Manifesting Your Mess
From Vesperisms Season 3, Episode 2, April 2022
Greetings and Salutations, and welcome to Vesperisms: The Art of Thinking for Yourself. I’m here to help you recalibrate toward an artistic worldview. So grab your coffee, and have a seat in my studio, and let’s have a chat. This is Season 3, Episode 2, Manifesting Your Mess.
This past year, I came on board as faculty at School of Visual Arts, teaching illustration portfolio to university seniors. It’s been nothing but wonderful. I really love the students and am thrilled to my toes to see their progress each week and over the course of the year. They have all grown as artists and communicators, some of them coming out of their shells in bold ways. I adore teaching—it’s been a lifelong dream of mine. The fact that I get to do it at my alma mater is even more of a gift.
Now, over the last 20-something years, since I graduated from Parsons with my BFA in Illustration, I’ve been a visiting artist at a number of art schools. And I’m sad to say that I’ve noticed, overall, a dramatic decline in the quality of student work, specifically of drawing. When I was in school, it was around the time that a lot of schools saw the writing on the wall and came to understand that they needed to embrace digital illustration if they were to send competitive graduates out into the field. I had graduated more or less at the beginning of that wave, becoming very good at Photoshop, and I’m glad for that. But I saw schools divest from their classical, technique-based educational structures and invest in multi-million dollar labs—which was fine—but also in fancy, hi-tech building facades to lure people in to the kingdom they were creating. My own alma mater, Parsons, did a multi-million dollar renovation in 2008, which includes new galleries and an alienating, Disneyfied, neon and chrome lobby with ubiquitous screens, but they did virtually nothing to the actual classrooms, which look exactly as crusty as they did when I graduated 10 years before, only with new laptops and projectors. And let me just say, when it comes to art school, I personally think the crustiness is the point.
Meanwhile, when I visited Parsons and other schools as a guest, I noticed that the drawing quality declined to the point that I sometimes felt like I was looking at 8th grade work, not the results of four years of education at one of the top 5 art schools in the country. The facade and the tools got more sophisticated. But, I’m sorry to say, the art did not get better.
When I began teaching at SVA this year, I was happily surprised. I felt there was a sea change. I did notice better drawing overall. And a couple of weeks ago, when I attended the Senior BFA Illustration show, I was proud to see the work of several of my students on the wall. In total there were about 500 illustrations in the gallery—a bit overwhelming, but a good show of hard work worthy of the degree. The first thing I noticed was that, yes, indeed, the drawing quality was very good. But after a few minutes, I began to think: why does it all look the same? Frankly, I began…to grow bored. A lot of the work had an element of sameness that felt manufactured and plastic. Where was the personal voice? Why did things look too tidy, too perfect? Where was…where was the mess?
The vast majority of emerging illustrators now create their final projects on Procreate on the iPad. Just a few years ago when I was in grad school at SVA, a few people did this, but our MFA program was so centered on artistic voice that it was just another tool in the toolbox, like gouache or a stabilo crayon. We all used digital tools to composite or retouch our work, of course. I’ve been doing that for almost 25 years. But the fact that the MFA in Illustration at SVA is so based in on-location drawing, oil painting, observation, and above all, the sketchbook, is what causes it to produce such individual artists who become household names…at least in the tiny, insular fandom that is illustration. Haha.
What I observed with my students was that Procreate had shrunk their artistic purview. They seemed trapped in a 9x7 world in every sense. The work was tight and sometimes distorted. It made me think: there’s really no way to step back from your work with this medium; it can only be zoomed in closer. What a metaphor.
And it’s not their fault. I’m not throwing shade at them at all. But it’s in the very name of the app. Procreate. OK, get your snickering out of the way. But I mean it. Even the name of the app is a bastardization of the artistic process. Because art is a form of procreation, as I’ll get to, but even more, it is a manifestation.
To make something manifest is to make it real, to bring it to hand, to draw it out of the realm of the unseen into the seen. Art is incarnational in that way—it is word made flesh. It is the logos brought into the tangible. It’s more than a mere idea making its way onto paper and looking good. The artist is bringing into being an extension of himself in the form of the work.
My time at Parsons in the late 90’s happened to be during a movement of deconstruction in illustration. Artists like Jordan Isip, Heinrik Drescher and Lane Smith were pioneering new ways of expressing deeply personal voice—collage, messy oil paint formulations, expressive mark-making. And even if the work was destined to don the cover of a financial magazine, it was undeniable that these were individual artists manifesting something unique to themselves. This was an important phase in my artistic development. I, too, deconstructed my work. I collaged. I did spit bite and sugar lift etchings. I wrecked brushes to get interesting textures. I retold fairy tales and centuries-old allegories with irreverent reverence. I learned to feel, really feel the mark on the paper, to feel how my arm moved, to make everything I did deliberate. And in doing that, I came to understand myself as a person—what I thought about, what moved me, what caused me to love and to live the most fully. At that time, too, I got married, I had children—all of this seemed to embody the same ethos.
Over the years, my illustration approach has gone through many iterations. After college, I went back to a tighter, more rendered style of acrylic painting. But it always had elements of that freedom I’d acquired in school, even if it wasn’t fully realized. When I got too tight, I had the muscle memory of that messy phase to even be aware that I was getting tight. I could work on bigger paper. I could sketch to loosen up. I had embodied a toolkit. But I still struggled to know more of who I was as an artist. I found myself frustrated at a certain inauthenticity in my work—I knew there was something in me that wanted to emerge, but I didn’t yet have the skill to make it real.
