with actuality via a conceptual stance.
*one of my main stated goals as a teacher is to “inform students’ intuition.”
so yeah, i’m contradicting perl. i like his stuff, but here i just have to say that all things are in relation. when i show my hand i show everything that has come to bear on that hand. in it i claim a legacy, not autonomy. claiming that something is absolutely one’s own seems simplistic - what do i have that i have not received? again, all things are in relation.
Wow. I had no idea that Bonnie had this effect on so many people. I thought she just hated me. What a relief.
I’ll probably regret this, but some of you might enjoy this song I wrote about my experience with Bonnie: http://www.whightsel.com/music/ABonetoPick.mp3
Garage Band is much cheaper than therapy.
Anyway, as frustrating as her studio visits and flour mountains could be, her anatomy class was pure gold. That class alone was worth the Sallie Mae bill as far as I am concerned.
Re: painting is conceptual
Was tough to type it, because ‘conceptual’ is a loaded word. I don’t mean painting is ‘conceptual art’–I mean that if you do it long enough, and you live in the world, and you interact with other people (artists or not), eventually, you become more self-aware, and to make a conscious effort to preserve that identity is a choice. Just as making a conscious effort to change that identity is a choice. I feel like my choices are usually intuitive, and when I betray my intuition, I’m usually disappointed by the result. I’ve made a lot of both (intuitive and, well, anti-intuitive choices) in the past 5 years, and the thing that’s tricky is that my intuition doesn’t always lead me to squeezing 12 to 20 tubes of oil and pigment, and then brushing it onto a prepared ground in some fashion proven by other people to be archivally sound. I mean, how ‘intuitive’ can you be when there’s so much received knowledge to wade through?
The fact is, not unlike Bonnie’s potted plant up there, we plant our intuition in a safe place and actively, thoughtfully tend to it and nurture it. Why?
Re: Murky and physical
By ‘murky and physical’, I mean 70’s-80’s painterly painting, kind of like John Walker, and/or the British school. Mud that bounces. Another structure that’s tried-and-true and teachable, alongside cubism or altarpieces.
PS, Jen, do you want “caption contradiction” to read “captain contradiction” ? If so, I’ll edit it.
PPS, Brandon, I’m almost right there with you on the anatomy class (but, as you know, I’m a bit of a slob, so I probably missed a couple $$’s worth)
Re-reading that, I’m not sure I answered John’s question well enough.
Yes, once you get cooking, you stop thinking, “should I put this form precisely here, and if so, is that because someone told me it’s better to compose in a certain way, or is this me achieving a primal expressive state?” You just do it. It isn’t worth dissecting any further. Paint another one.
So yes, painting is intuitive. But painting is also conceptual. Just like everything else is intuitive and also conceptual, even ‘conceptual art’. This is my opinion.
People are fascinated by Henry Darger. Maybe, at least partially, because there’s some promise that he was less self-aware, and never questioned what he did.
yeah,
sam: ‘captain contradiction’
thanks
conceptual, intuitive, nature, nurture. We may never know how much intuition is informed by the conceptual just as we may never resolve the nature vs. nurture argument. But there is a difference between painting consciously, creating art consciously, and painting intuitively. Someone like Perl believes that the intuition is more important. It is largely an argument against work like Dada or most post-modern work. In the moment, the heat of the moment, one isn’t thinking about what the work ’should’ be, one is running on automatic pilot.
For myself, I was in love with people years ago, who were heroes to me, but now think very little of. Frank Stella, Keith Haring, Lichtenstein, Joan Brown….I like to think that my intuitions didnt jive with those folks, and led me elsewhere, to painters that made more sense to me, that I felt more at home with. My reasons for liking/loving the painting that I do isn’t conceptual but intuitive. Finally intuitive. All of the concepts that I may have read about my painting heroes are not the attraction.
bah
you use the english language “intuitively” too, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a learned, interpreted, normed, delineated, constructed, and conventionalized application.
nature and nurture are two sides of the same coin and they are mutually inflected. the idea that the intuitive, natural hand is “pure” is about as mythological as originality.
bah? as in bah bah black sheep?
