Crescendoh (Legato) by Jenny Doh, 04.03.11
Jenny Doh: I understand that it was in graduate school that you became fascinated with vernacular photography. What was the trigger for this fascination? Was it a particular photo? Or was the fascination on that was building from your youth?
Jane Waggoner Deschner: I earned my second BA my 30s—this time in art. After taking all the required classes, I settled on photomontage as my medium. I’m a organized person, mentally and visually; artistically I’m “tight.” Snipping magazine images and fiddling with them before I committed to anything permanent worked for me. They were made of found photographs.
I went to grad school in my 50s, wanting to make better art. They asked me to examine everything, including my source material. I discovered that I didn’t particularly like all that “went with” slick magazines; I wasn’t making art about consumer culture. But, learning critical theory about photography was intriguing. About the time those realizations hit, I ran across a few photos I’d taken on a family vacation in the Ozarks in the 1950s. Now that I was thinking critically about everything, I realized that looking at those photos I was seeing out of my 10-year-old eyes again.
My last semester I had to prepare my thesis show—it was the semester of 09.11.01. I created “The Anchor Project,” in which I asked several hundred friends, family, colleagues, fellow students and teachers to send me a snapshot of someone/someplace/something that anchored them. I received over 200 snapshots; it was a joy to open the mail each day. None of the things consumer culture (and slick magazines) tells us is important were shown. They were photos of pets, children, parents, friends, special places. That’s when I fell totally in love with the snapshot. I liked looking through “every person’s” eyes.
What types of cameras do you own and use in your life?
I finally invested in a good digital camera, a Nikon D5000, which I use mainly for snapshooting. Most of my art documentation I do on my scanner.
I think it's very interesting ... your interest in vernacular photography as opposed to professional photography. In your opinion, what sets vernacular apart from professional? Are there some that fall in between?
As in any art medium, one encounters the total spectrum from professional to amateur; here, from fine art to photojournalism to the anonymous snapshot. Is the photographer who takes yearbook photos a “professional”? Nan Goldin takes snapshots—is she an amateur? Photographs by fine art photographers/photojournalists form their careers. Vernacular photos are taken to record private lives for private viewing. What I love about vernacular photographs is that there are billions of them and so many are essentially the same (birthday parties, weddings, fish caught, first steps).
You describe embroidery as a means of poetic and philosophical release for many women throughout history. I agree with that. Are there other artforms that you see as providing this sort of everyday outlet for people?
Those women were following the innate drive we all have to express ourselves creatively. I believe that everyone has the capability to be creative in some way. Many of us are taught as we grow up, to disregard/distrust/suppress that aspect of our nature. We often don’t understand that concocting dinner from what’s to be found in cupboard and fridge is being creative. One doesn’t have to paint a masterpiece; one can be creative cooking, writing (journaling, blogging, facebooking, etc.), scrapbooking, quilting, woodworking, gardening—and, there’s the burgeoning DIY movement.
With the ubiquitous availability and affordability of cameras, has photography also become an outlet for people?
Since 1888 people have been able to take their own photos; they could capture whatever occurred in their lives that they wished to be reminded of. In 2007 there was a fabulous exhibition and scholarly catalog from the National Gallery in Washington, DC, “The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson.” His collection, one of the foremost of American snapshots, chronicles how snapshooting has responded “to changing technologies and cultural influences.” Digital is just the latest evolution, but the billions and billions of photographs taken attest that vernacular photography has been an important creative outlet for well over a hundred years.
Could you describe your process a bit? For the ones where the photos are stitched together and then embroidered upon, all the stitches look very neat, as though they were done by machine. Is that correct or is it by hand?
I stitch everything by hand into the original photograph. The first work I did with snapshots, initiated by the “The Anchor Project,” was done on the computer; the resulting artwork was a digital print. Evenings, I’d knit the same size 2 toddler sweater over and over in various colors and stripe-ings. I have knitted and sewn since before I was a teenager; handwork has always been part of how I spend my time.
