NEW! Coming up, an interview with NYC-based Chinese American fashion and cultural photographer Becky Yee.

Heidi Whitman, Boston-based artist, www.heidiwhitman.com
Robert Siegelman, Boston-based photographer and artist

On Getting Rid of Rectangles

An interview of Heidi Whitman, Boston-based artist

How did you decide you wanted to become an artist—how was that process for you?

I’ve always been someone who loved to look at paintings in particular—and color. When I was 16 or so, I first discovered the Museum of Modern Art with my mother and went to various incredible shows and that affected me a lot. But I think I had a long, long time before I could call myself an artist. I started out when I was in high school. I was a good student, and I was okay at art, but it was not my main thing. I was good at English, political science and other things.  I first went to Sarah Lawrence and put in the visual arts group—I didn’t ask to be but I was put there. That was my concentration.

When I was there—around 1968-69— it was the beginning of the student protests and I didn’t want to be in a girl’s school (it had just become coed my sophomore year), so I transferred to Berkeley. In the art class at Berkeley, they were rigorously giving grading drawings, from A to C, which was I thought was ridiculous since Sarah Lawrence didn’t give grades. It was a much more progress experience. In the meantime, when I first arrived at Berkeley it was really intense, there was People’s Park [protest] , the march down Telegraph avenue. The university was shut down and political demonstrations, if not riots. There was also the beginning of feminism, food banks, good eating, drugs, hippie-dom, the whole theme and the cultural stuff for a girl from the East Coast was amazing.

I ended up feeling up that art was a bourgeois thing to be doing: why was I doing this when there was a revolution? It ended up being about two years when it really felt like there was a revolution coming. I dropped out of art, took a lot of political science classes, and I ended up majoring in comparative literature.  One of the classes I took that I loved was a French film class, and I thought: this is what I want to do, become a filmmaker.

I lived in Istanbul for a while, I lived in New York, and I went to NYU and took film courses. I tried to love being a filmmaker, but I realized the skills you needed to make films as a documentary filmmaker at the time (solo-woman, etc) were so amazing that I didn’t have it in me. The ability to pick up the phone and ask for money, fundraising was a lot. I never really loved any particular part of the camera or editing. After a period of mid-twenties I went through a lot of moving around, moved back to Berkeley, worked for a criminal justice project, and I thought I wanted to become a lawyer. So this was a very confused period of time.

Then, I started taking evening classes in painting and drawing in Paris and New York, and it was such a relief to physically do drawing. I didn’t have to raise money to do it; it felt completely under my control.  So I then moved back to Boston and ended up at the Museum School. I had taken some art at Berkeley, but I didn’t have a portfolio. The summer program allowed me to enter as a diploma student, and I did that in three years. I became a teaching assistant here and mainly did drawing and painting.

 

How does your work now compare to the work you were interested in doing before? I know you’re now doing mostly mapping, brain work.

When I was at school here, I took all kinds of courses, but drawing mainly. The work I started to do here in my last year and when I got out of here (SMFA) and didn’t have the voices of all the teachers, I started to make invented terrains. I think it’s what I was doing all along.

The earliest ones looked like aerial landscapes with a wacky sense of perspective. So with my mapping now, it’s also an invented terrain and in a sense, one’s brain is an invented terrain, too.

When did you start the invented terrain work?

In 1980.

Is there any connection between your early interest in French film with what you’re doing now?

Some people have said I have a cinematic way of stringing images together. I’m not sure I totally see that, but maybe I do. I sort of go in a long stream of consciousness from left to right, but I’m not sure and haven’t connected it. But maybe it’s there.

What drew you to the brain specifically?

That was also somewhat accidental. I was doing an invented landscape which had a lot of geometric field shapes in it and one day I was imagining a river through it and somehow it looked like the shape of a head. Then I thought, what a good place to be in this landscape. Then I thought about making my landscape more personal and what was going around in my life around my head (life experience, in other words) and processing going on inside the head. Some of the early ones would have abstracted shapes but also actual things that were part of my life then. I was living in England with my family, we were doing a lot of driving, seeing castles, so there were little things having  to with that in the first head shapes.