When I encountered the work of Lisbeth Zwerger around 2010, I felt a deep kinship in her open watercolor washes, just as I had always felt a kinship in the controlled marks of Byzantine iconography. And when I had the car accident in 2012 that killed a nerve in my working arm, even as I was in full time rehab and couldn’t work, I had that muscle memory to draw on—I found that watercolor offered me less physical resistance than acrylic, and I could be loose and open as I re-learned how to hold a pencil.
My work has always been like that—a dance between mess and control. Even now, coming out of working on three books simultaneously, I’m feeling the need to dismantle and rebuild. I’ve learned that I hit a ceiling like this about every 5 years ago and need some sort of learning, so I’m in an illustration mentorship to try to make sense of what I feel wanting to manifest in my work.
I love the open watercolor washes that make up the foundation of my work, but I’m also feeling the need for more precision in both my drawing and my compositions. The other night as I was working on a piece for my mentorship, I thought of the work of Greek iconographer George Kordis in his book “Color as Light in Byzantine Painting.” His approach to his icons is a loose, translucent layered underpainting with minimalist but precise detail on top. It’s a beautifully harmonized approach to a type of painting that we probably all initially think of as tight and rigid. Instead, Kordis’ approach yields a kind of shimmering movement and life that makes the icons truly feel like a window on a greater reality. I realized that his was a similar approach to my own dance between mess and control, and I decided to try it on my piece. And it felt good.
The piece is imperfect, as it’s an experiment, but I found that I was enjoying it in a way I haven’t enjoyed my work in a while. It was…delight. I was back in the flow state—that feeling when you’re both unaware of yourself and encapsulated in the creation of the work, and at the same time aware of being one hundred percent in the pocket of who you were made to be. It was a sense of communion that I remembered but had lost for a while.
If art is a manifestation of the unseen, then as such it cannot be made through pre-existing algorithms, because art is self-generated through the body, and not through banks of choices pre-created by a team of developers. In an app like Procreate, the artist can endlessly tweak a drawing, deleting its history forever, becoming ever more afraid to make an errant mark without the temptation to perfect it. I can make—or rather manipulate—a perfected drawing and then apply a charcoal texture over it to give it the appearance of organic messiness, but it will only be a simulacrum of organic messiness. One cannot “apply” history to a piece. You have to earn that history through risk and mistake and frustration and failure.
In the painting I was working on for my mentor, if I had been working with a perfectible medium, I would have kept reworking an unworkable piece, resulting in something rigid and lifeless. As my husband and I like to call it, “polishing a turd.” Sometimes, you have to cut your losses and admit that the way you’re working is unworkable. Sometimes you create ten pieces in a row like that and you waste paper and paint. Sometimes you might illustrate a whole book like that. That’s OK. It’s actually not a waste. No part of the creative process is a waste, as long as it’s allowed to be a process. That’s part of building the history of your work. Sometimes it’s the ghostly marks of erased pencil that make a piece come alive and give it its individuality. That can’t be faked or replicated. Every risk, every mistake, every do-over is part of the work. And isn’t it the same in the rest of life? That we learn best by failing upward?
Is technology the scapegoat here? Certainly, a team of pigment grinders can read Cennini’s 14th century Craftsman’s Handbook and produce a predetermined ultramarine blue. That is a form of technology. But it is an analog technology that is actual, physical. The paint becomes a part of the body, an extension of the body, as it is mixed on the palette, gotten into the skin, even breathed. This is unavoidable. Whether it’s the mixing of the color in all its nuance, or the touch of the paint on the paper, the paint has its own personality that the artist must learn to dance with. This is what makes painting “procreative”, so to speak—the artist’s relationship with the paint that creates a new life. Every artist in every medium must learn an analog relationship with the material. As poet Scott Cairns says, and which I may have engraved on my tombstone, “The substantive qualities of the medium have to become adored.” It’s a generative relationship that the artist must have with her material—just like the dancer’s relationship with the limitations of the body or with the space. A dancer learns through injury to move differently. A violinist learns to bow differently through misapplication of the bow. An artist must earn her history through embedding real charcoal in her skin, through learning to adore the medium as a lover.
The 11th century mystic Bernard of Clairvaux said in his treatise on the Song of Songs that angels do not need bodies, because they are in proximity to the Presence of God. As he says: “When your home is stocked with bread, you do not need to beg in the streets.” You don’t need to exert the manual labor of pressing olives if you have an eternal stockpile of olive oil.
But we humans are not angels. We do have bodies. We are in them, for life. One of the tenets of Vesperisms is that Art is Human-Centered: we create in bodies, to give our work to other people who also are in bodies. We can’t, as much as we sometimes may want to, transcend our bodies in order to make art. No—the body is the most important tool of our creative process. Before brushes or charcoal or rehearsal space or iPads, it’s the body.
The artist, like every other human being, must make sense of the experience of existence. Artists do it through manifesting that experience in our work. We need the charcoal to embed in our skin so that we can become embedded in the charcoal, so that the work becomes a manifestation of ourselves and our sense-making. The history cannot be applied, only earned. And that requires risk: the risk of a bad piece, an unrealized vision, a failed work, a rejected work. This is the human experience: Risk. Failure. Unrealization. Rejection. But also resilience. History. Muscle memory. Refined skill. And the transcendent moment when we recognize that what we’ve brought out of the paper…is us. It’s the recognition of Adam seeing Eve for the first time. “Oh! It’s you. You and I—the charcoal and the paper and the soul and the existence—are one.”
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