I get my photos on eBay. I like to buy large lots as I find the myriad mundane photos as wonderful as the occasional accidentally “artistic” ones. As a by-product of purchasing masses of snapshots (most of which sellers acquired from estate sales), I was gathering a collection of studio photographs. Studio images are fundamentally uninteresting because the person dressed up to look his/her best and then picked the most flattering image to have touched up before prints were made. In 2007 at Jentel, a residency in Wyoming, I tried embroidering quotes into these images to put famous words into their vernacular mouths. Aha! I could make art (stitch) in the evening instead of adding to the ever-growing stockpile of sweaters. And, I liked the interaction between two low brow forms of expression with the clichéd words.
My process: I find either a quote or a photo (or group of photos) that I would like to use, then look for its compliment. I scan the photo into the computer and typeset the quote over it in Photoshop. Printed out, that paper becomes the pattern I lay over the photo and use to poke the holes I stitch through later. For stitching snapshots together, I have made templates from clear plastic that I use to poke through.
How do you feel about the fact that we live in a time where photos are rarely printed out anymore, as people keep them as digital files?
Silver-based snapshots are a thing of the past. No more Kodachrome. Polaroid film is now manufactured at just one plant in Germany. There are only two original photo booths left in all of New York City (go to Otto’s Shrunken Head Tiki Bar on East 14th, buy a token from the bartender and slip into the booth across from the restrooms). Times change. There are artists who mine the billions of family photos on Flickr and other internet sites. For me, now, I resonate with the physical pieces of paper that have passed through many hands, survived being lost and found, then finally reached me for resurrection. Regardless of the form (paper or pixels), each image still captures “one moment in the narrative thread of a person’s life” (as Robert E. Jackson succinctly states it)
PS. For Christmas, I bought my daughter an external hard drive so she would be sure her photos were backed up. Several time a year, I print photos for family members so their refrigerator doors aren’t bare.
You quote Susan Sontag who you state imparts the ultimate wisdom of the photographic image by pointing out that beneath the photograph's surface, we can per chance feel layers beneath it if we look carefully, and that even though the object cannot explicitly say anything, we can deduct, speculate, and fantasize. This reminds me of a quote by Anne Sexton who says "It doesn't matter who my father was. It matters who I remember he was." Do you agree with that? Is our memory or our deduction or fantasy more important than what may have really been?
Sontag wrote, “The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: ‘There is a surface. Now—think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.”
My interpretation of her statement is that I don’t look down into a photo. I don’t try to go in…I take what I see out, project it out into the world and beyond, using my life experiences to deduce, speculate and fantasize about the image captured on the surface of the piece of paper.
Memories fade over time; often what we remember of the past is determined by what we see in a photo. In “Camera Lucida,” Roland Barthes wrote, “The Photograph does not call up the past…The effect it produces on me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed.” I would have no memory of my 5th grade birthday party without a snapshot that survived. My mother died when I was 13. I have a photo of her looking at 2-month-old me, held in her arms. When I study her face in that photo, I know she loved me.
I believe I look at other people’s photos differently. Rather than interpreting my life, I tease out a common humanity and share, I hope, what I’ve observed with others. Vernacular photographs have much to teach about the interconnectedness of human nature. We use our own recorded life experiences to connect with others; and theirs to connect with us.
Tell me about the personal photo albums you own. Do you have lots of family photos? Have you ever altered your own photos?
I have one album from my childhood; my parents took several photos of me every month for my first two years. I took, and still take, lots of family photos. I have a dozen or so albums from my 18-year marriage which ended in 1987. When we were getting divorced, he asked for his share of the photos. The albums now have holes where the photos were in which he was pictured. I then went to putting them in shoeboxes, and now, most are stored digitally.
I’ve only done one embroidered piece using one of my original photos. I’ve used “me” more often in the digital work. But, it’s not about “me,” it’s about “us.” So, anonymous photos seem more appropriate.
Tell me about your stash of photos that are in your collection waiting to be stitched. How large is the stash?
