Art History, BCE

Hey there!

Well, it has been a long and pretty fun summer for Catherine Hicks, burgeoning Independent American Artist.

But to understand where I have been all of this time, you probably ought to know a little bit about where I have come from.

If you haven't already guessed, back in the late 1970's, when the time came for me to go to college and decide who or what I was going to be, I did not study Art.

I should have studied Art.  I liked Art.  I was good at drawing, and I loved to look up artists and read about their very interesting lives and work in the Encyclopedias (bound, printed early version of Wikipedia) at our public library.  

Although I did not have access to a lot of Art materials (other than pencils and paper) around our house, my family did have a big Catholic (with a capitol C) Bible, and, as a girl, I spent hours just looking at the reproduction paintings printed on the shiny gold edged leaves in the front.  Because it was written in Latin, I was not too invested in the written Word, but I loved looking at those pictures. 

I was also sensitive, a good observer, had excellent spatial ability, and was smart enough for big picture, symbolic thinking.  And I was terrible at math.

Instead, I got two distinct messages from my parents about what course of study to pursue, and, unfortunately, neither one led me to Art.  

Until I found the back door.  And I'm back there, allright, banging away on that beautiful wood just as loudly as I can.

     My Father, who was the king of bloviation,  offered the following pearl:  

"Those who can, do, those who can't, teach."

Now this was seriously bad advice, and I regret feeling like I was in no position to ignore it.  The words that he spouted that day (eight of the twelve I got from him during the entirety of my high school senior year) probably meant very little to him; looking back, I am sure they were no more meaningful (in his mind) than a pitch for tobacco that he had read in the Time Magazine while trying to take a crap. 

You will note that he did not suggest what to do, only what not to do.  And his words ignored the fact that teaching is a nuanced profession; you can study to be a teacher specifically, learning educational methodology so that you can educate, or you can become so expert at something that your life's work is in sharing that expertise.  In my mind, both of these are teaching; that is what I thought then, and that is what I still think to this day.  His flippant remark did not allow for a more cognitive approach to the subject.

And he could not have been more wrong about my suitability to become a teacher.  My own children showed me that if you want to know something, then teach it to someone.  My earlier blog (http://vincentproject.blogspot.com) was all about learning to paint by demonstrating that process in a year long tutorial.  In it, I wasn't just teaching my readers; I was teaching myself by requiring my own mastery of the subject at hand.

In my Father's blanket statement, there was no thought as to what I might or might not be good at doing;  I honestly think his only consideration was that he perceived teachers as not making a lot of money, and that probably did not figure in to his retirement plan of having me "help him out" in the event he was having trouble making his rent.

But it was the 70's, and he had fought in World War II; I was a girl, and foolishly unrebellious. That meant that if he said it, then that was the way it would be.  

My conclusion: Daughters, don't (necessarily) listen to your fathers, and fathers, recognize that you hold tender hearts in your hands.  Think before you speak, and, if you have no interest in her other than your own selfish agenda, just recognize that you are not much of father, and please shut the hell up.


     Although she offered no specific words of advice, my Mother, who was and is a natural-born artist through and through, led me to repeat her mistake of allowing others to define her in the most soul crushing way imaginable - as a Non-Artist.  

She had come of age at the end of the aforementioned War to end all Wars, and she considered herself lucky, because upon graduation from High School, her parents had consented to her studying for an Art degree at a small nearby college.  

Of course, it was the end of the Depression, and, as the eldest of four children, my Mother understood that there was very little money available for her to go to even the very modest women's college where she had been accepted.

But my Grandmother, who was surely the original "Arter" Familias, had a plan.  Every day during that summer after my Mother's graduation, she and my Grandmother rose early, sneaking down the dark staircase of their old house into the cool kitchen.  Before the sun was even beginning to think about coming up, my Mother and her Mother would prepare a full hot breakfast and lunch for the rest of the family, and pack a small picnic for themselves.

When they had the dishes washed and put away, Mother and daughter would set out, shifting their baskets from arm to arm as they walked the mile to the meeting place.  There, they joined a half dozen or so other men and women as they all clambered into the back of an old, dust caked pickup truck, which bounced and bumped them over rutted dirt roads to their common destination. 

So that she could go to college and learn how to be an Artist, my Mother and her Mother spent a summer picking fruit.  It brings tears to my eyes to even think about that.

Sweating in the hot sun, bending low over berries, or climbing ladders and reaching precariously high for cherries, my Mother earned her place at school with every heavy bushel she brought in for weighing.  At the end of each day's work, she and my Grandmother would be dropped back off to walk the return mile home, then would begin peeling potatoes and chopping onions to have dinner on the plates before my Grandfather took his seat at the table at 6 p.m.

As tanned and fit as any farmer, my Mother matriculated at the end of that summer as a bona-fide Art student.  She thought she was on her way.