I called this series  “states of mind.” I did these heads for many years, then the heads, one day I thought, well what about the brain? The brain shapes I was thinking about the work that’s being done with brain imaging and thinking of the brain as an island. Then I got fascinated by maps—my work sort of goes this way, one thing leads to another and my work sort of circles back.

Where do you draw your inspiration from? Scientific magazines? Other reading?

I think there is certain imagery that keeps coming back. I have this thing for aqueducts and it keeps coming back into my pictures. I think that my iconography, shapes, and colors—you can see it, as with everybody’s elses art—they are the things I like the best. I think  I refer a lot to what I’ve done before and one picture leads to another. I do a lot of reading, but I’m not really that influenced by scientific imagery. I think it’s beautiful in itself, but I’m not a scientist.

I think a lot about formal issues in my work like color, composition—straight art talk.

It sounds like there is an internal narrative in your work?

Some of them have a range—some have more things in them. I think of myself as an abstract artist who uses things in her work.

What do you think draws you to abstract painting?

The things I’m drawn to in shows are simple and clean. And sometimes I’m attracted to things that are different from what you do. I always need something to think and look at in the real world. I’ve certainly of late looked at a lot of maps and had great pleasure of looking at maps and using shapes, particularly shapes of continents, that interest me, certain mapping conventions and I’ve thrown then into my work.

Referring back the tension you described earlier : how did you reconcile that the idea that real world issues/ sociocultural issues are happening around you and choosing to do art?

I’m not sure I really have [reconciled it]. I sort of wish I had 15 lifetimes. I feel like what I’m doing now, I’m very intereste din it. But as an artists, you are fairly self-involved in your thing. It’s not what I’d like to be doing for the world and what I could possibly throw my energy into.

Was it a specific moment where you realized [you wanted to do art] or was it a gradual process?

It was definitely a gradual process. It took me year to call myself an artist. It always seemed like a heavy term. I used to say “I draw.”

When did you finally feel like you could actually call yourself an artist?

When I got out of school, I got a traveling scholarship from the SMFA which was an affirmation to what I was doing and I was asked to be in a few different galleries and started selling my work and it was an exciting time. I managed to call myself an artist at that point.

What does that mean to you—to call yourself an artist?

I’ve been calling myself an artist for so long now, I’m pretty used to it. I do feel like it’s laden with other people’s opinion about what that might be.  To put yourself in the same category as Leonardo is sort of incredible. All the history of art, the great artists. On the other hand, I do my taxes every year, and I’m a self-employed artist. That’s a concrete thing, a small business as an artist.

Did you ever question it?

Oh yes, I’ve often questioned it, but I’ve never stopped. I’ve often questioned it when things have gone badly or you just feel like you’ve applied to yet another competition and they haven’t selected you. There is a lot of rejection in being an artist. And it takes a lot of willpower. But the one thing I’ve always been is very determined and very energetic, so I keep working. I work through everything. A lot of artists have artist blocks, but I’ve been fortunate. I just go to my studio and even if I feel totally uninspired, I force myself to do something, so I’ve been lucky that way.

How long have you been at your studio?

Current one, 5 years. But in the South End since the 1980s.

What is your relationship like with the community of artists around you?

Having artist friends is totally crucial—at least it has been for me, in order to carry on. I have two really good friends who have been on either side of me in terms of my studio building for the (since 1980 and soon thereafter). And another bunch of friends located in the South End generally. So it’s wonderful to feel like there are other people doing this “wacky thing.” We all look at each other’s work and do a lot of shop talk and talk about such-a-such show or going to NY. Things about competitions, so we sort of egg each other on.

How did you decide to stay in Boston?

I met my husband when I started museum school and when I got out of school, we got married, then I had two children. So that kept me busy, to put it mildly.