My stash, my archive, continues to grow. It’s a nice break at the computer to check eBay to see what treasures might there. I keep the snapshots in shoebox-size plastic boxes; I just counted #43 on the shelf behind me. Some I’ve sorted into categories (babies, best photos, men, women, animals, etc.); more are waiting to be categorized. I may have #15,000 snapshots (a full box holds about #500, but not all the boxes are full—yet). I also have #22 2” and 3” notebooks filled with studio portraits, film stills and news photos. Probably another #4,000–5,000 images.
Where do you find most of your photos?
I buy most of my photos in lots on eBay. If I am looking for something specific (like photos of men and boys wearing white t-shirts), I’m building a network of colleagues and dealers who will help me out by searching their inventories. Sometimes friends will give me old family photos that they aren’t interested in. I’ve borrowed friends’ family albums and scanned photos for some of the digital work.
Do you work with originals or do you make copies before using?
All the stitched pieces are made with original photos. It boggles my mind to realize that a photo I’m stitching into is 100 years old. Most are from three and four generations ago. The immediacy/reality of thread and needle demands the original photo. I want the digital work to be BIG so they made from photos scanned at high resolution. A 40” high snapshot is compelling.
I love your stitched garment series. Tell me how that series came to be.
Artist residencies are very productive and important times for me. I live in Montana and it’s isolating. I meet other artists at residencies; I also have the time and space to let ideas bubble up. I was at Ucross Foundation in Wyoming in the fall before the last presidential election. I was musing about Hillary Clinton and her pantsuits. I thought, “I’ll make a pantsuit from snapshots!” I hopped in my car and drove 30 miles to the Salvation Army store in Sheridan where I bought some used sewing patterns. Back at Ucross, they became the basis for constructing a size 12 ladies pantsuit. It wasn’t finished until the following spring (they take many, many hours). When I’d finally finished the jacket and pants and stepped back to look, I was distraught. It didn’t work! After several days of mulling, moaning and emailing some fellow artists, I realized that the form of the artwork didn’t match the content of the photos. Women in the 1950s did not wear pantsuits. I made a straight skirt and the piece worked. It’s now hanging in the anniversary show at Ucross.
That experience taught me a lot and suggested that I go back to my grad school training and research (!). What kinds of clothes “fit” the time period the photos were taken in, the 1940s–1950s? That’s when I began doing t-shirts since they became wildly popular in the 50s, after they were elevated from underwear during the war in the 1940s. My latest digital series uses polka dots, which also became very common mid-20th Century (remember “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”?).
Do you ever get tempted to alter photos with other things like paint and pencil?
Respecting everything about the photos I use is important to me. Vernacular photos are taken for personal reasons, to remember significant people, places and times. I’ve thought about adding seed beads, but haven’t done it yet. There is a purity/simplicity/honesty to just the paper and the thread. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, I like control and I’m not so comfortable with the uncertainties of paint or pencil. There is so much information in a photograph, as well as in a quote by a famous person, that, so far, keeping it simple seems to be working.
Have you done more traditional embroidery work in the past ... on fabric?
Before I went to art school I did a lot of handwork…knitting, sewing, some embroidery and needlepoint…none of it was “art.”
Describe for me your most perfect day.
Walking the streets in NYC in ideal fall weather with no agenda other than to go any direction I’m drawn. I’d stop for a slice if I were hungry; buy a beer at a deli and drink it from a paper bag people-watching in a park; wander into a store that caught my fancy. Just look, smell, taste, listen, feel, absorb, wonder…and be delightfully tired by the time the sun went down.
Which is your favorite season?
I’m an indoor person, though I do enjoy urban walking. Moderate weather is my favorite season.
Tell me about your family.
My two younger sisters and I grew up in a university town in the midwest, Lawrence, Kansas. Our mother died when I was thirteen. My father remarried nine months later and I gained a step-brother and step-sister. The transition to blended family was rocky. I married soon after I graduated from college and moved to Montana when he finished school seven years later. We divorced ten years after that. I have two grown kids, their spouses and four young grandkids. Everyone seems settled and happy these days. I’ve been with a great guy for fifteen years, a fellow artist. Our main point of contention is our differing degrees of appreciation of modernism and minimalism. We lost our last cat (22-years-old!) last summer.
