About the "Irish Postcards" series

I wanted to include something abut the "Irish Postcards" series because this project is incomplete. My goal is to return to Ireland to take more photographs, especially in urban areas and along the east and south coasts which are missing from the collection.

When I'm lucky enough to be in Ireland or in Northern Ireland I have a camera with me at all times. This is odd because at home I never think to pick up a camera. But over there I seem to want to record as much as possible, to store up memories of people and places I can later revisit from 3500 miles away. When I came back from an extended trip in 1998 my friend Suzanne Mitchell paid me the ultimate compliment after seeing some of my rural landscape photographs: "You're like Constable behind the lens." I know absolutely nothing about photography beyond point and shoot what I compose in the lens.

But with the "Postcards" I was creating a visual a love affair with the island. CJ Pressma scanned my 5x7" snapshots and printed them all as 18x26" images with no color adjustment or correction. I had him keep the original photographs so I could add color for emotional commentary as I remembered being in each separate place. Yes I took a certain degree of poetic license with color but that was part of my response. I colored the images as I wanted them to be. I need to continue that documentation in other areas beyond those selected for the first exhibition. In order to be a true series about a real place I need to go back and shoot at sites I haven't yet documented, especially in urban areas. It can't happen soon enough for me.

ABOUT "IRISH POSTCARDS"

Susan Gorsen's "Irish Postcards" series marks a dramatic turning point in Ms. Gorsen's career. Instead of the expected color rich abstract figure ground essays, this new work is entirely rooted in photographic realism. These are oil pastel drawings covering digitally enlarged photographs taken by the artist over the past 6 years while on extended trips to Ireland. The images show  Ireland through the eyes of someone long captivated by the country's unique charm. As before, Ms. Gorsen uses an overlay of color as the key ingredient to heighten the emotional components of memory in her work. For the most part these are romantic pictures where time seems suspended as a nonessential factor and the specifics of place are supplemented by the mystical quality of mists and myths.

Ms. Gorsen has stated "As an artist I do two things when I am fortunate enough to actually spend time in Ireland  -  I take photographs and I write. One accurately records the reality of present tense time and place. The other captures my intuitive emotional responses which transcend mere experience. This new body of work is no less personal than the previous abstractions. The images in this exhibition are memory scraps from several Irish summers. If art is born of the spirit rather than the mind then I can only say that, for me, the source of both remains rooted in Ireland."

There is no adequate explanation for why a person is mesmerized by a particular place. There is no genealogical connection tugging at Ms. Gorsen's heartstrings. But since first spending a month walking through Ireland in 1968, she has recognized this small island as the home of her spirit just as Kentucky is the home where she actually lives. "Irish Postcards" might not be the best name for this series; a more appropriate title might well be "Irish Love Letters".

The poem "The Prodigal" was written in 2000, a day after returning to Kentucky after spending 6 weeks in Ireland. Probably more than anything else it expresses her deeply felt connection with  Ireland.

busy busy busy

So much has happened during the past 2 weeks I hardly know where to begin. For starters, my friend Monica visited from Philadelphia and that was a great treat since it had been more than 2 years since we were last together. While she was here I gave my talk at the Carnegie on "Understanding Abstract Art for Art Phobics", subtitled " Why Jackson Pollack is a REAL artist". That Tuesday lunchtime talk brought out about 20 people, at least half of them people I'd not previously met. They were an amazingly attentive and enthusiastic audience.