Once at school, she got another grueling job - waiting on tables in her dormitory (yes, the rich girls she served were every bit as assholish as you are imagining right now...) and, with the fruit picking money she and my Grandmother had saved, she managed to hang on for two heavenly years of drawing, painting, art history and design.

Then her brother graduated high school.  I cannot imagine the conversation where her parents told her that she could no longer attend college because it was more important for all of her family's resources to go toward her brother's education, because, after all, one day he would have a family to support.  

Instead, it was suggested that she work to pay her own way (in yet another service job, this time at a department store) through a much more practical course of study: secretarial school.  Sadly, she accepted her fate, but I know she resented it with every fiber of her being. 

Ironically, as the 50s turned into the 60s and the American economy (for men) was booming, it was she who had to support her own family because my father, while very smart and an excellent liar, was also really, really bad at earning or holding on to money.

So with her steno pad, mad dictation skills, and super mod polyester pantsuit, my mother found herself stuck in a decidedly uncreative life.  

Oh the art leaked out anyway (just like mine would years later).  That coordinating pantsuit (which she boldly wore while breaking the pants-for-women barrier at her office) was one she had designed, cut and sewn right on our kitchen table.  

She always said that she made clothes for herself and my sister (mine were all of the hand-me-downs) to save money, but I think she sewed because it was a tiny breath of creativity in her very unsettled and always, ALWAYS financially challenging life.  

She was a child of the Depression, which meant that she had been brought up in a constant state of thrift, but it was that very thrift that offered her (and her Mother before her) the opportunity and excuse to have some creative outlet.  It wasn't about just buying the cheapest material and making the simplest dress that could be easily altered for the next child; it was about finding a way, within those parameters, to make something beautiful.

(For Example: My Grandfather was an engineer for Ma Bell, and would bring home to my Grandmother obsolete blueprints which were rendered on great swaths of very fine linen material.  The cloth was covered with a waxy blue substance that my Grandmother would carefully soak off, then repeatedly bleach to get to the fine, white, closely woven fibers below.  This is a process that was accomplished through hard hand scrubbing in laundry tubs, and took about a week of  labor to accomplish.  She then cut and sewed this material into fine white collars and cuffs, which was apparently [at the time] the mark of a good family and therefore a good Mother.  Less labor intensive and probably costly material was certainly available to her, but this would never be as nice or fine as the "free" linen.  This is typical of what was going on in the childhood home of my Mother...)

And that was the same reason that my Mother spent all of those hours slipcovering the sofa, or decoupaging a picture frame, or needlepointing an eyeglasses case - it was a way for her to provide the family with something (she would argue) that they needed, but was really an opportunity for her to have creative choices, or really, any choices in her life.

I am very grateful that she found a method of helping her to cope with an extremely difficult marital situation; I am convinced that it was those creative leaks kept her from getting into a car and just driving away - leaving behind a husband who did not contribute financially or with any meaningful presence, and three too-scared-not-to-be-good children.  

That slow, sad creative drip is literally what kept us alive.

But for her, that drip was never quite good enough.  Although she tried very hard to stuff it down, she remembered, fundamentally, that at one time she had studied to be a "Real" Artist.  And "Real" Artists did not engage in arts and crafts, like sewing, and decoupaging, and embroidering.  "Real" Artists finished college and lived in New York and didn't have shitty husbands and kids to feed and a car that left them stranded on the side of the road.  What she did, while artistic, was never engaging in RealArt.  She just made clothes and things because the family needed to have them.  It wasn't RealArt, but it was as close as she (thought) she was ever going to get.

Which I think made her very selfish, at least in her behavior toward me, about every kind of Art.  Those things were hers, and they were hers alone.  Not to be shared with children, but to be hoarded, protected, and locked away.  It's not that she was a bad person, or trying to be selfish, or that she even realized that she was engaging in any particular kind of behavior.  She simply had to protect the part of her life that made her feel like a sentient being.

Author's note: The very act of my writing this essay demonstrates  a level of my forgiveness and understanding of the situation that I hope (with careful editing) will come through.  Everyone on the planet has an extremely complicated family that is filled with flawed characters. There are no Cleavers or Huxtables or Dunpheys in the world, and there certainly were none in my family.  By necessity, and in the interest of some sort of brevity, what I am offering here is an extremely simplified version of the facts at hand.  There are and were many other psychological forces at play in my family dynamic; although some of what is being omitted is completely relevant, there are far too many interwoven details and facts to clearly articulate within the context of this particular setting.  What I am describing is assuredly not the only side to this story; the analysis offered here is only my own interpretation of the events, and all other individuals involved should thoughtfully come to their own conclusions.  As with all memories of the human experience, each observation, no matter how incongruent, is completely valid and completely correct.The point of this exploration is not to understand the roller coaster ride of my childhood; it is to understand why I ended up bruised and slightly broken, sitting on my butt on the far left side of the tracks.