Tell me about your favorite meal.
My favorite meals happen on Saturday. For brunch, we go to Sarah’s, a little Mexican restaurant in downtown Billings. I usually get the scrambled Mexican omelet (they have to scramble it because I ask them to add lots of chopped pickled jalapenos). (There’s enough left over for Sunday breakfast and lunch.) For dinner we have giant bowls of popcorn and watch a movie (one we generally can’t remember why we ordered it on Netflix).
For a restaurant meal, moules frites at Balthazar in NYC and liver and onions at the Winchester Steak House in Buffalo, Wyoming, or the Buffalo Restaurant in Murdo, South Dakota.
Tell me about your latest meal.
I’m going home in a few minutes and will make chicken, potato, red/yellow/green pepper curry with rice and peanuts.
In your favorite season, what is the activity you enjoy doing most?
As an indoor person, what I most enjoy doing is making art, especially when I can get in “that zone.” While working on these questions, I scanned thirty-one snapshots for a new polka dot piece.
Think fast and give me a word or two when I say ...
What makes you happy?
Making art; being alone, yet also being with people I love; being in NYC.
Are you happy?
This is probably the hardest question of all. On October 9, 2010, much of our home and my workshop, kitchen and much of my studio were destroyed by a “failed cliff face” which released thousands of tons of rocks that were stopped by our house.
http://billingsgazette.com/news/local/article_0c30ea50-79c2-5201-9843-2957c86b2917.html
In addition to the loss of our home and possessions, creative, psychological, physical and financial resources continue drain from our lives. The future is currently unforeseeable. I’m as happy as I can be.
Jenny Doh: I understand that it was in graduate school that you became fascinated with vernacular photography. What was the trigger for this fascination? Was it a particular photo? Or was the fascination on that was building from your youth?
Jane Waggoner Deschner: I earned my second BA my 30s—this time in art. After taking all the required classes, I settled on photomontage as my medium. I’m a organized person, mentally and visually; artistically I’m “tight.” Snipping magazine images and fiddling with them before I committed to anything permanent worked for me. They were made of found photographs.
I went to grad school in my 50s, wanting to make better art. They asked me to examine everything, including my source material. I discovered that I didn’t particularly like all that “went with” slick magazines; I wasn’t making art about consumer culture. But, learning critical theory about photography was intriguing. About the time those realizations hit, I ran across a few photos I’d taken on a family vacation in the Ozarks in the 1950s. Now that I was thinking critically about everything, I realized that looking at those photos I was seeing out of my 10-year-old eyes again.
My last semester I had to prepare my thesis show—it was the semester of 09.11.01. I created “The Anchor Project,” in which I asked several hundred friends, family, colleagues, fellow students and teachers to send me a snapshot of someone/someplace/something that anchored them. I received over 200 snapshots; it was a joy to open the mail each day. None of the things consumer culture (and slick magazines) tells us is important were shown. They were photos of pets, children, parents, friends, special places. That’s when I fell totally in love with the snapshot. I liked looking through “every person’s” eyes.
What types of cameras do you own and use in your life?
I finally invested in a good digital camera, a Nikon D5000, which I use mainly for snapshooting. Most of my art documentation I do on my scanner.
I think it's very interesting ... your interest in vernacular photography as opposed to professional photography. In your opinion, what sets vernacular apart from professional? Are there some that fall in between?
As in any art medium, one encounters the total spectrum from professional to amateur; here, from fine art to photojournalism to the anonymous snapshot. Is the photographer who takes yearbook photos a “professional”? Nan Goldin takes snapshots—is she an amateur? Photographs by fine art photographers/photojournalists form their careers. Vernacular photos are taken to record private lives for private viewing. What I love about vernacular photographs is that there are billions of them and so many are essentially the same (birthday parties, weddings, fish caught, first steps).
