Linda Bond—February 21, 2013

 

• Q: Who/what were your earliest influences?

A: The first thing I remember was being in kindergarten in a Catholic school. The girl who came into my class was a fourth grader, but she was Hispanic or some other ethnicity so she was put into the kindergarten class so she could learn to read and write with us. But she could color beautifully with the most sophisticated colors and I would sit and watch her and I was so memorized. I would go home and try to work with more elaborate colors. She had a way of clicking her tongue while she was working, so I started to click my tongue while I worked.

• Q: Can you feel that anywhere in your body?

A: It was ultimate pleasure watching her do this. I was hypnotized by watching her color in a coloring book. Just watching the way she would move her hands and control—it wasn’t just filling it in, she was really connected to this action, and I was connected to that. It wasn’t just filling something in. She would overlay colors so it wasn’t just putting red down. She would color lightly and then layer the colors, it was very interesting to me. I can’t remember a specific body movement, but it was calming and a transformative moment. If I had to say anything about the continuity of my work I would say it’s calming. I realized when I was younger that’s what I did. I would color in coloring books, I would paint by number—it was very small gestures, but I never thought of it as anything terribly serious.

• Q: Back to question one—your family?

A: I came from a working class family. I didn’t have any art instruction or any experience visiting museums. What I do remember was visiting the world’s fair in 61 or 61 in New York. The pieta (spelling?) in the Italian pavilion. The statue was down below and we were up high on a ramp and I was blown away. I must have been 10 or 11. We then went to an art gallery at the expo. The thing I remember most is watching my little brother walking along looking at each picture. We were all just waiting for him to reach the nude. He was right up against the wall, just looking from one to one. Then, he reached the painting of the nude woman and he was just taken aback. I don’t remember anything more specific than that, but it was funny.

• Q: Teachers?

A: I went to Catholic school. I didn’t have a lot of art classes. When I was a freshman in high school there was an art class but you had to pass a test and I didn’t pass the test. In my Senior year I had a free period, so I took an art class. There was no instruction, it was just a room where you could go and do whatever you wanted to do. There were materials and everything. So I used to copy photographs so I did a portrait of my best friend in pencil. Then I started to use a lot of oil pastels on color-toned paper of flowers. I wasn’t drawing from observation I was drawing from pictures. It was very labor intensive with lots of erasing and tweaking and find tuning. I was teaching myself. So I went to college as a math major (Bradley University, a small engineering school). I was just always good at math.

• Q: How did you feel when you were good in math? Was it different from making art?

A: No. It was the same calming feeling. As a matter of fact, I have done a lot of jobs related to accounting. I’ve done that in art institutions, like the Whitney Museum, and galleries. I’m just good at it. It didn’t take any effort for me. [Music and math] are very similar. It’s all sort of organizing and abstract thinking. For me, it’s that accumulation of things. It just feels the same, it’s very interesting. It comes very naturally. I never took accounting classes either, I just kind of learned by doing.

• When I was a freshman in college I wasn’t very happy. I wasn’t liking the classes I was taking and I couldn’t actually see myself being an engineer or a math teacher. One of my dorm mates said “you should be an art major” and I said “I don’t know anything about art” and she said “that’s all you do!” So, in my dorm room I would do the same thing—draw from pictures, make posters. So I went over the registrar and switched my major. I didn’t even have to submit a portfolio since I was already in the school but the great thing was that they had an actual art department. They had a BFA and MFA program. It wasn’t just a little art department, it was a serious school of art. So, I walked in that semester and had a lot to learn but I was also very humble. In my first painting class I had to do a nude and I had no idea what to do. I painted a life-sized figure on a life-sized canvas and thought it was very crude because I was using color in a very direct, it was not finessed. I was really struggling. I had a critique and we all had to put out paintings up. They were all only a few feet and mine was six feet tall. I thought they were very finessed. So we’re sitting there and I am just humiliated because so many of these people had experience and I was so raw. So the teacher approaches my painting and I am just sinking into the floor and he says “this is the only honest painting up here.” What was really wonderful for me was that I realized that was what it was about—just pulling out whatever you had that you could bring to it. I wasn’t trying to make art, I was just trying to capture this problem of seeing and translating it to paint on canvas.

• Q: What do you mean by “this problem?” Where’s that feeling from the beginning come from?

A: Well in this case it was an assignment and you have the option of approaching it anyway you want. I could have used an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper but instead I used a 6-foot canvas. I could have used little brushes or big brushed. So the problem of “how do I depict this subject” means that there’s a lot of initial decisions you have to make. That’s where the problem solving comes. When you have an idea (in the visual art form) it’s always a question of how you are going to try to depict it. How does the content and the form connect? What is the right form and scale of this subject? Sometimes I know right away what I want (black and white, pencil, painting)—sometimes those kind of decisions just present themselves.

• Q: Pick one work. How do you go about solving or responding to the situation of the object or concept addressed in one work?