I think that I completely understand (now) what was going on.  When it came to supporting any artistic tendencies that she may have seen in me, the situation that my Mother found herself in must have put her into an ongoing and truly awful interior crisis.  How could she support nurturing in anyone else the very thing that had been so cruelly ripped out of her own hands, especially when she had (through great effort and sacrifice) wrenched out a small way of claiming (a very lesser version of) it back?  How could she manage the risk of allowing anyone else to participate in the thing that was keeping her alive?  What if they fucked it up?  What if they were actually good at it?

So I received a full spectrum of mixed messages.

 Let me illustrate:

First, I knew that art was "good."  My Mom liked doing artistic things, and money (the most important and good thing of all) would actually be forked over on things where she allowed herself to express her creativity.  But only she was the one who was capable of successfully drawing, or using colors, or making things with her hands.

We were allowed to try, sometimes, but  any drawing, or sewing, or knitting or woodcarving or whatever, that any of we children made (by the fact that it was made by someone other than our Mother) could not be "good," and could never rise to the level of "good." Importantly, nothing we attempted could be made purely for the enjoyment of making it; everything had to be made for a practical and useful purpose.  

I  was once given one pad of paper and two "fancy" drawing pencils for as my gift for Christmas, but this came with a warning that it would have to "last"  (For forever?  No timeline was set),  and it was very important that I was not to "waste" it.  That admonition fairly paralyzed me with fear, and my pad was almost completely blank by the time I left for college.  My pencils retained their factory sharp points until they were absorbed into the household supply.  Despite that, I still made a lot of drawings, I just did them on scrap paper with school pencils.  And that didn't count as drawing.  That was doodling.  There was a difference.  My Mother's drawings were never doodles. 

And like all artistically inclined kids, I must have liked doing the school projects where you made things like maps and dioramas and other little projects at home, right?  Not exactly.  These art projects were always taken over by my Mom (under the guise of helping) and finished "properly," even if it took her all night to get them just right.  While I had almost no hand in this work, I was always vaguely embarrassed by the college level work that I was turning in for my Mother.  She was always happy when we got our A.

I never took an art class in High School or College.  It was required in Middle School, and while I was very encouraged by my teachers, my Mother explained that it would be too expensive to take in High School because of the supplies, and couldn't I just take Choir which was free?  The things that I brought home during Junior High were barely noticed, and to be kept in my closet if I wanted to bother keeping them at all.

So I was a good girl and stuffed down my own artistic impulses.  I didn't take a single education class, art class or (Thank God!) math class in college, and, after some floundering, I earned a Bachelor of Arts... in Journalism.  Although I am grateful that I know how to write, I have almost no interest in Journalism, and I have absolutely no desire to be a working Journalist.  (Unless I could write about Art....)  And, in case you were wondering, my education was funded by my own waitressing jobs, my in laws, and, for at least my freshman year, my Mother.

And, as you know, I have leaked Art all of my life, just like my Mother did.  I made all of the things our family needed, and I sewed, and house-painted, and needelpointed, and embroidered just like she did.  Until my therapist (I was so lucky to get to go to a therapist!) pointed out what I was doing, and encouraged me to ask myself: "Why?"

So, with a lot of  support from my (the good kind of) husband, I took a painting class, then I did the Vincent Project.  I started making things and calling them RealArt, and to my surprise, other people started calling them RealArt, as well.  As of today, I have had 15 pieces that I made, with my own two hands, in my own Artist's Studio, accepted into group shows.  I think that gives me the right to call myself an Artist.

But I'm not done yet.  I promised at the beginning of this theraputically long blog that I would tell you what I have been doing all summer, and here it is: I signed up for summer school at our local community college, and completed nine hours (with straight A's, which I earned, 100%, by myself with no "tweaking" by my Mother) - in Art History (1 and 2) and Figure Drawing.  It was Heaven.  Truly.

It turns out, I am pretty good at this stuff, and I like doing it a lot.  You might even say it is what I was born to do.  So I'm going to keep going.  I've got other (museum) classes already scheduled for the fall, and next December I am going to apply to a Graduate Program in Studio Art.  I know, given my age, that it will be a longshot for me to get in, and I also know that I don't need to do this in order to make art, but I just love, love, love learning this stuff, and spending my time not only creating, but also thinking about Art, and Artists, and the Ideas that make Art important.

My mother and I have made our peace, sort of, but I fear our detente may be as fleeting as a Palestinian/Israeli  cease fire... here's why: Last year, as she moved into a new apartment, I gave her a painting that I made during the Vincent Project, and, after leaving it leaning and mostly hidden behind a small table for more than a year, she finally, without a word, hung it on the wall.  So I guess that's progress... still, I am not sure how she will react when I publish this blog...  First the art, then the revealing of the family secrets, then the horrors of psychological introspection... I know this will not be easy for her, and I hope she will understand why I don't feel like I have a choice about whether to go forward with publishing this post...

But I am going to publish this, because if I don't, then I will not be able to continue in finding my own voice.  If that makes me not a good girl, then I have an announcement:  I don't want to be a good girl, and I reject the premise.  

I want to be, I am - An Independent American Artist.