On Demand
Getting away
By Claudia La Rocco
July 31, 2008
One of the best parts about living in New York is leaving it, and artists value their summer getaways just as much as everyone else.
Members of the Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group working on a new piece, “3 Dancers, 4 Chairs, 26 Words” during a June residency at Mount Tremper Arts. Photo by Mathew Pokoik.
While some people might spend these vacations lolling about on their parents’ couch, watching endless episodes of “Law & Order” and “Project Runway” and trying desperately to finish Proust, many artists opt, happily, for working vacations. As Carolyn Brown wrote in her wonderful memoir, “Chance and Circumstance,” of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s stint at Black Mountain College’s last Summer Institute of the Arts, in 1953:
“For us, Black Mountain was a kind of paradise: the paradise of being able to be dancers twenty-four hours a day, freed from the dreary little jobs most of us needed to pay the rent and grocery bills, freed from the hassles of scheduling rehearsals to accommodate the peculiar hours of seven or more people’s dreary little jobs, and freed, too, from hours wasted on subways and buses shuttling back and forth to classes, rehearsals, jobs, coldwater flats, and unheated lofts. At Black Mountain we walked dirt roads, breathed clean air, heard birds at dawn. We were fed good plain fare from the college’s farm, were housed in comfortable, rustic simplicity, and were surrounded by artists and students of other disciplines equally free to do nothing else but their work.”
(Excerpted from “Chance and Circumstance” by Carolyn Brown Copyright © 2007 by Carolyn Brown. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.)
And, of course, artists also go back to their roots for creative sustenance; New York ain’t called a melting pot for nothing, and many “New York artists” are mining rich veins of inspiration that originate in far-flung parts of the world.
Don Voisine is a painter who has lived and worked in New York for years. He is the president of the American Abstract Artists, and his elegant, architectural works, with their unruffled surfaces and spatially expansive depths, are worlds unto themselves:
“Delayed Green” by Don Voisine; oil on wood panel, 32″ X 63″ 2007
But I was struck, upon first seeing his paintings several years ago, by how much they reminded me of the Maine landscape where I grew up, which is marked by dark, sometimes oppressive masses of pine and fir trees. These forests give way to bleak expanses of sky and snow in the winter, and to green fields and bursts of color in the other seasons. This is particularly true in the northern reaches of the state, which is full of potato fields and far from the Atlantic Ocean. So it made complete sense to learn that Don grew up in Fort Kent - he didn’t see the ocean until he was 16.
“Delayed Green,” along with other recent works of his, is on view through August 9 at the Icon Contemporary Art gallery in Brunswick, Maine, and I wonder how many people who see the show up there will see the same landscapes I always do, hiding in luxurious abstraction.
Comments
Comment from Claudia La Rocco
Date: July 31, 2008, 3:06 pm
Hey … I should mention that the Mount Tremper festival (link above) is happening through August - looks like a great mix of visual and performing arts, and you can’t beat the Catskills location. Just got this from a reader:
“I was at Aynsley’s opening performance last Saturday night and you couldn’t ask for better ambience — wind, mist, rain, thunder, oh sh** — lightning! They had to stop mid-way while the audience ran to a nearby cottage for cover. One strike was very close….
They were able to finish fortunately. The rest of the season is to be presented indoors.”
Sounds fabulous to me …
Comment from June McAllister
Date: August 2, 2008, 1:09 pm
“Delayed Green” is stupid.
Comment from Aynsley V
Date: August 4, 2008, 3:25 pm
Hi Claudia,
Thank you so much for the mention. Our experience with residencies has been similar to Carolyn Brown’s. It really is different to get to work for periods of time uninterrupted by waitressing and teaching and all of the ways we keep ourselves afloat in NYC. And I’ve found the nicest thing about that kind of space and time is feeling freer to take risks–that absolutely necessary and oh so scary part of being an artist.
Comment from J. Theriault
Date: August 10, 2008, 10:50 pm
June:How cultured and intelligent you must be to label someone else’s heartfelt work as “stupid”
Comment from Don
Date: August 11, 2008, 9:51 pm
Let’s cut June some slack, perhaps she’s saying the title is stupid. The title is from a traffic sign I saw when I was working on the painting and it seemed to fit at the time. It took me a long time to resolve this painting, hence the delay.
It’s interesting to me how people from different regions will look and think about art work. In Maine there seems to be a need to read abstract forms as ’symbols’ to find meaning and allowing for more literal interpretation. Edgar Allen Beem (in yankeemagazine.com)read my intersecting horizontal and vertical bands as cruciforms, as a possible reference to growing up in a predominately Catholic region. In Chicago my work is perceived as purely formal, referring only to itself and how it’s made. New Yorkers seems to factor in both ways of looking at abstraction, which is how I think about my work, an impure formalism informed by references to the outside world. I’m open to whatever ways people choose to find a way into a painting.
I work with abstraction because I’m not a storyteller. For myself the goal is to arrive at a multiplicity of meaning through a simplicity of means.
In the past some Mainers have said to me, “We don’t see anything of Maine in your work.” (which they didn’t mean as a positive thing) For Claudia to see a relation to the experience of the Maine landscape is a vindication of those charges.
Comment from Claudia La Rocco
Date: August 11, 2008, 10:18 pm
Hiya Don, thanks so much for writing - I always am intrigued by titles for abstract paintings. I had thought of the “Delayed Green” in two ways - first in a literal sense, that the green doesn’t hit me till after I’ve sunk into the black; but once it does it wallops me. Then, and I think this is perhaps because of the nature of my post, I thought of the way springtime is so slow to come to New England - endless delays before that first opening of buds, and of the senses (I always think of the sense of smell as being green, somehow …)
That is so interesting, the different geographical responses - any thoughts as to why? To do with various painting schools/traditions, I would guess? I am partial to the New York way, too, surprise surprise. “Impure formalism” is a great way to put it. Let us know the next time you have an NY show.
Comment from Don
Date: August 18, 2008, 8:29 pm
Claudia, a nose for color, who’d of thought?
Titles are always difficult to come by. I use “Untitled” as a last resort. I want the title to have some kind of relation to the painting but not necessarily to provide the viewer with the “got it” feeling.
My comment about differing regional responses to my work was meant as an extremely broad generalization. (No angry emails please!) And yes I would attribute it to the various painting schools/traditions of an area. In the nature vs nurture debate I’d say that our response to art is culturally learned.
Comment from Claudia La Rocco
Date: August 21, 2008, 12:37 am
We here at the Culturist are fully in favor of gross generalizations.
I’m always a bit surprised, given my bias toward words, when artists use “Untitled.” I understand, I think, the desire not to have your piece hemmed in - but “Untitled” has so much baggage at this point!
Nurture, definitely.
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