Living Statue: The Eight Foot Professor

Here is an detail of the painting I have been working on for the past several months. The title is Living Statue: The Eight Foot Professor, the medium acrylic on unstretched canvas, size 96”x63”. The canvas is tacked to the wall of my studio, which is covered with a plastic sheet to protect it from the paint. A full image of the painting is below.

I started this painting last summer when I was busy working at Pygmalion’s, the local art store in Bloomington. Store operations and the everyday lives of those involved had been disrupted by the illness and recent passing of John Wilson, the artist who owned the store. As busy as I was, marshalling my energy and focus to help manage the store I felt the need to have a large painting to work on. Perhaps working large would externalize and help me manage feeling overwhelmed. In a more symbolic vein I also wanted to affirm the importance of art making to my life by making a large painting.

Bringing this to a state that I wanted to share has taken longer than expected. Along with working on this painting I have been preparing for then teaching my classes at Ivy Tech. Studio time has also been taken by a second large painting, a landscape set on the Bloomington Rail Trail, and a few smaller canvases. I have also been bicycling and walking longer distances on a regular basis than previously in colder months.

Back in July 2019 I came across a conversation on youtube that podcaster Tim Ferriss had with musician Amanda Palmer. Here is a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GIdpgCL5_k   I learned that Palmer had raised millions of dollars crowd funding her creative work and had given a TED talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMj_P_6H69g   I found her book The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help enjoyable in audiobook form.

Palmer grew up in the suburbs of Boston, where I had spent thirteen years of my life right after high school. She conveys the urgency of her creative search for meaning in terms that felt familiar to me. Palmer’s first creative job, after working at an ice cream store that I remember, was acting as a living statue in Harvard Square. People called her the Eight Foot Bride. She wore a white wedding dress, painted her face white and handed out flowers. I have just discovered footage of her performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiiO_XNqOHQ   In her book she writes thoroughly and engagingly about her experience.

As I listened to stories from Amanda Palmer’s life I was thinking about the large painting that I wanted to make. Inspired by Palmer’s theatrical persona, developed in her enactment of her role as an artist, I decided to cast myself as a similarly public-facing performer, just in paint, not in life. I considered my role of teacher as performer. It was a chance to think about teaching and externalize discomfort I feel as an introvert in a public role.

In the painting I enjoy the joke that I am a lackluster, perhaps incompetent performer as a living statue. I’m wearing no makeup, with an everyday costume, indifferent pose and no hat to collect tips. Instead of being downtown where people might be interested in my performance I have set up in the middle of the construction of a roundabout in a residential neighborhood.

Joking aside, the understated performance that I am offering seems true to my character. I am presenting some version of my everyday life on a makeshift stage. The subtle artifice of everyday pose and attire tends to interest me more than grand gesture or costume. I want the magic of the theatre in everyday clothing.

I need to see magic in a sustainable version of everyday life. If I construct the fabric of my everyday life well enough I believe this can happen. Travel has provided a glimpse of how people in other places are building their lives in somewhat unfamiliar and often admirable ways, and also by contrast shows me my life here.

Technically speaking, what has involved me as I work is how the image reads abstractly. Along with narrative content implied by the picture’s subject matter the areas of paint, transparent or opaque, brushed or palette knife-applied speak about my experience. The painting is a collection of responses, a repository of energy that I hope to be a net positive experience no matter how deeply anyone looks into the things they see in the painting. I have spent time viewing and reacting to the painting in progress to look into the image and carry it further in the way that interests me most at the time. I want to make a positive experience for myself and others as I investigate, as honestly and truthfully as I can, how the marks I am making communicate with each other and what they seem to mean as I continue the conversation.

The story that I read in the areas of paint in a painting is what Vincent Desiderio has termed the technical narrative. Investigating technical narrative makes paintings indispensable over the centuries and communicates most. I am learning by building the technical narrative in my paintings. At the same time I hope to be making something that engages with another person’s internal dialogue, enriches their experience, informs their search for meaning.