TINY PORTALS

This painted book series began as simple commitment to making art every day which evolved with the onset of the pandemic as a way to grapple with the expansiveness of our inner lives in a moment of isolation and dislocation. The exhibition of the work at ChaShaMa’s 266 West 37th Street space featured limited edition photographs of the painted journals and a site-specific mural that evolved each day. Each evening I invited a fellow artist, musician, or performer to join me in a shared creative ritual on IG Live, transforming the small gallery space into a portal-like conduit for expansive artistic connection despite the challenges of social distancing.

Some more musings on this practice:

A while back a friend asked what it is that I’m making in this painty book of mine. I said “abstract landscapes.” Which is true in a way, but not really true-true. Because if I’m being honest, what I’m making when I sit down to paint isn’t abstract to me at all. I’m translating my inner landscape out onto the page as accurately as I can. The view in here changes minute to minute and it’s never the same twice. The one constant is that this internal space I’m making visible to myself is the only place I know of—real or imaginary—that’s wide enough to contain all my multitudes. And in a world hellbent on squeezing most of us into the smallest, flattest, easiest-to-categorize versions of ourselves, that feels like a small miracle to me. 

I run in artist-activist circles, and a lot of the artists I most admire make work that’s explicitly political. Their art is urgent and necessary. Dismantling white supremacy. Calling out gender bias. Galvanizing action on the climate crisis. I’m also a part of an activist women’s chorus that demands change loudly and without apology. So in that context, I sometimes ask myself why this artwork that’s coming out of me at the moment feels so different. Why make art about inner landscapes when the outer landscapes are full of melting icecaps and kids in cages?

I don’t have easy answers. But here’s what I know to be true:

I’m making art to re-sensitize myself. I want to feel more. More than constant whiplashing between spikes of outrage and waves of dread. I want to remember how to envision with my mind’s eye without pre-planning how I’ll craft what I see into a zingy tweet or a protest chant. I want to slow down and retrain my nervous system to read nuance again, to swim in the flickering eroticism of mystery and curiosity, to let myself flail if necessary, without reflexively trying to mediate or define or smooth the raw edges of my experience. I’m making art so I can re-learn how to be alive to sensation with every neuron.

Painting in this book started as a simple way to get back to daily art-making, but the practice has evolved into a year-long exploration of creativity as healing and resistance. It’s become as necessary to me as breathing. Sometimes I paint at five in the morning when my kids are still asleep. Sometimes I fall face-first through the studio door on a Friday night after a long week of teaching, start layering color onto a new page and feel a wave of relief hit as my inner landscape slowly comes back into focus.

Ultimately, it feels both urgent and—in my own quiet way—political to coax myself into internal states where I can live in the fullness of my contradictions and longings and astonishments, and every so often to make glimpses of those internal states visible to other people. So many of the people I care about also seem to be at odds with this current moment, feeling like—for all its wonders and possibilities—the world we’ve created demands that we contort our inner lives in ways that are limiting, deadening, and at the very least unkind. Some people have to bear the weight of this way more than others, and the injustice of that is a responsibility we all have to shoulder. But the point is that when so many of us live in landscapes that are way too contracted for our wingspans, we need to remember that our imaginations belong to us, and that no matter what devastation the external world dishes out, we can envision spaces that are free enough to wrap us up while our bodies pulse and unclench for a minute or two and our hearts widen out again to their actual size. 

There is a reason that my work is full of imperfections—rough surfaces, scribbles, layers on layers. It’s important to me to keep a thread of mundanity and grit running through the images. For me, the daily search for what is luminous and expansive co-exists with what is heartbreaking and hard. The glimpses of possibility create a brief receding of the mundane but not a removal of it. I’m not escaping. Making art is not a psychedelic experience that rips me away from my chores. I’m still here with my sleeves rolled up and my feet planted in the now—but the there is palpable. I can hear it breathing. See flashes of it in the warp and weft. 

The book I’ve been painting in is a novel called “The Moviegoer,” which my dad gave me in high school. It’s not a perfect novel, and there elements that haven’t held up well over time. But it contains this stunning passage, which I underlined as a teenager and was electrified to stumble upon again as a grown-up:

“The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. […] To be aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

When I think about the work of world-changing, I think first and foremost about that idea of the search. Healing society is an inside job. I don’t think we can build a freer, more inclusive, more just society until we can give ourselves over to our own search first and re-learn what those big ideas actually feel like inside our own skin and bones.

It’s hard. At least it’s hard for me. So this painty book of mine is a portal into the widening search that is my birthright. The painting is me faltering my way back in... and an invitation to anyone else who wants to fumble into their own expanse with me. Welcome. We can search together.