Open

In my first year of graduate school, I spoke a lot about wanting to make "open paintings." I am interested in making paintings that invite the viewer in rather than those that defend their space as separate from the viewer compositionally. I was making work that I felt opened up to the viewer using techniques like radiating points and not "engaging my edges."

I learned about engaging my edges in art school, when my drawing professor kept giving me this compositional note. I was perplexed--I was using the whole page, including the corners. Finally, I asked my painting professor about it. He used a Baroque landscape painting like the one below to illustrate the concept. (This painting a Van Ruisdael, The Jewish Cemetery, 1655-60). "Do you ever notice how there's a fallen tree in so many landscape paintings?" "Sure." "Well, that's there for compositional reasons--to engage the edge." "And there's a tree branch in the upper corners, and a cloud formation, each of which form a triangle shape that cuts off the edge." In the case of Ruisdael's "Jewish Cemetary," a tombstone and a stream engage the lower left edge.

I was exploring this process of opening paintings in graduate school. It was hard because in the first part of 2007, I was making work that it seemed no one liked, with a few exceptions of people who "got" it or who like unkempt studio production. I dreaded studio critiques because I feared the remarks of my classmates who weren't supportive of my studio practice. I am a sensitive soul who invests a lot of personal care into my work. I was used to more gentle or constructive forums for critique for the most part.

Openness and transparency as aesthetic values are so expressed in Middle Eastern dance. This is a dance about bearing your inner personality, making eye contact with your audience, opening your body, and echoing, radiating moves. I have also come to trust and love each and every dancer in my Thursday night class as a classmate. We watch each other with a critical eye, but with love.

Recently, an audience member who is trained in Middle Eastern dance told me that my chest (my heart) seems very open, but that I need to open all the way down the spine. I think there may be some truth in that statement. I hold onto a lot of defenses--those daily worries from being untenured faculty, past judgments, current people in the dance world who have made it known they do not love me, my inner critique of my own dance, my body. I have some letting go to do to disengage my edges as a dancer. But as surely as it exposes these things to me, this dance teaches the body through pleasure and the sensations to which it attunes me. Through vulnerability comes strength.

A dance friend sent me the link below. It reminds me how safe it is not to care about the "haters" or just "non-fans" that I have.

Like a good meal (above is my eggplant manicotti, a South Beach recipe which I served with sauce), self-regard is a fortifying experience. It is a muscle that my dance flexes just as much as my physical body, probably more. By letting go of boundaries and immersing myself in pleasure, that wonderful manicotti and snap peas, and my dance, I open to all that is possible.

Below is a poem by one of my favorite writers.











Marie Ponsot
[from Springing: New and Selected Poems by Marie Ponsot]


Entranced


1


For openers
any wall has doors in it.


Openers who want
a door (not for air
but for passing through)


open & shut it
forcefully, under
heavy pressure
from the atmosphere
outside.


The ideal opener investigates
those osmotic waterfalls
which infiltrate
doorless walls.


2

To enter the enclosure
of the garden
or the citadel


be door, be son
or daughter


to the dearness
of pleasure.


Exits are disclosure.
Making an exit
can unlock you—
the way entrances do—


to being
outgoing.


In verse & reverse
word and worm
both turn.

A beautiful, open arabesque of a sugar snap stem that was mixed in with my lunch.