You describe embroidery as a means of poetic and philosophical release for many women throughout history. I agree with that. Are there other artforms that you see as providing this sort of everyday outlet for people?
Those women were following the innate drive we all have to express ourselves creatively. I believe that everyone has the capability to be creative in some way. Many of us are taught as we grow up, to disregard/distrust/suppress that aspect of our nature. We often don’t understand that concocting dinner from what’s to be found in cupboard and fridge is being creative. One doesn’t have to paint a masterpiece; one can be creative cooking, writing (journaling, blogging, facebooking, etc.), scrapbooking, quilting, woodworking, gardening—and, there’s the burgeoning DIY movement.
With the ubiquitous availability and affordability of cameras, has photography also become an outlet for people?
Since 1888 people have been able to take their own photos; they could capture whatever occurred in their lives that they wished to be reminded of. In 2007 there was a fabulous exhibition and scholarly catalog from the National Gallery in Washington, DC, “The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson.” His collection, one of the foremost of American snapshots, chronicles how snapshooting has responded “to changing technologies and cultural influences.” Digital is just the latest evolution, but the billions and billions of photographs taken attest that vernacular photography has been an important creative outlet for well over a hundred years.
Could you describe your process a bit? For the ones where the photos are stitched together and then embroidered upon, all the stitches look very neat, as though they were done by machine. Is that correct or is it by hand?
I stitch everything by hand into the original photograph. The first work I did with snapshots, initiated by the “The Anchor Project,” was done on the computer; the resulting artwork was a digital print. Evenings, I’d knit the same size 2 toddler sweater over and over in various colors and stripe-ings. I have knitted and sewn since before I was a teenager; handwork has always been part of how I spend my time.
I get my photos on eBay. I like to buy large lots as I find the myriad mundane photos as wonderful as the occasional accidentally “artistic” ones. As a by-product of purchasing masses of snapshots (most of which sellers acquired from estate sales), I was gathering a collection of studio photographs. Studio images are fundamentally uninteresting because the person dressed up to look his/her best and then picked the most flattering image to have touched up before prints were made. In 2007 at Jentel, a residency in Wyoming, I tried embroidering quotes into these images to put famous words into their vernacular mouths. Aha! I could make art (stitch) in the evening instead of adding to the ever-growing stockpile of sweaters. And, I liked the interaction between two low brow forms of expression with the clichéd words.
My process: I find either a quote or a photo (or group of photos) that I would like to use, then look for its compliment. I scan the photo into the computer and typeset the quote over it in Photoshop. Printed out, that paper becomes the pattern I lay over the photo and use to poke the holes I stitch through later. For stitching snapshots together, I have made templates from clear plastic that I use to poke through.
How do you feel about the fact that we live in a time where photos are rarely printed out anymore, as people keep them as digital files?
Silver-based snapshots are a thing of the past. No more Kodachrome. Polaroid film is now manufactured at just one plant in Germany. There are only two original photo booths left in all of New York City (go to Otto’s Shrunken Head Tiki Bar on East 14th, buy a token from the bartender and slip into the booth across from the restrooms). Times change. There are artists who mine the billions of family photos on Flickr and other internet sites. For me, now, I resonate with the physical pieces of paper that have passed through many hands, survived being lost and found, then finally reached me for resurrection. Regardless of the form (paper or pixels), each image still captures “one moment in the narrative thread of a person’s life” (as Robert E. Jackson succinctly states it)
PS. For Christmas, I bought my daughter an external hard drive so she would be sure her photos were backed up. Several time a year, I print photos for family members so their refrigerator doors aren’t bare.
You quote Susan Sontag who you state imparts the ultimate wisdom of the photographic image by pointing out that beneath the photograph's surface, we can per chance feel layers beneath it if we look carefully, and that even though the object cannot explicitly say anything, we can deduct, speculate, and fantasize. This reminds me of a quote by Anne Sexton who says "It doesn't matter who my father was. It matters who I remember he was." Do you agree with that? Is our memory or our deduction or fantasy more important than what may have really been?
Sontag wrote, “The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: ‘There is a surface. Now—think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.”