Is there something about being a woman in the art world that makes the experience different?

Things have gotten way better for women than when I first began. There were so few women artists. In fact, I ran “a room of one’s own” where I invited local women artists to talk to students at lunch and the school gave me a tiny bit of money to do this. That was an interesting and important thing to do—I met a lot of people. Even though things have gotten a lot better for women, even in the top echelons, women are not selected at the same rate in terms of top galleries and other things in the top art departments.

How has teaching been in all of this?

I love teaching. For one thing, you get out of the studio. I love to see what people are up to. I get a tremendous amount out of my students, get a lot of ideas from them, and I enjoy people.

What does your daily schedule look like?

It’s a whole lot different now that my children are no longer at home. I go into my studio everyday- generally not on weekends but sometimes I am. I generally work more during the day than at night.

And you have shows coming up, right?

Yes, here are two shows coming up. One in June at Gallery Benoit, and I have another one coming up in NY in a year.

What timespan does it cover of your work?

The last year—that was when I started cutting up and making paper construction.

How did you get to start the work with cutting paper?

I wanted to work on shapes without rectangles. I was at this artist residency last May and spent a lot of time with another young artist who had an Exacto knife. And we had crit nights and one English artist saw all my map drawings and said, you could lose some of those rectangles. Just hearing someone else saying this, I started making collages of them, moved shapes around, and started hanging them up on the wall.

Well, I should probably let you get to class now.

Oh, I went on way too long at the beginning.  But maybe it was interesting to you?

Her show Invisible Cities is at Gallery Benoit (June 4-July 16).
Upcoming exhibit at: The Christopher Henry Gallery, 127 Elizabeth St., New York, NY, Phone: 212 244-6004
Website: Christopher henrygallery.com

Corners, Columns, and Mirrors

(4.12.2010)

Interview of Robert Siegelman, Boston photographer and printmaker

As we sit down to talk at the Museum School (SMFA Boston) where Robert Siegelman (who goes by Bob) has taught for years, we moved a few places to find the right, quiet spot for the interview– moving from the downstairs cafeteria tables to the classroom stools then to a chairs on the other side of the room.  Trying to find the right space and being sensitive to work created within and presented in a space are concepts not unfamiliar to Bob. As he has taught me in the Art as Process class this year, space—the setting in which we work and in which one shows the work—fundamentally impacts the creation, the piece.

Bob started as a Polaroid photographer, enjoying the immediacy of the final product, similar to his work in printmaking.  He has since transitioned to digital photography and portraiture, and his work continues to shed light on vulnerability and male sexuality, using corners, columns, and mirrors to capture the nuances of what one might call “queer space.”

work

How did you get interested in this subject matter and portraits?
It kind of surprised me, I don’t think I was realizing that I was interested in portraits until I realized I was making them for a long time. And even in teaching drawing and working with figures and on paper, I am working on portraits as well. I started posted on Facebook a portrait everyday. I realized I wanted to post something on Facebook everyday and what of my work could I post, because most of it involves more nudity than Facebook allows. Plus there were two people who asked me to do portraits of them and got me thinking of the fact that I think I don’t do portraits, but I kind of do. I don’t do traditional head shots. And in teaching drawing, I often asking people to work on the head, which is often neglected and consider portraiture as part of figure drawing.

What do you feel like you want to convey with it?
I’m still learning that. But I see the work as being in some part about sexuality and vulnerability – and male vulnerability, vulnerability around sexuality, and being a person.

What is the relationship between your photography and printmaking?
I’m not making prints anymore—I was saying that I was taking a leave of absence, but I might be leaving it. People always wanted me to bring them together, and I did some work that brought them together, but I didn’t feel it was right.

on moving to new studios

Several years ago I had to move studios. I had a printing studio running and renting it, and I had been using it myself as well. But then I started using another studio with a bigger press, and I was using my own studio less for printmaking. I knew I had to move and decided to sell my press and not just replicate my old studio in a new location and see what that would do for my work—to have my new studio as a new beginning.

