On The Border of Sacred Mystery and Indecency (3 New Paintings)
I think it's all holy. It's also all very masculine. Good morning from NYC.
I’ve been waiting to send out these paintings — Election Day in the US might be a weird day, or it might be the most appropriate. These are paintings about reproductive freedom, something I hope you are all voting for today.
A friend told me these feel like the most explicitly sexual paintings I’ve ever made. They can certainly be read that way. My hope, always, is that you imbue my work with your own meaning and significance based on what resonates for you.
Meaning is created the moment an object touches your mental conception of it. I’ve always envisioned it as this third independent thing, sitting in the space between the object and your consciousness, co-created, floating. A little cloud taking form in the space between. Similar to pulling a Tarot Card, reading a horoscope, etc., and getting value from that — in my belief, the proverbial card itself holds no inherent meaning. The meaning is activated upon witnessing and the receiver and their personal experience, biases, and projections, is an inherent part of that meaning-making process. The Magician card holds a symbol, but that symbol is only activated when [You] interact with it and associate it with your own life.
From this vantage (“an object has no inherent meaning”), we might be tempted to throw out the artist’s intention. Quite the contrary — similar to the viewer, the artist creates meaning with the work via the process of creation. Similar to the little cloud, I’ve always envisioned this more like a romantic fog that sits around the piece permanently. It’s separate but it’s always there, and it’s hard (but possible) to truly see the piece without it. The artist’s intention is always valid, always biased, and likely inescapable. At the most it’s desperately important; at the least it’s simply interesting dinnertime fodder.
So let me tell you about these paintings.
One is a self-portrait (see image at end of newsletter), my first painted in New York City. It references The Magician card in Tarot, sometimes called The Alchemist, which is a card I was pulling often at the end of the summer. In the card, the figure holds one hand to the sky and one to the heavens, representing a connection between the spiritual and reality. A conduit, a grounding force. This was hopeful as best, as I finally learned what it meant to feel “disassociated” in my first few weeks here. Extremely ungrounded, disoriented, and neither here nor there.
Two of the paintings explicitly reference female genitalia and/or penetration and were actually inspired not by sex, but by my recent experience with egg freezing, a process I had the privilege of going through and one that I fear will be lost if today’s election goes a certain way.
In my first month or so here, penetration was very much on my mind — and not in the fun way. If everything in the desert is vast and expansive, everything in New York is vertical and compressed. Buildings pushing upwards, streets being squeezed in. The energy is extremely masculine, fast, and intense. Everyone is pushing against you, bumping into you on the subway; everything is loud, all the time. With egg freezing, I literally getting penetrated multiple times a day by needles, having my blood drawn, getting ultrasounds which required a machine up my vaginal cavity every other day. Penetrated — and not in the fun way. It was not the most comfortable.
If the desert invites you to open up, New York invites you to define your boundaries. With everyone pushing up against you, you are forced to say, “this is me, this is you,” lest you be consumed by the rush. But the rush is a thrill as well; I think the rush might be holy. The rush pulls you into a mass of energy that allows you to lose yourself. I felt similarly in the desert, where the expanse exposed me to the point where it felt my boundaries were washed away by the wind. On the surface, this experience of being consumed by nature seems the opposite of being consumed by the rush of a city. In reality, the diametric opposition is so extreme that you find yourself falling over the edge and back on the other side. That existence, those masses of energy, start to feel the same.
I think a lot about it all being holy. I think it is all holy.
The second painting, “on the border of sacred mystery and indecency” find its title from Simon Shama’s writing on Bernini’s “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa,” a famous Baroque sculpture, in which the Saint is depicted in religious, orgasmic ecstasy.
Where is the border between sacred mystery and indecency? Does it exist? Is it obscured by a romantic fog? I think I’d like to live there. Neither here nor there. Both, and. The border of sacred mystery and indecency… I’m starting to think I do live there. I think it is all holy. I think I need to believe that it — that this — is all holy in order to survive.
Reminds me of one of my favorite memes:
I used to say New York is the city in the world I feel the most comfortable — it still is, I think, but for my art practice it has been a huge adjustment. I painted these works in my first couple weeks, tapping into energy that felt held over from the place before. Now that I’ve settled into New York City, a couple months in, it hasn’t felt quite authentic to paint feminine forms nor paint in the same palette, which so explicitly references outside light. For the first time in my practice, I’m painting interiors. Warmer light. Compositions with primarily straight lines. Architecture. Hell hath frozen over and last week, I willingly painted a male nude. What is happening!
I knew my practice would change, but the amount it has in such a short time is disorienting. I’m working through it. It feels scary, honestly. I feel resistance to it and to the vast amount of input and prescriptive instruction I’ve been getting at school. I am trying to trust the process, but I sometimes fear The Magic is lost. I’m waiting to pull The Magician card again, if only to be reminded that we cannot ever really lose The Magic.
I keep coming back to the idea — it is all holy. It is all holy, right? It has to be. How else do we survive?
These three paintings are available directly from me, out of the studio. If you’re interested or have any questions, please reach out, I’d love to hear from you.
My primary income while in school is the sale of my paintings, so I am indebted to you and your support of my practice! Thank you for being here. More soon.