My interpretation of her statement is that I don’t look down into a photo. I don’t try to go in…I take what I see out, project it out into the world and beyond, using my life experiences to deduce, speculate and fantasize about the image captured on the surface of the piece of paper.
Memories fade over time; often what we remember of the past is determined by what we see in a photo. In “Camera Lucida,” Roland Barthes wrote, “The Photograph does not call up the past…The effect it produces on me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed.” I would have no memory of my 5th grade birthday party without a snapshot that survived. My mother died when I was 13. I have a photo of her looking at 2-month-old me, held in her arms. When I study her face in that photo, I know she loved me.
I believe I look at other people’s photos differently. Rather than interpreting my life, I tease out a common humanity and share, I hope, what I’ve observed with others. Vernacular photographs have much to teach about the interconnectedness of human nature. We use our own recorded life experiences to connect with others; and theirs to connect with us.
Tell me about the personal photo albums you own. Do you have lots of family photos? Have you ever altered your own photos?
I have one album from my childhood; my parents took several photos of me every month for my first two years. I took, and still take, lots of family photos. I have a dozen or so albums from my 18-year marriage which ended in 1987. When we were getting divorced, he asked for his share of the photos. The albums now have holes where the photos were in which he was pictured. I then went to putting them in shoeboxes, and now, most are stored digitally.
I’ve only done one embroidered piece using one of my original photos. I’ve used “me” more often in the digital work. But, it’s not about “me,” it’s about “us.” So, anonymous photos seem more appropriate.
Tell me about your stash of photos that are in your collection waiting to be stitched. How large is the stash?
My stash, my archive, continues to grow. It’s a nice break at the computer to check eBay to see what treasures might there. I keep the snapshots in shoebox-size plastic boxes; I just counted #43 on the shelf behind me. Some I’ve sorted into categories (babies, best photos, men, women, animals, etc.); more are waiting to be categorized. I may have #15,000 snapshots (a full box holds about #500, but not all the boxes are full—yet). I also have #22 2” and 3” notebooks filled with studio portraits, film stills and news photos. Probably another #4,000–5,000 images.
Where do you find most of your photos?
I buy most of my photos in lots on eBay. If I am looking for something specific (like photos of men and boys wearing white t-shirts), I’m building a network of colleagues and dealers who will help me out by searching their inventories. Sometimes friends will give me old family photos that they aren’t interested in. I’ve borrowed friends’ family albums and scanned photos for some of the digital work.
Do you work with originals or do you make copies before using?
All the stitched pieces are made with original photos. It boggles my mind to realize that a photo I’m stitching into is 100 years old. Most are from three and four generations ago. The immediacy/reality of thread and needle demands the original photo. I want the digital work to be BIG so they made from photos scanned at high resolution. A 40” high snapshot is compelling.
I love your stitched garment series. Tell me how that series came to be.
Artist residencies are very productive and important times for me. I live in Montana and it’s isolating. I meet other artists at residencies; I also have the time and space to let ideas bubble up. I was at Ucross Foundation in Wyoming in the fall before the last presidential election. I was musing about Hillary Clinton and her pantsuits. I thought, “I’ll make a pantsuit from snapshots!” I hopped in my car and drove 30 miles to the Salvation Army store in Sheridan where I bought some used sewing patterns. Back at Ucross, they became the basis for constructing a size 12 ladies pantsuit. It wasn’t finished until the following spring (they take many, many hours). When I’d finally finished the jacket and pants and stepped back to look, I was distraught. It didn’t work! After several days of mulling, moaning and emailing some fellow artists, I realized that the form of the artwork didn’t match the content of the photos. Women in the 1950s did not wear pantsuits. I made a straight skirt and the piece worked. It’s now hanging in the anniversary show at Ucross.
That experience taught me a lot and suggested that I go back to my grad school training and research (!). What kinds of clothes “fit” the time period the photos were taken in, the 1940s–1950s? That’s when I began doing t-shirts since they became wildly popular in the 50s, after they were elevated from underwear during the war in the 1940s. My latest digital series uses polka dots, which also became very common mid-20th Century (remember “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”?).