How did that process happen with building your new studio?

Really easily. I helped design the studio. The studio as is wasn’t suited to me—broken up into small rooms, needed to be gutted and changed. It was a process of designing the studio. Something I did know was that there was one section of the studio where the light was beautiful for daytime shooting. Just absolutely gorgeous.

What was important to you when you designed the studio? One of the things I’ve learned in class was something I didn’t even think about was that the space in which you work really affects your work.
I wanted a corner. Because there are various ways I could divide a wall.

What is it about a corner?
For photography and installations—I like to place things in corners. And I also wanted the largest single wall in the studio unencumbered by anything else.

I don’t know but it’s happening for a long time. One of the turning points in being a photographer was that I used to do large scale Polaroid work. There are a handful of huge Polaroid cameras the size of a refrigerator and they take photographs and the pictures are 20 x 24 inches. They are incredibly expensive to use and that is one of the reasons I stopped using them. But there is one at Mass Art and maybe still is. At that time, the person that worked with me on that camera noticed I used corners.

I like bending images around corners, I have done that several times for pieces. I was talking to another artist last week and he was noticing I had things in little corners. Not so much the corner of the room, but the edge of a wall or where the wall takes a little dip and continues. Sometimes a corner that is only 4-5 inches wide.

He related it to being as being queer space—being marginalized or being in the corner and looking at architecture in a different way. The prime example is being “in the closet” which  is an architectural metaphor.

I’m placing things in corners where people might see them or might not see them, or might particularly see them because they are in corners. I just knew that I wanted the flexibility of a corner of a workroom in the studio. I wanted where two prime walls come together. That was important to me.

My association with corners is punishment, like being forced to be in a corner, being shamed.
I hadn’t thought of that, but I think that’s exactly right. I didn’t know corners had all these connotations but they seemed so important to me.

In speaking about the piece “Columns”
I saw there was a piece that was in your studio with a column of photos…

Yes, there is a piece called Columns which is up in my studio now and will be up for Artwalk coming up. It’s a tribute to Matthew Shepard and to other men who are affected because they are gay or even because others think they are. This piece was made for a show “Violence Transformed.” I took several images in space and had my idea and looked at the space. And literally on the drive from the space to the studio, I knew what the format would look like—in columns, which ended up being the name of the piece. It’s not a direct piece—not everyone would recognize a picture of Mathew Shepard. It’s subtle in its portrayal of violence violence and masculinity.  There is an advertisement of this attractive man selling cologne for Dolce and Gabbana. And there is a handout at the bottom of a story written by someone who was gay-bashed and people can take one.

What is the significance of columns? To me it almost looks like a cemetery.

Again, it [the idea] came afterwards. Columns started as a structure. I had done other pieces with rows. But then I thought, columns of soldiers, that are architectural, that are a significant place, buildings like that. And that was more after the fact when the name came about. Also, columns of newspapers. Some of my work is overt and some is “in-overt?”

Overt meaning explicit?
Yes, and even in this book, I’ve mixed men that you could see in an advertisement and those that you wouldn’t. some people who photograph men would only photograph young  men. But there is a 76 year old in here. I can’t define how I pick models.

Some of these pieces have a lot of mirrors.
Yes, I’ve been thinking more about mirrors lately. Actual mirrors in pieces. There is a  connection with my printwork is a rectangle within a rectangle.  In the 80s, that was the format that I used to use. I always saw it as a mirror in space, another plane in space. A square within a square, more like an angled one.

Years ago I went to a Sting concert in the old Boston Garden. There was a big video monitor with a concert on it and that was sometimes new. I was watching it live and live televised and I thought about how we go through life “live” and then going through life with our past being in our present and our future sometime in our present, even though we can’t define that.

