END OF SEMESTER BIG WRAP-UP CONCLUSION POST:

I feel that the main benefit I took from this class was that working on a smaller scale and making a lot of pieces quickly helped me identify patterns in my work and figure out what aspects of my work are ""successful"" (for lack of a better term because the idea of unsuccessful paintings is hinged entirely on the viewer's experience/interpretation of the work and leaves out the process and making of the work but whatever!) and what i need to change or work on or switch up. I realized a lot of my forms end up looking the same, and that I have a lot to think about in terms of depth and flatness of my shapes and colors, layering, subtlety versus drama, composition, etc. I think I got frustrated when I realized that a lot of the forms in my work are pretty similar and my gestures tend to repeat themselves, but if I hadn't had to churn out so many small paintings one after the other I might not have noticed that and I wouldn't have been able to work on it.

I learned from the readings too, although I won't pretend I found them nearly as valuable as the critique and discussions about work and the time spent making it. I still really like that one passage from Blues People about erasing the separation between the artist, the artist's emotions, and the artist's means of expression. That's how I feel even if it's kind of corny, like i think i am myself and i am also my feelings and my actions which are also the paint and the paint is me. That's the only way artwork makes sense to me. That's why I think I wasn't too concerned with the specificity of making my work "about" the songs, or feeling like it had to "relate to" the songs. Every time I started working I would think about the meaning of the songs or the readings or the videos of that week, the lyrics of the songs, the feeling of the music, maybe play the song I chose a few times while I worked. The connection might not be immediate or apparent but it's there inasmuch as I'm a person who is affected by music and stories and histories and I'm also the same person who was making the works. To me that's a much more powerful way to learn about something: by just letting yourself soak up the parts of it that speak to you, not worrying about it too much but just taking in whatever seems resonant, mulling it over, and then spitting it back out. I've always thought that way, but taking this course helped me consciously realize and articulate that for myself, and reaffirmed that for me.

Probably my favorite part of the class were the discussions about the work, and seeing everything that everyone else made every week. I think you can learn a lot about people through their art (including writing!), and I enjoyed finding out a little bit about everyone's methods, what they like, their tendencies, what they don't like, and watching people develop, try new things, and find out what works for them. I really value getting comments on my work so I want to thank everyone for sharing their responses with me. I find people generally have a harder time commenting on abstract paintings because there's less of a way into them, so I'm grateful for any feedback I get, and even for the feedback and responses given to others. Thanks for sharing your work with me, all the different approaches taken, media used, and meanings derived from songs/readings/works were really remarkable and valuable to me. I wish y'all luck in the future and I hope you keep making beautiful things! best, cristina

Sea shanties week I think I finally stopped being so frustrated with everything I was making and it sounds minor but I'm pretty sure it was because I liked the green I mixed into the top left corner so much. I was just trying to make something oceany, some colors that invoke the ocean visually but also through their feelings. Like the meaning of the ocean and the depth and changeability of water, though I guess that's kind of cliche. I'm very interested generally in "elements", for lack of a better term, as symbols, because I think they function in the same way color does. Like water/the ocean can have a literal meaning but it also has layers of emotional and symbolic meaning, which is how colors function for me, so they feel connected like that. The motion and form of this one is kind of so-so, but I'm not really mad about it because I like the colors so much. That's the main thing I have to tackle I think --balancing form and motion and texture with getting the right colors. 

This is the painting from hell that made it all the way from Mississippi John Hurt through Delta Blues and came out in cowboy songs week. But it's actually not about cowboy songs and it is actually supposed to be Careless Love. I couldn't tell you how I feel about it. Like I don't dislike this piece I just don't think it does anything very special. I like the white spaces and the greys most of all. I'm a little put off by that purple, it just wasn't a good color anywhere and I hope i never mix anything that ugly again. The red and the blues are ok. I remember one of my instructors told me not to use ultramarine straight from the tube but then I did it anyway; actually I'm pretty sure I started doing it more after that. So I'm not sure what the implications of that are but it's true. I think at least with this piece I got a sense of motion and layers that I was having trouble with for a while, so I'm glad I sort of stopped feeling so frustrated while painting. I do know that's not ever going to go away for me, I have a tendency to fight with my work, which is alright I guess. It's just part of my process and i'm starting to accept that. 