The same could be said for the audience the day before of about 80 at Indiana University SE for a lecture by Kristen Grey aka Justin Credible, an MFA student and performance artist from Ohio U whose talk was sponsored by the IUS Ceramics Department. The lecture was promoted as relating to art themed gender issues and transsexuality, neither my usual area of interest but something both Monica and I thought would be worth considering. We were wrong. This very attractive and articulate young person was totally obsessed with genitals and with other people who make "art" by photographing and/or using their genitalia as the subject for visual documentation. Some of the slide images were truly offensive. They might have possibly have been less offensive if there had been more historical images (readily available) shown beforehand as reference material to prepare the audience for all the up close and personal photographic crotch shots. Meanwhile the talk centered around this person's personal decision to hormonally manipulate her birth gender by beginning a course of testosterone treatments to become more overtly masculine while electing not to identify as either gender. He/she/it does a performance art piece entitled "Ask a Tranny" which places him/her/it into a public setting such as London's Hyde Park Speakers' Corner for direct interaction with people passing by. The stated goal was to demystify transsexulaity to the point of having him/her/it simply become "the tranny next door who you'd ask to bottow a cup of sugar". All in all Monica and I felt it was adisappointing presentation but the students were enrapt. I had sat next to an artist friend on the faculty who is a lesbian and her negative response to some of the images was more dramatic than mine. We both questioned the legitimate use of such images in what was billed as an art presentation when it was, instead, a personal journey about sexual choice.

Somehow in the scheme of things that poor but effective promotional "come on" resonated in my mind the next day when I was giving my talk about how to understand art that doesn't tell an obvious story. The nice part for me was the fact that after speaking for an hour and 20 minutes about half of the people wanted to go up to the gallery and ask direct questions about my exhibit. This question and answer period lasted for nearly another hour. It was an amazingly gratifying experience. I now find myself wondering what might have happened if I had slipped a crotch shot or 2 into my slide presentation just for the sake of  "keeping it real"!!!!! Naaahhhh!!

My gallery talk last Saturday was fun because there was a Cub Scout troop at the exhibition and I love speaking with kids. These young boys were especially well behaved and attentive and both asked and answered questions about the artwork. My adult audience told me later that they thoroughly enjoyed my encounter with the kids. That was great because they could easily have resented my decision to direct the initial half hour of the gallery talk to the boys instead of the adults. But I felt my mission in giving gallery talks was to service those who patronize those who attended the program regardless of age or level of art sophistication. It was fun for me to see the lightbulbs turn on one by one in the boys' heads. They were working for their "art badge" and I seemed to have helped fulfill that requirement. I told the troop leader to send my art badge in the mail!

blessing counting

Earlier this week I spent nearly 2 hours with a lovely woman who was essentially a stranger to me. I regret not having known her earlier but, even if we had known eachother previously, I suspect she would have still regarded me as a stranger. Yet she knows and loves my artwork. This woman, once a gifted artist herself, has early onset Alzheimer's disease and her gentle essence and personality seem to be literally disappearing moment by moment. Her adoring husband asked me to consider working with her on a one to one basis in the hope that my own affinity for color as an independent language might strike a positive and pleasurable chord in his wife. It was an offer I felt morally obligated to accept and fully commit to. Good decision on my part in so many unexpected ways.

While he suggested I use oil pastels because she had used them in the past, I opted for watercolor crayons instead. I brought my big 84 color set only to find they already had the exact same set along with a collection of brushes any artist would envy. Having done so much work with young people who need highly structured lessons based as much on following directions as anything else I decided try and assess her skill level by giving her a series of directives beginning with " draw a circle". In retrospect I think she might have been able to copy a circle or even trace over a circle if I had shown her a circle. But I watched her thinking about what a circle is and then she tentatively drew the beginnings of a spiral and looked at me questioningly for approval. It's a very humbling awareness to watch someone's true confusion over what we consider such an elementary concept. My own dawning recognition of what she has already lost just tore into my heart. I ached for this woman I was already too late to know.

Everything we did from that point forward was geared toward what she could do, some things easier than others but none producing frustration. But my reason for selecting watercolor crayons was twofold: #1  I learned from working with seniors that the act of coloring itself triggers very old muscle memories from childhood and is itself a pleasurable physical activity with virtually no learning curve; #2  the dramatic change when a paintbrush with water touches an area she has already colored is worth its weight in gold on the surprise and pleasure scale. That delightful drama happens in an instant as
the colors literally jump off the page when liquefied.

I always tell my students that art is a verb, it's the process NOT the product that matters. In the final analysis I make colored marks on paper. Sometimes they are pleasing to look at; sometimes they are a source of frustration. But at no time are the marks themselves more important than the act of making them. So for someone who seems to have no capacity to anticipate, this surprise element was a source of genuine delight for her. We tried various brushes and got various affects. At one point she dipped the crayons into the water and drew some lines but was dissatisfied with their lesser degree of drama. Our entire time working together was spent helping her decide where to put a mark or where to spread color with me trying to explain that when you don't have a specific picture in mind there are no such things as "mistakes", only surprises on the paper that simply require some looking into.