Looking in mirrors and judging ourselves, reflecting ourselves, trying to look for the “right” reflection. This has been a visual theme in so many different ways. And this mirror has a history—it was one I used to use in my Polaroid work. There is another piece where it’s a series of traditional snapshot 4×6 inches—a stack of them 8 feet tall—and a 4-in square mirror at the bottom on the floor.

This one is actually called “Chris Cornered.” I met this person in an Art as Process and he was really exploring who he is and then he took another class here, and then dropped out in the middle after being very committed to his art and he’s kind of in a cult now. And I feel like he’s cornered and I made this piece based on that. I feel he found his niche as a way not to deal with who he is.

With the column structure, it looks like a reel of film.

Yes, there is a filmic quality. And he’s at various stages of undress but not in chronological order. Here is one piece where there are 300 photographs of men in various stages of undress but not in order—except they are ordered by color, movement of color. But there is no chronology of “here they are dressed, here they are not dressed.”

being an artist

When did you know this was what you wanted to do?

I can’t say I always wanted to be an artist. I knew I always wanted to teach, but then again I knew what a teacher looked like. Even though I didn’t like school. I always drew when I was young.

What’s your earliest memory of drawing, of art?
I don’t know exactly. Just kind of drawing at home, cars, which is very unlike me now. I drew  mostly from my imagination. Coloring book, drawing colors in the “wrong” way—I don’t know if I was told that. I was drawing out of the lines, which kind of fits me.

Around high school was the first time that I was recognized for my work in classes, the last two years of high school. The last year of high school, much to my surprise, I won one of the art prizes for a woodcut piece. I was involved with printmaking then. At that point, I was not doing much with photography. I wasn’t ever interested in dark room work, so that was one of the reasons I did not pursue photography early.

What drew you to art at that time?
Being depressed and withdrawn as a person.

Did you share your artwork with anyone?
Not in any formal way. I took art classes but outside of school I don’t know that I ever shared it. I was in a local show in high school and that was for a sculptural wall piece, which is interesting, which was an ongoing theme—working from installations. I made a piece yesterday applying photographs to a mirror. It will be leaned against the wall, 30 in squared.

What is the meaning of it not being hung on the wall?
Then it’s an object. But it’s more something the view encounters, so it’s in the viewer’s space more than it’s in the wall space.

What else are you working on now?
I am working on what looks like double exposures but they are not. It’s very much like printmaking. It’s very much not like photography but they are photographs that I’ll run through the printer more than once. Randomly two images are printed on top of each other. When you have a light image, you get great transparencies where the ink is not very dense. It looks like something done with Photoshop or exposures but they are random prints on top of each other.

I think sometimes they have an anxious or confusing feeling because you literally cannot make heads or tails of what you’re seeing but you kind of understand what you’re seeing at the same time.

When you do these pieces, do you think about what feeling you want in your audience or is it more an expression of what you want to convey?
I don’t think about what I want to convey when I’m making the work. I think about it afterwards.  When I’m making work, I want to be in the making moment. Before or after I might be thinking about that, but in the making it’s important to just make it and I’m not directing what the piece is going to be—that the possibilities are directing the situation.  I think that’s more important.

Where do you think that making comes from?
I think it’s pretty innate with me. I’m always involved with something, working in a book, or working in the studio. One wonders if as I was young and so withdrawn and artmaking is something that makes one feels better, if that came from just being alone a lot. And kept going. It’s hard to really say. There’s nothing else that I do—teaching.

Is the process itself at one with being alone or does it relieve it? The process of artmaking seems to me that it could be very lonely.
It’s not really lonely for me. It’s been less that way in that I’ve been working with models. I’m not literally in the studio. I’m more interested in what that’s about. Even if working with models can be a performance piece in itself. It’s not about being lonely. I don’t know if it’s about escaping loneliness, but I still see myself as kind of a lonely person, but less than I used to.

When I work, I feel less lonely even though I am alone…
Yes, I definitely feel less lonely. Or working with a model, it’s intimate.