SO this was supposed to be a post about Chicago blues, but it just turned into a drawings roundup because I'm not entirely sure what weeks half of these drawings were from! which sounds really bad but i just honestly really don't feel that connected to my drawings so sometimes I can't tell them apart! plus i made so many that i never want to make another drawing again. I actually like drawing but as a process more than like a means of getting an end product, which is why i prefer painting. I feel like with painting I get the same release/action/physical experience of making / channeling of emotions and energies, but I actually like and care about what the paintings look like, whereas with my drawings I honestly don't that much. That's why I like drawing in notebooks and on random papers, because it gives me something to do and helps me sort through my impulses, and it's discreet and convenient. I don't care for it quite as much in terms of creating a final product. It's just not as suited to abstract forms in my opinion-if you overwork it everything ends up just dark and inky, and you can't take anything away. You can scrape away and keep adding things when you're working with oil so you have more time and chances to get it right and figure out what the hell you're actually making and what it's trying to be. But I did learn a lot from making drawings, i think i like it more now than i did before this semester. I hadn't really made any abstract drawings at all prior, so now I'm thinking about if i wanted to make a series or something. maybe. not sure yet. 

BUT the above was supposed to be Chicago blues anyway; I was still mainly thinking about Victoria Spivey. I really liked the videos of her, I liked her energy. I was happy to see a Black woman included in the course. I can't entirely tell you how that translated to the drawing, although I was concerned with trying to get some middle values in the washes. I tried really hard to get subtle variations in this one, because I realized I have a tendency to overwork my washes. I think someone said that that black form in the upper right side looked like a cross and I resent that. It's not supposed to be a cross. I can't believe i made something that looked so much like a cross and didn't even catch the resemblance; now i want to go back and make it look more ambiguous because I can't have literal symbols in my work or else i'll die.  

 

I know for sure that this drawing was from John Hurt week because that black form was supposed to be the pallet on the floor. I think this is as literal as I ever got this semester, and probably as literal as I am ever going to get in my work for the rest of my life. jk i guess i can't say that. but if you want a tangible connection between the work and the song then there it is, that's the only one I'm giving you. 

I think this is "Dusty Old Dust". I got a little frenetic with my movements because I was thinking about what a dust storm must be like. 

This one was from the week with "Sally Gardens" too. Looking back on it I'm not sure what the hell this has to do with anything.

I'm pretty sure my frustration with painting carried into "Careless Love", because I was still reworking that piece that was originally supposed to be for John Hurt week. In a way the two were mirrors to one another. The above piece was supposed to be more calm, like the Lonnie Johnson version; the other one was more chaotic a la Victoria Spivey. I liked the song. I felt it was about the ways in which one's own actions and feelings can affect others, even if it's not readily apparent / obvious. Though I'm not happy with this piece....honestly it looks like an Icee ad the more i look at it. like its just the colors of the Icee logo. so whatever, fuck that. I'm interested in the blues I ended up making, but not in conjuction with the flat white and that weird purple. I don't really like that purple color much at all. Like I said in the earlier post I just hit a block with painting and life generally at some point so everything I was making started to seem off to me and I just gave up on it for a few weeks. Then when I started again everything was still coming out kind of wrong. I'm pretty sure I didn't feel satisfied with anything until I mixed the colors for the very last piece i did (for the sea shanties week). 

I really liked Mississippi John Hurt and especially "Make Me Down a Pallet on Your Floor", which was the song I chose to focus on primarily that week. I was trying to paint something with some colors, I think some blues and maybe a little bit of red, and I was getting so frustrated with it that I honestly gave up and mixed all of the paint I had out together and made the grey, and then I found I actually liked the grey, so I used that. In a sense I connected with the chorus of the song for the image/action of it, the making of the pallet, because I felt that was what I was sort of doing too. that blobby form in the middle was the pallet I ended up making, and i think the story of the song itself invoked grey because of an atmospheric feeling, like the color of the light at 4 or 5 am, and also the emotional tenor of the song (at least from my interpretation). I feel like common narratives in society give us ideas of black and white in relationships, where in reality it's a lot messier. there's a lot of grey areas when it comes to dealing with other people (factoring in the "good girl", etc). I again found myself frustrated with the onesided-ness of the narrative, trying to put myself in the shoes of the other person (or people) implicated in the situation. I liked the grey for that. I liked that it was softer in a way, because I felt i needed it to be. it feels like it's trying to figure itself out, but it's also trying to just be what it is.

this was for "Sally Gardens" and maybe even a little bit of "Coming Through the Rye", not so much "Barbry Allen". i stopped updating this blog around the same time that i became too frustrated with painting to ever do it for like five weeks in a row so thinking about it now that seems interconnected. When I was making this piece I remember being really angry, because I had been reading about Cecil Sharp and the biographer who had written that article was glossing over Sharp's racism and I became so frustrated that  I couldn't even continue reading the article at that point. Honestly I lost all interest after that, because the biographer was trying to excuse Sharp's anti-blackness, and then there was a paragraph about how Sharp met a few Native American people on his travels and he thought that they were ok because they could sort of play the music according to his assessment, but he thought that they would never be as refined as all the Appalachian whites. So at that point I lost all interest in the reading. I liked the songs though, I really liked how Sally Garden is sort of helpless and nostalgic, like the speaker wishes that they could go back and change their past actions. It's sort of about hindsight being 20/20, and life experience building on itself. I'm not sure how well I managed to capture that in this drawing but I actually like it considering i'm not very invested in my drawings. 

