By Dan Cooper
P'Town Women, 2000

Jeannie Motherwell: Painting Again (page 3 of 3)

DC: Let's get a bit chronological. Outline your painting career for me.

JM: I was born in New York. My parents were divorced when I was four, so I spent a lot of time with my mother in the Washington, DC, area, while summering with my father and Helen [Frankenthaler] in Provincetown. I went to Bard College in upstate New York, and about three years into it, I got a loft in SoHo. I was still attending Bard College two days a week, but spending the rest of the time in SoHo. There were only two restaurants down there then. It was quite livable for artists, and that was the theme. 420 West Broadway was one of the few gallery buildings, it was more artists than anything else. I began painting when I lived in SoHo and had a loft there for 14 years. There were shows, openings and parties every weekend...very different from the commercial way it is now.

But then my father, who had moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, to have a quieter life and a larger studio, became quite ill, and my husband, my daughter and I upped and moved to Greenwich.

I really wanted to be closer to my father. I had a difficult relationship with him. No, not difficult...complicated. I don't think, for whatever reasons, that it was in his nature to be a perfect father. But I accepted him as a friend and comrade, and we were very, very close. It was important for me to have my daughter know her grandfather. He was a public figure, but very private inside. And so the moments I spent with him and she spent with him were very special. My husband got along with him very well too; so it was an easy move.

My father died in 1991 from a heart attack brought on by a stroke. I think he would have taken his own life if he couldn't have painted every day until the day he died.

I lived in Greenwich for 9 or 10 years, eventually got divorced, and waited for my daughter to graduate from her school before moving to Cambridge. Since we always summered on the Cape, and since my sister Lise has a home in Cambridge, it seemed wise to move closer to Boston than to New York.

I did stop painting for over 10 years; that was a big thing for me. Living in Greenwich, I felt culturally deprived...starved. But I was saved by the Bruce Museum in Greenwich. I served as a consultant and a teacher there, developing children's programming, which was all very satisfying.

DC: As an artist, you have a good sense of space.

JM: My father and my two stepmothers all had incredible eyes for design, and it showed everywhere in their homes. Everywhere you looked there was an objet d'art. My father might get up during the night and rearrange paintings, and it was amazing how much everything changed from his fresh approach to our space wherever we lived.

I think that's part of where I got that collage desire. Moving things around...different patterns and different things, what works and what doesn't, and how you can rearrange space and fool the eye by bringing things forward or pushing them back.

It's also why I don't always need color, why black is a color for me, why I can do so much using just black and white. At least when I'm successful at it!

DC: It's wonderful how articulate you are about the process going on inside your head, and it's a reminder of what those of you gifted in the arts can do for the rest of us.

Do these collages include any "found" objects, or do you generate all the elements from scratch?

JM: The photographs themselves are not taken for the collages. I have a basket filled with things I have saved: photographs, pieces of paper, things that interest me. Most are usually photographs. In fact, if someone sends me a photograph or postcard or particular interest to me, it will most often end up in my painting.

I'll be working, and I just see something and I'll stick it on the canvas and it starts to look like something to me and I just go with it. I don't think that a lot of the photographs, the way they're cut up, are meant to be seen as photographs. It's just a shape and a color and a hue or a tone, and they are supposed to mix and blend in and contrast in terms of spacial relationships. Some of them are clearly symbolic, like the view from my house in Provincetown. Others are not. It doesn't even matter what it is. If it seems to work in the picture, I use it. Then, later, when I'm looking at it all come together, I see "Ah, this is what it's all about." And that's when the text comes in to help crystallize the vision.

DC: I'm hearing you say that, at that earlier stage, you're really engaged in a kind of abstract painting, so it's a return, in a completely modified way, to the things your father was doing.

JM: The abstraction is a kind of drawing that loosens me and opens me up without getting it too contrived and too tight. I notice that these collages are getting more complicated than they used to be, and I notice also that these are not like large paintings that you look at from a distance and say, "Oh, that's a...." You really have to get engaged, they're hard to look at, and you need time to look at them.

That was part of my concern while hanging this show: how much work should I show so I don't overwhelm my audience. I like the idea that it's broken up into two rooms, so you can take a breather and look at some other work.

DC: Underneath your surface cheerfulness is there a more somber person?

JM: Well, these pictures are very much about who I am, which is a person on a path. I'm underway, hopefully growing continually, through my pains, and hurts, and happiness, and the whole gamut of emotions that everybody goes through. A lot of the underlying themes in my work are really universal: experiencing things like loss, and pain, and love and anger, all the kinds of things most of us experience. I've certainly had my share of those things, but the work ultimately is about having a positive point of view, because I don't think I'm cynical, and I wouldn't want to convey that.

So they're serious, but they're not somber or depressing to me. I know that people look at paintings with black or predominantly black in them and think, "She must be awfully depressed." And I'm sure there are people who come in and look at my paintings and think, "I would never hang something like that on my wall!" But I don't paint them to be pretty, and I don't paint to have other people hang it on their walls. I really paint for myself.

DC: These seem to me to be metaphors for the very intimate conversations you see women having, and men often envy them for having.

JM: Much of the text I get comes from writings by men. Although men and women think very differently, I think that both men and women have the full range of emotions. The sources may be different, but they end up with the same emotions. I learned, when I got divorced, how very different men and women are. It was like a light bulb going off for me. I had no idea.

DC: That leads to another technical question: You have a photograph, a portion of which you want to use. Do you cut up the original or reproduce it, or...?

JM: It doesn't matter to me. I usually get a number of sets made. I've recently been scanning some of the things and then trying to adhere them to the painting. I don't particularly like doing that because the paper isn't "moveable" then. I have been experimenting with different glues, and recently found one that works well enough; it's rubbery so you can actually take it off and then put it back on. But with paper that's harder to do. Part of the thing with collage is to be able to move pieces around and change it, rather than having to paint over it, as people who paint in oil do. I like the immediacy of that. That's what attracts people who work in oil; it remains wet so they can constantly change it. And that seems to work for me, because I'm a fast painter, not that I'll finish a painting in a day—it actually can take me a long, long time—but I'm fast in that it happens right away and then I'll go back to it. Collages work very well for my temperament.

DC: Is there other work you're doing in acrylic?

JM: All these collage paintings begin with acrylic on canvas, and then the photographs or whatever are adhered to it.

DC: So it's not like you're doing other things that are larger in size and reducing them.

JM: I used to paint very large, and it was all relatively abstract: abstracted fishing boats like the fishing boats in Provincetown. In the late '70s I spent two winters there. One of the fishing boats, whose crew I knew, sank and all were drowned. I was so moved by that incident that I did a whole series of paintings about it.

But despite many people saying to me that they would like to see my collages bigger, what I like about their size is the intimacy. Also, I can literally pick them up and take them with me, the way a writer totes a pad of paper. So, I don't have a problem with their being small. And the text—I'm not yet convinced that I need or want to see the text enlarged. So I think about such things, but I haven't really made a commitment to going larger.

Dan Cooper is an M.I.T.-trained nuclear physicist who usually writes scientific articles. He is a former publisher and the owner of "Eyes Look Take A Look" by Jeannie Motherwell.

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