But each time she did something that pleased her she smiled and her lovely face was animated with enthusiasm. She of course had no idea what a gift those smiles were for me. So that is my goal for our next session...... simply to devise art experiences that will make her smile. Next time I think we will share a picture and alternate adding marks or shapes and see whether the collaborative process can reach deeper into her own creativity. The completed picture, by the way, was elegant and purposeful and very lovely  -  as they say, definitely suitable for framing  OR working on again next time.

Driving home I had the top open and the radio off. I needed silence and the crisp autumn afternoon sunlight. It felt like I had come from some sort of spiritual event that lingered past its natural time. I used to say that having degenerative osteo arthritis was a life altering challenge not a life threatening one. I was absolutely convinced I would find a way to navigate through that particular challenge. And I was quick to count my blessings when thinking of those whose medical challenges were greater and more profound than my own. I'm one of the very lucky ones to have overcome my shoulder problems and have the chance to rebuild my life. This woman will not have my good fortune. She is fading away. I consider meeting her and working with her as one of my new blessings and view each of her smiles as trophies. I only hope what I have to give brings her enough momentary pleasure for her to want to continue our art play together for quite a while.

sharing my secrets

Last Thursday evening I taught an adult oil pastel class. This was a first for me  -  not a first for teaching but a first time demonstrating and directly sharing any information about my personal techniques using oil pastel crayons. There were 10 "students" as well as an artist friend visiting from Ireland.  I began with a brief talk upstairs in the gallery and then we moved to the lower level for the messy stuff. I was quite surprised when more than half of these people opted to use surgical gloves. I hate having something get between me and a direct art experience but evidently most people prefer clean hands at the end of a 2 hour work session.

Anybody who has used or attempted to use oil pastels has quickly learned they are tricky and can be very frustrating to control. As mentioned in an earlier posting, I never knew that when I first used them in 1968 or when I reintroduced myself to their brilliant colors in January 1980. Ignorance really was bliss in my case. I had these very nice adults trying to figure out how to control the material and purposely kept getting them more and more confused. Better to have no illusions that I was going to be able to wipe away all their prior apprehensions about this medium!! It IS tricky and very idiosyncratic in comparison to other drawing materials. But in my mind the rewards are far greater for anyone willing to invest the necessary time to understand what can and can't be done and in what order or on what surface.

I always judge the success of my teaching ability by how often people laugh. A crowd of frowns is not a happy sight and fortunately the frowns only lasted about 10 minutes. But after that everybody realized I had been outlining worst case scenarios for them to experience before attempting something more positive. In the end everybody figured a way to manage the materials in a way they could complete a "picture"  -  which was evidently more than any had previously done. No crayons were thrown across the room or dumped into the trash. But the most interesting thing for me was simply watching each individual push through confusion to a point where a lightbulb lit over their heads and they settled into enjoyment of their own experiementation. Several people asked if I would teach another class and, if so, where so the end must indeed have justified the means!

GO TO http://www.youtube.com/user/TheCarnegieCenter !!!!!

I was hoarse the day this interview was recorded and think my voice sounds like Brenda Vaccaro's old Tampax commercial. Nevertheless I am thrilled that Karen Gillenwater from the Carnegie Center thought to post these pieces on "youtube" for all the world to find and hopefully enjoy. This specific technology connection is very exciting for someone like me who is still working to establish a permanent state of detente with my hand me down laptop computer (named, not surprisingly, Grammie's Challenge). I suspect such publicity is exciting for most people since the vast majority of us live lives far far outside any hope for 15 seconds in the spotlight let along 15 minutes of actual fame.