For Banks of the Ohio/Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Banks of the Ohio was the direct influence for my piece. I found the story itself was rather shallow, told again from a first person perspective with no characterization of the sweetheart beyond the speaker's view. to me the whole story seemed flat, it clearly lacked the depth of feeling and displayed a disconnect from others and even from one's own actions (the narrator asks himself "oh lord, what have I done?" --in a way, he dissociates himself from his own violent decisions in the moment he is carrying them out, only to reflect on them later). To me the song highlights the way men have historically felt and continue to feel entitled to control over women, women's lives and women's bodies under a heteronormative patriarchal society. Personally i found the song to be sickening in a very real sense. Today as then, men still turn violent because they feel women owe them something romantically or sexually. For this narrative to be presented and passed down in this form, the woman in the story reduced to a dimensionless character stripped of agency, and for it to be accepted and even cherished had me very ill at ease. Needless to say I was not much able to enjoy the music. But I do very much like the painting that I made for that week. Once again, i found it did what i needed it to do. 

For "Oh Mary, Don't You Weep", i thought a lot about the biblical images, as well as the emotional implications /uses of the song (both lyrically and musically). As far as Biblical images there seemed to be, as addressed on the course page for the week, a blending of the New and Old Testament references. Almost like one story (the story of Martha and Mary, an NT story, more personal, domestic, warmer somehow) was being superimposed over another (the Exodus story, OT, historic, epic, dramatic, grander and more impressive). Thinking about it now calls to mind my own thoughts about the god (i want to say gods here, although of course the OT god is canonically the same god of the NT)--the different versions, visions, or experiences of god presented in these texts. As a kid growing up catholic i sort of wrestled with teachings and scripture and dogma, especially with a lot of the language and rhetoric used throughout church proceedings, in the scripture itself, in the community in general, etc. The Old Testament presented me with this image i was supposed to be afraid of, something hulking, wise, tempestuous, some big jealous dude hanging out in the sky somewhere who would come down and smite me if i did something wrong or started worshipping idols or whatever. Which of course I resisted, because i was kind of a snarky hot-headed kid with a warped sense of my own importance and i figured i didn't much care to be devoting my time to a higher power like that, with the main motivation presented being fear of some form of punishment, or maybe a will to strike some deals and get something good for myself out of it (all the language of covenants and deliverance and whatever the duck else). I think the New Testament appealed more to me at that time, because i could rationalize belief in god on the moral grounds that it was somehow mutually beneficial to me and to others that I do so, and that i could build relationships and community and find purpose in that, rather than this idea that i should believe in god because he was more powerful than i was and he could squash me or something if i didn't follow the rules. Ive always kind of defiant and I've never much cared for rules so of course that didn't appeal to me. And I've since found problems with the NT, and merits in a lot of the OT language (although more from a personal literary/philosophical  perspective than my previous religious/spiritual one, which I've largely abandoned), but that was just sort of my 7 year old self's view of the thing.

Anyway i think in my painting this stuff sort of sprung up organically again, there's several levels of meaning that i can read into my work now after having made it, the first, and probably least intentional, or maybe, most unexpected (for me to find in my own work), of which has to do with the Biblical references. This idea that there is a superimposition of warmth and hope on a personal, domestic and intimate scale on this narrative of the Exodus, this epic, historic and impressive story, which happens on a much larger and grander scale. This mirrors the way the stories were incorporated and used in the song and in spirituals in general, these grand historic events taken and put to music for moments of comfort and hope to the community, or to individuals, even though the story of the Exodus itself seems, to me at least, not the most well-suited for that purpose. although when i think about it i guess im wrong. There's comfort in knowing that you subscribe to a belief system where the guy in charge can drown all your enemies I guess. I just never took comfort from that personally, but this song manages to weave narratives together to make that somehow much more salient for me. 

