Portrait of George Painting

Anita Dhekne Artist’s Statement: Emotions, Psychosis, and Imagination in the Art Making Practice When asked why I make art my reply is that after discovering art production I was incapable of doing anything else. As a schizophrenic my medication made reading difficult, so I turned to art and am known as an “ArtBrut-Neo-Expressionist” artist. I believe my work taps into a temperament of raw emotion that cannot be easily reached in words, gestures, and everyday interactions. Focusing on the human figure and portraiture in simple settings I communicate by painting. I try to paint the moods of solitude, self-consciousness, and suffering experienced by people, and I add some humor to temper the pain. For me this means having time for myself, enriching my art, and lifting the loneliness that is often characterized by this illness. People with mental illness often feel vulnerable in social situations, and in turn become isolated and then suffer. The best way to describe dealing with this in concrete terms is simple. These portraits are the images of the people I talk to in my imagination. Again I am paranoid schizophrenic, and I experience voices and hallucinations of all kinds. These are the spirits that get me through the day and sometimes play tricks on me. Thankfully I have been stable for about fifteen years, but I had a nervous breakdown in college when I was nineteen years old. I was living in New York attending N.Y.U. As a communications major with a concentration in media studies, my learning consisted of chronicling the various transformations in mass media. Each of these mediums including painting, t.v., and writing, etc. drastically change how people live in the world. My figures are international and multi-ethnic. For example I paint portraits whose ethnicity is vague, and I also paint nudes with the same concept. I examine of the development of a mass society in its diversity and recast perceptions of senses through each medium, translated specifically into art. The sensory mind and body part that I observe is vision. In my portraits it is not easy to tell whether someone is pretty, ugly, or interesting looking. And more importantly it is not easy to tell what race/ethnicity the person is. I try to make each one interesting looking and full of colors and contrast. Painting this leads to evaluating the role of civilization and culture, the changes in art brought on by competing mass media, and the integration of post-modern art in communications theory. For example there were countless paintings by other people that were in the classic style and atelier style that idealized caucasian aspects. I was somewhat trained in this, and we rarely had an ethnic model. The model always had a near-perfect head and body. Regarding competing mass media - television, throughout it’s life, featured caucasian shows in all formats. Only lately since the birth of Postmodernism has television spotlighted ethnic shows. Newspapers are guilty of this too! They have had an all caucasian staff with news and features pertaining to upper middle class and elite readers. However I am focused on art as a rebellious task to enrich myself and other suppressed people. My paintings definitely touched on race/ethnicity. Throughout the process they always told what people looked like, such as examples of their fashions, their faces, and their bodies. People were pretty, ugly, and interesting looking. To hear someone ask if the people I paint are sad, or what race/ethnicity they are is commonplace. I always intend that my viewing audience finds humor. This combined with the personal emotions felt by each member of my audience, including those invented by my psychosis, are what motivates my artworks. And believe me, the voices talked to me on a personal level and an abstract level such as that of music and television technology. Post-modern Art is the age in which we live and this encompasses the styles I practice. Outsider/ArtBrut and Neo-Expressionist Art are my favorite, and and naturally the web of historical art that birthed them seeps through in my paintings. In the spring semester of 2001 I enrolled in two classes of Beginning Drawing and Postmodern Art History at the Houston Museum of Fine Art’s Glassell School. For an optional final paper one of our teachers instructed us to write about an artist that was not featured in class, so I touched base with the current art world and found several figures whose work and personae have produced academic analyses, commanded newsworthy reviews, and created occasional public frenzies. At the same time the other teachers guided us in drawing a series of self-portraits. The enthusiasm and intellectual challenge generated through drawing these self-portraits as well as researching and writing the paper crystallized my decision to pursue art as a career. At the time I was still gaining the skills to develop my own unique form, but nevertheless I looked forward to involving myself in the comprehensive coursework that was a necessary prerequisite before starting a Master’s in Fine Arts. Columbia University’s Department of Visual Arts offered a broad range of courses in the subject of art, and its Manhattan location is embedded in the culture capital of the world. New York has invaluable resources such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art at an arms length away. I decided to join Columbia’s Second Majors Program in Art after I ended a work-study scholarship at the Art Students League in New York. I learned that I enjoyed a postmodern penchant for play, performance/process, and anti-form, which became obvious in my early abstract works. These were made by mixing color on canvas. Painting subway maps of cities like L.A., Houston, and New York was good to relieve O.C.D. As I trained in oils and other media, I became interested in representative forms. The human figure presented itself to me as female protagonists whose images provided a narrative touching on the surface emotions