After Karen and I talked about my work in the "Phoenix Rising" show I asked how she planned to use what we had recorded. Et voila...... there are 2 iPODs, 1 in each gallery. The complete question and answer series is on each iPOD along with about 60 images of my work in chronological order beginning with 1980 through some 2010 pieces that we couldn't include in an already very tight exhibition. Now do I actually expect people to sit and listen to our running commentary while looking at the work? I feel that's too much to hope for. But I have been assured that many visitors to the Carnegie have been known to input this sort of information the way I would be glued to the curator's audio talk for a Mark Rothko or Arshille Gorky exhibit. But the one request I had for Karen was to find a way to be able to post this on their Facebook page or website so I could link it to this site. Once again, job well done Karen.  And thank you.

speaking with art students

Yesterday afternoon I had the opportunity to speak about my exhibition with a group of art students from Indiana University. First of all, I like talking with students. The hard part is quickly capturing their attention in such a way that I become "real" enough to them for genuine communication to take place. I have no idea whether or not these students enjoyed what I had to say but I certainly had fun speaking to them. In a formal setting it's a bit of a challenge to be chatty and conversational but that's how I approached the task. At one point I asked how many had tried to work with oil pastels in the past and maybe a dozen hands went up. Then I asked how many found the medium nearly impossible to manage and every hand stayed in the air!

The thing about this material I use is that it's really easy to make a mess and really difficult to control. Only I never knew that because I was never introduced to the frustration of using cray-pas crayons as a student. This seems to have been my great good fortune. I bought my first set of oil pastels in May 1968 shortly after arriving in London to work for TWA. I lived at Lancaster Gate directly opposite the Round Pond in Kensington Garden and thought it might be nice to have some sort of art materials to play around with nafter work and on weekends. Shortly after arriving I stopped into an art supply shop in Bayswater and the man suggested oil pastels because they were not messy and needed no fixative. I'd never heard of oil pastels but I bought a set of 36 Caran D'Ache neocolors and a sketch pad. I enjoyed being able to sketch while I was in London but when I returned to the US that September I promptly forgot about the crayons and went right back to painting with oils.

In January 1980 I was looking for a way to paint without any of the fumes or dust or fixatives that could trigger an asthma attack in my then 4 year old daughter. I had also figured out that with my limited time for painting I couldn't afford the 15 minutes of set up time and the 10 minutes of clean up time when I could only steal an hour here and there to work. Remembering the old set of oil pastels from England I thought I'd try to work with them in layers and see if there was some way to build up deep rich colors. I initially did "under painting" with colored pencils and applied oil pastels over the prismacolor pencils. The Caran D'Ache neocolors worked exactly the same 11 years later as when they were new. Eventually I bought oil pastels from other manufacturers and learned each had very different pigment densities and very different base compositions and had very diferent proerties when I wanted to combine them.

Through trial and error I learned how to layer these different brands of oil pastels and in the process developed the unique build up of surface textures that characterize my work. It wasn't at all unusual for my larger pieces to have more than 60 layers of color applied dry one color over another over another. For 25 years I resisted adding paint thinner to explore a more painterly experience. I really liked the unusual effects I was developing by working dry and loved the intimacy of my hands working directly on the paper. There were always small accidents when a finger nail got too close to the surface and scraped away several layers of color. I could never repair these scratches so decided to consider then "gifts" and figure out how to incorporate these unexpecgted gestural markings into the composition as positive elements.

At some point during the late autumn of 2008 my friend Billy Hertz convinced me to try using Turpenoid to liquify the oil pastels for underpainting and save myself the wear and tear of so much repetitive motion that wouldn't ever be visible in the finished pieces. Not only has this new aproach given me a very wonderful tool, it has really saved my shoulders hours and hours of repetitive motions. Now I wonder why I was so resistant for all those years when people used to ask if I ever used paint thinner with the oil pastels. I hadn't handled a paint brush since 1979 and with new bionic sholders I had to relearn how to manipulate a brush which was an interesting task all by itself. Now it seems perfectly natural for me to draw and then apply the turpenoid to make washes that create grounds and then either repeat that process or simply draw over the grounds..

Before they left yesterday I invited the students to attend the adult oil pastel class I'm teaching tomorow night. I hope some of them will attend. It's the first time I have given a specific demonstration of my working methods and techniques. After 30 years I figure it's OK to share some of my secrets.