Remembering Dear Old Dad

George Simmons
Singing Self Times Four (my title for his self-portrait, made before digital cameras :^)

My Dad died thirteen years ago today. How he would have enjoyed Photoshop, and Julien Neel! I grew up hearing this tune...

Father

Playing in photoshop with the charcoal drawing I made from a projected slide of my father holding me. Eggs - whole, and broken open, constellations, areolae, the universe, brains, an ovum being fertilized, eyes, veiny retinas....all these images emerged as I adjusted levels and color balance.....

My Father's Ghost

My Father, My Self.

Inside Out Man

Iris San Giovanni

Robert San Giovanni

Scenes from my Mixed Media Portraiture class at MECA yesterday morning. I ask my models to introduce themselves and to bring a few personal items to share. After doing several warm up gesture poses, Robert changed into a costume inspired by the culture of India, and his early years as a musician in NYC when he would wear all his clothing inside out. Because of this quirky habit, he said the local folks called him Inside Out Man. Typically my models talk for a few minutes about themselves and are then silent while the students draw them, but Robert had many stories to tell.

My students soon realized that Robert was going to keep talking and instinctively picked up their brushes (we were using ink wash) and began to draw him while he spoke. His daughter Iris, a student at South Portland Jr. High, had come to class with Robert to be his DJ, and had started off the session with some Indian music. Even she turned away from her laptop and joined the class in sketching her father. I took this moment to ask Robert to pause his story and told my students that this is what really goes on when someone sits for a portrait. They talk. And there is a chemistry between the model and the artist - it is intimate, almost like a therapy session. The challenge then, is to keep drawing while the model's facial expression changes during their story telling. There are probably many portrait artists who insist that their subjects be still and not speak. Not me. A face alive with movement and emotion is a deep mine that can powerfully feed the making of a portrait.

Many models who have posed for my Mixed Media Portraiture class over the past few years have thanked me afterwards for the experience, telling me that it was the first time they had been asked to share something about themselves, and that it felt so good to be acknowledged. Models are typically seen and not heard.

Robert spoke for nearly an hour, and after class told us that he was "glowing" inside from all the attention. My students found him to be a very soulful, colorful muse, so it was a rich and satisfying collaboration!

My Father My Self

Reading Musa Mayer's memoir and biography of her father, the painter Philip Guston, has brought up for me thoughts about the tangled complexities of the father/daughter relationship. I can relate to the force that her larger than life father was in her life - I felt that way about my father, although he was not a famous man. Another thing that she and I have in common is a very quiet, almost voiceless mother. Musa Mayer's mother rarely spoke her opinion and dreaded speaking in groups - my mother was and still is the same way. The strong connection I feel with Mayer is that our fathers were in charge and center stage.

Much of my work is about my connection to my father: the healthy connects and the unhealthy disconnects; feeling protected, feeling unprotected; love that could feel good at times, and controlling and suffocating at other times. I have boundary issues around intimacy and sexuality that are the product of the times I grew up in (the 60's and 70'), and the product of growing up in a patriarchal culture, as well as of my personal dynamic with my father. Boundary issues are at the heart of the panic disorder I've struggled with my whole adult life and are the subject of many of my self-portraits.

Maine artist Amy Stacey Curtis writes in her book, Women, Trauma and Visual Expression:

For artists who have experienced trauma, recurrent symbols and patterns in their work could be archetypal, could contain language representative of personal, cultural, and collective experiences. Furthermore, it may be through the gradual emergence and development of these themes that artists work through their experiences of trauma.

Philip Guston's (whose birth name was Goldstein) late work is filled with these recurrent symbols - this archetypal language which speaks about his personal trauma and the collective trauma of the Jewish world community. I am rummaging through my old work now to see what is there. It is always my hope that my self-portraits reach and speak to others about shared experience and are not, as an old painting teacher of mine accused, "a form of masturbation," implying that they are merely a selfish, exclusive act.

photo: me at age 2 or 3 with my father's shadow.

The One That Got Away/Self, 1997

pastel and pencil on Rives BFK, 22" x 30"

collection the artist

photo detail: my father's hand and mine
In/Out I, 1991

charcoal on Rives BFK, 29" x 41"
lost in studio fire

me and my father on our way to the annual Dancing School party, 1966 (though you can't see them here, I'm wearing my first pair of heels - white pumps. We won the trophy for best father/daughter dance partners!)

Surrendering Self, II, 1991
charcoal on Rives BFK, 22" x 30"
lost in studio fire

me and my father at Point Judith, RI, 1971

Witch's Milk II, 1991

charcoal on Rives BFK, 22" x 30"

lost in studio fire

me with my father and my sisters Amy and Debby, at my brother Steven's wedding in 1972