of identity in many women. I saw reflections of gender and ethnic cultures through stereotypes, rather than an immediate reading of each painting as a metaphor for racial, ethnic, and feminist struggles. My goal is to make an impact as a woman not just to other women, but across the board on sexuality, race, and class identities. I hope to avoid images that are too shocking to apply any determinant signification, but which warrant silence, and instead of accepting the too occasional verity of stereotypes, they, in the end, encourage a rhetoric of difference, irony, and historicity. I want my work to be looked at and misread to kindle a discourse of a different kind of history. Unfortunately postmodernism is often dismissed as bunk. If the art is interesting, then I think it qualifies as good art. In October 2001 I entered a room in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art containing one work of the artist Jeff Koons. Decision Cultivations. Markedly in the center of the room, the oversized gold and ceramic Michael Jackson and Bubbles were passively overlooked by the masses of visitors as “dumb art,” “shock art,” or “weird art.” Its once de-contextualized and less comfortable situation of life-size kitsch was in a proper, prudent museum. That challenged the forbidden taboo of taste and the other one - bad taste. This ingeniously polemical act of putting kitsch in a high art setting did a few things. It called out whose offense at this art object is more serious, the naive lover of pop humiliated in the elitism of high culture, the sensitive curator-critic too embarrassed to concede the possibilities of art these days, or the poor accommodating tourist ignorant of contemporary art discourse left to come up with zero significance for Michael Jackson’s monkey’s graces in the museum, except perhaps the faint and happy comfort in recognizing something amidst the dullness and boredom. These are the questions that I think of and become stimulated by when studying art and its effects. A summer later I visited the Tate Modern and stood inches away from Lucien Freud’s “Standing by the Rags,” later comparing his coloring of human flesh and fat to the works of Jenny Saville. The Cremnitz white, muted gray-greens and yellow ochre, and dashes of cadmium red gave age, value dimensions, and spanned volume to human skin. This has prompted me to look closely at the composition and coloration of flesh and body in portraiture and figure painting, I want to have Freud’s experience of “painting paint.” I also am quite painterly, which means you can see brushwork and brushstrokes in the final image. My recent work looks less so, because I can now afford different paints. I believe a long time from now when the work dries it will be painterly too and have the same effect. An artist who might identify with the comment about “painting paint,” is Wayne Theibaud whose canvases of cakes, pastries, and cookies have mounded cream and pinwheel colored paint shaped like thick and frosty icing. Immediately after a short vacation in London, I stopped over in New York just in time to see the Wayne Thiebaud retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Comparing the perfectly aligned cakes of steady pastel coloration with the similarly rigid figures and curvy landscapes of California, the appreciation of Thiebaud as an artist bearing a consistent modus operandi that has stood the test of time for over 45 years began to take root. However the reasons for why his cityscapes of San Francisco composed with odd, deep, concrete angles, and specks of nature distinctive to the city did not get similar critical acclaim as his densely painted-painting pastries is another topic worth researching, Visiting San Francisco for the first time a month later and walking up and down the steep urban hills under the branches of oak trees intensified my wonder at the unprecedented composition of Thiebaud’s cityscapes. By studying art I desire to paint as methodically with results as dependable as his. Notwithstanding the technical inventiveness of smearing paint on canvas like icing and having calculating bird’s eye views of San Francisco compositionally, he remains consistent in his choice of colors and subject matters. His themes both approach pop, although he denies himself the label of a pop artist, Thiebaud’s art misses the avant garden confirmation. The recent trend of the past thirty-some years is to depict concepts, a departure from traditional art and old Master style of painting, which was bred from technical ability and beauty. Suppose an artist attempts to depict “beautiful” with a painting of rich yellow-orange sunflowers, and “ugly with a painting of thick earth colors stuck together formlessly on canvas. In this instance, language (“ugly” is not necessarily applied to the object (the painting), but the object is applied to language). I am a visual person. The painting as an object is the signified, but more emphasis is felt through the signifier, “ugly,” and this also forms the topic of discussion. Customary distinction between object and language is temporarily, if not forever displaced by the phenomenon. Its historical significance is ever more deceptive, for example, if one were to say in the properly slight sardonic tone when viewing the much reproduced image of Van Gough’s Sunflowers, “Oh that’s beautiful,” or “Oh that’s ‘ugly,’ a dual reaction unique to Van Gough, what is conveyed is the signifier itself, the riddling description. Beauty has not had the final apotheosis in art for the last three or four decades, and understanding this with detachment does erase much of the aura of traditional art, such as particularly heavily reproduced images such as “Sunflowers,” leaving it a trend descending into history. The exchange of art, semiotics, and sociopolitical agendas augur a new era for perception or at least another level of abstraction can be appreciated and anticipated. This is also what excites me about learning visual art. Finally, looking