How is it working with a model?
You have one person that is naked and one person that is not (me) and you are directing them and there is a communication that is going on in all kinds of levels. It’s completely different with each model. And it’s different for each model since they are each there for different reasons. And I’m there to direct and record. And some of what I record is directed, accidental or model performative situation.

Have there been challenges over the years that you weren’t expecting?
I don’t know—probably. Not having the kind of recognition that you’d like but I think that’s true of many artists.

My fear is, for example, that I’ll run out of ideas.
No, not going to happen. Probably for you either. The more you work, the more you have. I always think of an artist as having more ideas than you could possibly execute so that you’re always turning ideas and hopefully choosing the best ones because they have the most interest to you. So I’ve never been afraid of that. Maybe the challenge for me was after I stopped doing photography and Polaroids was how to stay a photographer and not be a conventional photographer and not be a Polaroid photographer. During that time, digital photography became more feasible. The challenge was what is this transition going to be—where will I come out with that?

What is it that drew you to Polaroid?
The instant possibility that happens that you can see your work. Like in digital now.

art as process

How many years have you taught the Art as Process course?
Probably before you were born! (laughing)

How has it been to witness the development of young artists?
It has always meant a lot to me because I was a student in the predescessor of this class—it wasn’t called Art as Process. It’s also a reflection of how I work—being very involved in the process, keeping books, seeing what happens.

You keep daily books…
Many.

At the same time?
It’s based on rules. Where I have one work I work 4 pages of everyday. And this has changed throughout the years. And then I have a couple others going that I have to work in  at least a page of at least 2 books of my choosing of many that are going. I see it like a library. Sometimes I read a book and never quite finish and put it down. Some I do and finish.

It started as a purely written journal and now it’s evolved into not as much writing, except in the summer. There is journal writing, images…

Are there other parts of how you practice as an artist that is important to the process?
All of it is. All of it — being in motion as an artist. Looking and reading about it. I don’t know that reading about it is that strong for me, but important too.

Have there been people that have been important and influential to you in developing as an artist?
That’s probably something I could use. When I was in school, there were teachers that were. Many, many years out of school, I don’t have an artist mentor.

Do most people have artist mentors?
I don’t know. I do that – as a paid mentor to others, but I think many artists don’t have one.
Where is your studio?
Fort Point.

Do you communicate a lot with other artists in the building?
With one. In particular. No, just in the halls. I like that I’m in an artist building, but I’m not there to socialize. A lot of people live there and I don’t. I’m pretty single-minded once I’m there and there is one friend that I’ll have lunch with and look at each other’s work, but not really there for that purpose. I like being an artist area, though it’s a much smaller area for artists.

We do a lot of crits within art class—but what do artists do to do feedback when they are out of school?
They don’t do a lot of that I think. I don’t think a lot of artists get that. I’ve conducted some through art associations, but I don’t think many artists do that. Some people stay in touch with teachers, but you don’t get a lot of that after school. But I don’t know that I can speak for other artists.

I fear that sometimes art will no longer be part of one’s identity. There is something reassuring that art is so integral to people.

I’ve had a very direct route. People often ask me “can you see which people will really make it?

I guess it depends what you mean by make it.

Well they mean: be successful, be famous. There are a couple students that are doing extremely well, internationally known. But the answer of the question is no. looking back one of these people was fantastic in class and the other was fine. But there are a lot of people fantastic in class. And there are some people you see a lot of people with a lot of drive. But you don’t know what’s going ot happen next in their lives—it’s not like their drive for artmaking is going to disappear but they could decide on another career, another job, another baby. There are a lot of distractions and solid ones. And how do you – are people driven by their original goals? Do people end up having different goals? Some people are really focused and single minded and other people go off and do different things.

This is a horrible way to end this conversation, but one person I had pegged that way, but also wondered how he would remain single-minded without a community around him—at the time he was one of the top students here, if you could say such a thing. He ended up dying very young, don’t know—I don’t know what happened but possibly by his own hand. This is a horrible way to end a conversation thought— it may have been an accident with him.