A: Early on there was a big moment for me. In learning about the materials of paint and pencil and how things work. Paint, photography—experimenting with different media. I realized going to graduate school that the kindergarten place where the mark making was simple and it was an accumulation of marks was more what I was about. I would fill a big canvas with small gestures and that, to me, was the language I felt most comfortable with, the pictorial language that worked for me. There’s continuity in the whole lineage in my work. Finding that language was essential for me. It goes back to that meditative sort of activity of repetition of gesture, reputation of mark making that accumulates into a drawing. (Shows example) This is 5x10 feet and it used by little sponge make-up applicators to rub on graphite.

• Q: What do you mean by meditation? How would you describe that experience?

A: the activity of this repetition of something makes you connected to the simplicity of that. It’s not about the object I’m making, it’s not about the end result, it’s about the activity of doing it. It connects you to the present moment and what’s going on right in front of you. And because much of my work is labor intensive and takes a long time to get to the end where you have a finished product that it becomes something very other. It is an accumulation of all this activity that amounts to something in the end.

• Q: Do you think there is an emergence of form that comes out of the process?

A: I usually have a clear vision of what the end result is going to be. The process itself allows for a mechanical process. Because of the way it’s made there is a record of all this mark making, especially if you get up close. So even for abstract work, you can see it. For my instillation of the gunpowder fingerprints that count all of the fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan, I knew that was going to be labor intensive. I had an abstract idea, but didn’t know how it was going to look in the end. I knew these strips were going to be hanging but I wasn’t exactly sure how until I found a form of how to organize it. They hang from suspended panels. It was at the APE gallery in North Hampton.

• Q: The idea that I think is when you get into the process of an artist it’s open ended. It has an arising and an emergence of it’s own. What do you think of that?

A: I think for me I feel very fortunate because my work seems to evolve. My artistic concerns are not blocked by certain external impositions. Like, I don’t depend on my work for income. I have been able to, through many disappointments one experiences through this profession, to maintain and sustain my practice of art making and I’m not getting validation from any other place except people close to me. I’ve been fortunate because it seems like the work flows… my work isn’t necessarily like I do this one thing and then get better and better and better at it. For example, I started making these drawings which came out of work that was much more abstract and less about rendered images. From this work, in a very natural and conceptually connected way, it moved into this abstract sort of installation work. It feels very fluid, it’s the next thing that evolves out of this process. The work that I’m doing now came out of a process of working with printing and it flowed out of this engagement with the content and the materials and it evolves as necessary. I’m not imposing any “I have to paint, I have to draw”—I allow myself the freedom to explore and follow instinctive and intuitive paths to the next thing, which is always engaging. I think what happens is I know I’ve done something well and I’m ready to take on the next challenge. I don’t think it’s conscious but that’s what happens. I don’t find satisfaction in repeating myself over and over again.

• Q: How do you know when you’re done with something?

A: I think when I’m finding other things that I’m interested in doing. I don’t feel like I’m done with these (current) drawings. I don’t think I’ll ever do drawings like these again. I’m somewhere else right now that’s really pulling me and engaging me to this energy. It’s where I want to be at the moment. If I had to go back and finish these drawings it would feel like “oh, well now I have to finish these.” I ended up transitioning to my other work.

• Q: Choose one work—the first glimmering of a work pre-concious or concuious. Where were you? What were you thinking?

A: for me, it’s not been that way. It’s been more of an investigation. The work I’m doing now came out of about a two-year period of false starts. My drawings are derived from working with newspaper photographs. I was also interested in working with the newspaper pages and the content. I had done all kinds of various things I wasn’t happy with. Then, accidentally, something happened that turned me in a different direction. It came out of an attempt to find this form that wasn’t completely clear. As I worked through these attempts to find an image about what I was thinking I stumbled into a place I never would have found. That’s what happens with me. I basically just keep pushing and usually find a doorway into something that really opens up in a very expansive way for me. It’s usually a process of discovery.

• Q: What is your take on a transformative experience?

A: After 9/11 my work transformed in a visible, obvious way. I was trying to understand in myself the capacity for this kind of violence and the response to it, which was to perpetrate a similar act of violence. This even was traumatic and devastation and the United States responded by doing the same thing in Afghanistan and killing 3000 civilians in bombings. It was not at all dealing with the perpetrators but the civilians, which is exactly what happened here. I think it was retaliation. It was so mindless. My reaction to the whole experience was that everybody was a victim. I had pictures of the guys on all of the victims and I thought, “how sad to think this is your only hope.” To be somehow misguided. This happened a month after being on a retreat. I really felt genuinely like this whole business about terrorists, the axis of evil, the good and the bad, our justifying our actions, rhetoric, belief, and ideology was no different from the enemy. Human beings have the capacity for all things. Transformative was trying to sort this all out through my work and the meditation of making these objects, which really had to do with focusing on compassion for all of the parties involved.