The thing that I thought about most in the actual making of the piece was the implication of telling someone not to weep, which for me raised some issues. On the one hand, there is the obvious intention of providing comfort, but on the other, it seems to me an active attempt at suppressing another individual's emotions. Which bothered me, and brought me back, again, always to the paint itself, the medium of my expression, the thing i try to suppress and control and command but that i find works best, like most emotions, when i let it run its due course. There are some things, like stopping the flow of tears, splitting the ocean, and trying to plan a painting, that i guess could be done, with varying amounts of work and effort, and i guess with some results that could be considered desirable, that i have personally decided are simply not worthwhile. In fact things i find are usually much more meaningful if you don't spend too much time trying to control those sorts of things. Which brings me to a passage that I particularly loved from LeRoi Jones' Blues People, on pages 30-31: "In the West, only the artifact can be beautiful, mere expression cannot be thought to be...the principle of the beautiful thing as opposed to the natural thing still makes itself felt...Thus an alto saxophonist like Paul Desmond, who is white, produces a sound on his instrument that can almost be called legitimate, or classical, and the finest Negro alto saxophonist, Charlie Parker, produced a sound on the same instrument that was called by some 'raucous and uncultivated.' But Parker's sound was meant to be both those adjectives. Again, reference determines value. Parker also would literally imitate the human voice with his cries, swoops, squawks, and slurs, while Desmond always insists he is playing an instrument, that it is an artifact separate from himself. Parker did not admit that there was any separation between himself and the agent he had chosen as his means of self-expression." 

i don't have much to say about that quote, except for that i did some very violent and emphatic underlining in my reader when i came across it. i was truthfully very moved to have found something so directly applicable to my own practice. but otherwise I'll let the quote and the painting speak for themselves. 

For project 3 i chose "Balm in Gilead". I first heard the song about a year ago in a documentary about Bayard Rustin and his role in the Civil Rights Movement (the film is called Brother Outsider). i mentioned that i wasn't sure who was singing that particular version, but that i thought it might be Rustin himself, since the interviewees kept mentioning Rustin's angelic singing voice. anyway, it really struck me at the time; I'll have to go back and view the film again and have a look at the credits to see if i can find that version. I'm very much invested in the lyrics of songs, and i found the chorus in particular of "Balm in Gilead" moving. i feel there is a lot of nuance that can be read into those words, about wounds and sickness, both physical and emotional (as a balm is typically applied to physical wounds on the body, but the words also mention "the sin-sick soul", which implies emotional or spiritual damage). The lyrics contain a balance between acknowledging hurt and pain, and having faith in healing and redemption. This is a balance that i think is critical if one is to understand oneself and maintain one's health, particularly one's emotional and mental health. It seems pretty self-explanatory that focusing only on the negative aspects of one's situation leaves no room for hope. I think it's much more difficult for people to realize that by subscribing to a wholly positive and hopeful view of life and denying one's hurts, one can never overcome those difficulties. Problems can only be addressed if you acknowledge them, and if you believe you have no wound, then what need do you have for a balm? 

These concepts can be political as well as personal; there can be no activism, reform, or revolution without an admission of injustice. This is all applicable to Bayard Rustin's life in particular, as Rustin was alienated from the Civil Rights movement because he was a gay man. Respectability politics in general aim to present a non-threatening front, to address marginalization in relationship to only one axis of oppression at a time, holding all other axes constant. This is certainly a major part of the reason why Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was selected as the leader for the civil rights movement, and also the reason why Rustin was pushed away and discredited on multiple occasions despite his huge contributions to the movement, and why today his contributions are all but forgotten. This is not a problem exclusive to the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s either. Respectability politics given white supremacy, homonormativity, and patriarchy mean that white cis gay men are the face of the LGBT community, granted the most visibility despite their clear position of relative privilege within the community, and the fact that problems faced by queer people of color, queer women, trans folks, and above all trans women of color are far more dire. Bayard's intersecting identities place him at the heart of these issues. Listening to the song and in particular poking around on YouTube watching documentary clips trying to find the version I'd first heard got me thinking about all of this stuff again. eventually i gave up because i figured I'll just have to rent or purchase the film sometime, and of couse paul robeson's version is beautiful too. 

the process of making this piece was pretty satisfying for me. the colors feel like they're the ones i wanted, which is always rewarding since my sort of...unrefined....color mixing process combined with the very particular emotional connotations i assign to color (and my strong visual preferences) makes for results that tend to be hit or miss. Coming back to the idea of the wound and the balm, i feel that painting is pretty similar in that it's most useful to me when i manage to strike that balance. A painting that tries to  feign perfect health, order, logic, whatever is useless and superficial to me. it's only by acknowledging the messy and raw parts of myself that I've been able to create anything of value. Painting for me is both an acknowledgment of the wound and the balm itself.