??
no one is saying or has said that the intuitive is “pure’. intuition has a connection to the conceptual, sure. everything is connected, blah bah, etc. But I know for damn sure that there is a distinction between the two. That is what I am talking about: the distinction….not the connection. or, originally, I wasn’t making a point about intuition in terms of painting, just asking for a clarification about the use of conceptual (painting is conceptual). Thanks for the clarification, Sam.
what is important about the way one uses a language, be it painting or english, is not the fact that one does use said language intuitively. It is what is SAID with that language: what words, colors, shapes, order of the parts, when and where…the intuitive is in the doing, not the learning/acquiring of the language. One finds oneself as a painter. Of course a painter comes from a history, from a time and a place and so on. We all have familys, lineages…but we are finally one thing and not the other. I speak english, maybe with a certain accent. I could learn to speak another language, Greek or Spanish, but that would be a conscious, not intuitive, choice. which is more telling, is more me..?
but i think it’s that insistence on there being an absolute (”one thing and not the other”)that becomes problematic. it just seems like the gray zone between intuition and conception…between any example of the one thing and the other…that is worth testing.
the above quote, plus: What an artist makes of painting is NOT SO MUCH a matter of freely choosing among a variety of options as it is a matter of making the most of a few intuitions that are absolutely one’s own. Every time a painter paints, we want to see what those intuitions are. To paint is to show your hand. It is left to the audience to decide whether the way the artist handles paint reveals unselfconscious virtuosity, a canny imitation of virtuosity, or an inability to achieve any level of virtuosity.
I think he is simply saying he believes in the intuitive over the overtly conscious. it’s like: your words say one thing, but your actions say another. I know you are lying, I can see it in your eyes. Its that simple. What is real and what is false? what is a pose?
If one feels the need to debate that, test it, argue with it…fine. If Kermit the frog sings “It aint easy being green”, I suppose we can say “bah…its all relative. there is no green without blue and yellow.” If Stephen Hawking pulls two crayons out of the box and says “This is a black crayon and that is a white crayon.”, we could say “gee, there is no black and white, only shades of gray…I’m contradicting Stephen Hawking”
woke up this morning, pulled an old art magazine out of the rack, and saw this from an essay:
The expectations of what a painting must look like are formulated by painters. A tradition is a succession of painters with individual styles who share certain attitudes about visual experience and certain expectations of what a painting should look like. It is an individual ambition which is the cause of changes in attitudes and expectations. Any painter, at any time, whether in Florence in 1495 or in New York in 1979, is confronted with immediate ancestors, with a formulated set of expectations–an aesthetic–and a body of techniques with which to put a painting together. The painter has a direct visual experience of the world, affinities to certain paintings, rejections of others, and the experience of making paintings. No matter how respectful he may feel toward any number of the painters around him, the natural desire is to do something that looks and feels right to him. He takes what he wants of a persuasive aesthetic, developing his own technique to best make visible, to paint into existence, to realize his expectations of what a painting might, can, and then will look like. The imperatives of ambition are, finally, that the painting look right and feel right to the painter, whether that painter is Georges de la Tour or Barnett Newman. Painters are always talking about ‘getting it right’– the light, the drawing, the space, the color (abstract painters talk the same way as representational painters). ‘Getting it right’ means realizing the intention. The specific red that Mark Rothko had to make and the specific blue that Ingres had to make were right because they looked right to them. They were not right because they looked like someone else’s red or blue.
from A Painter’s Reflections on Real Paintings, by Harriet Shorr. ARts Magazine Oct 1979
sorry for the length
john, you’ve made no attempt at explaining why the intuitive is preferable to the conceptual. you’ve just stated in an insinuating way that it is. the two examples are pretty specious–it’s not that simple to look in someone’s eyes and tell they are lying. stephen hawking pointing at crayons (if we are to take crayons as absolute versions of colors) isn’t anything like trying to point out that the difference between what is intuited and what is conceived is difficult to define.
It seems to me that if you are an artist and you want people to know that you are working intuitively….that intuition, in it’s rejection of other options and strategies, and in what it implies and aligns itself with, becomes a conceptual stance.