Do you ever get tempted to alter photos with other things like paint and pencil?
Respecting everything about the photos I use is important to me. Vernacular photos are taken for personal reasons, to remember significant people, places and times. I’ve thought about adding seed beads, but haven’t done it yet. There is a purity/simplicity/honesty to just the paper and the thread. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, I like control and I’m not so comfortable with the uncertainties of paint or pencil. There is so much information in a photograph, as well as in a quote by a famous person, that, so far, keeping it simple seems to be working.
Have you done more traditional embroidery work in the past ... on fabric?
Before I went to art school I did a lot of handwork…knitting, sewing, some embroidery and needlepoint…none of it was “art.”
Describe for me your most perfect day.
Walking the streets in NYC in ideal fall weather with no agenda other than to go any direction I’m drawn. I’d stop for a slice if I were hungry; buy a beer at a deli and drink it from a paper bag people-watching in a park; wander into a store that caught my fancy. Just look, smell, taste, listen, feel, absorb, wonder…and be delightfully tired by the time the sun went down.
Which is your favorite season?
I’m an indoor person, though I do enjoy urban walking. Moderate weather is my favorite season.
Tell me about your family.
My two younger sisters and I grew up in a university town in the midwest, Lawrence, Kansas. Our mother died when I was thirteen. My father remarried nine months later and I gained a step-brother and step-sister. The transition to blended family was rocky. I married soon after I graduated from college and moved to Montana when he finished school seven years later. We divorced ten years after that. I have two grown kids, their spouses and four young grandkids. Everyone seems settled and happy these days. I’ve been with a great guy for fifteen years, a fellow artist. Our main point of contention is our differing degrees of appreciation of modernism and minimalism. We lost our last cat (22-years-old!) last summer.
Tell me about your favorite meal.
My favorite meals happen on Saturday. For brunch, we go to Sarah’s, a little Mexican restaurant in downtown Billings. I usually get the scrambled Mexican omelet (they have to scramble it because I ask them to add lots of chopped pickled jalapenos). (There’s enough left over for Sunday breakfast and lunch.) For dinner we have giant bowls of popcorn and watch a movie (one we generally can’t remember why we ordered it on Netflix).
For a restaurant meal, moules frites at Balthazar in NYC and liver and onions at the Winchester Steak House in Buffalo, Wyoming, or the Buffalo Restaurant in Murdo, South Dakota.
Tell me about your latest meal.
I’m going home in a few minutes and will make chicken, potato, red/yellow/green pepper curry with rice and peanuts.
In your favorite season, what is the activity you enjoy doing most?
As an indoor person, what I most enjoy doing is making art, especially when I can get in “that zone.” While working on these questions, I scanned thirty-one snapshots for a new polka dot piece.
Think fast and give me a word or two when I say ...
- Vonnegut…be kind, babies
- baby…life changer
- black&white…snapshot
- color…Polaroid
- needle…and thread
- river…Yellowstone
- Joplin…Janis
- motherhood…yes
- Zorro…Zorro?
- Ansel Adams…not for me
- war…please, no
- Japan…empathy and profound sadness
- calendar…time
- film…camera
- Internet…connectivity
- piano…never learned
- depth of field…never learned about
- garden…Farmers’ Market
- style…fashion
- cigarette…would still love to
- Kerouac…The Beats
- mundane…interesting…life
- dread…cancer, stroke
What makes you happy?
Making art; being alone, yet also being with people I love; being in NYC.
Are you happy?
This is probably the hardest question of all. On October 9, 2010, much of our home and my workshop, kitchen and much of my studio were destroyed by a “failed cliff face” which released thousands of tons of rocks that were stopped by our house.
http://billingsgazette.com/news/local/article_0c30ea50-79c2-5201-9843-2957c86b2917.html
In addition to the loss of our home and possessions, creative, psychological, physical and financial resources continue drain from our lives. The future is currently unforeseeable. I’m as happy as I can be.