intently at the September 2001 cover of Art News, which features a black and white photograph by Shirin Neshat further propels my yearning to study art. The tableau photograph, “Allegiance with Wakefulness,” is a close up of the sole of a pair of effeminate feet delicately inscribed with Arabic writing by means of henna. The feet grip a pointed rifle boding the horror of September 11. This is one incident of art’s integration in culture, principally how 21st century global mores serve as interpretive tools in negotiating our identity and play in humanity as well as our fellow world citizens. Through the experienced and accredited teaching of art in the institutes I’ve attended I look forward to more learning of the historical and modern role of artists and our communication presence in the global culture as well as to improve my painting and art making practice. Regarding my own art I want to note that the Bodies Exhibit has influences in a series of work that I painted in the last fifteen years. Notice that the portraits are slightly stiff and pasty looking like dead bodies pumped with chemicals (in my case paint). I have teamed each painting with the name of which I know and in some cases changed the name to avoid getting my privacy disturbed. Again this series is about me experiencing my own funeral with people from my imagination. This alludes to my illness making me feel like I am trapped in my own mind and body wanting to be alone at peace, yet this does not happen. Concerning the technique of painting and the mental process, between starting and finishing, I expand portraits of friends in subcultures and paint the differences in superficiality. This is done with me being an ethnic woman. I hope that I can unmask these examples through figures and portraiture, painterly brushwork, and deep bright colors. Cadmium yellow pops in some work and grey in others. Even though the former is most hated and the latter loved by me. I feel like I practice extraction of the spirits, voices, and hallucinations, as well as symptoms of schizophrenia through my work. Recording the process of vanity such as transgendered nudes applying make-up and women’s wear, technically vague people defending their right to be less and more transparent, and South Asian nudes dressing in sarees is my continuing project. This is the meta-context or rather details of the series. As a South Asian-American with family and friends who immigrated from India I notice that too many of these people are racist. Besides having biased stories about young women getting into controlling marriages with Muslim men, ignorance about the Holocaust, and using politically incorrect terms for African Americans, the people refuse to diversify their social networks. There is truly a public and private personae that steps into sociological, economical, and ideological structures. For example my illness causes me to be paranoid of people, but I am not racist nor prejudiced towards a particular group. My people in the portraits have unique nomenclature revealing their individual heritages. The majority are British naturalized, because I think British people have good humor, and I like their music and literature. I am sort of an anglophile and feel some shame as my homeland and Great Britain have a contentious history as do most nations with post-Colonial Great.Britain. I address this problem in my work by painting portraits of various ethnicities and races as well as vocalizing each special cultural aspect and contribution. Whether it is taboo to talk about these differences or not I feel that it is important in the process of achieving harmony. Each piece is reminiscent of a cultural subgroup though it is not overly obvious which it is. My pleasure also comes from audience reaction, hence the larger viewers of the painting, and the imaginary funeral and its attendees. Besides the euphoria I feel when creating a piece from imagination I enjoy abstracting the draughtsmanship and hues in order to reinforce my points. The allusions are the impact of simultaneous richness, and desultory and passing experiences that one has when attending to toiletries specifically. I wish for the viewer to take away an aesthetic participation with with my work which help break stereotypes and assumptions, and biases concerning image. For me accomplishing these tasks in art-making is serious with much humor highlighting the process. Most everyone knows that beauty comes from the inside, but aren’t emotions, sensations, and other human attributes related to identity reflected in the individual and group behavior and exterior? This idea of cosmetic coterie as tempering and inflating really is crux of my investigation constantly when painting. An example of how this is related to painting and schizophrenia comes full circle back to my college education. All media swings opinion about how people look, how they dress, and whether they are worthy of respect according to their behavior, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic states, as well as gender. Under this umbrella is how they dress and whether they conform to classic and/or trendy concepts of beauty. In my portraits they are ugly and beautiful. To the untrained eye some of them are tromp e’oil and some of them are abstract meaning scary but funny. These people are subject to bias according to how they appear and return it too. This also happens with the basic perception of a viewer towards a painting and any piece of art. The irony is I am submerged in this universe of perception everyday along with everyone else, but the paintings are not. They don’t judge me nor anyone else, and really make me feel safe because of this. Painting is the act of putting myself in this translation of messages influenced through visualization. Overall I believe I am an avant-guard painter who is ArtBrut-Neo-Expressionist with a lot to offer to communities and persons that want change. I enjoy it, and I am pleased for you to view it, analyze it, and enjoy it.